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Microsoft to let employees work from home permanently: Report

“The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged all of us to think, live and work in new ways,” Microsoft’s Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan said in a note to employees obtained by the tech news outlet.

“We will offer as much flexibility as possible to support individual workstyles, while balancing business needs and ensuring we live our culture.”

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Google chalks out a plan to turn YouTube into the next shopping destination

For months now, Google executives have signaled that YouTube will be central to their e-commerce strategy. On a recent earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai suggested YouTube’s sea of popular product “unboxing” videos could be turned into a shopping opportunity. The video site is full of other popular categories, such as makeup and cooking tutorials, where creators tout commercial products on air.

Amazon and Walmart Inc. have tinkered with shoppable videos for several years. Thus far, neither retailer has shown much progress. In China, though, this business model has taken off. On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, influencers use live streamed videos to hawk wares from lipstick to smartphones in real-time to hundreds of millions of users.

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World Bank praises efforts to arrest COVID-19 spread in Mumbai’s Dharavi

Dharavi, which is located in India’s commercial capital Mumbai, is spread over an area of 2.5 square kilometres and has a population of 650,000. People live in shanties and dilapidated buildings with narrow lanes and open sewers.

Observing that effective approaches have tapped the skills and dedication of community members, the World Bank said that in Mumbai, city officials were able to stem the rapid spread of the coronavirus in Dharavi, one of the city’s largest urban settlements, by mobilising community members and staff from private medical clinics for a strategy based on mass screening for fever and oxygen levels.

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Maharashtra becomes first state to regulate prices of masks during COVID-19 pandemic

According to the recommendation of the committee, the N-95 mask will be available for around Rs 19 to Rs 50 depending on the type, while the double and triple layer masks will be available for just Rs 3 to 4. The process of deciding on the price fixed by the committee is in the final stage and after the approval of the government, it will be mandatory to sell the masks at the revised rate, said an official release.

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Life insurers see recovery in new premium income, subdued growth in policy sales in H1 FY 20-21

The life insurance behemoth LIC is at the verge of recovery as its new premium income, at Rs88, 018 crore, has shown a de growth of just two per cent.

Among the listed players, HDFC Life reported robust growth of 43 per cent y-o-y , followed by Max Life (16 per cent y-o-y growth), while SBI Life posted 4 per cent y-o-y-o decline. On the other hand, ICICI Prudentail Life Insurance (IPRU Life), which declined 24 per cent y-o- y continued to witness pressure.

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