1.Ambanis Overhaul Retail Unit in Quest of $125 Billion Valuation: Bloomberg

Mukesh Ambani is overhauling Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd. to reassure investors seeking an exit option in the form of a public listing, as slowing sales have led to a valuation of $50 billion, half of what it was two years ago.

Ambani and his daughter Isha are implementing job and cost cuts, limiting physical store expansion, slashing marketing budgets, and reviewing global brand partnerships to signal progress to investors.

The retail entity's overhaul aims to address operational inefficiencies, slow revenue growth, and dwindling transactions, and to fend off competition from Tata Group, Amazon.com Inc., and quick commerce platforms in India's consumer landscape.

The 67-year-old chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd. acknowledged to investors in recent discussions that the retail entity — part of a push to diversify the family’s energy businesses he inherited two decades ago — had grown too big too quickly as a result of expanding across formats and geographies, according to people familiar with the matter.

2.Adani's $2.1 bn Navi Mumbai Airport draws IndiGo, SpiceJet

India’s low-cost carriers will lead the shift to the Navi Mumbai Airport, the highly anticipated second airport for the commercial capital developed by billionaire Gautam Adani, as it targets a May opening.

India’s largest airline IndiGo will shift part of its operations to the new airport, according to people familiar with the matter who did not want to be identified as the information is private. Tata Group’s low-cost carrier Air India Express and smaller rivals SpiceJet and Akasa are also in discussions to eventually relocate all of their operations, the people added.

Air India Ltd.’s full-service carrier will continue to operate from the existing airport for now but will shift more of its domestic operations to Navi Mumbai, about 22 miles southeast of Mumbai’s congested existing aerodrome, the people said.

The lack of high-speed transportation links to the new facility and between the city’s two airports, especially in a high-traffic metropolis like Mumbai, poses a major challenge for the Adani Group in luring fliers and transit passengers. A metro line between the two airports is being planned but it’s a few years away.

3.After Ukraine, imperialism is now the norm: Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Indian Express

The fact that the invasion of Ukraine happened at all was a profound failure, not of Ukraine as Trump suggests, but of the international community, which failed to uphold its security guarantees to a country that had willingly given up its nuclear arsenal.

“The grotesque spectacle of an inverted narrative, where the victim Ukraine is blamed for its own condition, did not capture the significance either. Even if the US was duplicitous about its stance on NATO expansion, Russia had no casus belli to invade Ukraine. The invasion was a momentous transformation of the international order. It was only the second time since World War II that one country had claimed an entire other country.

This was not a war over a territorial dispute or even regime change. It was a war to erase a country. That Putin did not succeed in his objective should not blind us to this fact. Ukraine’s tragedy lies in the fact that seeing it simply through the framework of competing US and Russian hegemonic ambitions made it doubly invisible.

Now that Russian and American imperial ambitions are temporarily coinciding, one would have thought that it would be a reason for anti-imperialists of all stripes to at least recognise the injustice being meted out to Ukraine. But once again, Ukraine has become about Trump or Putin.

“The only possible conclusion to be drawn from the needless humiliation of Ukraine is this: It is now clear that imperialism, the outright claiming of whole countries without cause, is being reestablished as a norm in international relations. It was a remarkable feature of the post-1945 order that wars for full territorial conquest had significantly disappeared….This likely to have serious consequences.

4.India sees 5th month of negative flows, US accounts for 50% of outflows

India’s capital outflows continued for the fifth straight month, though the pace has slowed. Business Standard reported a $177 million weekly outflow — the smallest since January. However, India-dedicated funds saw $370 million in redemptions, pushing current-year-to-date (CYTD) outflows to $2.9 billion. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) lost $1.3 billion, while long-only funds saw $1.6 billion in outflows.

The US accounts for 50% of redemptions ($1.45 billion), followed by Ireland, Luxembourg, Japan, and the UK. Meanwhile, US and European markets remain investor favourites, while China sees cautious inflows. India’s rupee remains under pressure amid dollar carry trade unwinds.

5.Oil prices tumbled after OPEC+ agreed to increase crude production for the first time since October 2022.

The surprise move by the oil producers’ group led by Saudi Arabia and Russia followed calls from US President Donald Trump to lower oil prices, but the plan was “locked in well before Trump took office,” commodities analyst Amena Bakr wrote in Semafor Gulf. Still, OPEC+ is keeping an eye on Trump’s demands and his policy direction, especially his new tariffs on oil imports from Canada and Mexico.

