News

IndianExpress: THERE has been a spate of stories on Pune roads in recent times, saying how a particular road is the absolute pits and how another road has so many crater-like potholes. Actually, almost all Pune roads tell the same story: Bad maintenance, poor fund utilisation, shoddy job execution — all this adding to the woes of hapless citizens.

The flip side is that bad roads play the role of a great leveler. Traffic snarls hit the corporate czar and the politician just as bad as the commoner on his way back home from office. Thus, when Nasscom chief Kiran Karnik finds out that it takes him as much time to fly into Pune from Bangalore as it does for him to navigate the airport-university stretch, he is speaking about a reality that Puneites have been living day in and day out.

Monday was no different as they hit the road for their destinations. Residents of Pune and the neighbouring twin township of Pimpri-Chinchwad had a harrowing time negotiating crater-like, waterlogged roads with bumper-to-bumper traffic. With the third continous day of incessant rain, it was more of the same: Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad infrastructure crumbled once again.

IndianExpress: TWO cadets from the National Defence Academy (NDA) were swept away on Monday morning when a flash flood hit a causeway they were trying to cross during a training exercise. The cadets, both from Uttar Pradesh — A V Bisaria from Etah and Aditya Verma from Allahabad — were part of a four-member team on a map reading and navigation exercise near Donge village at the base of Sinhagad Fort when the bridge they were crossing was swept away by a sudden flow of water at 11.15 am.

The other two cadets managed to escape by clinging on to a tree. Rescue teams and senior officers, including NDA Commandant Lt Gen A K Chopra, rushed to the spot but failed to trace the cadets till late in the night.

IndianExpress: ‘‘PUNE has tremendous potential in the engineering services space and National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) will be doing all that it can to boost this emerging sector,’’ said Kiran Karnik, President of NASSCOM at a NASSCOM-CEO meet organised in the city on Monday.

Karnik said that the global engineering services industry is worth $ 700 billion and would be touching the trillion dollar mark by 2020. ‘‘As almost $ 250 billion of this would be outsourced, India would capture 20 per cent of this pie and Pune would be driving forward this growth,’’ he expressed.

Speaking at the meet, Karnik said NASSCOM had started a nationwide initiative to bring select entrepreneurs together for brainstorming sessions. This, he said, would encourage innovation and collaboration, particularly among smaller and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) across the country.

IndianExpress:  A NEW era in the Indian construction sector began in Pune on Monday with the inauguration of the Tata BlueScope (TBS) manufacturing plant at Hinjewadi. This venture will allow the construction sector the option of using pre-engineered building systems and solutions, instead of the conventional RCC building.

‘‘Steel is the most useful material for construction because of its attributes. This new technique of building allows for faster and efficient executing of projects as compared to conventional techniques,’’ Tata Steel managing director B Muthuraman said.

 TBS, a 50:50 joint venture between Tata Steel and Australia-based BlueScope Steel, is investing Rs 1,300 crore in the country that includes three manufacturing plants in Sriperumbudur, Bhiwandi and Pune as well as a coating and painting facility at Jamshedpur.

IndianExpress: AFTER the floods hit the city thrice in a little over a week, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) finally woke up to the situation on Monday and decided to demarcate flood lines and to construct retaining walls along the Mutha and Mula rivers.

The decisions were taken at a meeting of people’s representatives, PMC office bearers, party leaders and civic officials convened by Mayor Rajani Tribhuvan to discuss the flood situation in the city.

The meeting decided to draw maps of low lying areas showing possible effects of floods, making public announcements on radio to inform people about flood situation, increasing coordination between PMC, police and irrigation department, desilting the rivers, removing debris dumped in the river bed, rehabilitating residents of slums in the river bed under the Slum Rehabilitation Authority schemes, removing encroachments in various streams, preparing action plan for improvement of Mula river. It was also decided to organise another meeting to finalise action plan to prevent recurrence of floods in future.
 

IndianExpress: A CITY-BASED institute has aided the development of a vaccine critically needed in Africa.

The Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP), a partnership between the World Health Organization (WHO) and Seattle-based non-profit, PATH, and Pune-based Serum Institute of India Limited (SIIL) have completed the Phase I clinical trial of a new conjugate vaccine against serogroup.

 A meningococcus, a bacterium that causes deadly meningitis epidemics and human suffering in sub-Saharan Africa.

BBCNews: File-sharing networks are being drafted in by a UK technology firm launching a high-speed video download service.
CacheLogic will use the fast transfer speeds of existing file-sharing systems to deliver movies and TV shows to paying customers.

The software behind the download service is already included in some widely used peer-to-peer programs.

The company hopes its technology will start to wean people off illegal use of file-sharing networks

News.com: AOL has introduced free antivirus software that is likely to become the highest-profile alternative to security software you pay for.

Active Virus Shield offers basic protection against viruses, spyware and other malicious software, AOL said in a statement Monday. The product is available to all Internet users, not just to subscribers to AOL’s Internet access service.

“Antivirus protection is too important to make people have to pay for it,” an AOL representative told CNET News.com in an e-mail interview. “We want to make sure that everyone is protected from viruses and spyware, and we believe that making Active Virus Shield available for free will help make the Internet a safer place for all.”

The protective tool is being delivered in partnership with Kaspersky Lab, a well-respected Russian antivirus software maker.

BBCNews.com: European astronomers are planning to build an optical telescope that is four times bigger than any in existence.

With a main mirror around 42m-wide, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will allow remote objects to be studied in greater detail than ever before.

The powerful observatory will allow astronomers to see some of the first galaxies to form in the Universe.

It could also look for signatures of life, such as vegetation, on distant planets circling other stars.

The European Southern Observatory (Eso) operates the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal in Chile, which has been described as a “discovery machine”.

TechTree.com: Google has launched a new feature that warns the users with a pop-up when they are about to visit a website hosting spyware or other malicious program.

This new feature is a collaboration between Google and Stop Badware, a nonprofit organization backed by Google, Lenovo Group and Sun Microsystems.

Reportedly, the warning will be given to the Google search engine users when clicking on the website that has been identified as malicious by the Stop Badware. The warning will be displayed on an alert page with the option to go back to the results page or continue on to the questionable website.

Initially, the warnings will simply alert user of the danger but eventually, the alert page will contain detailed reports about the sites, which will be provided by researchers at Stop Badware