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Business Line, April 26, 2020 IT, health, ed-tech, logistics and e-com, among others, buck the hiring trend Are you looking for a job in the midst of the havoc wreaked by the coronavirus pandemic? Well, you could keep your hopes up if you are looking to be hired by sectors such as IT, health, ed-tech, logistics and e-commerce industries. Even though the number of job offers posted on sites has gone down compared to the pre Covid-19 time, data shared by  Naukri.com  shows new job offers across key industries, including IT, BPO, BFSI, education/teaching, medical/healthcare, FMCG, pharma, insurance, accounting/finance, and internet/e-commerce. Subramanyam S, CEO of AscentHR, said that with the Indian economy grinding to a halt due to enforced lockdown, the demand for the workforce has shifted to frontline essential sectors, “which are bucking the trend and hiring to keep up with the demand to provide essential services to a country under lockdown.” Job portal...

The Indian Express, April 28, 2020 The month-long lockdown that has hit the tourism industry, has also severely daunted the state revenue collections with the closure of temples. MYSURU: The month-long lockdown that has hit the tourism industry, has also severely daunted the state revenue collections with the closure of temples. Footfall of devotees is highest in April-May in Karnataka. The state has about 200 ‘A’ grade temples of which about 40-50 earn Rs 3-6 crore revenue per month. As temples are closed due to pandemic, authorities and priests hold formal puja twice a day. Male Mahadeshwara Swamy Temple that usually generated Rs 5-6 crore during Shivarathri, collected only Rs 3 crore as the footfall reduced drastically. Cancellation of Ugadi Jatra that again made the temple lose Rs 5 crore. Endowment Minister Srinivasa Poojary said that the government has lost Rs 150 crore due to closed temples. He said that they are planning to consider the introduction of online ...

Dawn, April 30, 2020 ISLAMABAD: The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP)   on Wednesday issued guidelines for cooperation with international regulatory bodies to strengthen detection and deterrence of cross-border financial misconducts. Under the law governing financial regulators in the country, the SECP can seek and aid on reciprocal basis to international regulators for assisting in any inquiry or investigation for contravention of laws relating to financial services. The law also authorises the commission to require production of any information or document from any person on the request of the requesting authority. The SECP guidelines will allow for cooperation not only in investigations but also in other types of inquiry, as part of a compliance program for preventing illicit activities. The regulators, that have bilateral cooperation agreement in this regard, can also exchange general information about matters of regulatory concern, including f...

The Telegraph, April 30, 2020 The first randomised clinical trial of the anti-viral medication remdesivir in patients with the novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has failed to find significant clinical benefits, Chinese doctors reported on Wednesday. The study was conducted on 237 Covid-19 patients drawn from 10 hospitals in Wuhan, the first epicentre of the outbreak. It found that treatment with remdesivir — a drug also set to be offered to patients in India — did not speed recovery or reduce deaths in patients compared to those who had received a placebo. “Unfortunately, our trial found that while safe and adequately tolerated, remdesivir did not provide significant benefits over placebo,” Bin Cao, a critical care specialist at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing, said in a media release. Remdesivir has not yet been approved for Covid-19 treatment. But interest in this anti-viral spiked after a paper earlier this year in the  New England Journal of Medi...

The Telegraph, April 30, 2020 Individuals from the business and finance community have started venting their displeasure with the prolonged lockdown and are calling for the restrictions to be lifted entirely at least in the non hotspot zones. Days after Rajiv Bajaj criticised the lockdown , Axis Bank CEO Amitabh Chaudhry and Sachin Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart, on Wednesday called for a total lifting of the lockdown (in the non-red zones). “We can’t lock ourselves up for two years in homes waiting for a vaccine. India can’t make use of the opportunities if our most productive people are locked in their homes,” Bansal, who is now the CEO of Navi, a financial services firm, said in a tweet. Speaking to a television channel, Chaudhry said the entire country needed to be opened up, even as he warned that the lockdown would lead to a huge economic crisis. He added that if the  restrictions continue,   corporate houses and individuals could go through severe stress...

Hindustan Times, April 30, 2020 With the registration forms being active today on the Indian embassy website, an exercise to gather the exact number of stranded Indians in the United States, the Indian government has given a clear indication that it is all set to undertake what could be the biggest repatriation operation of stranded Indian diaspora from not just the United States but also from other countries amid the coronavirus crisis. A senior official told ANI that the Indian missions will be asked to compile a list through this registration and repatriation will be coordinated with respective states. This registration exercise would help the Government of India to obtain relevant information in respect of Indian nationals wishing to travel to India for “compelling” reasons. As the clamour for repatriation is rising from hundreds of thousands of Indians in the virus-hit countries, ANI learns that the GoI has listed some categories, who would be given priority and will get t...

Hindustan Times, April 30, 2020 A plan to give the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to thousands of people in Mumbai’s c rowded slum    s to prevent coronavirus infections has temporarily been shelved, officials said Wednesday. Health officials in Mumbai said that a test to prove the efficacy of the much touted but largely untested drug was still in the cards, but that for now they would follow federal Indian guidelines. India, which reached the grim milestone of over 1,000 deaths from the virus on Wednesday, is one of the few countries that has pushed for the use of hydroxychloroquine, as a precautionary measure among high-risk groups such as health care workers or people who have come in close contact with COVID-19 patients. Mumbai, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, has struggled to contain the spread of the virus, and has over 3,000 cases. In Mumbai slums like Dharavi, which is Asia’s largest, social distancing is nearly impossible. In respo...

