News

IndianExpress: When the Olympiastadion in Berlin lit up on Sunday for the biggest clash of FIFA World Cup 2006, the excitement coursed through thousands in Pune including young school fans of Zizou, Henry, Del Piero and Grosso. After all, they could stay up late and watch the match between France and Italy thanks to several schools willing to relax rules for them.

St Vincent’s High School student Alok Gadkari (14) was the envy of his friends in his society since he could stay up till 2 am and catch the historic moment at the FIFA World Cup 2006 final. His school had declared it Monday a holiday.

The school had put up a big screen in the school auditorium and installed additional television sets and DTH connections in the hostel, ever since matches began a month ago.

IndianExpress:  Fourteen-year-old Mayur Mahendra Bagade’s favourite subject is Marathi and he has managed to score over 50 per cent in the annual examination without attending school even once.

That’s set to change with the Pune Municipal Corporation coming up with a solution for children like Mayur. The civic body plans to begin teaching such physically challenged children at their homes. The project will be conducted under the State government’s Sarva Shikshan Abhiyan’s intervention-inclusive education for the disabled
The project was announced through a notification last month by the Maharashtra Primary Education Council. Its co-ordinator Shrikant Hingne had said the notification would play an important role in the education for physically challenged.

IndianExpress:  Shiv Sena workers went on the rampage in the city on Sunday damaging at least 25 Pune Municipal Transport buses and private vehicles and forcibly shutting down shops. The violence also hit the Pune-Mumbai link as private and Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation buses kept off the roads.

The Sena was protesting against the alleged desecration of the bust of Meena Thackeray, the late wife of Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, in Mumbai. The police have detained 20 Sena workers for stone pelting and violence.

The PMT buses were the main target of the Sena workers and at least 22 buses were damaged in stone pelting. The bus services were suspended at 2 pm and did not resume till late in the evening, causing hardships to a holiday crowd.

IndianExpress: It’s not quite a special economic zone (SEZ) along the scales of the one being put up by Reliance Industries Ltd at Chandigarh, but the Rs 2,000-crore DSK Developers is doing its bit to put Pune on the national SEZ map.

Being planned is a 100-acre SEZ with Rs 500-600 crore investment that will also include a residential township near Wakad — a suburb that houses a number of upcoming IT companies in the city. The Pune-based company has already acquired land at Rs 100 crore and is in talks with foreign developers for the SEZ.
Simultaneously, DSK Developers is also targeting cities in the UAE, Australia and the US to expand its operations. ‘‘Most of the big cities in India, including Pune, are fast reaching saturation point as land is not readily available. This is not so in some of the countries that we are now looking at. The potential of development is also huge abroad,’’ he said.

IndianExpress: Residents of Kunal Puram Cooperative Housing Society in Phugewadi have said there are no unruly elements in their society premises. Society members are peeved at allegations that goons come to their locality and disturb the peace by drinking liquor and consuming ganja inside Kunal Puram, a cluster of 200 flats at Phugewadi.

‘‘The allegations of goons coming to our society and disturbing the residents is incorrect and baseless,’’ said society chairman Sandeep Londhe. According to him, elected members of the society are getting calls from anonymous people, alleging that nothing has being done to protect the residents. ‘‘We found that the calls originated from PCOs,’’ Londhe added

IndianExpress: Two unidentified men fled with a bag containing cash of Rs 1 lakh and a mobile worth Rs 8,000 from Ashwini Chandrakant Mantri and her friend while they were riding a two-wheeler on ABC Road, Ghorpadi. Mantri had received a job offer from England and was to fly to resume her job. On Saturday evening, she withdrew Rs 2 lakh from the Union Bank branch in Camp and handed over Rs 1 lakh to be converted to foreign exchange. She was going to her home on B T Kawade Road with the remaining amount when the crime happened.

ITWire.com: Bangalore-based MindTree Consulting has partnered with Australian-based software firm, LANSA to offer web-enabled insurance products for the first time in India.

Mindtree is an IT and R&D services firm started by a group of veterans from Wipro about six years ago.

Just a month ago, it opened an office in Sydney aiming at increasing its footprint in Australia.

Apart from increasing its presence in Australia, the partnership with LANSA is aimed at enabling MindTree to become the sole Indian implementer of InsureIT, an interactive Internet transaction processing framework for insurance companies.

ITWire.com: While the world awaits the final release of Microsoft’s long overdue IE7, the Mozilla Foundation is set to release its own beta Firefox 2.0 and, from all reports, it’s a very nice piece of work.

A brief demonstration of a preview of release candidate of the beta illustrates that, unlike IE6 users, Firefox users will not have to get used to a new interface; they’ll just get some extra functionality and, unlike Internet Explorer, a browser that works on just about every desktop operating system worth using - even MAC OSX. So Mac users, you can ditch Safari if you want.

Some of the new features include an inbuilt spell checker complete with the red uderline that Word users have become used to so that bloggers and posters don’t have to worry about all the typos they invariably make when entering their content into text boxes.

TheHindu.com: India’s latest communication satellite INSAT-4C would be launched by a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, about 80 km from here, tomorrow.

The GSLV would lift off with the 2168 kg INSAT-4C, the heaviest in its class, at 4 PM tomorrow, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman G Madhavan Nair told reporters at the airport here last night.

“The preparations for the launch are going on satisfactorily. A rehearsal was held and the results were good”, he said on arrival here enroute to Sriharikota

News.com: China launched a Web site on Saturday offering free Chinese lessons and materials to promote the study and use of the language abroad.

The site,  includes audio-visual presentations, interactive exercises and advice for teachers of Mandarin Chinese, with photographs and descriptions of cultural icons such as the Great Wall, kung fu actor Jackie Chan and basketball star Yao Ming.
China launched a Web site on Saturday offering free Chinese lessons and materials to promote the study and use of the language abroad.

The Web site is only in Chinese and English, but versions in Japanese and Korean are being developed, the official Xinhua news agency said.