Microfinance Monitor NEWS WITH GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

By Sridhar Narsing When Gandhi’s statue was to be placed at India Gate when Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister, the British media found it amusing as to what kind of a message it would send — peace and non-violence that he taught and the traditional military might of India that would go on display during the Republic Day. Later, ...

Bangalore’s much-awaited Namma Metro will be opened officially on October 20, announced state chief minister DV Sadananda Gowda. Since Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not available for the inauguration, Union Urban Development minister Kamal Nath will inaugurate the first reach of the Bangalore Metro from Byappanahalli to MG Road at 11 am on Oct. 20. The opening of the metro ...

The Tevatron, the second highest energy particle collider in the world after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),has finally ceased its operations at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Illinois on Friday. The “energy doubler” accelerates protons and antiprotons in 6.28 km ring to generate energy of up to 1 TeV. Set up in 1983, the $270 million unit added its main ...

Erstwhile barber on Brigade Road in Bangalore has become the owner of a million dollar car rental company with 154 imported cars, thanks to the boom in IT industry in the last two decades. Ramesh Babu inherited a salon from his father who died when he was a teenager. When Ramesh finished his graduation from a local college, he began ...

On the opening day after the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, an estimated 95,000 pre-orders were made, according eDataSource, which tracks consumer purchases. By analyzing purchase receipts received by email, eDataSource is able to estimate the daily orders places at major ecommerce sites as well as what products are being purchased. Though this was one-third of what Apple’s iPad ...

Few months after al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s death, the second-most target in the list of dreaded terrorists was killed on Friday in an airstrike in Yemen, confirm the country’s defence ministry. While some US officials confirmed the reports discreetly, no confirmation has come from the office of the Secretary of State so far. Awlaki was tipped to be ...

Thirty-two years ago, Iran held the US embassy staff hostage for over 444 days coinciding with the so-called Islamic Revolution led by cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The hostage drama which was led by student leaders, including the present Iranian President  Ahmedinejad. The trick had worked for Tehran while it showed the shallow diplomacy by Washington in such situations. The US ...

Germany, one of the few countries with diplomatic ties with Iran, has asked Iran to stay the execution of a pastor who refused to re-convert to Islam. German diplomat Boris Ruge has summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires in Berlin on Thursday and demanded the death penalty on Youssef Nadarkhani be lifted and he should be freed. “In light of the ...

Samsung Electronics has introduced its latest addition to its Exynos product family – the Exynos 4212 – a dual core ARM Cortex-A9 application processor, designed on Samsung’s advanced 32nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) low-power process. The dual-core Exynos 4212 supports a high-quality user-experience and energy-efficient requirements of smartphones and tablet devices. Samsung’s new Exynos application processor was displayed recently at ...

Remember the film ‘Mr India’ in which the hero (Anil Kapoor) wears a wrist watch or clock to get invisible? It has come true in less than two decades. BAE Systems said it has successfully tested an ‘invisibility cloak’ that allows a vehicle to camouflage into its surroundings. The system, which can work over infra-red and other frequencies, will be ...