Arvind's Newsletter

1.Adani retains global support as Israel, others back it despite bribery row

Despite setbacks in Kenya and from some partners including Total Energies, Adani has managed to retain support of several global countries where it has infrastructure investments.

Israel has reiterated its support for the Adani Group despite bribery allegations against its founder in the United States. Reuven Azar, Israel’s envoy to India, expressed optimism about the conglomerate’s ongoing involvement in the country, Reuters reported on Thursday.

The Adani Group holds a 70 per cent stake in Haifa port in northern Israel and is involved in ventures such as military drone production and plans to manufacture commercial semiconductors.

Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Company (IHC), a key investor in Adani, also reaffirmed its trust in the group despite recent controversies. IHC, which manages assets worth nearly $100 billion, stated that its partnership with Adani remains strong.

The Sri Lanka Ports Authority has also voiced its continued confidence in Adani’s role in expanding the country’s port infrastructure.

2.Air India to increase fleet size by a third to 400 planes by 2027: CEO

However, aircraft deliveries in 2025 are expected to be slower compared to 2024. The seven-week-long strike at Boeing's manufacturing facilities in the United States is one of the reasons for the slow deliveries, followed by supply chain challenges.

Air India group is in the middle of its five-year transformative journey called Vihaan.AI. As per the plan, the group is in its third phase or 'the climb phase', which commenced in April 2024 and will end in March 2027. The group is confident about the passenger demand in calendar year 2025, and believes that 2025 will be a year in which the airline will put all pieces together that it worked on in the last two years.

2025 will be a year of 'heavy lifting', starting with the retrofit of legacy aircraft, but the group is confident that it will start bringing all the pieces together on a tighter and more consistent note.

3.New E-Scooter for Gig Workers Adds $1 Billion to Ola’s Value

Ola Electric Mobility Ltd.’s market cap surged by $1 billion in just two days after the company launched a new electric scooter for workers involved in quicker deliveries.

Shares of India’s biggest electric-scooter maker surged about 29% in two days through Thursday, boosted by the company’s efforts to tap opportunities in the country’s vast workforce that’s in demand from quick commerce firms. Shares of the company, which debuted in August in one of the nation’s biggest initial-share sales, came under pressure recently amid its struggles with rising consumer complaints.

Launched at an introductory price of 39,999 rupees ($474) Ola Gig scooter’s base version is designed for the needs of gig workers who are involved in shorter trips, according to the company.

Ola also introduced a new version of its S1 scooter aimed at urban commuters, especially young professionals, students, women and elderly riders. The products are aimed at “democratizing electric mobility”.

4.Rs 11,333 crore lost in just 9 months: A look at the cyber scams that have hit India the worst

The Indian Express reported that the highest number of such scams took place in stock trading, followed by investment based and digital arrest scams. The report said that a significant part of these scams, almost 45%, originated in south east Asian countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.

5.Australia’s Social Media Ban for Under 16s to Become Law

Australia will ban children under 16 from using social media, after its Senate approved the world's strictest laws.

Under the proposed law, minors will be prohibited from setting up accounts on all major social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Reddit, even if they obtain parental permission.

Meta, TikTok and X have all expressed reservation about the proposal, with Elon Musk calling the legislation “alarming,” and adding that his company had “serious concerns” as to its lawfulness, potentially setting up a court challenge to the legislation.

The social media giants will be responsible for policing the ban, and could face fines of up to A$50 million ($32.5 million) for failing to enforce it.

6.Coffee beans hit their highest price in 47 years, driven by bad weather in Vietnam and Brazil, the biggest producers of robusta and arabica beans respectively. 

Brazil saw its worst drought in 70 years this year followed by heavy rains, raising fears that next season’s output will drop, further pinching already tight global supplies. Vietnam has itself had three years of low output.

Arabica beans hit $3.18 a pound on Wednesday, leading Nestlé, the world’s biggest coffee company, to increase prices.

As well as climate concerns, future prices are being raised by worries about tariffs: Roasters “will try to import now, because otherwise you will be paying higher tariffs later,”one trade analyst told the Financial Times.

7.Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad for you; The Economist; Long Read

For millennia, people have altered food to please their palates. More than 3,000 years ago Mesoamericans, living in what is Mexico and Central America today, cooked corn kernels in a solution of wood ash or limestone. The process, known as nixtamalisation, unlocked nutrients and softened the tough outer shells of the corn, making it easier to grind.

