News

IndianExpress: PUTTING to rest speculation about any kind of terror attack on the city, Pune police commissioner D N Jadhav said on Wednesday that they had no specific intelligence information about the possibility of an attack. However, he said the police were well-prepared and equipped to deal with any contingency.

‘‘We are in a position to provide security cover to entire city within 30-45 minutes of receiving a tip off about any incident. Moreover, it will only take another 30 minutes to further strengthen the security arrangements,’’ he told Pune Newsline.

Jadhav said the present response time (time taken to reach a particular spot of crime or untoward incident) of the police was about 10-12 minutes.

IndianExpress: A DAY after a series of blasts rocked Mumbai, bomb hoaxes kept Pune police on their toes.

The Pune police received three calls about bomb hoaxes in a short tenure of three-and-half hours on Wednesday. Despite thorough anti-sabotage checks, no objectionable article was found. One of the hoaxes was about a car parked near the residence of the police commissioner.

The police received a call around 11 am saying a bomb might have been planted near Pushpam Gas Agency in Bibvewadi area. About an hour later, the authorities at Jog School in Sadashiv Peth received a telephone call saying a bomb had been planted at the school. The school was vacated and searched after the authorities alerted the police.

IndianExpress:  THE Pune Traffic and Transportation Forum has served a notice to the Pune Municipal Corporation for the appointment of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Limited as project manager and consultant for various road projects costing Rs 1900 crore, under the Centre’s Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission.

Last month, the civic administration had forwarded the proposal to appoint ILFS as the consultant for the road projects. The fees to be paid to ILFS would be five per cent of Rs 1900 crore that is Rs 95 crore

The notice also raises doubts on the Build, Own and Transfer system. ‘‘This would mean handing over the ownership during the long-lease period to private parties who would be free to levy charges for the use of the road infrastructure within the city limits and that the elected representatives would lose control over the basic municipal services

IndianExpress: WHEN the injured were being shifted to hospitals after the blasts in Mumbai on Tuesday, Puneites had already started gearing up to help them. By Tuesday night, at least 30 units of blood were collected by Janakalyan blood bank in Swargate, after receiving a request from the State Blood Transfusion Council in Mumbai.

‘‘The council asked us to keep 200 units of blood ready by Wednesday. If there is a shortage of blood in Mumbai, we will be asked to send it,’’ said the blood bank blood transfusion officer Dr Ramesh Kamble.

IndianExpress: ENERGY-strapped Pune may soon be rid of its worries for good. An initiative by environmental company Pyramid Projects India to set up power plants for converting solid waste into electricity using bio-methane technology can tackle the twin problems of waste disposal and power generation at one go

The company plans to set up power plants on a Build-Operate-Transfer basis in various parts of the city and country, which will use any kind of solid waste barring plastic and industrial hazardous waste to produce biogas. These plants will then supply power to both private and governmental bodies. A pilot plant at the Urali Devachi dumping grounds is also in the pipeline, once the agreement is finalised with the Pune Municipal Corporation.

IndianExpress: EVEN as Mumbai bounced back to its daily routine on Wednesday, it was Pune that decided to wait and watch before venturing into the financial capital of the country. A day after serial blasts rocked the ‘Maximum City’, Mumbai-bound trains, buses and even Cool Cabs saw very few people making the trip.

A regular commuter for six months in the Mumbai-Pune Sinhagad Express, the head cook of the pantry car — R N Shaikh — could not believe it when the train left Pune station in the morning. ‘‘Each compartment had just four-five people in it. We had made only 25 per cent of our usual volume, but even that remained unsold. The passenger turnout was less than 30 per cent for the to and fro journey,’’ Shaikh told Pune Newsline, as the train rolled into the Pune railway station at 6.30 pm.

News.com: Nine months after announcing they would make their instant messaging services interoperate, Yahoo and Microsoft have done it.

The companies are set to release on Thursday a limited beta test of a service that will enable users of Windows Live Messenger (the next generation of MSN Messenger) and Yahoo Messenger with Voice to connect with each other.

The move creates a global community of nearly 350 million accounts, the companies said. The beta service is being launched globally in 15 localized languages.

“It’s the first-ever bridge between two global instant messaging services,” Blake Irving, corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform division, said Wednesday.

The service will allow people to sign into both services using one user ID, and to see the status of connections of friends from both networks.

News.com: Google has joined a group that is promoting an OpenDocument Format standard that allows people to open documents regardless of the application they were created in.

The group, the ODF Alliance, was formed to solve the problem of users getting locked out of files when they are using an application other than the one the document was created with.

Google, whose Writely online word processing program supports ODF, joined the roster of 240 ODF Alliance members this week, Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF, said Tuesday.

Google also unveiled its Google Spreadsheets application last month, but has not said whether that program will support ODF. Company spokespeople did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment.

TechTree.com: Thatavarti Technologies, providers of independent software testing services, have launched what the company claims, is the world’s first testing jobs portal, “jobs4testing.com”.

According to the company, the portal will offer ready-to-employ software testers to companies, by collecting and evaluating resumes, conducting interviews, and then holding certified software testers’ resumes in the database. The entire exercise will be conducted by the portal’s panel-of-experts.

The portal aims at getting around one lakh resumes by March 2008.

T V Radhakrishna, chief executive officer, Thatavarti Technologies, said that this is not a job portal that caters only to software testing, but that it also has a ten-odd personal technical team, which is in a position to assess candidates before uploading their resumes.

BBCNews.com: An inflatable spacecraft that could form the basis of a future space hotel has blasted into space.
The Genesis craft has been built by commercial company Bigelow Aerospace, set up by hotel tycoon Robert Bigelow.

The folded experimental module launched from Siberia on a converted Russian intercontinental ballistic missile.

Once the watermelon-shaped craft - based on a design discarded by Nasa - is safely established in orbit, it will be inflated to full size.