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By P. Sreekumaran THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The VD Satheesan-led United Democratic Front (UDF) Government has temporarily stayed an order implementing minimum marks for classes VI-II, IX and X in the 2026-27 academic year. Implementation of minimum marks was one of the most significant and debated decisions of the previous LDF Government. The LDF had in 2024 approved […]

The article Keralam Govt Stays Implementation Of Minimum Marks In Schools appeared first on Latest India news, analysis and reports on Newspack by India Press Agency).

Economists interviewed for the series said that, as a key gateway to the world’s second-largest single market, ASEAN businesses cannot afford to overlook the historic opportunity to enter the Chinese market through Hainan. Chen Bo, Senior Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, said that with multiple policy incentives taking effect, the next decade represents a golden opportunity for Hainan. Xiao Saizi, a professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, noted that in the six months since the launch of special customs operations, the number of foreign trade companies registered in Hainan has grown rapidly. High-end manufacturing and processing industries—including chip packaging and testing, premium food processing, aviation maintenance, green energy, medical devices, and biopharmaceuticals—are among the sectors most likely to benefit.

Located at the southernmost tip of China, Hainan is within a four-hour flight of 21 Asia-Pacific countries. This natural geographic advantage makes it an important springboard for ASEAN businesses seeking to enter the Chinese market. Xiao said that Hainan received 106 million domestic and international tourist visits in 2025, making it an ideal testing ground where foreign investors can test the market at relatively low cost.

Previous surveys have shown that foreign exchange settlement is one of the key concerns for foreign investors. By the end of 2025, 11 banks in Hainan had launched EF accounts, enabling cross-border fund flows with 91 countries and regions, with total transaction volume equivalent to CNY 350.9 billion.

Several economists advised ASEAN businesses to conduct thorough internal assessments before making investment decisions. If they determine that the Chinese market will form part of their future growth strategy, they should consider entering Hainan early while the benefits of the Free Trade Port’s policies continue to unfold.

Hashtag: #FreeTradePort

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At the event, mayors and city representatives from six international sister cities of Wuhan called for closer cooperation in technology, industry, education and culture.

Representatives from Manchester in Britain, Kemi in Finland, Cape Town in South Africa, Yangon in Myanmar, Rzeszów in Poland and Turkistan in Kazakhstan took part in discussions on urban innovation, industrial cooperation and cultural exchange.

Manchester: a new start after 40 years of friendship

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the sister-city relationship between Wuhan and Manchester.

Shaukat Ali, lord mayor of Manchester, said the city was ready to deepen cooperation with Wuhan in education, culture, youth affairs, innovation and industry.

“Manchester is committed to promoting urban transformation through open cooperation, sharing opportunities, and fostering common development with international sister cities like Wuhan,” he said.

Ali said Manchester had developed from a post-industrial city into an innovation-oriented economy, with a focus on advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, life sciences and green technologies.

He said the two cities could share experience in urban transformation, innovation districts, university-industry cooperation and low-carbon development, while encouraging links among universities, businesses and research institutions.

He also highlighted existing educational and cultural links, including cooperation between Hubei University and Manchester Metropolitan University and exchanges between the Royal Northern College of Music and Wuhan Conservatory of Music.

Kemi: balancing growth with environmental protection

Mikko Koivulehto, chairman of the City Council of Kemi, said the Finnish city sought to balance economic growth with environmental protection.

“We believe that protecting nature and building a prosperous city can go hand in hand,” he said.

Kemi, a port city in Finnish Lapland, has developed industries based on renewable raw materials, clean energy and the bioeconomy. The city is also seeking to expand tourism and improve livability.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the friendly exchange relationship between Wuhan and Kemi. The two cities have cooperated in areas including trade, the circular economy, tourism and youth exchanges.

Cape Town: technology and jobs key to urban transformation

Lungelo Mbandazayo, city manager of Cape Town, said technological innovation, talent development, infrastructure and green renewal were key to Wuhan’s transformation.

Cape Town, a UNESCO City of Design, is seeking to expand its technology and digital sectors while promoting green technology and an inclusive economy.

Mbandazayo said youth unemployment remained a major challenge for Cape Town and that technological development needed to create jobs.

After visiting Wuhan companies and technology facilities, he said Cape Town hoped to deepen exchanges with Wuhan in technology and talent.

Yangon: seeking practical cooperation with Wuhan

Yangon Mayor Myo Myint Aung said the city was looking to Wuhan for experience in smart-city development, digital governance, intelligent transport and urban resilience.

Wuhan and Yangon signed a letter of intent on friendly exchanges and cooperation during the event.

Yangon is developing a long-term plan to accommodate population growth and expand its urban, industrial and transport infrastructure.

