Friday’s strike is the latest launched by Israel on Gaza despite a ceasefire with Hamas.
Hamas confirms top commander killed in Israeli air strike
Financial systems must remain connected to real economy, PM’s principal secretary PK Mishra cautions against speculation
Principal secretary to Prime minister Narendra Modi, PK Mishra, on Saturday cautioned that financial systems should remain connected to the real economy and everyday lives of citizens, warning against risks arising from excessive speculation and instability in markets, ANI reported.Addressing the 20th convocation ceremony of the National Institute of Bank Management (NIBM) in Pune, Mishra said financial systems should not drift away from productive economic activity.“Financial systems cannot become disconnected from the real economy and lives of ordinary citizens. Excessive speculation, irresponsible lending, unsustainable leverage and instability in financial markets can create disruptions,” he said.At the same time, Mishra highlighted the role of India’s digital public infrastructure in transforming financial inclusion and expanding access to banking, digital payments and formal credit.“In India, this convergence of finance and technology has enabled the creation of one of the world’s most ambitious and inclusive digital public infrastructures,” Mishra said, ANI quoted him as saying.He said the JAM trinity — Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar and mobile connectivity — has significantly reshaped the reach of India’s banking ecosystem.“The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana brought crores of people, unbanked citizens, into the formal banking system. Aadhaar created a verifiable digital identity architecture at an unprecedented scale. Mobile connectivity provided the final layer of access,” Mishra said.Referring to India’s digital payment ecosystem, he highlighted the rapid growth of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), describing it as one of the world’s largest real-time payment systems.“In less than a decade, India has built the world’s largest real-time digital payment ecosystem. From just 2 crore transactions in 2016-17, UPI now processes over 25,000 crore transactions annually,” he said.Mishra said one of the biggest achievements of the digital payments revolution was expanding access to formal finance across both rural and urban India.“A small tea seller in a village or a professional in a metropolitan city can today transact through the same interoperable digital payment infrastructure,” he said.He also noted that digital transaction records are increasingly creating formal credit histories for individuals who previously lacked collateral or banking relationships.“Every payment made, every purchase recorded, every transfer completed, leaves behind a data trail. And that data trail over time can become the basis for a credit history, for those who have no formal credit record, no collateral to offer, and no prior relationship with the bank,” Mishra said.Emphasising the broader objective of financial inclusion, he said access to financial services should ultimately translate into economic opportunities.“True inclusion must ultimately create productive economic opportunities,” he said.Highlighting the government’s Mudra scheme, Mishra said over 57 crore loans worth around Rs 40 lakh crore have been sanctioned to micro, small and medium enterprises, benefiting a large number of women and people from marginalised communities.“Behind every Mudra loan lies a human story, a tailoring business expanded, a small workshop modernised, a transport vehicle purchased, a family enterprise stabilised, and a first business opportunity created,” he said.
Israeli settler blindfolds and detains Palestinian in occupied West Bank | Israel-Palestine conflict News
An armed Israeli settler blindfolded and detained a Palestinian man near the village of Beit Iksa in the occupied West Bank, dragging him onto a road as Israeli forces stood nearby. The Palestinian farmer was reportedly trying to reach his land before he was captured.
Published On 16 May 2026
Can Centre shield OMCs with Rs 3 cushion, or will rupee flip the script?
