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The EconomicTimes, October 28, 2019 Hong Kong has fallen into recession, hit by more than five months of anti-government protests that show no signs of relenting, and is unlikely to achieve annual economic growth this year, the city's Financial Secretary said. "The blow to our economy is comprehensive," Paul Chan said in a blog post on Sunday, adding that a preliminary estimate for third-quarter GDP on Thursday would show two successive quarters of contraction - the technical definition of a recession. He also said it would be "extremely difficult" to achieve the government's pre-protest forecast of 0-1 % annual economic growth. Protests in the former British colony have reached their 21st week. On Sunday, black-clad and masked demonstrators set fire to shops and hurled petrol bombs at police who responded with tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets. Protesters have routinely torched store fronts and businesses including banks, par...

The Hindu,  October 27, 2019 Russia’s Defense Ministry on Saturday harshly criticized the United States decision to send armored vehicles and combat troops into eastern Syria to protect oil fields, calling it “banditry.” U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said the move is aimed at keeping the fields from potentially falling into the hands of Islamic State militants. The decision was the latest sign that extracting the U.S. military from Syria is more uncertain and complicated than President Donald Trump has made it out to be. On Saturday, there were several troop movements in Syria as the various players adjusted to the U.S. decision to withdraw troops from the northeast. A U.S. convoy of over a dozen vehicles was spotted driving south of the northeastern city of Qamishli, likely heading to the oil-rich Deir el-Zour area where there are oil fields, or possibly to another base nearby. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor also reported the con...

Scroll.in October 26, 2019 The United States Department of Defence on Friday awarded a $10 billion (Rs 70,840 crore) cloud computing contract to Microsoft, choosing it over Amazon, months after President Donald Trump said he might intervene in the matter, The New York Times reported. Trump has often criticised Amazon about some of its business practices and has not taken kindly to The Washington Post’s critical coverage of its presidency. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos owns the newspaper as a personal asset. Apart from Microsoft and Amazon, technology companies such as IBM, Oracle and Google also lobbied hard to get the 10-year contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. It is central to the Pentagon’s efforts to modernise its technology systems, and will replace the military’s aging computer networks with a single cloud system. Most of the military still operates on 1980s and 1990s computer systems. Amazon, which built the Central Intelligence Age...

Scroll.in October 27, 2019 World Bank Group President David Malpass on Saturday called for more reforms and innovation to improve India’s growth rate, PTI reported. Malpass made the comments during a visit to Delhi where he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and addressed officials at the NITI Aayog. “What my prescription or suggestions are are that openness to reform, innovation, improvement in government structure allows for faster growth,” PTI quoted him as saying. “I think India has very good platform in doing that because of the experience India had with technology with knowledge as a broad concept within the society. They can help it move forward. It has made several important reforms in the last few years that can still pay off.” He said India has been affected by the global environment and has slowed from fast growth rates in the past year. The Indian economy is facing a sustained decline in growth. Gross Domestic ...

The Indian Express,  October 29, 2019 The deadline set by the Centre for wrapping up the Naga peace talks, October 31, arrives this week. While the Centre’s interlocutor and now Nagaland’s Governor, R N Ravi, has stressed that the government intends to meet the deadline, some key issues remain unresolved with the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), or NSCN(I-M). What are the Naga peace talks? The talks seek to settle disputes that date back to colonial rule. The Nagas are not a single tribe, but an ethnic community that comprises several tribes who live in the state of Nagaland and its neighbourhood. One key demand of Naga groups has been a Greater Nagalim that would cover not only the state of Nagaland but parts of neighbouring states, and even of Myanmar. The British had annexed Assam in 1826, in which they subsequently created the Naga Hills district and went on to extend its boundaries. The assertion of Naga nationalism, which began during Briti...

Dailyhunt October 27, 2019 The dreaded Islamic State, whose leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was reportedly killed in raids conducted by the United States on Sunday, had also tried to get a foothold in India in 2016-17, a report said. It was May 2016 when a purported ISIS video threatening to unleash terror in Uttar Pradesh left security agencies in tizzy and the state police's Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) launched a massive exercise to counter any terror activities in the state. Investigators said it was the first attempt of the proscribed terror group when it "particularly" tried to establish its foothold in the state. Uttar Pradesh Police put its social media monitoring labs on alert and sensitized its intelligence network particularly in communally sensitive districts in the wake of the IS propaganda. The 22-minute documentary, mostly in Arabic, showed jihadists supposedly from India threatening to "return" to "avenge killing of Muslims in In...