During a visit to Wuhan on Sept. 19, Myo toured the Optics Valley “Photon” suspended monorail, HGTECH and a Xiaomi smart home appliance factory.

“We came to Wuhan not just to observe, but to learn and cooperate,” he said, adding that Yangon hoped to develop smart manufacturing and strengthen cooperation in information technology.

Rzeszów: opportunities in aerospace and technology

Rzeszów Mayor Konrad Fijołek said the Polish city hoped to cooperate with Wuhan in aerospace, sensor technology, biodiversity and climate action.

Rzeszów is home to the “Aviation Valley,” a major aerospace cluster in Central Europe.

“Exploring cooperation with Wuhan is the reason I came here,” Fijołek said.

After visiting HGTECH and a Xiaomi smart home appliance factory, he said Wuhan’s automated manufacturing and technologies in sensors and satellite systems had impressed him.

He said cities could help connect universities, businesses and research institutions and promote international cooperation.

Turkistan: five areas for cooperation

Turkestan Mayor Azimbek Pazylbekuly said his city hoped to expand cooperation with Wuhan in tourism and culture, education and science, investment and entrepreneurship, digitalization and innovation, and transport and logistics.

Wuhan and Turkistan signed a memorandum of intent on friendly exchanges and cooperation during the event.

Turkistan, an ancient Silk Road city and a UNESCO World Heritage site, has been developing industries including food processing, textiles, furniture and construction materials.

Pazylbekuly said cooperation between governments, businesses, universities and research institutions could help turn the two cities’ exchanges into concrete projects.

The conference also included friendship-city anniversary celebrations and a signing ceremony for 10 cooperation projects. A digital list of cooperation opportunities and an initiative on international friendship-city cooperation were released.

During their stay, the visiting mayors toured Wuhan’s technology, manufacturing and ecological facilities, including the Optics Valley suspended monorail, a Yangtze finless porpoise conservation center, Xiaomi, HGTECH and Dongfeng Motor facilities.

Hashtag: #wuhan

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The District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission in Dakshina Kannada held that the airline had failed to provide the level of care it had undertaken to offer after collecting ₹2,000 from passenger Sushanth N. G. for special handling. The order, passed on August 31, directed the carrier to refund that fee and pay additional compensation and legal costs.

The commission awarded ₹20,000 for deficiency in service, mental agony and inconvenience, along with ₹5,000 towards litigation expenses. It gave the airline 45 days to comply, failing which the amount will carry interest at 6 per cent a year from the date of default until payment.

Sushanth had booked an Air India Express flight from Chennai to Mangalore for July 27, 2025. He was travelling with a bicycle used for training and competitive racing, which he valued at more than ₹3 lakh. At the time of booking, he paid ₹2,000 for one-piece special equipment handling.

He told the commission that airline staff at Chennai airport had assured him the bicycle would receive special care. After reaching Mangalore, however, he found the bicycle circulating on the ordinary baggage carousel along with other passengers’ luggage.

Sushanth questioned airline staff at the airport and later raised the issue by email on July 31, 2025, seeking a refund of the special handling charge. The airline initially told him the matter was being examined but subsequently closed the complaint, prompting him to approach the consumer forum.

Air India Express acknowledged that the special handling fee had been collected but disputed the passenger’s interpretation of the service. It argued that payment for special equipment did not mean the bicycle had to be manually carried at every stage of the journey.

The airline maintained that special handling involved additional attention and protection where operationally required and permissible. It also contended that baggage within allowed belt dimensions could be delivered through the normal arrival carousel and that the bicycle fell within those limits.

The carrier further submitted that staff had noticed the bicycle on the conveyor and removed it by hand, limiting its exposure to contact with other baggage. It stressed that the bicycle had reached Sushanth without physical damage, wear, tear or loss.

The commission rejected the argument that absence of damage was sufficient to defeat the complaint. It examined documents produced by both sides, including the airline’s terms governing special equipment handling, photographs, email correspondence and video footage showing the bicycle on the baggage belt.

The bench, comprising President-in-charge Somashekarappa K. Handigol and member Sharadamma H. G., found that the footage was inconsistent with the standard of special care promised for the paid service. It held that a passenger who pays an additional charge for handling delicate or valuable equipment is entitled to expect treatment different from ordinary baggage processing.

The commission said the airline’s own service terms contemplated care and caution in dealing with special equipment. By placing the bicycle on the regular belt despite accepting the additional handling fee, it found Air India Express had failed to perform the service in the manner promised.

The panel therefore treated the conduct as a deficiency in service under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, and also found that the handling arrangement had not been honoured as represented to the passenger.

Sushanth had sought refund of the ₹2,000 fee, ₹40,000 as compensation for mental agony and ₹10,000 towards litigation expenses. The commission partly allowed the complaint, awarding a lower compensation amount while granting the full refund and litigation costs.