Business Standard, April 29, 2020 Keynesian economics had prescribed an increase in expenditures and cutting of taxes to pull the economies out of the great depression. Many economists offer the same formula to fight the economic slowdown exacerbated by the Covid-19-induced lockdown. During the time of depression of the late 1920s and 1930s, British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that even small direct interventions by the Government to perk up demand can have a disproportionately high impact on economic growth due to the multiplier effect. While the government has already announced a package of Rs 1.71 trillion targeted at vulnerable sections of the society, does India have space to cut taxes after the overhaul of corporation taxes and leeway to the middle class to opt for lower personal income tax rates? And this, at a time when the slowing down economy has put a question mark on the revenue numbers given in the Budget? The numbers speak The latest Budget had ...

CNBC, April 29, 2020 Gilead Science said Wednesday preliminary results of a coronavirus drug trial showed at least 50% of patients treated with a five-day dosage of remdesivir improved and more than half were discharged from the hospital within two weeks. The company also said another trial by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases met its main goal. It did not provide further details, however.  Later Wednesday, White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said NIAID’s remdesivir drug trial, which enrolled about 800 patients, showed “quite good news” and that the drug would set a new standard of care for Covid-19 patients. Speaking to reporters from the White House, Fauci said he was told data from the trial showed a “clear-cut positive effect in diminishing time to recover.” The Food and Drug Administration, in the meantime, has been in “sustained and ongoing” discussions with Gilead to make remdesivir available to ...

Business Line, April 26, 2020 A prolonged lockdown may possibly push millions of Indians into the “margins of subsistence”, former RBI Governor Duvvuri Subba Rao said on Sunday while expecting a V curved recovery once the Covid-19 crisis ends and the turnaround in India to be faster than some economies. He was participating in a webinar on History repeats - but differently- Lessons for the post-Corona World,” organised by the Manthan Foundation here, in which former Deputy Governor of RBI Usha Thorat took part. “Because most analysts believe that this year India will actually have negative growth or growth will contract. We must remember that even ahead of the crisis two months ago, our growth slowed. Now it has completely stopped. Last year growth was five per cent. Just imagine, five per cent growth last year and we are going to negative or zero growth this year, a decline of five per cent growth,” he said. “It is true that India is going to perform in this cris...

The Hindu, April 27, 2020 Ms. Pelosi cited Mr. Biden's experience in government, including his role in passing the Affordable Care Act, as an evidence of his leadership qualities. U.S. House Of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed Joe Biden for president, joining a list of top Democrats, who have recently thrown their support behind the former vice-president. Ms. Pelosi's endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate follows that of U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, former president Barack Obama and former vice-president Al Gore, who all threw their weight behind Mr. Biden earlier this month. In a video statement released on Monday, Ms. Pelosi cited Mr. Biden's experience in government, including his role in passing the Affordable Care Act, as an evidence of his leadership qualities. She said Mr. Biden is well-positioned to lead the country amid the ongoing coronanvirus outbreak. “As we face coronavirus, Joe ha...

Hindustan Times, April 29, 2020 India on Tuesday rejected a report by a US panel on religious freedom that said the country was violating religious freedom of minorities as “biased and tendentious.” In its 2020 annual report, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended that India be designated as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC), for “engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations”. The panel cited the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which fast-tracks Indian citizenship for non-Muslim refugees fleeing persecution from neighbouring countries, and “nationwide campaigns of harassment and violence against religious minorities” as its reasons for the move. External affairs ministry spokesperson Anurag Srivastava rebuffed the report. “We reject the observations on India in the USCIRF annual report. It’s biased and tendentious comments against India are not new. But on this occasion, its misre...

The Hindu, April 28, 2020 President says many options on the table to hold Beijing accountable, draws an angry response U.S. President Donald Trump suggested he may seek damages from China over the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in the Chinese city of Wuhan and spread around the world, prompting a furious response from Beijing on Tuesday. Beijing and Washington have clashed repeatedly over the outbreak as tensions have soared between the world’s two biggest economic powers. “We are not happy with China,” Mr. Trump said at a White House briefing on Monday. “We are not happy with that whole situation because we believe it could have been stopped at the source. “It could have been stopped quickly and it wouldn’t have spread all over the world,” he said, saying there were many options to “hold them accountable”. Mr. Trump was asked about a recent German newspaper editorial, which called on China to pay Germany $165 billion in reparations be...

The Hindu, April 28, 2020 Although the world economy may start to recover as more countries allow businesses to reopen, analysts say prospects for oil prices remains gloomy. Oil prices plunged for a second day in a row on Tuesday on concerns about dwindling global capacity to store more crude and fears that demand may be slow to recover even after countries ease restrictions to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Brent crude fell 83 cents, or 4.1%, to $19.16 a barrel at 0808 GMT, following a 6.8% slide on Monday. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was down $2.57, or 20%, at $10.21 a barrel. The contract plunged 25% on Monday. Analysts said part of the WTI decline was due to retail investment vehicles like exchange-traded funds selling out of the front-month June contract and buying into months later to avert massive losses like last week, when WTI fell below zero. The United States Oil Fund LP (USO), the largest oil-focused U.S. exchange-traded product, said it woul...