News

IndianExpress: BRICKBATS from all sections, cutting across party lines, seemed to have worked, with the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) undertaking repair work on the city’s worsening potholed roads. Due to the rain, the repairs were temporary in nature with murum and pieces of bricks. The PMC, however, failed to notice potholes in its own backyard — the stretch from Congress Bhavan to Dengale bridge.

The civic administration claimed to have repaired 24 roads on Wednesday. The civic officials said the roads repaired on Wednesday included Solapur Road, Nagar Road, Shivarkar Road, Kondhwa main road, Salunkhe Vihar Road, ITI Road, Aundh-Baner Road, Warje octroi post road, Ambedkar Road, Residency Club to Vidhanbhavan, Maldhakka Chowk to railway bridge, 7 Loves Chowk to Vahkar Mahamandal, Law College Road, Jedhe Chowk to Volga Chowk and Panand Road.

IndianExpress:  TWELVE Bangladeshi girls were deported to their home country by Calcutta Mail on Wednesday evening.

The girls, in their early twenties, had been rescued from Budhwar Peth brothels on June 6 in a police raid. They were convicted and ordered to be deported by the court. The city police accordingly took up the matter with the Border Security Force with Aug 16 fixed as the date for their return.
 
Assistant Commissioner of Police (Special Branch) S N Bhoomkar said, ‘‘We booked the railway tickets for the girls following the court order. The deportation order came to us on August 2. The girls will be handed over to the 27 Battalion of the Border Security Force (BSF).’’

IndianExpress: VARIOUS dahi handi mandals in Pune, Mumbai and Nagpur, which offer a prize of over Rs 50,000 for groups breaking their handis, will now find themselves under the scanner of the Income-Tax department.

Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax S K Sharma said that the decision has been taken by the department as part of its crackdown against unaccounted assets. This is for the first time such an exercise is being carried out by the Income-Tax department.
 
Sharma said the department would collect information about such mandals in a week. In the next phase, he said, the department would verify the source of earnings of these mandals and their tax liabilities

IndianExpress: THE Bombay High Court has ordered Mumbai-based Tata Power Company Ltd to remove the wall, iron barricades and gates used for blocking a disputed pathway and a one-way bridge near Lonavla dam.

The orders were issued recently in a writ petition filed by Mishrimal Jethamal Oswal, a senior citizen from Lonavla and a former municipal engineer. The Court gave two-weeks’ time for removing the structures, which would clear the road for pedestrians wishing to reach Bhushi village. The Court has directed the Lonavla Municipal Council to demolish the illegal structures in case they were not removed within the time limit of two weeks.

ITWire: In another tilt at Microsoft, Google has introduced a web-based word processor, Writely, following its acquisition of the product from a Silicon Valley startup in March.
Writely was available prior to the acquisition but stopped taking new users while Google reworked it. Writely can read and write RTF documents and save as PDF, although Google says this is likely to be a premium feature of the paid service once Writely comes out of beta. Word documents can be imported and edited after conversion to html.  Writely is already available in over a dozen languages.

Documents can be shared with “the whole world” or just with nominated individuals, collaborative editing and the addition of comments are also supported.

BetaNews: Apple silently pushed an upgrade to its Boot Camp dual-booting software on Tuesday, offering support for the latest Intel-based Macs and better hardware support among other enhancements. The Cupertino company recommended that users of the previous version upgrade to the newest release to take advantage of the new features.

“You don’t need to partition your hard drive again (unless you want to change its size) or reinstall your Macintosh and Windows software or documents,” Apple said on its Web site. However, the company said it was important to update the Boot Camp Assistant software, create a new Mac drivers CD, and install the new software in Windows.

Some of the enhancements include support for the recently released Mac Pro and Xserve computers, the ability to install Windows XP on any internal disk, “right clicking” when pressing the Apple key from within Windows, and improved support for the Apple keyboard including Delete, PrintScreen, NumLock, and ScrollLock keys.

BetaNews: Microsoft on Friday released a beta of Windows Live Writer, a new application designed to create blog posts for Live Spaces and a number of other services. Appearing like a slimmed down version of Microsoft Word, the tool is available free of charge.

Users can author blog posts in a WYSIWYG environment that makes editing easy and shows exactly how the post will look when published. An HTML source code editing mode is included for more advanced users, as well as a Web preview option.

Photo publishing has been integrated into Windows Live Writer, enabling users to quickly add an image to their blog post and modify it with the application’s built-in tools. Size, text wrapping, borders can be edited, and a variety of graphical effects are also available.

BBCNews: Hi-tech hackers have started to produce malicious programs that target the latest bugs in Microsoft’s Windows.
A worm has been spotted in the wild that tries to use vulnerabilities to hijack home computers.

Any computer compromised by the worm will become part of a large botnet set up to send out junk mail.

At the same time Microsoft is re-issuing a recent security patch which has made the Internet Explorer browser crash on some computers.