The ruling turned on the distinction between successful delivery and fulfilment of a paid service commitment. Although the bicycle arrived intact, the commission found that its placement on the ordinary baggage system showed that the special handling Sushanth had purchased was not provided as agreed.

Chief Executive John Lee’s 2026 Policy Address and the city’s first Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development set out measures covering finance, trade, shipping, aviation, innovation and technology, alongside efforts to attract capital, companies and skilled workers. The government said the programme is designed to reinforce Hong Kong’s international competitiveness and support longer-term economic development.

Gold will serve as the entry point for a broader commodity trading ecosystem. Hong Kong plans to formally launch its central clearing and settlement system for gold in the first quarter of 2027, following trial operations that began in July. The system is intended to support trading that meets international standards and strengthen links among clearing, settlement, storage and physical delivery.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing will announce details this year of new renminbi-denominated, physically settled gold futures contracts. The government also plans to explore tax concessions for qualifying activities across the gold and commodity trading chain, with proposals expected to be put to the Legislative Council for consultation next year.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is studying whether the Exchange Fund should moderately increase its gold holdings and participate in local spot and futures markets. Existing physical gold inventories could gradually be transferred to designated vaults appointed by the Hong Kong Precious Metals Central Clearing Company.

Authorities also plan to expand storage and related infrastructure. Since the London Metal Exchange added Hong Kong to its global warehousing network in 2025, approved storage space has exceeded 60,000 square metres and inventories have risen above 20,000 tonnes of metal. More LME-approved warehouses are planned for the Northern Metropolis.

A half-rate tax concession for physical commodity trading is also being pursued to encourage traders to establish or enlarge operations in the city. A joint working group led by the Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury will examine market opportunities and possible collaboration between exchanges.

The wider financial strategy seeks to strengthen Hong Kong’s role as an offshore renminbi business hub and an international centre for asset management and risk management. The government plans to deepen green and digital finance, widen financing channels for technology companies and strengthen trade finance, supply-chain finance, clearing, settlement and risk-management services.

A proposed Innovation and Technology Industry-Oriented Fund will receive HK$10 billion in government funding and is expected to reach at least HK$40 billion when market capital is included. Priority areas include life and health technology, artificial intelligence and robotics, semiconductors and smart devices, digitalisation, and sustainable development.

The five-year plan also calls for greater emphasis on high-value maritime services rather than relying mainly on traditional port logistics. Measures include reforms to ship registration, support for ship financing and marine insurance, and further development of maritime arbitration and other professional services.

Hong Kong also intends to build a broader aviation industry ecosystem. Plans include developing aircraft-parts processing and trading, participating in research and certification connected with domestically developed aircraft, and expanding sustainable aviation fuel supply chains across the Greater Bay Area. Authorities aim for sustainable aviation fuel to account for 1% to 3% of fuel used by departing flights at Hong Kong International Airport in 2030.

Trade policy will focus on digitalisation, diversification and higher-value supply-chain services. The government wants more companies to use Hong Kong for international orders, foreign-exchange transactions, treasury operations, trade finance and supply-chain management, while attracting regional and international headquarters.

The plan places innovation alongside the traditional pillars, with support directed towards artificial intelligence, robotics, life sciences, microelectronics and advanced manufacturing. It also identifies aerospace technology, marine technology, quantum technology and embodied intelligence as fields for longer-term development.

Rotating chairman David Wang said at Huawei Connect 2026 in Shanghai on Thursday that the company plans to release the 960DT in the first quarter of 2027 and the Ascend 960PR in the third quarter. The roadmap places Huawei’s next generation of accelerators at the centre of its effort to build domestic alternatives for training and running increasingly demanding AI models.

Huawei also unveiled the Ascend 960 SuperPoD and an upgraded version of its UnifiedBus interconnect technology, designed to link large numbers of processors so they can function as one computing system. The company said a combination of UnifiedBus and its Hi-ONE optical system could connect as many as 4,000 processors within a SuperPoD, extending high-speed optical links deeper into the machine.

The strategy reflects a broader shift towards system-level performance rather than relying solely on the capability of individual chips. Advanced AI workloads require thousands of processors to exchange data rapidly, making networking bandwidth, memory access and cluster efficiency increasingly important alongside raw chip performance.

Wang said Huawei has developed 11 semiconductors based on UnifiedBus technology for use across its large computing systems. Its biggest planned superclusters will be able to support up to one million AI processors, he said, while the company has already shipped more than 1,000 smaller supernodes to more than 370 customers.

Huawei did not identify those customers or give a detailed breakdown of shipments. It also did not provide independently verified benchmarks directly comparing the new 960-series chips with Nvidia’s leading accelerators, leaving questions over single-chip performance, software compatibility and manufacturing scale.