The government on Friday raised fuel prices in the country, in an effort to soften the blow on oil marketing companies, as global crude soared beyond $100 while retail prices remained unaltered. Now, as petrol and diesel are Rs 3 costlier, the key question is: to what extent will the price hike help?While the outlook may have appeared slightly optimistic at first glance, the issue is no longer limited to crude oil prices, as a falling rupee has also entered the field. The main concern is what happens when a weakening currency and rising fuel costs come together, where even a small change can erase the gains from recent policy measures.According to SBI Research’s Ecowrap, rupee is now at a level where further depreciation could neutralise the benefit of the recent Rs 3 per litre hike in petrol and diesel prices. The report highlighted, “even an additional depreciation of Rs 2 in the Rupee raises the effective crude oil price, pushing the landed import cost, which fully offsets the gains from the current fuel price hike.”It added that the recent hike in fuel prices was introduced primarily to ease the financial strain on Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs), which continue to suffer from high crude oil costs while retail fuel prices have remained unchanged.According to the report, “OMCs’ under recoveries on sales of petrol and diesel are soaring because of unchanged retail prices,” adding that these companies are “incurring losses to the tune of Rs 1000 crore per day, which amounts to around Rs 3.6 lakh crore a year.”According to the bank, Rs 3 per litre revision in fuel prices would provide relief worth about Rs 52,700 crore to OMCs, but this would cover only around 15% of their projected FY27 losses.The report also highlighted the sensitivity of this relief to currency movements, noting that “Rupee has already approached a critical depreciation threshold, beyond which further currency weakness could substantially erode the intended benefits of domestic fuel price revisions.”Consider the math: assuming an FY27 exchange rate of Rs 94 per US dollar and crude oil at $106 per barrel, SBI Research has estimated the landed crude cost at nearly Rs 9,964 per barrel. It said the Rs 3 per litre hike gives OMCs a benefit of about Rs 477 per barrel, but even a Rs 2 fall in the rupee would push up import costs and wipe out much of this gain.
SBI called for broader macroeconomic preparedness, stating, “There is a need for a comprehensive policy on balance of payments.”On global oil markets, SBI Research pointed to continued volatility, citing disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz linked to the ongoing Middle East crisis. It said, “As per the latest IEA report, crude will continue to remain under pressure owing to the depleting inventories.”It further noted that shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have declined sharply in recent months, affecting both crude oil and LNG flows.On inflation, the report estimated that the fuel price revision may push Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation higher by around 15–20 basis points during May–June 2026, while also revising its FY27 inflation projection to 4.7%.
Deepa Anappara: “Women explorers were considered to have loose moral values”
Your journalism experience inspired Genie Patrol on the Purple LineWhat inspired you to write? last of earth?
I guess I’ve always been interested in Tibet and I also like Rudyard Kipling kimEven though the representation of Indians in the novel is difficult for you to read as an Indian, I think there was quite a bit in the book that I found interesting, and especially the stories of the spy surveyors, so it was always something that was on my mind. I never thought I’d write about it, but then when I moved to the UK, I came across this account by an Englishman about a trip to Tibet in the 19th century, and how he was helped by two Indians, who he describes as his servants, and these two guys essentially kept him alive during this expedition in the 19th century, because he had no knowledge of this land. This is a very unfavorable scenario if you are not used to it. The average altitude in Tibet is over 13,000 feet; The air is thin and you’re not getting enough oxygen, so it was very obvious that he was flailing, and they literally saved him several times from danger and from falling into rivers, and actually there’s a photo of him at the beginning of the book where he’s with these two Indian guys, and he credits them with saving his life.
Also, he’s very racist in his language and how he describes Indians and Tibetans, and he talks about flogging one of these guys because he didn’t polish his shoes properly, and he talks about how you have to punish hard, but not too harsh, so that the natives are taught how to behave appropriately and what is expected of them, and I was really interested in that power dynamic where you completely depend on the Indians for your survival. Dependent, but at the same time you don’t see them as your equals… I wanted to write about that: to go on a trip that was completely dependent on the Indians’ knowledge of the landscape, but at the same time really condescending towards them and patronizing and in many ways racist. So, when I started researching travels in Tibet, I found stories of Indian spies like Nain Singh Rawat and Kinthup, who were trained by the British Survey of India to use their bodies as survey instruments, so essentially they were taught to move in a certain way so that each movement was exactly 33 and a half inches. So, if you count 2,000 steps, that’s about a mile, and that’s how they mapped the whole of Tibet. In the 19th century, Tibet was known as the Forbidden Kingdom because Westerners could not visit the country, so for the British, this was their way of avoiding those rules and prohibitions. They would just send Indians to map the area. The Indians would come back with information and then make maps.
