1.Hero MotoCorp's e-scooters to debut in the UK and EU markets in 2025

India’s Hero MotoCorp, one of the world’s largest producers of motorcycles and scooters, plans to start selling e-scooters to the UK and at least two other European countries next year, in its first foray into a developed market.

The UK launch was planned for mid-2025. Hero, which already exports to more than 45 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, has also announced plans to sell e-scooters in France and Spain. 

The moves come at a time when Indian officials say India and the UK are making progress on a free trade agreement that would cut tariffs on goods, including in the automotive industry.

2.Indian carriers soar on international routes but foreign rivals lead

Indian airlines are ramping up their international presence by adding more direct flights. Despite these efforts, foreign carriers continue to dominate on many routes outside of West Asia, particularly to Europe and Southeast Asia.

According to Cirium data, AirAsia leads the India-Malaysia route with 46 per cent of the overall seat capacity share for September 2024. Indian carriers, in comparison, hold less than 5 per cent of the capacity on this route.

AirAsia Thailand is also making its mark. It is the third-largest airline on the India-Thailand route, with a 17 per cent seat capacity share in September, surpassing both Air India and Vistara combined. Thai Airways remains at the top with a 36 per cent share, followed by IndiGo.

3.Sensex, Nifty 50 jump over 1% to hit all-time highs. What drove the Indian stock market today?- explained with 5 factors

Stock market today: Indian stock market benchmarks—the Sensex and the Nifty 50—jumped over a per cent each to hit fresh record highs in morning trade on Friday, September 20.

The Sensex opened at 83,603.04 against its previous close of 83,184.80 and jumped over a per cent to its fresh all-time high of 84,694.46. The Nifty 50 started the day at 25,525.95 against its previous close of 25,415.80 and scaled its fresh peak of 25,849.25. The gains were broad-based as the BSE Midcap and Smallcap index also rose over a per cent each.

4.Living in paradise: The great Goa realty rush

For some, Goa is a party paradise with cheap liquor and a bohemian vibe. For others, it’s the perfect beach getaway. Now, property developers—the likes of DLF, The House of Abhinandan Lodha and the Prestige Group—have made a beeline for the coastal state. What gives?

Goa has always been a big draw for domestic and foreign tourists. For some, it’s a party paradise with cheap liquor and a bohemian vibe, and for others, it’s the perfect beach getaway. In the last four years, however, Goa has also become the go-to address for property developers, investors, and home buyers—it became a big part of the ‘second home’ buying and renting rally during the pandemic.

Demand for luxury homes and premium plots, in particular, went through the roof. On property portals such as 99acres.com and Housing.com, it is not unusual to see listings of residential plots for sale at ₹4-5 crore across Goa today. On Magicbricks.com, villas on sale cost ₹3-12 crore in places such as Assagao, Anjuna and Siolim.

5.Young women are starting to leave men behind; John Burn-Murdoch
Across the developed world, girls and young women have been pulling ahead of boys and young men in education for several decades, with much larger proportions going on to attend university than their male counterparts. This trend has generally been treated more as something to remark upon than to act on.

The myriad domains in which women remain at a disadvantage to men have understandably led to efforts at achieving gender equality becoming synonymous with advancing women’s opportunities and outcomes. Men have always gone on to have better labour market outcomes anyway, and if women outperform men in education, this helps narrow the overall male advantage — or so the thinking has gone.

Much less appreciated than the widening tertiary education gap is the fact that in several rich countries young women are now more likely to be in work than young men. The UK joined this group in 2020, and the female employment rate lead among 20-24s has since widened to three percentage points. The crossover is yet to happen in the US, but young women’s employment rate deficit has shrunk from almost 10 percentage points in 2006 to a single point last year.

Put another way, the UK is part of a growing list of countries where the answers to “who is doing most of the legwork raising children?”, “who is focused on getting a good education?” and “OK, but who is out working to bring home a good income?” are all: “Women.”

If this were simply a case of women making strides, it would be something to celebrate — and that side of the story certainly is — but a substantial minority of young men are actively moving backwards, with growing numbers increasingly disengaged from society.

Across the developed world, the portion of young men who are neither in education, in work nor looking for a job has been climbing steadily for decades. In countries including the UK, France, Spain and Canada there are now more young men than women in effect outside the economy for the first time in history. Unlike young women, these men are generally not occupied by caring for other family members either. They are adrift and likely to be the ones in need of care themselves. More than 80 per cent of this group in the UK report long-term health problems.

6.Schizophrenia: the new drug set to tackle the ‘cancer of psychiatry’

The first truly novel treatment for schizophrenia in 70 years may soon be approved in the US. 

Existing drugs for the condition, which can cause delusions and hallucinations, inhibit the uptake of dopamine, a brain chemical involved in reward and enjoyment. But that has profound side effects. Patients are often left with dulled emotions, and many come off the drugs.

The new drug, KarXT, targets the production of dopamine only in certain brain regions, and has fewer side effects. One researcher told the Financial Times that a patient of his had returned to work for the first time in 10 years after going on the drug. The Food and Drug Administration is expected to decide this month whether to allow doctors to prescribe KarXT.

