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IndianExpress: CITIZENS living in Pune Cantonment Board areas, especially those in New Modikhana, who have been receiving turbid water for the past few days, can hope for better water.

On Monday, after Pune Newsline highlighted the woes of these residents, the Pune Cantonment Board (PCB) sent its engineers to inspect the affected areas in New Modikhana.
 
A separate inspection was carried out by engineers from the Pune Municipal Corporation’s (PMC) water supply department. Workmen dug up some areas in New Modikhana to check the leakages.

IndianExpress: Here is some good news for Puneites who have been suffering from bad roads over the past two months. The Pune Municipal Corporation finally seems to have woken to the woes of the citizens. It has slapped show-cause notices to nine road contractors for shoddy work.

Patil Constructions, W S Constructions and Ganesh Constructions, Sandeep Associates, Sunshine Pavings Pvt Ltd, Ashwin Constructions, A R Constructions, Thakkar Constructions, Nandkumar Constructions and Pravin Patil Constructions have been served the notices.
 
These contractors had recently resurfaced around 80 roads in the city, which were washed away by the very first rains.Additional city engineer (projects) Shrinivas Bonala said that the contractors have been directed to resurface these roads again. ‘‘The contractors have said agreed to repair the roads,’’ he said.

IndianExpress: Changes in school syllabus always bring about some degree of unsettlement for teachers, be it while adjusting to the new changes or through the long hours of teacher’s training, that inevitably eats into their school or vacation time.

To avoid this, the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education has come up with a unique solution: training sessions in the form of radio broadcasts over Aakashwani.

In a first-ever initiative, the State Board has collaborated with the All India Radio (AIR) to air special programmes for teachers of standard IX and XI, to guide them through the new syllabus.

IndianExpress:  A CULTURAL extravaganza that promises to leverage Pune’s artistic ethos — the 18th Pune Festival 2006 — will be held between September 1 and 5 and present a bouquet of the city’s sights and sounds.

The opening ceremony of the festival, to be presided over by Minister for Tourism and Culture Ambika Soni at the Ganesh Kala Krida Rangmanch will also be attended by Minister for Information, Broadcasting and Parliamentary Affairs Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, Members of Parliament and actors Shatrughan Sinha and Hema Malini and actor and social activist Shabana Azmi.
 
The inaugural ceremony will see a melange of performances, starting with actor Meenakshi Seshadri, who will perform the Ganesh Vandana. Other performances will include a vani by actor Varsha Usgaonkar and a show by Shiamak Davar and his troupe.

IndianExpress: IN a bid to foil any untoward incident or crime during the Ganeshotsav, the Hindu Yuva Shakti Pratishthan plans to install close circuit television cameras (CCTV) at 100 places across the city.

Pratishthan president Sudam Pillai said the project, which was launched by Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Ganapati Mandal leader Mama Rasne on Monday, is expected to incur an expenditure of Rs 25 lakh and the money will be collected as voluntary contributions from the public.
 
Pillai also appealed the residents to take precautions during the festival like alerting the police if a vehicle was found abandoned at a public place and asked shop owners to not keep empty boxes or garbage outside their shops or offer to look after strangers’ luggage.

IndianExpress: The construction of the Easterly Bypass Road — it will connect Katraj and Theur Junction in Loni Kalbhor — which has been pending since 2003 for want of land, got a shot in the arm with the State Government recently sanctioning the first installment of Rs 1.80 crore for land acquisition for the 11 km stretch between Hadapsar-Saswad Road and Loni Kalbhor.

Executive engineer, Public Works Department, Vinay Deshmukh, said: ‘‘The district collecterate’s land acquisition officer had given an estimate of Rs 2.06 crore as the compensation to be given to villagers for acquiring the land for the bypass.’’ He added that the funds had been disbursed to the Public Works Department in the second week of August

Betanews: SanDisk on Monday launched the largest flash-based MP3 player on the market, an 8GB version of its e2xx model player. At $249 USD, it is the same price as the largest iPod nano, yet twice the capacity. In addition, SanDisk lowered the price of its smaller capacity players to make them price competitive to the nano.

Low prices from SanDisk have catapulted the company more known for its flash card memory products to second place in U.S. MP3 player sales. Although it’s 9.7 percent market share in the second quarter was far behind Apple’s 75.6 percent share, it was still nearly twice that of its nearest competitor, Creative.

Since SanDisk produces flash memory itself, the company says it is in a unique position to offer the savings to the consumer. “The most costly ingredient in a flash-based MP3 player is the flash memory,” SanDisk marketing director Eric Bone said

TechNewsWorld: Palm (Nasdaq: PALM)  is aiming to make its next Treo handheld available in time for the upcoming holiday shopping season. It will unveil the new Treo based on the Windows Mobile operating system  by year’s end, the firm has vowed.

The company will first release the device for Vodafone (NYSE: VOD)  customers in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. Earlier this summer, the company stopped selling its Palm OS-based Treo 650 model in Europe after it proved incompatible with a new phone technology standard introduced there.

The company hopes the Windows Mobile version will help win back confidence among customers who have complained of poor performance with the Palm OS-based devices. Technological details for the upcoming Windows Treo have yet to be revealed.