Trailing a set and 2-5 down in the second, the few spectators who left the stadium had probably not expected a turn around. It was at that stage that Dinara Safina, who had spent most of her tennis years in teh shadow of big brother Marat Safin, showed that she too could up her game as mercurially as her famed brother. She managed to etch out a 6-7, 7-6, 6-2 victory over her compatriot and world number one Maria Sharapova.

Coming into the tournament on the back of a shock retirement by Justien Henin, Sharapova was considered one of the favorites to win the French Open 2008 and in the bargain complete a career slam. She would have been one of the few tennis players to have done so having won the other three slams earlier. She was also a favorite for the Olympics later in Beijing.

Dinara Safina is today considered a much better player after overcoming a lot of injury niggles and seeing her ranking rise up owing to some good results in the 2008 season.

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Developed by the young techies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur; this unique GPS/GPRS based train tracking system would provide real time data about the location of any train in country and also its scheduled time of arrival accurate to the minute.

SIMRAN, short for Satellite Imaging for Rail Navigation is an online train tracking system which is currently trialling the major trains in the country like the Rajdhani and the Shatabdi expresses. This is currently in the last stage of development and would soon be incorporated to all trains in the country. Since GPRS telecommunication module has been included in the system, it becomes extremely easy to send out information to any station in the country. A passenger waiting for a train at a station would not only be able to know how much time it would take for the train to arrive, but can also track the train real time on a computer device to know where the train is at that moment and at what speed it is travelling.

Once developed fully, this can be used even for in-train information system which can give the travellers information about their trains whereabouts and its running status.

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Image Courtesy: SIMRAN, IIT Kanpur

To make people understand the same and to prevent them from doing so, the Hyderabad City Police has started this new initiative to change the laid-back lifestyle of the Indian road users. The Violation-free day, observed on the first of every month, envisages just that.

With the help of a few hundred volunteers, the city police manned prominent intersections of Hyderabad and educated people on the importance of following traffic rules. As part of the same endeavour, the police has decided that on these violation free days, no person would be fined for simple offences. Instead the offenders would be required to don the mantle of a traffic constable for one full day taking a break from his/her work. This would give the citizens a first hand feel of the difficulty in handling traffic as also make them realise that following rules makes the traffic situation in the city much better.

Unfortunately, the exercise lasted only in the day time and the dark hours when most serious violations and accidents occur were left untapped. Maybe if there was an exercise to inculcate traffic sense in the night time when violations are rampant, it would have been an undisputed success.

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He stated that smoking would not be allowed in Railway premises, Airports, movie halls, malls, shops, bars, pubs, offices (Govt and private) and all places where there might be interaction with other people. Smoking would be allowed henceforth only in two places. Home and on the streets.

He also mentioned that there are laws existing which prohibit one from smoking in any public place. It is a totally different matter that the said laws are not followed by anyone. Not even the law enforcers. The minister also mentions that the new laws would be enforced from October 2. The point that everyone forgot is that if a law already exists, why should it not be implemented? Whats stops the police from catching an offender today instead of waiting for October 2? And what is the guarantee that come Oct 2, the law would be strictly enforced?

The minister is also mum on citizen’s rights in asking smokers to either stop or move away. So maybe if one finds a smoker on a train, we would have to lodge a complaint with a smoking hawaldar before any action is taken. There has also been no quote on the prohibition of sale of cigarettes in areas near schools and in residential areas. The law states that no cigarette can be sold within 100m of an educational institution or a hospital. The Minister has not given any commitment on the same.

Rounding up, the Minister’s statements appear more like a PR exercise on the occasion of World No-Tobacco Day than any serious talk.

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Till date, it was the Governments at the State level and the Centre that were playing ball with Rao’s T-dream. Sunday brought a new development. The public too has joined hands in giving Rao a royal boot.

Just as a flashback, 16 sitting TRS MLAs and 4 parliamentarians put in their papers last year as a revolt against the Government’s apathy towards the formation of a new Telangana state. They would re-contest the elections to prove to the nation that the T-sentiment is still hot. Unfortunately in the by-polls that were conducted on Thursday, it was the turn of the Telugu Desam party and the Congress to smile.

KCR’s dream soured horribly. He could manage only 7 out of those 16 Assembly seats and 2 out of the four Lok Sabha seats his party vacated. Personally too, KCR suffered a major jolt. For someone who had created a record by winning with a margin of over 2 lakh votes last time around, 15000 seems quite a downfall. Add to it allegations that there was big-time rigging in the Karimnagar constituency by the TRS cadre makes one think that KCR just about managed to cross the line.

These elections have proved that a separate state does not ensure development. It is the will of the governing people that does. How else can KCR explain the state of underdevelopment the region is in what with four MPs and 18 MLAs in power. KCR himself was in the Union ministry. That seems to have backfired on him as well.