I was thinking about that story and why he did these dangerous missions and what was the driving factor that motivated him, was it just money, was it something his family had done for a long time? I think that was the point when I started working on this novel. I just want to also quickly say that once I started looking at the exploration of Tibet in the 19th and early 20th century, I found that there were many women who also traveled to Tibet, people who described themselves as women explorers and they were wearing very restrictive clothing, so they didn’t even have proper clothing to climb the mountains. This did not stop him from traveling to Tibet. In the novel you also have the story of a woman named Catherine who wants to be the first woman or the first European woman to reach Lhasa. It’s all based on true stories and what we can find in the historical record, but obviously a lot of it was created through my imagination as well.
You mentioned restrictive clothing that female explorers did not mention in their accounts, so how did you see this difference in Katherine’s characterization?
I think they had to present a certain view of the world, so they had to be true to the time. If you were a female explorer, you were essentially traveling without a chaperone, so you could be seen as a woman with very loose morals, which in the Victorian period, certainly for English women, was not something they could easily live with. It’s quite clear that they couldn’t be completely honest about what they were wearing.
A big question that I had in mind was what were they doing if they were menstruating, and at that time, before sanitary pads and tampons, how were they managing? There is not a single mention of it in any of these female explorer accounts. So, on account of that, they’re behaving very much like men, so there’s some discrepancy between what they’re telling us and what might have actually happened. You have to rely on your imagination, and you have to think about what that experience of being a woman is, and how they might have climbed the mountains, what they might have done during that particular time, and how honest they might have been, and what they might have told their family at home?
One of the interesting things I discovered was that if they met someone in England who knew someone back home – there was always the danger that gossip could travel six months back to England via steamer – so they were very conscious of how they presented themselves to the world. When writing to Katherine you’ll find that there are brief excerpts from her journal, and you see what she’s said, and then we get her point of view where we see what she’s really experiencing. What I wanted to do in the novel was to look at what the experience was, and how that particular experience is reflected in this fictional character’s writing. I wanted to talk about the difference that we couldn’t really see but that was clearly there at that time.
How different was the research process for this novel compared to your previous novels?
The records have been very carefully prepared by the British, they had a very definite understanding of how they wanted to present the Empire to the world, so you see mentions of atrocities being erased or they may have been downplayed. Subaltern studies historians have written a lot about it. For example, the people are described as savages, not as people who are protesting some injustice. So, when you are reading the archive, you have to look at what is depicted there and what might have actually happened. That was one of the main challenges: to locate the Indian consciousness in these essentially English archives, and then to try to read between the lines and find out what has been erased and what has not been said.
You traveled to Tibet just after completing the first draft of your book. What changes did you have to make to the draft after your visit?
What was surprising to me was that the description of the landscape in my novel was accurate, in that I was so dependent on the explorers’ accounts, I didn’t feel the need to change any of them. In Tibet, today you can travel only as part of a group. It opened my eyes to what kind of little issues can arise, or how people help each other, what makes you angry after spending two weeks with a person. Some of those aspects became clear as I traveled to Tibet as part of a group tour.
There were some very minor changes in the description of the landscape after my visit, and I think perhaps one of the main changes was the relationship that Tibetans had with the landscape. Because you see the lakes, the rivers and the mountains, refer to them as mother and father, that’s part of the name in Tibetan, and I found that very inspiring. what we call circumambulation Around Mount Kailash, Tibetans call it blankAnd if you’re walking it’s a three-day trek, but many Tibetans actually do prostrations every step of the way, so it’s 52 kilometers, the elevation at the highest point is about 18,000 feet, and they’re bringing their hands together, they’re prostrating, and then they’re getting up, and then they’re prostrating again, and just watching them do it at such a height where I can barely keep a foot forward I am also… It is a very difficult journey that they were undertaking. And they are praying not just for themselves but for the world. I found that part of it really inspiring, and I think it informed how the landscape is depicted in novels.
