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Hindustan Times Sutirtho Patranobis Dated  January 09, 2020 Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh, the chief of the Indian Army’s Northern Command on Thursday reached the northwestern frontier province of Xinjiang that borders Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) during his ongoing China tour, a rare visit for a top Indian army general. Beijing usually refers to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s (XUAR) border with PoK as a border with Pakistan-administered Kashmir; it is the only so-called border it has with Pakistan. China strictly controls access to Xinjiang and it is rare for visiting foreign military officials to be taken to the region. Most of Aksai Chin, controlled by China but claimed by India, also lies in XUAR in the province’s Hotan prefecture. Official sources told Hindustan Times, Singh reached Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on Thursday and was expected to meet China’s People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) top commander of the region...

Money Control Dated January 10, 2020 The US will sign the first phase of a pending trade deal with China probably on January 15, President Donald Trump said. Beijing's trade envoy Vice Premier Liu He is scheduled to visit the US next week to sign the interim agreement's "Phase One", marking a pause in the nearly two-year trade war between the two sides. "We're signing, as you know, a very big deal among many other things with China … probably on January 15," Trump told reporters at a White House event here. Liu will lead a delegation to the US from Monday through Wednesday, Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng said on Thursday. The "Phase One" of the trade deal, Trump said, is "a big percentage of the deal". "Some would say half. Some would say a little less or a little more than half, but it's a tremendous percentage. It's pretty much all for the farmers, also bankers," he said re...

The Telegraph Dated January 09, 2020 In a move to boost natural gas consumption in the Northeast, the Modi government on Wednesday approved a Rs 5,559-crore viability gap funding for the proposed Indradhanush Gas Grid. In the absence of anchor customers, the Rs 9,265-crore pipeline is not economically viable. “The CCEA, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has approved a viability gap funding of 60 per cent of the project cost,” oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan told reporters after the CCEA meeting. The 1,656-km Northeast Natural Gas Pipeline Grid will connect Guwahati in Assam to major cities in the region such as Itanagar, Dimapur, Kohima, Imphal, Aizwal, Agartala, Shillong, Silchar, Gangtok, and Numaligarh. The pipeline will supply cooking gas to households and CNG to automobiles, besides fuel to industry. The Northeast pipeline grid is to be implemented by Indradhanush Gas Grid, a joint venture of state-owned GAIL, Indian Oil, Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), Oil In...

The Indian Express Anil Sasi, Sandeep Singh Dated January The Centre is likely to tighten its  drone regulations  in the wake of two major global attacks involving unmanned aircraft systems over the last few months — the first in September,  on Saudi Arabian refineries  that impacted nearly half of the country’s global crude supply, and the other last week, when Iran’s top military commander General  Qassem Soleimani  was  killed in Baghdad . Two senior government officials, who are aware of the deliberations to tighten the regulatory framework, said the move to “step back” on the drone policy has been prompted by fresh red flags raised by security agencies. A newly launched, first-of-its-kind national unmanned traffic management mechanism called the “Digital Sky Platform” — a live platform for registration of manufacturers and operators of drones — could see fresh safeguards being built into the certification process. A ‘National Counter...

The Indian Express By Ramin Jehabegloo Dated January 10, 2020 Iranians around the world started 2020 with the threat of a war with the US hanging over their country. The unexpected killing of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards IRGC’s Quds Force, by the American military in Iraq has opened a dangerous and lethal round of confrontation between the US and Iran. Soleimani’s assassination might have been celebrated by the Donald Trump administration as a decisive step against the mastermind of Iran’s proxy wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere, but the prospects for West Asia do not look good from the perspective of the region’s geopolitics. The assassination has come at a time when the Iranian regime is facing unprecedented social unrest. It faces a huge legitimacy crisis because of the massacre of nearly a thousand people during the popular uprisings of November 2019. With the rapid decline of the economic situation in Iran as a res...

