Arvind's Newsletter- weekend edition

Further to yesterday news on foreign credit card transactions,The Finance Ministry on clarified that payments using international debit or credit cards up to Rs 7 lakh per financial year will be excluded from the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) limits and, therefore, will not attract any Tax Collected at Source (TCS).

1.Amazon's cloud unit (AWS) to invest $13 billion in India by 2030. This comes on top of its $6.5 billion investment in e-commerce in India, where it has rapidly expanded over the years but faces a strict regulatory environment that forces it to run only a marketplace reports Reuters.The latest investment will be used to build its cloud infrastructure in India and will support over 100,000 full-time jobs annually. With this, the total planned investment in India adds up to about $16.4 billion by 2030.

The company already runs two data centers in the Indian subcontinent - one in Mumbai which was launched in 2016, and another in Hyderabad, which started in 2022

A host of global companies, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc's Google, have ramped up cloud investments in India in recent years amid New Delhi's push to gain stricter oversight of Big Tech firms by nudging to store data locally.

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2.Apple’s new ‘Personal Voice’ feature can create a voice that sounds like you or a loved one in just 15 minutes. Using Personal Voice, users will be prompted to read along with a randomised set of text prompts to record 15 minutes of audio on iPhone or iPad. Using on-device machine learning, the iPhone or iPad can then create a voice that sounds like them.

3.ChatGPT Now Has an iPhone App
Six months after OpenAI’s silver-tongued chatbot launched on the web and set off an AI arms race, you can put it in your pocket. OpenAI’s free ChatGPT app for iOS just hit Apple’s APP Store in the US.
OpenAI says the mobile app syncs your history of chats with its bot across devices and will be expanding to other countries “in the coming weeks.” An Android app is coming “soon.”

The biggest change that comes with ChatGPT’s new mobile incarnation is that you can now talk to the chatbot instead of just typing. OpenAI has added its speech recognition system, Whisper, which the company claims reaches “human-level robustness and accuracy” for English.

4.Ranked: The Cities with the Most Skyscrapers in 2023
When it comes to soaring skylines and architectural marvels, no country has embraced the vertical revolution quite like China
China’s cities dominate the list of cities with the most skyscrapers, solidifying the country’s reputation as a global powerhouse of tall buildings. The top 10 list has 6 Chinese cities (including Hong Kong). Hong Kong which is No 1 has 657 skyscrapers (> 150 m) and 6 super tall buildings (> 300 m). The next 3 cities are Schenzhen(513, 16), New York (421, 16) and Dubai (395, 28).
Hong Kong, along with Shenzhen (#2), and Guangzhou (#5) are part of the burgeoning megacity known as the Pearl River Delta, which is home to over 1,500 skyscrapers. This is even more impressive when considering that Shenzhen was a small fishing village until the 1970s.
Dubai has become synonymous with grandiose architecture and record-breaking structures, exemplified by the Burj Khalifa, which is the world’s current tallest building at 828 meters (2,715 ft).

5.Ending of an Era in tennis: Rafael Nadal to miss French Open with injury, expects 2024 to be his final season.

Rafael Nadal has announced his withdrawal from this month’s French Open because of the hip injury that has kept him out of competition since January. As his body continues to struggle with the physicality of professional tennis, Nadal also revealed he will probably retire in 2024. He will now take a break for a number of months to be prepared for what he believes will be the final year of his career.

The Spaniard withdrew injured from this year’s French Open, which he has won 14 times, winning 112 games, losing only three: “A level of dominance unmatched … in the long annals of a sport that dates to the 1800s,” noted Sky Sports.

Nadal, Federer, and Novak Djokovic have dominated 21st-century tennis, and no stars of comparable stature are yet to replace them.