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indianexpress: The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) on Sunday issued a warning to those residing in low-lying areas and banned traffic on all causeways and low bridges including Baba Bhide bridge connecting Narayan Peth and Deccan Gymkhana as the irrigation department began releasing water from Khadakvasla dam.

The discharge was 17,423 cusecs on Sunday. Catchment areas of Panshet, Varasgaon, Temghar, Pavana and Khadakvasla received heavy rain on Sunday.

“Anticipating more rain and increase in discharge from Khadakvasla, a warning has been issued to slums in all low-lying areas, while the use of all causeways has been banned. We are closely monitoring the situation,” said assistant commissioner Ashok Kalamkar, adding that the civic administration was prepared to tackle emergency situations.

Meanwhile, Southern Command officials said army columns were kept on standby to tackle any eventuality in the region. “No requisition for deployment has been received so far from any quarter,” a senior army official told The Indian Express.

In the city, a ten-year-old deaf and mute boy rescued from the debris of a 150-foot wall that collapsed near Kamgar Putala chowk around 4.30 pm on Sunday by Kasba Peth fire brigade personnel died later in the evening.

Incessant rains since Sunday afternoon caused water logging in many parts, traffic snarls and power cuts. Trees keeled over at KEM Hospital in Rasta Peth, Parvatigaon and Salisbury Park. At KEM Hospital, the 100-year-old tree that fell on an old building blocked the approach road to the hospital. The clearing operation was on till late evening, fire brigade sources. Nobody was injured.

indianexpress:  Second appeals filed by senior citizens and differently abled persons under the Right to Information Act (RTI) will now be taken on a high priority basis, according to a directive of the Central Information Commission (CIC) in response to a petition by city-based activist Vihar Durve.

The commission issued the instruction on June 19, after an email by Durve to the Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah on June 17. “The issue was discussed and agreed upon ahead of the agendas for that day. However, I had also made an appeal to consider people below poverty line which was not looked into,” said Durve.

RTI petitions are first filed with the public information officer and then the first appeal is filed with the first appellate authority; the time limit in case of the reply for both the petition as well as appeal being 30 days.

If the petitioner is unsatisfied with this reply, the next resort is a second appeal with the CIC or the SCIC.

Durve said that the CIC which used to take four to six months to hear Central Government related second appeals and more than one and a half years to hear State related second appeals will now be giving priority to the cases in the two categories.

“The demand was to fix a time limit of 30 days for the second appeal too, but the CIC has not committed to this. There are more than 2,000 second appeals pending before the city information commissioner. At least now it becomes mandatory for the State information commissions to give high priority to senior citizens and differently abled persons,” he said.

indianexpress: TIRED of inaction by authorities, residents of Pune-Solapur Road near Golibar Maidan took the initiative to ensure safety of commuters travelling between Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar High School and Golibar Maidan Chowk, by erecting a radium-plated wooden plank on a divider causing many accidents.

The divider, located on a bend, is hardly visible.
 
On Saturday night, nearly six residents got together and dug into the tar road to place a radium-plated wooden plank to attract attention to the divider, after a car rammed into it at around 9 pm.

Poor visibility has been a problem on this stretch that has defunct streetlights. As a result, many vehicles including rickshaws, buses, trucks and cars can get into accidents.

“I have seen rickshaws turning turtle, cars crashing into the divider, trucks and buses driving over the divider, or vehicles accidentally plying on the wrong side,” said resident Richard Fernandes, adding that people from the neighbourhood often had to come forward to help accident victims.

On June 28, Fernandes and his son Sheldon decided to take things into their hands after complaints to the nearby police station were of no avail. After an accident on that day at 10.30 pm, the two painted the divider white so that it could be seen from a distance of 25 metres. However, the paint wore off, and two days later on June 30, another accident occurred on the same stretch.

indianexpress:  Nearly 30 activists of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Yuva Morcha (BJYM), Shivajinagar unit, led by Sandeep Kailas Kale barged into a popular restaurant in Kalyaninagar on Saturday night to protest against the “pub culture”. The activists, carrying party flags, entered Soho’s hall where music was being played, shouted slogans and demanded that the restaurant be closed for running an illegal dance floor cum pub and for violating the 11.30 pm deadline.

“The rich culture of the city is being sullied by the pub culture. Youths indulge in illicit activities at these pubs under the garb of freshers’ parties at the beginning of the academic year,” Kale said, adding that his party will target other high-profile clubs and pubs too.

However, Soho’s general manager Kiran Chavan denied the restaurant was running a pub. “ We don’t have a pub in our restaurant. We function within the deadline and never violate it. The protestors caused a huge business loss on Saturday. Our clients are topnotch software professionals, mostly foreigners. We have been targeted unfairly. Our customers ran helter-skelter fearing that they will be attacked on Saturday night.”

Yerawada police Inspector (crime) Sunil Deshmukh said they had lodged a case against the manager of the restaurant under Section 33 and 135 of the Bombay Police Act for violating the stipulated deadline and investigations were on.

“Pubs organise theme parties to attract youngsters. City pubs are flourishing with the influx of a huge migrant population and night spots are growing under the nose of the police,” Kale said.

indianexpress: DR Amaresh Bagchi, professor emeritus, National Institute of Finance and Policy (NIPFP) asked banks to be more vigilant in securing adequate credit to farmers and helping avoid their suicides.

Speaking at the recently held fourth annual convocation of the post-graduate programme in banking and finance of National Institute of Bank Management, Bagchi said, “If the banks had been more vigilant in securing credit to farmers and had cautioned them against the use of adulterated pesticides, the suicides might not have taken place.”
 
