DNA

The dismissal of petitions seeking quashing of criminal prosecution of senior representatives of the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwar (UAS), agri-biotech company Mahyco, and consultants Sathguru has paved the way for proceedings to be initiated against them in the Bt Brinjal biopiracy case wherein they have been accused of criminal conspiracy in using local brinjal varieties to develop the GM vegetable. The ruling by Justice AS Pachhapure came on Friday after an earlier high court...

The much-awaited public screening of Fabricated, based on the case of Abdul Nasser Maudany, will be held in Bangalore on Saturday. This screening is part of a nationwide campaign to focus on the scourge of falsely implicating activists, political opponents, and fighters for peoples' causes wantonly by the State. The film's director, KP Sasi, in this freewheeling interview with dna talks about the larger context of fabricated cases. Q: Your film deals with the issue of undertrials and fabricated...

It doesn't take much of hair-splitting to find faults with projects of the Karnataka government. Many of these are replete with glaring loopholes, and are often done without even token transparency. The Rs8,323 crore Yettinahole diversion project is one such. It may not qualify as a "scam", but prima facie it certainly is one. It was only after the project report was obtained under the Right to Information Act (RTI) by activist Kishore Kumar Hongadhalla that the scale of ecological devastation...

A languid and sunny Sunday, an ostensibly picnic mood, some flashes of brilliance here and there, and a seamier look at literature brought the three-day Bangalore Literature Festival langurously to a close here today. The highlight of closing day was a tête-à-tête – ‘Mera kuchh saman, tumhare paas pada hai’ – between lyricist-filmmaker Gulzar and film writer Bhawana Somaaya. Dressed in his resplendent, trademark white kurta pajama, Gulzar started off from the point that he himself had in the...

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Friday directed the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) to respond to applications challenging diversion of 10,000 acres of Amrit Mahal Kavals grassland ecosystems to a variety of public sector and commercial projects by October 30 or face serious consequences. The South Zone bench of the NGT, based in Chennai, warned the ministry that failure to comply, by filing an appropriate response, would attract a fine of Rs1 lakh in each of the two...

Businesses across India can now deploy graphics-accelerated virtual desktops for their employees. And this, they will be able to do cost-effectively anywhere, across platforms and on any device with the adoption of NVIDIA's Grid technology. Servers from IT majors like Dell, Cisco, HP and IBM have started incorporating NVDIA's Grid into their desktop virtualisation solutions. Combined with enterprise virtualisation software from Centrix, Microsoft or VMware, these solutions can deliver GPU...

Some fifty years ago, a relatively unknown Italian filmmaker, Sergio Leone, was egged on by a well-meaning friend to go and see Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Leone did so, and immediately recognised the potential for remaking it as a Western. He had his own good reasons. Leone had already been taken in by the success of German Westerns that had been running to packed houses across Europe, and believed that he too could make one. Yojimbo only made his resolve more resolute. Leone first approached...

Scientists from the US and Cambodia have developed a novel and rapid way to test whether the most common and lethal form of malaria is resistant to artemisinin, the key anti-malarial drug. “In the race against time to stop the spread of artemisinin-resistant malaria, new diagnostic tools are urgently needed to identify and track resistant parasites. These simple in vitro and ex vivo ring-stage survival assays (RSAs) can clearly identify artemisinin-resistant, slow-clearing Plasmodium falciparum...

Every industry has its own singular set of problems. So has the animation industry, fledgling as it is as yet in Bangalore. The animation, visual effects, gaming and comics (or, AVGC for short as it is popularly known in the industry) sector in the city is roughly 10 years old, though the first players had probably started tricking in some 18-20 years back. It took a while for the early explorers to grope around and get a feel of things. It was only around six years ago that industry leaders...

The lesser-known cousin of Bangalore’s IT/ITes industry, the animation-visual effects-gaming-comics sector, or AVGC for short, is looking out for that great leap forward. The promise to that effect came from minister for information technology, biotechnology, and science and technology, SR Patil. The minister, who inaugurated a two-day industry meet in the city on Wednesday, asserted that his government would do all it takes to make the city the most preferred and lucrative outsourcing...