The Indian Express George Mathew Dated January 10 ,2020 Bad loans in the small and medium sector are rising despite the overall decline in bad loans in the commercial lending business of the banking sector. Non-performing assets (NPAs) of medium, small and micro enterprises (MSMEs) have risen 50 basis points (bps) to 12.2 per cent as of September 2019, as against 11.7 per cent in September 2018, according to data from a credit information company TransUnion CIBIL. However, the overall NPAs of commercial lending declined 20 bps to 16.8 per cent in September last, marginally lower than 17 per cent in September 2018, the report said. The Reserve Bank of India’s Financial Stability Report had last week indicated the worst may not be over for banks on the bad loan front, as their gross NPA ratio may rise to 9.9 per cent by September 2020 from 9.3 per cent in September 2019. Gross NPA ratio of banks stood at 9.3 per cent in March 2019, the report said. The Cibil study said that ...

Dawn  Dated January 10, 2020 The World Bank says the global economy should see a modest rebound in growth this year. But the 189-nation lending institution is cautioning that a number risks could upend its forecast, including the possibility of renewed trade hostilities between the world’s two biggest economies, the United States and China. In an updated economic outlook released Wednesday, the World Bank forecast the global economy will grow 2.5 per cent this year, up only slightly from 2.4pc growth in 2019. That had been the weakest performance since the 2008 financial crisis and a significant slowdown from growth rates above 3pc in 2017 and 2018. The bank’s revised outlook represents a downgrade from its last forecast in June when it had expected growth to be 0.2 percentage-points higher this year. The forecast also trimmed its expectation for global growth by 0.2 percentage points over the next two years to moderate rates of 2.6pc in 2021 and 2.7pc in 2022. Down...

First Post Dated January 09, 2020 Three weeks before Britain is due to leave the European Union, the president of the European Commission warned Wednesday that the UK won’t get the “highest quality access” to the European Union's market after Brexit unless it makes major concessions. In a friendly but frank message to the UK, Ursula von der Leyen said negotiating a new UK-EU trade deal will be tough. She also said the end-of-2020 deadline that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has imposed on negotiations makes it “basically impossible” to strike a comprehensive new agreement in time. Von der Leyen, who took over as head of the EU's executive branch on 1 December, met Johnson at 10 Downing Street in London on Wednesday for the first time since the British leader’s election victory last month. Johnson’s Conservatives won a substantial parliamentary majority in Britain's 12 December election, giving him the power to end more than three years of wrangling over ...

Live Mint By Tanya Thomas Dated January 09, 2020 Reliance Infrastructure , part of the debt-laden Anil Ambani group, has received in-principle approval from the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) for a “harmonious substitution" of its Delhi-Agra toll road to Singapore-based Cube Highways and Infrastructure for  ₹ 3600 crore. Reliance Infra, which will receive equity payment of  ₹ 1700 crore from this transaction, said it would use 100% of the sale proceeds to pay off the company’s debt. By “harmonious substitution", the control of the asset moves to the new owner who will also take on responsibility for servicing the asset’s ongoing debt. Reliance Infrastructure, in an exchange filing on Friday, said its total debt was at over  ₹ 6,000 crore at the end of December 2019. The filing showed that the total amount outstanding was  ₹ 4,597.06 crore, of which the amount of default as on December 31, 2019, was  ₹ 1,048.70 crore. The total financial ...

Wion News Dated January 09, 2020 India's restrictions on imports of refined palm oil  will lead to a loss of market share for Malaysia and spark a price war with rival suppliers, Indonesia, a Malaysian industry association said on Thursday. India, the world's biggest edible oil buyer, issued a notification on Wednesday amending imports of refined palm oil to "restricted", a move that industry sources said amounted to an effective ban. The move was seen as punishing Malaysia, India's main supplier of refined palm oil, for criticism of its policies by Mahathir Mohamad, the 94-year-old outspoken prime minister of Muslim-majority Malaysia. Indonesia is the world's biggest exporter of crude palm oil. The Palm Oil Refiners Association of Malaysia (PORAM) said the move meant Malaysia would now have to compete on crude palm sales to India, where Indonesia has traditionally been more cost-competitive. "This puts Indonesia and Malaysia at loggerhead...