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India Today Date: Aug 07, 2020 PTI, US President Donald Trump issued executive orders on Thursday banning any US transactions with ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns video-sharing app TikTok, and Tencent, owner of the WeChat app, starting in 45 days. The orders come as the Trump administration said this week it was stepping up efforts to purge “untrusted” Chinese apps from US digital networks and called the Chinese-owned short-video app TikTok and messenger app WeChat "significant threats." The TikTok app may be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, and the United States "must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security," Trump said in one order. In the other, Trump said WeChat "automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information."...

The Indian Express  Date: Aug 07, 2020 Haseeb A Drabu,  Exactly a year back, the  BJP  did what no one in Kashmir ever thought anybody would do — let alone, anyone could do. Constitutional propriety be damned, the fact is it has been done. That was the approach then, and has been the attitude ever since. After pursuing it with single minded devotion for the last 70 years — BJP’s progenitor, Jana Sangh, started the “Ek Vidhan, Ek Pradhan, Ek Nishaan” agitation in Jammu in 1951 — the BJP finally made it the policy of the Government of India on August 5, 2019. A year later, it has become the nation’s policy on Kashmir, cutting across ideologically diverse political parties, autonomous institutions of judiciary and regulators, sub-national governments, and of course, the national media and the country’s civil society. It would appear that, for the first time in history, domestically there is complete consensus on Kashmir. Small optical irritants — the modality of the abr...

The Indian Express  Date: Aug 07, 2020 George Mathew,  The Reserve Bank of India  kept interest rates on hold  on Thursday, seeking to contain a rise in retail inflation even as growth remains a concern. The RBI has slashed policy rates by 115 basis points since February this year, and pumped close to Rs 10 lakh crore liquidity into the financial system. In its bi-monthly monetary policy review on Thursday, it has also given the green signal to a loan restructuring scheme to bail out stressed borrowers. Why did the Monetary Policy Committee not slash interest rates? While Governor Shaktikanta Das said the RBI’s accommodative stance continues, the holding of rates runs counter to broad market expectations of a slash in policy rates to enable banks to lend more. Retail inflation, measured by the Consumer Price Index, rose in June to 6.09% from 5.84% in March, breaching the RBI’s medium-term target range of 2-6%. That seems to have been a major red flag that prompted th...

The Indian Express  Date: Aug 07, 2020 Shubhajit Roy  A day after  China raised the issue of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir  at the United Nations Security Council at Pakistan’s behest, India on Thursday said that it “firmly rejects”  China ’s interference in its internal affairs and urged it to draw proper conclusions from such “infructuous attempts”. Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, said that the Indian government has not responded to his requests for a visit to India. “For a straight 4 years, every year, I have formally requested to meet the Ambassador of #India to @UNGeneva to discuss an official fact-finding visit to the country, including Jammu and Kashmir, in line with the Special Rapporteur’s Torture mandate. I have not even received a response. Not once.” The Ministry of External Affairs’ official spokesperson Anurag Srivastava on Thursday said, “We have noted that China initiated a discussion in the UN Security Council ...

The Indian Express Date: Aug 07 , 2020 Sandeep Singh and 3 others, New delhi,  FROM AVIATION to automobiles, consumer durables to capital goods, and even alcoholic beverages, India Inc’s move to reduce employee costs to withstand the Covid slump had the deepest impact in non-essential manufacturing and services, according to filings of 40 leading BSE 100 companies that have announced their results for the quarter ended June 2020. Among them, the top five Auto to aviation, employee costs take the biggest hit that witnessed the biggest year-on-year drop in aggregate employee expenditure at a consolidated level across corresponding quarters are: Mahindra Finance (36.7%), Havells India (27%), Tata Motors (26%), HDFC Life Insurance (21%) and Maruti Suzuki India (15%. Close behind are InterGlobe Aviation (14.8%), Bajaj Finserv (13%) and United Spirits (12.9%). InterGlobe Aviation, the parent company of IndiGo, reduced its employee costs by 14.8% during the quarter, compared with the same...