Livmint October 27, 2019 In a conversation with Mint, Ajay Piramal, chairman of Piramal group discussed his company's growth plans in the Financial Services and pharmaceutical sectors and the key takeaways from the liquidity crisis that has plagued the NBFC space.Edited excerpts The NBFC sector has been under stress for the last year. What is your outlook for the sector? Our belief is that consolidation is taking place in the NBFC sector. Only the fittest NBFC will survive and actually do better, if we believe the story that India will continue to grow. If India's GDP has to grow then financial services has to be an important part. We have seen that NBFCs have to be an important part of this growth story of financial services. What are the areas that will drive growth for your financial services business going ahead? We need to be more diversified. So we are focusing on getting a whole retail franchise going, which is consumer lending and housing finance...

The Print October 26, 2019 Shimon Peres, the late Israeli leader who signed the Oslo accords, once said that as soon as you begin negotiating with the enemy, you realise that you first have to negotiate with your own people. Trade negotiations are not with any enemy, for trade is supposed to be win-win. Still, as the tortuous talks over the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) have dragged on, it has become increasingly clear that the real negotiations that the government has to conduct are with Indian business, which, with almost no exceptions, is wary of yet another free trade agreement. Signing up for the RCEP, or refusing to do so, will be one of the most important decisions that the government will take in the coming months. Staying out of the grouping, which will include every economy in East Asia and Australasia, will come at a cost. The region has become the world’s leading economic powerhouse (accounting for 40 per cent of global GDP), with the larges...

Dawn October 27, 2019 ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has asked the Frontier Works Organisation to defer the implementation of axle load condition in a move to appease the agitating traders protesting against the government’s documentation drive. Chairing a meeting of his economic team, the premier also tasked Finance Adviser Dr Hafeez Shaikh and Federal Board of Revenue Chairman Shabbar Zaidi to work out a better package for traders in consultation with the visiting International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to an official source, he asked Zaidi to meet with traders on Monday to further discuss their demands. “We will hold a meeting with the traders on Monday,” FBR chairman also confirmed to Dawn. The chairman said that his team is regularly meeting the representatives of traders and the finance adviser will also be holding talks with IMF on their proposals. “We will sort out some deal for them,” he said. Soon after the direction of the prime minister, F...

Bloomberg October 29, 2019 Saudi Aramco earned $68 billion in the first nine months of the year, cementing its position as the world’s most profitable company, according to people familiar with the figures. The state-owned oil producer disclosed the unaudited net figure to financial analysts working on its planned initial public offering, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Aramco has not published comparative numbers for the same period last year and its media office declined to comment. The IPO process will begin on Sunday, Saudi television news channel Al Arabiya reported. When the Saudi company disclosed financial results for the first time earlier this year, showing income of $111 billion for all of 2018, it vaulted to the top of the list of the planet’s highest-earning businesses. Its nine-month income alone exceeded the 2018 net posted by Apple Inc., the most profitable publicly traded company, and is more than the annual ea...

Time October 10, 2019 Around noon on Wednesday, a 27-year-old German man drove to a synagogue in the city of Halle in eastern Germany with the aim of killing as many Jews as possible. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The attacker failed to get past the perimeter gate of the synagogue, and then allegedly shot and killed a passerby before driving off while apologizing for his incompetence to his livestream audience: “Sorry guys … like the loser I am … One time loser, always a loser.” He continued to a nearby kebab shop where he killed one person before making an escape. Police later arrested him following a car chase. What at first sight may appear as an isolated attack in an obscure German city is anything but. The manifesto the attacker posted online — as well as his comments during the livestream — make clear that this is just the latest in a series of interconnected far-right terrorist attacks that have taken place across the world. It follows on...

New Statesman America October 16, 2019 Just when it looked as if the hard work of dismantling Islamic State was nearing some form of resolution, Turkey, with the blessing of Donald Trump, launched a cross-border offensive on Kurdish-held areas of northern Syria. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been agitating to strike against the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) for many months, but was prevented from doing so by the presence of Nato allies in the region, primarily British and American troops. These forces have been stationed in the north-east for almost three years, working to defeat Islamic State (IS) by training the very people Erdogan is moving against: the Kurds. The various entanglements of the Syrian Civil War are inextricable from one another. It’s perhaps more accurate not to think of the Syrian crisis as one civil war but instead as a series of concurrent but separate wars involving regional and great powers and their proxies. When the Turkish offensi...

United States Institute of Peace October 23, 2019 Sunday marked eight years since longtime Libyan dictator Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi was killed. In the post-2011 aftermath, another military man, Khalifa Haftar, has taken control over Libya’s east and much of its vast southern region, Fezzan. The battle for the capital, Tripoli, between Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), based in the east, and the U.N.-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), based in the west in Tripoli, has dominated international attention on Libya. But the stability of the south is all too often overlooked. The region is critical to U.S. interests and any effective policy must not only focus on achieving reconciliation between the east and west, but on building stability in Fezzan. Why Fezzan Matters The people of the Fezzan want security, development, and a political voice. The security vacuum in recent years has led to the emboldening of criminal gangs, smuggling of illicit goods, human traffi...