Simar Bhasin is a literary critic and research scholar based in Delhi. Her essay ‘A Tale of Resistance: Desire and Dissent in Selma Dabbagh’s Short Fiction’ was awarded ‘Highly Commended’ by the Wasafiri Essay Prize 2024.
Senior IS leader killed by US and Nigerian forces
US President Donald Trump said the joint operation eliminated “the most active terrorist in the world”, Abu-Bilal al-Minuki.
Coffee giant to lay off 300 workers across US in $400 million restructuring
Starbucks is once again trimming its workforce, laying off about 300 US-based roles set to go as the coffee giant reshapes its operations in a bid to get back to what it calls “durable, profitable growth”.The job reductions, according to Reuters, will affect regional support offices, with Starbucks also moving to consolidate its US office network. Several locations are set to shut, including those in Atlanta, Burbank, Chicago and Dallas. Alongside the domestic changes, the company said it is reviewing its international support structure and expects additional job cuts outside the United States.The restructuring is intended to “sharpen focus, prioritize work, reduce complexity, and lower costs”. The company added that the changes will not have any impact on its coffeehouse operations.The latest cost-cutting measures come as Starbucks continues to navigate rising expenses while chief executive Brian Niccol advances a turnaround strategy centred on strengthening in-store operations, including increased investment in barista staffing. The company recently reported its strongest sales growth in more than two years, which executives described as a milestone in the turnaround, even as operating profit margins have nearly halved since late 2024.Starbucks estimates that it will be spending about $120 million in severance payments linked to the latest round of layoffs. It is also taking a $280 million reduction in the book value of selected real estate assets, largely tied to its reserve and roastery sites and certain non-retail support properties.In parallel, the company had last month announced plans to invest $100 million to expand its presence in the US Southeast, including a new support office in Nashville, Tennessee, which is expected to accommodate around 2,000 employees over the next five years.Executive incentives are also linked to the company’s cost strategy, with Starbucks board approving a plan last summer under which top executives could receive $6 million each if specific cost-cutting targets are achieved by 2027.The latest layoffs add to a series of workforce reductions since the turnaround began, including the elimination of 1,100 corporate positions announced in February last year.
Iran war day 78: Trump, Tehran signal talks as Lebanon truce extended | Border Disputes News
Iran says Trump signalled openness to talks as deadlock remains over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Published On 16 May 2026
Lebanon has welcomed an agreement with Israel to extend a fragile ceasefire by 45 days beyond Sunday’s deadline following talks in the United States, even as Israeli forces continued attacks on towns and villages in southern Lebanon.
At least 12 people were killed on Friday, including three paramedics, according to Lebanese authorities.
Recommended Stories
list of 1 itemend of list
Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said during a BRICS meeting that Tehran had received communication from the administration of US President Donald Trump indicating openness to new negotiations aimed at ending the war. However, Araghchi said a “deadlock” remained over the issue of Iran’s enriched nuclear material.
Trump also suggested he could be open to Iran placing its civilian nuclear programme on hold for two decades, provided Tehran demonstrates what he described as a genuine commitment to a broader agreement.
Here is what we know:
In Iran
- Iran open to China’s help: Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the US had sent messages indicating it was willing to continue talks, and that he was open to any support – including from China. “We appreciate any country who has the ability to help, particularly China,” Araghchi said.
- Tehran details toll of attacks on Iranian capital: The municipal government said US-Israeli attacks during the war caused at least 650 impact incidents across the capital, killing more than 1,260 people and wounding at least 2,800. Officials also said about 51,000 homes were damaged, along with more than 10,700 cars and 754 motorcycles, including nearly 150 taxis.
- More ships pass through Hormuz: Iran is allowing more ships to pass through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, state television has reported, because “many countries have accepted the new legal protocols” it has put in place.
War diplomacy
- China signals likely veto on Hormuz resolution: China’s UN envoy Fu Cong criticised a proposed US-backed Security Council resolution on the Strait of Hormuz as “not right” in both timing and content, signalling Beijing would likely oppose the measure alongside Russia.