Chandrababu Naidu’s development mantra seemed to have been taken very well by the Telangana public and that shows in the five assembly seats that no one expected the TDP to win.

If only all Governments adopt the Development Mantra!

Image Courtesy: The Hindu

There are high chances that one has never come across these names. But, of course. With scintillating players like Justine Henin and Serena Williams or even Amelie Mauresmo hogging the limelight, one never had a chance to look at the gen next of women’s tennis.

However, the past one year has seen a few re-orderings happen in world of women’s tennis. Belgian champ Justine Henin retired from tennis at the ripe age of 25 with just seven slams in her bag to spend quality time at home. This was exactly what Kim Clijsters did about a year ago. Martina Hingis was banned for cocaine and she too announced her retirement. The Williams sisters are seen more on the ramp than at the business end of a grand slam these days. Amelie Mauresmo is just a pale shadow of her dominant self.

A few seasons ago, Henin versus Williams would be the eagerly awaited quarter final or semi final match up. Today a quarter final at The Roland Garros features Jankovic and Navarro, while Sharapova playing compatriot Safina becomes the most awaited match of the tournament.

The one positive we can take out of this is that tennis is no more a game of the classes. It has surpassed boundaries that games like football could not do with elan. You will not find India or Pakistan in a Football World Cup Final, but there is every chance that you might see a Cypriot or a Czech or a Pole in a Tennis Grand Slam final.

Image Courtesy: Tennis Forum

Actually, the agenda is rather the opposite. Women contend that it signifies the fact that they would never ever need the wedding dress again in their lives and hence destroying it would be significant in proclaiming their love and devotion towards their husbands.

These nice thoughts by women are also being taken very seriously by delighted men who actually are coming out and helping their women destroy the wedding dress.

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The zoo authorities have shut the zoo to its visitors for the next 15 days as a precautionary measure and have quarantined all animals, vaccinated them, placed the zoo staff on medication and so also all animals within a radius of 5kms.

It might be recalled that the killer disease anthrax had created havoc in 2001 worldwide amidst fears that it was an attempt at biological warfare.

Anthrax is an acute infectious disease in humans and animals that is caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis and is highly lethal in some forms. Anthrax is one of only a few bacteria that can form long lived spores. When the bacteria’s life cycle is threatened by factors such as lack of food caused by their host dying or change of temperature, the bacteria turn themselves into more or less dormant spores to wait for another host to continue their life cycle. On breathing, ingesting or getting anthrax spores in a cut in the skin these spores reactivate themselves and multiply in their new host very rapidly. The anthrax spores in the soil are very tough and can live many decades and perhaps centuries and are known to occur on all continents except Antarctica. Anthrax most commonly occurs in wild and domestic grass eating mammals (ruminants) who ingest or breathe in the spores while eating grass.

Anthrax can also be caught by humans when they are exposed to dead infected animals, eat tissue from infected animals, or are exposed to a high density of anthrax spores from an animals fur, hide, or wool. Anthrax spores can be grown outside the body and used as a biological weapon. Anthrax cannot spread directly from human to human; but anthrax spores can be transported by human clothing, shoes etc. and if a person dies of anthrax their body can be a very dangerous source of anthrax spores.

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Fisherman often use potassium cyanide and other poisons to stun and capture valuable reef fish. Divers squirt a cyanide solution from bottles directly onto fish resting on corals, killing the corals and stunning the fish. The fish often escape into crevices and the fishermen have to break apart the coral to get to their paralyzed prey. With this technique not only the fish are poisoned, but also the coral polyps and other creatures in the area. Places where cyanide was spread will first form black slime, then they will just become dead coral rock.

Sharkfin soup is a delicacy in Asian cuisine and is offered at many functions or weddings. Some people believe that the shark fin is also an aphrodisiac. But nowadays sharkfin soup is not a rare treat anymore but it is consumed in much larger quantities and even found canned on grocery shelves. Sharks are caught on hooks, reeled in and the fins are cut off. The still living shark is then thrown back into the sea where they are eaten by other sharks or flounder for hours before suffocating, unable to use their gills to breathe and without fins to propel them through the water.

When people grab, kick, walk on, or collect coral, they also contribute to coral reef destruction. Careless boating, diving, fishing, and other recreational uses of coral reef areas can cause damage to them. On some islands the resorts use dynamite to create a passage for their boats. If here are no buoys, anchors are dropped which crush or break corals. Good samaritan tourists feed reef fishes, but this results in changing their feeding behavior and don’t graze on algaes anymore which can choke the corals.

One of the steps that should be taken immediately is the creation of marine reserves off limits to fishing. About six percent of the world’s land is in parks. But at sea, less than one-half of one percent is in any kind of protected area. At the same time we will have to develop alternative livelihoods for fishers and regulate the trade in live reef fish and other threatened marine animals.

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