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 Timesnow News August 10, 2020 Mumbai : In a massive haul of drugs, heroin worth Rs 1,000 was seized at the Nhava Sheva port on Saturday. The contraband weighed around 191 kilograms and was confiscated after the officials received a tip-off. The contraband was smuggled to India from Afghanistan via Iran.  The drug had been hidden in plastic pipes that had been painted to make them look like bamboos. The contraband had been declared  an Ayurvedic medicine, to , to make the transport easier.  The Customs and the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) seized the contraband after a Customs official gave a tip-off. Following this, officials of special intelligence and investigation branch (SIIB) approached the DRI for help.  Contraband was inside gunny bags  An official said that when they examined the container, they noticed orange-coloured gunny bags that had been imported by Sarvim Exports. The goods inside the gunny bags had been labelled as Glycyrrhiza glabra extract or licorice roo

Hindustan Times August 08, 2020 As India’s economic growth begins to pick up, the country is going to need perhaps ‘a little bit of stimulus’ on the demand side, noted economist and former Niti Aayog Vice-Chairman Arvind Panagariya said on Saturday. Panagariya also said that imposing import licensing will be a violation of WTO norms that India has signed. “Down the road, as the economy is continuing to open up, if we see that inventories are accumulating rapidly then that would be a clear sign that there is a demand deficiency problem. At that point, I think stimulus would be very useful,” he said at CII’s India@75 virtual event. Panagariya pointed out that even with the current level of intervention, India is staring at debt-to-GDP ratio rising from 72 per cent to about 85 per cent at least by the end of the current year. “And we are going to need perhaps a little bit of stimulus on the demand side as the economy begins to pick up,” the eminent economist said. The government in May an

 The Indian Express August 10, 2020 Microsoft  Corp. founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said it’s “mind-blowing” that the US government hasn’t improved  Covid-19  testing that he described as slow and lacking fair access. “You’re paying billions of dollars in this very inequitable way to get the most worthless test results of any country in the world,” Gates said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday. “No other country has this testing insanity.” “A variety of early missteps by the U.S. and then the political atmosphere meant that we didn’t get our testing going,” he said. Gates cited long lines at commercial labs and delays in obtaining test results, meaning that “you pay as much for the late result as the timely result.” Meanwhile, “very wealthy people have access to these quick-turnaround tests,” he said. “It’s mind-blowing that you can’t get the government to improve the testing because they just want to say how great it is,” Gates said. Public officials have regul

   Hindustan Times Aug 09, 2020 The High Commission said in a statement that the strong mandate received by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa provides a fresh opportunity for New Delhi and Colombo to enhance bilateral engagement including mitigating the adverse economic effects of the Covid-19. Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Gopal Baglay on Saturday called on Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa to congratulate him on the emphatic victory of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) in the parliamentary election. The High Commission said in a statement that the strong  mandate received by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa  provides a fresh opportunity for New Delhi and Colombo to enhance bilateral engagement including mitigating the adverse economic effects of the Covid-19. The SLLP has secured a landslide victory in the country’s parliamentary election winning 145 seats in the 225-member legislature. It can also count on the support of at least five allies. During the meeting wit

 The Indian Express August 09, 2020 External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar Saturday said that India and  China  can overcome their differences in the long-term if they reach “some kind of equilibrium”, but achieving this is one of the big challenges faced by the country. Speaking at a session on “India@75 Summit — Mission 2022”, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry, Jaishankar said, “We are a neighbour of China. China is already the second largest economy in the world. We will one day be the third, you can argue when but we will be. “We are demographically very unique countries, in the billion plus population category. We happen to be neighbours. The period of our difficulties were similar, which really started at least vis a vis the Europeans around the same time frame. The period of our re-emergence in a strong way in international politics is also not that very far apart,” he said. Jaishankar said that the two nations are rising in a “parallel” but “differential” manner

 The Indian Express August 09, 2020 Rajiv Mehrishi, who completed his term Friday as Comptroller and Auditor General of India, said he did not make defence audit reports available online because “someone in Washington, someone in Beijing and someone in Islamabad may also be watching”. “The idea is to make (these reports) not too easily accessible. There is no need.” He said this was “not a government decision”, but “my decision”. “ Parliament ko hum (report) de rahe hain, PAC ko hum de rahe hain  (we are giving the report to Parliament, the Public Accounts Committee). It is not really a secret. At least we are not making it available on the tap of a button. Koi  Washington me bhi dekh raha hai, Beijing me bhi dekh raha hai aur Islamabad me bhi dekh raha hai.  Therefore, we took a decision,” he said. “ Hamari report aayegi toh usme hum shortcomings batayenge hi. Lekin defence ki report ko website par daalne ka koi sense nahin hai  (We will highlight shortcomings in our report. But there