7.Three scientists who pioneered the development of new anti-obesity drugs won a top research prize

Recipients of the US medical Lasker Awards were announced, recognising scientists for their work in immunology, GLP-1 hormone therapy, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Often described as "America's Nobel," the awards frequently predict winners of the Nobel Prizes announced in October, with 95 Lasker laureates having won a Nobel. 

A trio of researchers, including pioneering endocrinologist Svetlana Mojsov, was recognised for the discovery of the GLP-1 hormone's efficacy in treating obesity and diabetes, the basis of highly popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. For decades of HIV/AIDS research, including involvement in testing a promising twice-yearly antiviral drug injection, Quarraisha and Salim Abdool Karim were recognised with the public service award. University of Texas' Zhijian “James” Chen was recognized for identifying how the immune system detects foreign DNA in viruses.

8.How the world’s poor stopped catching up; The Economist

SINCE THE Industrial Revolution, rich countries have mostly grown faster than poor ones. The two decades after around 1995 were an astonishing exception. During this period gaps in GDP narrowed, extreme poverty plummeted and global public health and education improved vastly, with a big fall in malaria deaths and infant mortality and a rise in school enrolment. Globalisation’s critics will tell you that capitalism’s excesses and the global financial crisis should define this era. They are wrong. It was defined by its miracles.

Today, however, those miracles are a faint memory. As we report this week, extreme poverty has barely fallen since 2015. Measures of global public health improved only slowly in the late 2010s, and then went into decline after the pandemic. Malaria has killed more than 600,000 people a year in the 2020s, reverting to the level of 2012. And since the mid-2010s there has been no more catch-up economic growth. Depending on where you draw the line between rich and poor countries, the worst-off have stopped growing faster than richer ones, or are even falling further behind. For the more than 700m people who are still in extreme poverty—and the 3bn who are merely poor—this is grim news.

To judge what has gone wrong, first ask what previously went right. In the poorest countries education and (especially) health have depended on donors writing big cheques. But even if aid has curbed disease, it has not unleashed sustainable growth. Likewise with pro-market technocrats in the IMF and the World Bank. Western institutions were most involved in Africa and Latin America, where growth has been patchy and has varied with commodities prices.

Critics of the “neoliberal era” conclude that globalisation therefore failed. However, the most successful liberalisations came from within countries, rather than in response to donors’ advice. In the 1990s global convergence was powered by a few big successes: China’s rapid growth after it opened up under Deng Xiaoping, a similar—albeit less spectacular—process in India after reforms dismantling the “licence Raj”, and the integration of countries in eastern Europe into the global market economy after the fall of communism. All that amounts to a powerful endorsement of capitalism.

Just as the rich world did not make convergence happen, it is not to blame for the stalling of development today. It is true that the West’s efforts are as flawed as ever. The IMF and World Bank are juggling promoting reform and development with fighting climate change, and are caught in the middle of the power struggle between America and China, which is making it fiendishly hard to restructure poor countries’ debts. Aid budgets have been squeezed, hurting global public-health campaigns, as Bill Gates argues in our online By Invitation column. Cash has been diverted from helping the poorest to other causes, such as greening power grids and helping refugees. Of what aid money remains, much is wasted rather than being spent after careful study of what works. The “Sustainable Development Goals”, by which the UN judges human progress, are hopelessly sprawling and vague.

The biggest problem, though, is that home-grown reform has ground to a halt. With some notable exceptions, such as President Javier Milei’s efforts in Argentina, the world’s leaders are more interested in state control, industrial policy and protectionism than the examples of the 1990s—and it is no accident that such policies boost their own power. Indices of economic freedom have been broadly flat in sub-Saharan Africa since the mid-2010s and in South America since the turn of the century. Nigeria, where nearly a third of the population is extremely poor, still wastes a fortune on petrol subsidies; textile bosses in Bangladesh get special treatment at the expense of manufacturers who might otherwise create better jobs; and Pakistan’s inefficient state-backed mining, oil and gas conglomerates are allowed to stagger on.

Despite its past growth, a quarter of China’s population still lives on less than $2,500 per year; its present economic slowdown, made worse by Xi Jinping’s centralisation and the censorship of economic data, is reducing their chances of a better life. Even India and Indonesia, which have successfully liberalised in the past but still contain many poor people, are now interfering with market forces to try to bring supply chains home. According to Global Trade Alert, a think-tank, the 2020s have seen five times as many harmful trade measures as liberalising ones.

Many of the West’s interventions in the Global South failed, but in the era of catch-up, it did at least preach the virtues of free markets and free trade. These ideas spread because communism was proved to be backward in comparison with America’s prosperity and power. Today, though, America is increasingly taken with interventionism, disdaining the old order and trying to replace it. Many countries instead look to the Chinese model of industrial policy and state-owned enterprises, drawing entirely the wrong lessons from the country’s growth.

The world will pay for its failure to learn from history. Rich countries will cope, as they usually do. For the poorest people, however, growth can be the difference between a good life and penury. It should not be a surprise that development has stalled as governments have increasingly rejected the principles that powered a golden era. Nobody will suffer more as a result than the world’s poor.