- Israel, Lebanon extend ceasefire: Lebanon and Israel on Friday extended a ceasefire for 45 days, despite a new flare-up in violence, the US State Department said after mediating talks. “The April 16 cessation of hostilities will be extended by 45 days to enable further progress,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said.
- Lebanon sees path to ‘lasting stability’: Lebanon’s delegation at the talks in Washington said on Friday that the truce extension and the establishment of a US-facilitated security track pave the way for “lasting stability”.
In the Gulf
- UAE fast-tracks oil pipeline bypassing Hormuz: The United Arab Emirates said it will accelerate construction of a new ADNOC pipeline linking Abu Dhabi to Fujairah to double oil export capacity outside the Strait of Hormuz by 2027, with operations expected to begin next year.
In the US
- US charges alleged Kataib Hezbollah commander: US prosecutors charged Iraqi national Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an alleged senior Kataib Hezbollah figure linked to Iran’s IRGC, over his alleged role in at least 18 attacks and attempted attacks in Europe and Canada. The FBI said al-Saadi was arrested in Turkiye before being transferred to the US.
- Tlaib marks Nakba anniversary in Congress: US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib commemorated the Nakba in a speech to Congress, saying the displacement of Palestinians “did not end in 1948” and calling for justice and the Palestinian right of return.
In Israel
- Israel intensifies attacks in southern Lebanon: The Israeli military said its forces killed more than 220 Hezbollah fighters over the past week and struck more than 440 targets across southern Lebanon during the same period.
In Lebanon
- Strike hits building in Lebanon’s Tyre: An Israeli strike hit a building in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on Friday after an evacuation warning by the Israeli army, state media reported, despite the extension in the truce between Israel and Hezbollah. An AFP correspondent saw a strike hit one of the threatened buildings.
- New evacuation orders in southern Lebanon: The Israeli military ordered residents in nine towns and villages in southern Lebanon to flee ahead of planned attacks, hours after Lebanon and Israel agreed to extend their fragile ceasefire by another 45 days. The affected areas included Ansar, al-Marwaniyah and al-Baysariyah.
- Death toll rises in Lebanon: Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health said Israeli attacks have killed at least 2,951 people and wounded 8,988 others since renewed air raids and the ground invasion began on March 2, as some residents continue refusing to leave partially destroyed homes despite ongoing military operations.
Rupee breaches 96/$ before closing at new low
MUMBAI: The rupee hit a record low of 96.14 against the US dollar on Friday before settling at 95.97, one paise lower than its previous close, as global and domestic pressures weighed on the currency.The decline comes amid a widening current account deficit, continued selling by foreign investors, and broader macroeconomic pressures, while global developments added to the downside.According to Abhishek Goenka, founder of forex advisory firm IFA Global, “It’s a one sided market. Exporters are reluctant to hedge. Market participants are broadly divided in two camps as of now. First, who are long USDINR. Second, who expect some measures from RBI or a sudden reversal and are on the sidelines. It’s very difficult to time that reversal. There are very few who are thinking shorting USDINR at this point.”“This sentiment is reflected in price action. There is incessant pressure on the rupee. Absolutely no respite. The only thing holding is RBI supply. If they step off, USDINR will fly,” he added.US President Donald Trump’s comments that he is still strongly considering resuming attacks on Iran dampened risk sentiment, while a price hike by oil marketing companies is seen as a temporary measure as it passes on only a tenth of the increase in costs. Yields on US treasuries have risen, with the yield on US two-year bonds up 8 basis points to 4.05% and the 10-year yield rising 6 basis points to 4.52%, making US assets more attractive.Brent crude futures rose more than 3% to $109 per barrel on Friday, nearing the $110 mark, adding to pressure on the rupee through higher import costs.
Man killed by 13ft great white shark in Western Australia
The man was bitten just before 10:00 (03:00 BST) at Horseshoe Reef – north-west of the popular Rottnest Island near the city of Perth, local police said.