 The Indian Express August 10, 2020 hile RBI is reducing the interest rate it charges the banks, the banks have not reduced their lending rates to you and me commensurately enough. Dear Readers, John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canada-born US economist, who also served as the ambassador to India in the early sixties, held that “There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know”. So with apologies to Galbraith, let’s try to look at five charts, courtesy the Reserve Bank of India and the five surveys it conducts regularly, to map the state of the economy. Chart 1  alongside maps the state of consumer confidence in the economy. The red line maps the current consumer confidence and the blue line tracks the consumer expectation a year from now. Over 5,300 households across 13 major cities in India are asked questions about the economic situation, income, spending, employment and the price level. As the red line shows, the consumer confidence index

 The Telegraph August 08, 2020 The Trump administration has announced sweeping restrictions on two popular Chinese social media networks, TikTok and WeChat, a sharp escalation of its confrontation with China that is likely to be met with retaliation. Two executive orders, released late on Thursday and taking effect in 45 days, cited national security concerns to bar any transactions with WeChat or TikTok by any person or involving any property subject to the jurisdiction of the US. The order essentially sets a 45-day deadline for an acquisition of TikTok, which is in talks to be acquired by Microsoft. Tensions between the US and China have already escalated to levels not seen in decades over rifts in geopolitics, technology and trade. In recent months, Trump administration officials have challenged China on its crackdown in Hong Kong, its territorial claims in the South China Sea and its efforts to produce global tech champions.  The campaign has been provoked in part by China’s more a

The New Indian Express  August 07, 2020 KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia was looking for a country except India to send Zakir Naik, but not many countries are willing to accept the controversial preacher, former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has said. Naik, a 54-year-old radical Islamic preacher wanted by the Indian authorities for alleged money laundering and inciting extremism through hate speeches, left India in 2016 and subsequently moved to the largely Muslim Malaysia, where he was granted permanent residency when Mahathir was the prime minister. Claiming that the fugitive Islamic preacher "would not be safe from the Indian public", the 95-year-old politician, who is eyeing a comeback, said he would like to send Naik to some country "where we feel he will be safe." "For the time being he (Naik) can stay here but we would like to send him to some other country where he would be safe. Unfortunately, not many countries are willing to accept him," Mahathir was qu

 The Indian Express August 08, 2020 After the breakdown of talks at the level of the Corps Commander to restore status quo ante at friction points on the  Line of Actual Control  (LAC) in Ladakh, the division commanders of India and  China  are likely to meet in the coming days to arrive at a plan to reduce tensions in the strategic Depsang Plains. Official sources told  The Indian Express  that the meeting would be held at the Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO)-Tianwendian border meeting point on the LAC. The Indian delegation will be led by the General Officer Commanding of 3 Mountain Division, Major General Abhijit Bapat, at the meeting which is likely to happen “in the next few days,” sources said. The agenda of the meeting, sources said, is to reduce tensions at the Depsang Plains where both sides have massed troops on the disputed border. More than 15,000 Chinese troops are estimated to have been deployed opposite Depsang, where India has also mobilised matching troops on its side, including

Tribune August 06, 2020   China and Pakistan were once again victimised by a fake news information warfare attack late last month that was clearly connected to the Indian intelligence services. An Australian   “ investigative journalism ”   website called   The Klaxon   released a   “ report ”   alleging that the two were secretly conspiring with one another to create banned biological weapons, coincidentally at the Wuhan laboratory that’s been in the news quite a lot ever since the Covid-19 outbreak sparked theories that it actually originated at that facility. The outlet claimed to have been fed this tip by  “ highly credible intelligence sources ” , including what they described as one  “ senior intelligence source ” . More specifically, they said that some of these supposed sources also came from  “ the Indian subcontinent ” , which says all that’s needed about the origin of this fake news scandal. Nothing in the  “ report ”  itself is substantiated, and it instead reads like a poo