The company had previously said the Ascend 960 would offer twice the computing power, memory capacity, memory bandwidth and interconnect ports of the Ascend 950 generation. Huawei has also been developing the Atlas 960 SuperPoD and SuperCluster, with the larger system intended to combine more than one million neural processing units when it reaches the market.

Huawei’s current product roadmap also includes the Ascend 950DT, due in the fourth quarter of 2026. The company has said that processor will use its HiZQ 2.0 high-bandwidth memory, providing 144 GB of capacity and 4 terabytes per second of bandwidth. Those specifications are intended to support both model training and the decode stage of inference workloads.

US restrictions have limited China’s access to cutting-edge Nvidia processors and advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment, giving domestic suppliers greater room to expand. Huawei has emerged as the most prominent of those suppliers, but Nvidia retains a major advantage through its CUDA software ecosystem and a broad global developer base.

Chinese AI developers have increasingly turned to domestic accelerators for inference, where trained models generate responses, even as many frontier laboratories continue to depend on Nvidia hardware for the most demanding training jobs. That split has made Huawei’s ability to improve both hardware and software a critical test of whether China can reduce its dependence on foreign computing infrastructure.

Huawei is also contending with shortages of high-bandwidth memory, a key component in AI accelerators. The company has designed memory for some newer Ascend products, but supply constraints across the industry have increased costs and complicated efforts to scale production quickly enough to meet demand.

The group is seeking to offset those limitations through architectural changes, advanced packaging, optical networking and tighter integration between chips, systems and software. Its SuperPoD approach is intended to compensate for weaker performance from individual processors by allowing much larger numbers of chips to work together with lower latency.

The All India Petroleum Dealers Association, led by president Ajay Bansal, made the request in a letter to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday, seeking relief before the revised UPI merchant payment framework takes effect on October 15.

Under the new framework, person-to-merchant UPI payments above ₹2,000 will generally attract an MDR of 0.4 per cent, with the charge capped at ₹300 for transactions of ₹75,000 and above. Fuel, railways, telecommunications, insurance and agricultural inputs have been placed in a separate essential-sector category carrying a flat MDR of ₹5 on payments above ₹2,000.

The Finance Ministry has said person-to-person UPI transfers will remain free regardless of value, while merchant payments of up to ₹2,000 and qualifying small-merchant transactions will also continue without MDR. It estimates that about 96 per cent of merchant UPI transactions will remain unaffected by the change.

AIPDA, however, said petrol pump economics differ from businesses where earnings rise with the value of a sale. Dealer margins are determined by oil marketing companies under the petroleum ministry’s framework and are primarily fixed on a per-litre basis, leaving outlets unable to offset payment-processing costs through higher margins on larger transactions.

“Dealers therefore have no mechanism to increase their earnings in proportion to the value of a transaction,” the association said in its letter.

The dealers’ body said even a flat ₹5 charge could become material because fuel stations handle large transaction volumes every day. It argued that multiplying the fee across thousands of payments would create a recurring cost burden, while applying the general 0.4 per cent rate would be still more difficult for the sector to absorb.

AIPDA asked for an absolute exemption from MDR and associated transaction fees for all UPI payments at retail fuel outlets, irrespective of value. As an alternative, it urged the government to provide a specific exemption for petrol pumps from both percentage-based MDR and fixed per-transaction charges if the ₹2,000 threshold is retained.

The association also warned that imposing the fee could encourage some dealers to discourage or restrict UPI payments above the threshold to protect margins, a development it said would run against the government’s goal of expanding digital payments and improving transaction transparency.

The Finance Ministry, setting out the rationale for the framework, said MDR is not a tax and is not collected by the government or the National Payments Corporation of India. The fee will instead be distributed among banks, payment service providers and UPI application providers to support the operation and expansion of the payment network.

The ministry said the differentiated fee structure was designed to preserve free payments for individuals and small merchants while creating a sustainable revenue stream for the wider UPI ecosystem. The flat ₹5 rate for fuel and other essential services was intended to give businesses in thin-margin sectors greater cost certainty than a percentage-based charge.

Dealers contend that fuel retailing warrants stronger protection because the mode of payment does not change the underlying economics of a petrol or diesel sale. They also cited earlier concessions on card-payment costs as evidence that fuel transactions have previously received distinct treatment within the digital-payment system.

The association said its commissions had not received an upward revision since October 2017 even as expenses including electricity, wages and regulatory compliance had increased. It said discussions with oil marketing companies over dealer earnings had yet to resolve the pressure on operating margins.

The dispute comes as fuel retailers prepare for the October implementation of the revised UPI rules. Dealers’ groups from several states have also approached the finance and petroleum ministries, seeking relief from the new fee and warning that outlets could reconsider accepting higher-value UPI payments if they are required to absorb the charge.