Author: Mahavir Sumila

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said the government has reduced red tape and upped investments, making the country and the consumer market ripe for growth “India has already seized the moment,” Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s minister of petroleum and natural Gas and minister of housing and urban affairs, declared during a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel Thursday. Coca-Cola James Quincey concurred. “The Indian government has seized the moment,” Quincey said on a panel with three Indian union ministers at the global annual conference at the Swiss ski resort Davos, pointing to “how much red tape has been removed in India and how the…

Construction work on the bridge progresses despite hurdles; anticipated completion by mid-2024 With the demolition and flattening of key commercial structures hindering the construction of the new east-west Vikhroli road over bridge on Tuesday, work should now proceed smoothly without any interruptions. Officials stated that 60 per cent of the physical work has already been completed, and the bridge is expected to be ready by mid-2024. “The bridge costs Rs 26.68 crore, divided equally between the state government and the railways, with the Central Railway contributing Rs 13.34 crore and the state government providing a matching sum,” said a senior official. The bridge has…

Much like its ideological counterparts at HispanTV (Iranian-owned) and Actualidad RT (Russian-owned), Telesur wraps its incitement into a sophisticated and slick twenty-four-hour news platform through its website, broadcasts, and social media presence. Though it is difficult to gauge its influence, numbers suggest that Telesur’s message is impactful. Telesur has two million followers on its Spanish X account, 117,500 on its English X account, and more than half a million on Instagram. Its YouTube account has over 1.7 million subscribers, with 100,000 new subscribers and almost 7.4 million video views since October 7 (It also posts its videos on the Daily Motion). The network traditionally pushes out conspiracy theories, fake news, “whataboutism,”…

The Cabinet of Ministers has green-lighted a proposal seeking to enter into necessary agreements with the World Bank to secure financing under the Sri Lanka Financial Sector Safety Net Strengthening Project. The proposal was tabled by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, in his capacity as the Minister of Finance, Economic Stabilization and National Policies, at the Cabinet meeting held on Tuesday (Dec.05). The project was designed to boost the financial and institutional capacity of the Sri Lanka Deposit Insurance Scheme (SLDIS), which is managed by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. The financing will help boost reserves of SLDIS which could be used…

Romania’s PM has expressed irritation with Ukraine’s apparent decision to continue using the phrase ‘Moldovan language’ – a term that Bucharest sees as artificial and wants phased out. Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu on Wednesday said the printing of “Moldovan-language” school manuals in Ukraine would pose a “logistical problem” for Romania, after the two countries had agreed that this phrase would no longer be used in Ukraine. “When the Ukrainian Prime Minister came to visit Bucharest, we discussed the replacement of the Moldovan language, and we established it as a priority in the Romanian agenda,” Ciolacu told a TV political…

Gabriela Bankova is on hunger strike in front of Bulgaria’s Palace of Justice after a court rejected her request to change her ID documents to match her gender identity. Gabriela Bankova, a 32-year-old trans woman, is continuing a hunger strike in front of the Palace of Justice on Sofia after Bulgaria’s judicial аuthorities said she could not change her ID documents according to her gender identity. “The situation illustrates how Bulgaria has essentially turned into an authoritarian state: the court decides who is fit for society on some vague moral grounds, with no regard to whether this is in breach…

After hackers reportedly attacked the company managing the real estate assets of the Greek state, opposition MPs urged the government to come up with a long-promised national cyber-security strategy. Hellenic Public Properties Co, HPPC, the company managing the real estate assets of the Greek state, suffered Distributed Denial-of-Service, DDoS, attacks on November 8, media reported on Wednesday. Opposition MPs accused the conservative government of treating cyber security “supertficially” and demanded a national strategy to deal with the issue. “Cyber security is treated by the Greek government and in particular by the Ministry of Digital Governance superficially in terms of communication…

The start of a transitional period for the European Union’s (EU) carbon border tax (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism – CBAM) on October 1, 2023 also marked the beginning of serious changes in doing business for companies in the Western Balkans and Turkey. The affected companies are exporters of cement, electricity, fertilizers, steel, iron, aluminum, and hydrogen, but also certain products obtained from them, such as screws and various constructions. Exporters will now have to measure how much CO2 is released in the production of the exported goods and report on it to their importers in the EU. Reporting is done quarterly, and…

Valencia, Turin, Madrid (28/11 – 25) Ducati’s Francesco Bagnaia retained his MotoGP world title with many records; there are nevertheless signs that the Ducati rider will face sterner competition next season. The Italian rider won the 2023 season-ending MotoGP Grand Prix in Valencia on Sunday to clinch his second world title in a row. The protege of Valentino Rossi becomes the third rider to take back-to-back MotoGP titles since the introduction of the class in 2002. Only Valentino Rossi and Marc Marquez previously managed to do that. Bagnaia is the first rider to successfully race and defend #1 in the…

London (08/11 – 50) A U.S. development agency announced on Wednesday that it would lend $553 million to establish a deepwater shipping-container terminal at the Port of Colombo in Sri Lanka, expanding America’s effort to finance infrastructure around strategic parts of Asia. The loan package is tied to Adani Ports, part of a conglomerate closely linked with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India that is still wobbling from a short-seller’s attack in January. Adani will help develop the terminal with Sri Lankan partners. The money from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation resembles the kind of big-ticket deals that China’s…