DNA

Nokia on Monday released its first 6-inch Lumia smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 1520, into the Indian market. The Nokia Lumia 1520 comes with a 1080p Full HD screen, a 20MP PureView camera with optical image stabilisation, oversampling technology and zooming capabilities, enabling people to easily capture and edit high quality pictures and tell better stories. The company, which lost considerable ground and quite fast at that after the advent of Android smarphones, claims that the newest phone in...

When Titan opened its first store at Safina Plaza on Infantry Road in 1988, retail as we know it was in its infancy. And so was the business of watches. Twenty-five years later, the retail landscape has changed. As have the very format of retail outlets, evident when the company launched its 1000th store on 100 ft road in the upmarket Indiranagar area on Monday — a swank big-format store spread over two floors. Harking back to the times when there was nothing glitzy about watch stores, Bhaskar...

Scams revolving around mini-hydel projects (MHPs) in the Western Ghats region of Karnakata get weirder by the day. And there's nothing sublime about any of the preposterous projects; each dam scam in fact is more ridiculous than the previous one. The latest one that's come to light is a two-in-one project. This one is a single project masquerading as two different hydel projects on paper. The 24MW Perla Mini Hydel Project and the 24 MW Shamburi Mini Hydel Project on the Netravathi river have the...

Here's exactly what meets even to the undiscerning eye. The empirical evidence of so many young foreigners has found a sound statistical basis — about one in every four foreign students in India pursues his or her studies in Karnataka. The state is reported to have around 10,100 foreign students, which constitutes around 36.7 per cent of the total number of foreign students studying in the country. It is the leading state in attracting students from overseas, followed by neighbouring Andhra...

Most river basins in India are under duress, and stand in the mortal danger of moving to the "extremely high" level of baseline water stress. Though India does not figure in the list of 37 countries which face “extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, using more than 80 percent of their available water supply every year, it is close enough at 41 position, according to the first-ever global water stress rankings. The rankings, created by the US-based World Resource Institute's Aqueduct...

India is leaking like a tap. Money is flowing out of the country, and there seems no way of plugging the breach. Crime, corruption, and tax evasion drained US$344 billion from India between 2002 and 2011. Illicit financial flows, in fact, have jumped more than 10 times from $7.9 billion in 2002 to roughly $85 billion in 2011. The findings—which peg cumulative illicit financial outflows from developing countries at US$5.9 trillion —are part of a new study published Thursday by Global Financial...

When the swank, new terminal of Bengaluru International Airport opens for the public sometime soon, it will cater to rich taste. And the flavour of the new airport will be a brand new brand — the Malgudi Tiffin Centre restaurant. The ethnic South Indian restaurant in the middle of one of the most modern airports in India has been planned and positioned (both physically and otherwise) as a pleasant surprise to the visitor. It's the first thing that meets the eye after one exits the security check...

Development is taking its toll on birds, and it is getting worse every year. Fifteen bird species that are found in India have been declared 'Critically Endangered' in the just released IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. If that's not all, three other bird species now face greater danger than before. These have been uplisted to Near Threatened (NT) and Vulnerable (VU) categories. Earlier, these were better off and classified under the Least Concern (LC) category by IUCN. Four of these birds...

The trouble with a knee-jerk reaction is that it not only fails to address a problem at hand, but complicates matters as well. The response of the Karnataka home minister KJ George to Wednesday's horrific attack on a woman at a Bangalore ATM is precisely that. The minister, in his infinite wisdom, has asked banks to post guards at these kiosks within three days, or shut them down. In his desperation to sound pro-active, George has failed to see a number of things. First, for a city with 2500...

Just 90 companies have been responsible for almost two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions generated since the Industrial Revolution began, new research has suggested. It found that 83 of these companies are energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. If that is not worrying enough, the study by Richard Heede of the Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute has concluded that half of all emissions have been produced in the last 25 years alone. What has got the goat of climate change...