He said banks could help by ensuring that farmers and SMEs get adequate and timely credit and that intermediaries do not take a substantial chunk of it.

“For providing equality of opportunity, the right course is not ‘reservation’ but good education and primary health care to all. This is where our state is failing and ways must be found to reverse the trend,” Bagchi said.

He also added that banks have an important role to play because in a way it is they who are the closest to the community and are in a position to know their problems and find solutions to them. He called for developing corporate social responsibility for the same.

indianexpress: A CITY-BASED land developer C Shamsuddin has accused Citifinancial Consumer Finance, a private finance company of cheating him to the tune of Rs 10,22,000.

Shamsuddin claimed that he had availed a vehicle loan of Rs 10,22,000 in January 2004 from Citifinancial’s F C Road branch for purchasing a car. Later in the year, he decided to sell off the vehicle and applied for closure of his account. However, he claimed that despite his repaying the balance amount, the company did not respond to his letters and refused to release the vehicle.

In August 2006, Shamsuddin registered a complaint with the District Consumer Redressal Forum and in April this year, the forum ruled in his favour saying the company had deliberately delayed the release of the vehicle without substantial ground and ordered it to release the charge before May 25 and pay Rs 50,000 compensation. However Shamsuddin has claimed that he has still not received the car or the NOC. “The delay in the release of the vehicle cost us financial losses, as the market value of the vehicle decreased considerably,” said Likhit Pillai, Shamsuddin’s office co-ordinator.

Pillai also said that Shamsuddin had repaid Rs 9,90,000 by the end of 2004 itself, despite which the company did not release the vehicle. So he decided to delay the repayment of the Rs 32,000 that was pending until the company released the vehicle. Pillai claimed that the balance amount was paid in January 2007.

The company on its part said that that a stay had been granted against the forum’s decision by the State High Commission in Mumbai. “The appeal was made before the State High Commission on June 5, within the period of limitation,” said an official from the company on condition of anonymity.

indianexpress: IN the age of growing environmental hazards, disposal of electronic or e-waste may be termed as a major area of concern.

To focus on this issue of e-waste, Electronics Components Industries Association (ELCINA) and Mahratta chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture (MCCIA) will be conducting a seminar on ‘Reduce, recycle and reuse of e- waste’ at Hotel Central Park on Thursday.
 
Besides outlining the hazards of e-waste, the seminar will also focus on ways and means of disposing it off, said Vilas Rabde, head, electronics committee, MCCIA.

The seminar will see talk sessions on topics like ‘E-waste — an emerging threat and steps for its management’, ‘Green materials for Printed Circuit boards (PCB)’ and ‘Role of nanotechnology.’

Around 60 participants from across the country are slated to attend the workshop.

Speaking at a press conference in Patrakar Bhavan on Saturday to announce the seminar, Subodh Purohit, Additional Director General, MCCIA said, “Electronic goods like computer peripherals, CDs, gadgets, electronic toys, television and radio sets etc are getting cheaper because of which more and more people can afford them. As a result, dumping of electronic instruments is happening on a large scale and resulting in increase in e-waste at an alarming rate.”

He termed damage by e-waste as ‘unseen’ and ‘causing slow degeneration of health’ because of absorption of heavy metals in water.

techtree: Acer has launched new notebooks to cater separately to consumers, and the commercial segment.

The Aspire Gemstone is meant for consumers while the TravelMate Profile is targeted at commercial users in the country.

The new notebooks will run on Intel’s Centrino Duo platform, Acer said.

In a break from tradition, the Aspire Gemstone comes in a rounded, fuller shape, said W S Mukund, managing director of Acer India.

The Gemstone sports an elegant shiny jet black frame, and encases a satin-finished sub-layer with the Acer logo moulded onto the frame. Whereas the TravelMate comes in a magnesium casing that not only minimizes weight, but also provides a higher degree of protection.

The notebooks are available through Acer retail outlets and resellers across the country for prices ranging between Rs 59,999 and Rs 69,999.

itwire: Customers of Telstra’s ISP, BigPond can now personalise their homepage to display their favourite RSS news feeds, applications, widgets, to-do-lists, photos, local weather etc in what BigPond says its latest Web 2.0 initiative.

According to BigPond group managing director, Justin Milne, all the information displayed on an I-Pond home page is dynamically linked to the wider web for real-time updates, and is accessible from any internet-linked computer. “I-Pond isn’t limited to text either – video, audio, podcasts, sticky notes, games and even animations can be added to the page. And it looks how you want it to, as you choose the content of the page and its layout.

I-Pond is powered by Ajax. According to Telstra, “[Ajax] is multimedia capable and can be used for audio and video podcasts. It’s also a publishing tool, enabling users to upload and share information, for example sharing photos with friends with password protection.”

There are no sign-up fees for registered BigPond internet access customers, and most I-Pond access is unmetered for most BigPond broadband members.

cnn: There are a billion Bluetooth-enabled devices in the world — cell phones, headsets, cameras, keyboards, printers. Another 13 million of them are being sold every week.

But that’s chump change compared with the growth that analysts expect to see once a new version of the short-range wireless technology makes its way into products later this year.

“The most significant challenge that Bluetooth has faced is making the technology more usable, especially when it comes to setting up connections,” says Stuart Carlaw, an analyst with New York-based ABI Research. “There is no doubt that there are more viable business models for the technology. They just need to be better supported at the most difficult point” in the user’s experience.

That should happen this fall, when the first Bluetooth upgrade in three years, Bluetooth 2.1, starts shipping.

Devices will be paired in as few as three clicks. Encrypted data transfer means no need for passwords. And lower power consumption means that Bluetooth 2.1 devices will have as much as five times the battery life of their predecessors.