With the invention of tinned goods and pasteurisation in the 19th century, food alchemy became possible on an industrial scale. Processing innovations made food cheaper, more convenient and plentiful. According to the un, the average daily food supply available for a person in the rich world increased by over 20% between 1961 and 2021, to 3,500 kilocalories. In that time, obesity rates have more than tripled; today, nearly one in three people globally is obese or overweight.

Now concerns are growing that the heavy processing used to cook up cheap, tasty nibbles may itself be harmful. A particular target is “ultra-processed foods” (upfs), a relatively recent label put forward by Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian scientist. Robert F. Kennedy junior, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health, has likened processed food to “poison” and promised to reduce the share of upfs in American diets. In November 2023 Colombia imposed a tax on highly processed foods and drinks. Authorities in Brazil, Canada and Peru have advised the public to limit consumption of these foods. In Britain parliamentarians are investigating the effects of upfs on people’s health.

At the heart of the debate is a question: are upfs unhealthy because their nutritional content is poor, or does the processing somehow pose risks in itself? New research may soon provide answers that could reformulate what people eat.

In 2009 Dr Monteiro came up with a classification system, called Nova, that sorts foods into four buckets depending on the degree of processing they undergo. The first group includes minimally processed foods including fruit and milk. The second covers basic ingredients like butter and sugar. Next are foods such as tinned vegetables, bread, and cold cuts.

The fourth group, UPFs, includes heavily processed items, for example fizzy drinks, sugary cereals and frozen pizzas. These are made with ingredients not typically found in a home kitchen, such as hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, flavouring agents and emulsifiers. UPFs are made by breaking down whole foods into components such as sugars, proteins, starches and fibre. These are chemically modified and reassembled along with additives like artificial colours and sweeteners to make the food more appealing.

Since the 1990s the share of UPFs in diets worldwide has grown; they now account for more than half of the calorie intake in America and Britain. And for several decades, evidence has also been building that these foods are harmful in some way. Numerous studies show that people who consume diets high in UPFs tend to have more health problems, including obesity, type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, various cancers and mental-health problems. UPFs often contain higher concentrations of fat, sugar and salt than processed foods, which could explain their negative effects. But a recent analysis by Samuel Dicken and Rachel Batterham at University College London reviewed 37 studies and found that even after adjusting for fat, sugar and salt UPFs were still strongly linked to poor health. That suggests there is more to their harm than just a poor nutrient profile.

A better way to assess the question is with a randomised controlled trial (RCT), where researchers track a person’s food intake and control for all other variables. In one of the few such trials, published in 2019, Kevin Hall, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in America, admitted 20 adults to the NIH Clinical Centre for four weeks. The participants received either ultra-processed or minimally processed foods for two weeks before swapping diet for the next fortnight. Participants in both diets had access to the same amount of calories and nutrients like sugars, fibre and fat. People were free to eat as much or as little as they wanted.

The results were striking. People on the ultra-processed diet ate about 500 more calories per day than those on the unprocessed one. They also ate faster and gained an average of 1kg (2.2 pounds) over two weeks. On the other diet, participants lost a similar amount of weight. Dr Hall says that, though the study was short and conducted in an artificial setting, the results suggest that excess amounts of salt, sugar and fats might not be fully to blame for the ill effects of processed food.

Further RCTs will be needed to confirm Dr Hall’s results. Even then, a bigger question remains—why do people overeat UPFs? Dr Hall has some ideas. One is that highly processed foods pack more calories per bite. When creating them, manufacturers often remove water to dry the food, to improve their shelf life. But this also makes foods more energy dense.

Another theory—as anyone who has tried, and failed, to eat just one crisp from a bag can attest—is that highly processed foods are also engineered to be irresistible. UPFs often contain combinations of nutrients—higher in either fat and sugar or fat and salt, or carbohydrates and salt—known as “hyper-palatable” mixes. These combinations do not appear in nature and tend to encourage people to eat more quickly, not giving the gut enough time to tell the brain that it is full.

To test these ideas Dr Hall is running another study where 36 people check into his diet hotel for a month. They will be rotated through four different diets: two similar to those in his previous study and two new ultra-processed regimes. One of these is low in both energy density and hyper-palatable foods, while the other is high in energy density but low in hyper-palatable combinations. As before, all diets are balanced for key nutrients and Dr Hall is tracking changes in the participants’ weight and other health measures. Though the full results of the study are not expected until next year, early findings suggest that both hyper-palatability and energy density seem to cause most of the excess calorie consumption of UPFs.