Analysts have warned the duties could tighten supply options for refiners and push US gas prices higher. “Consumers are about to get caught between tariffs, refinery bottlenecks, and seasonal price hikes,” OilPrice.com wrote.

6.Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state: Janan Ganesh in Financial Times

There is no way of defending the continent without cuts to social spending.

“In that rare thing, an Angela Merkel statement that aged well, the long-serving German chancellor worried that Europe accounted for 7 per cent of the world’s population, a quarter of its economic output and half of its social spending. Those numbers have modulated somewhat in the subsequent 13 years, but the gist of her point holds.

More than that, it has gained a new urgency. The reason Merkel wanted some welfare trimmings was to preserve Europe’s “way of life”. The mission now is to defend Europe’s lives. How, if not through a smaller welfare state, is a better-armed continent to be funded?

By now, quick-minded readers will have registered what a more militarised, less welfarist continent would evoke: the superpower that is turning from it. As a result of their geopolitical estrangement, Europe and America could end up looking much more like each other than they ever did as two blocks of a cohesive “west”. Whether this is an irony or a paradox or something else, it would be enough to raise half a smile, were the circumstances less desperate.”

7.Germany’s likely next chancellor pledged to drastically ramp up defense and infrastructure spending. 

Friedrich Merz, whose center-right party won last month’s general election, announced a deal with his likely coalition partners to relax Berlin’s strict borrowing rules to fund 500 billion euros ($535 billion) in extra infrastructure spending, and hundreds of billions more on defense, a decision Deutsche Bank economists characterised as “one of the most historic paradigm shifts in German postwar history.”

A Handelsblatt columnist described the about-face — Merz had presented himself as a fiscal conservative during the election campaign — as “dizzying.” Investors were wary: The yield on Germany’s 10-year bond jumped the most since 2020 on the news.

8.OpenAI launches $50M grant program to help fund academic research

OpenAI on Monday said it is supporting a new consortium called NextGenAI that would focus on supporting AI-assisted research at top universities.

NextGenAI, whose 15 founding academic partners include Harvard, the University of Oxford and MIT, will be funded with $50 million in research grants, compute funding, and API access from OpenAI, the company said. Students, educators, and researchers will be eligible to receive awards, which will be doled out over the coming months.

9.ChatGPT isn't slowing down Google just yet, and these numbers prove it: Business Insider

OpenAI's ChatGPT may pose an existential threat to Google's business, though new numbers suggest it isn't making a dent in Google's search growth just yet.

Google said Monday that it now sees more than 5 trillion searches a year. Barclays analysts took that figure — along with previous company disclosures — and did some back-of-the-napkin math to conclude Google queries may have grown over 20% over the two years since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022.

ChatGPT's active users have been rising for two years, reaching 100 million weekly active users (WAUs) in November 2023 and 400 million WAUs in February 2025. That had some Google investors worried.

By estimating that Google had 3.5 trillion searches a year in early 2023 based on Microsoft's disclosure that it had 10 billion searches a day around that time, the analysts found that OpenAI isn't hurting the search giant just yet. Google first said it was handling "trillions" of searches a year in 2016.

"While this could still play out in the future, the opposite appears to be true over the past two years," the Barclays analysts wrote, referring to ChatGPT's perceived threat to Google's business.

10.The Cost of Trying to Live Forever:
Ariana Huffington in Time magazine

“ Most of the longevity movement is not really about immortality but rather about extending life and limiting the damaging effects of aging. Of course, we all want longevity, and doing what we can to extend how long we live is great—as long as we don’t allow that to distract us from focusing on how to live. The danger of Johnson’s obsessive approach is spending so much time trying to extend your life that you never quite get around to living it. 

Indeed, keeping death close—even while pushing it as far into the future as we can—has many lessons to teach us about life. Because as one headline from The Onion puts it: “World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100%.” This punchline, that no one escapes death, can of course be confirmed by multiple scientific studies. 

We are not anywhere close to conquering death. In fact, a study from the University of Illinois in Chicago last year showed that though the average lifespan has gone up, the pace of improvement is slowing and the maximum lifespan hasn’t changed as much. “We’ve now proven that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed,” the study’s lead author Professor Jay Olshansky says. “There’s plenty of room for improvement: for reducing risk factors, working to eliminate disparities and encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles—all of which can enable people to live longer and healthier.” But room for improvement in living longer is very different from delusions about eliminating death.

Death can help us focus our attention on living our best life, because there’s nothing that can teach us more about how to live life than . Death is the most universal experience, yet we will do anything and everything we can to curtain it off, to avoid dealing with the only plot twist that we know for sure will be in our story’s last act.”