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Eco/Invest/Demography

Maggi noodles to chyawanprash:What India has been spending on in pandemic

Companies such as Dabur India Ltd. and The Himalaya Drug Co. are witnessing high demand for traditional products like chyawanprash (a cooked mixture containing honey, sugar, ghee, herbs and spices) and proprietary supplements like Septilin,which combines ayurvedic ingredients including licorice and guduchi
Sales of packaged foods have surged since March, as home-bound consumers stockpile familiar products that won’t go stale quickly. Breakfast cereals, instant noodles, rice and cooking fats are among the products experiencing the strongest growth but missed out on sales due to stock outages, according to Euromonitor.
Online retailer Flipkart says overall laptop searches have more than doubled since March, with high-performance laptops the most popular search.
ZEE5 — the homegrown rival to Netflix Inc. — reported a 33% jump in daily active users and 45% in app downloads in May

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Lemonade’s 2020 giveback hits new high, Backing 34 nonprofits chosen by customers

The Lemonade Giveback is part of the company’s socially-impactful business model, in which a portion of underwriting profits go to nonprofits of customers’ choosing. As the Lemonade community grows, so does the potential of the Giveback, and this year’s donation is more than 20x the first one in 2017.

“The global pandemic has hurt so many in so many ways. More than ever, we’re grateful that our business allows us to take care of our customers while they take care of their communities.Many of our customers selected Direct Relief’s COVID response for their Giveback, and in so doing they helped finance medication for 50,000 ICU patients – a hugely impactful move,”said Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade CEO and cofounder.

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Serum Institute to produce up to 100 mn COVID-19 vaccine doses for India, other countries

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, via its Strategic Investment Fund, will provide at-risk funding of USD 150 million to Gavi, which will be used to support the Serum Institute of India (SII) to manufacture the potential vaccine candidates and for future procurement of vaccines for low- and middle-income countries via Gavi’s COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC), the statement said

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AIE flight crash:Govt announces Rs 10 lakh interim relief for each of the deceased, Rs 2 lakh for the seriously injured,Death toll rises to 18 

Seventeen people were killed and scores injured when the AIEflight from Dubai with 190 on board overshot the table toprunway while landing in heavy rains and fell into a valley 35 feet below and broke into two portions on Friday night.

The pilot-in-command Captain Deepak Sathe and his co- pilot Akhilesh Kumar were among those who lost their lives.

Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said authorities managed to rescue most of the passengers because the plane did not catch fire while descending the slope at the end of the table-top runway. Such runways are located at an altitude and have steep drops at one or both ends.

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Crowded villages show why coronavirus cases are surging in rural India

The disease is now widespread outside metropolitan areas, said Bhramar Mukherjee, professor at the School of Public Health, University of Michigan. “We need commitment and collective sacrifice from people of rural India to keep contact diaries, symptom diaries, and to not feel stigmatized if they test positive or have symptoms, so that the disease does not infest villages like an enemy in the dark.”

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Container ships sent to Tripoli to keep Lebanon supply lines running

Ship insurer Gard said: “According to our correspondents, the port of Beirut is closed for a minimum period of 14 days which could be extended until port facilities have been restored.”

The International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents seafarers, quoted its representatives in Lebanon as saying at least 12 dockers and seven separate seafarers had been killed in the port. The figure could not be independently confirmed.
Lebanon, which imports almost all it uses, relies on container ships to bring in everything from refrigerated food cargoes to clothing and other consumer goods.
There is no firm date for Beirut port to re-open, and this is a strain on supply chains.

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