US President Joe Biden has announced his intent to appoint two Indian Americans to his powerful Export Council, the principal national advisory committee on international trade.

The president on Feb 28 announced a list of members he intends to appoint to the council.

Punit Renjen, the former CEO of Deloitte Consulting and Rajesh Subramaniam, CEO and president-elect of FedEx, have their names on the list of members the president intends to appoint as members of the influential President's Export Council.

The council will be headed by Mark Edin, chairman of Kastle Systems.

More than two dozen leaders from the corporate sector, labour, real estate, national security and law, have been tapped into the President's Export Council.

Prominent among them are Karen S.Lynch, president and CEO of CVS Health; John Lawler, the chief financial officer of Ford; Gareth Joyce, CEO at Proterra; Brett Hart, president of United Airlines; Beth Ford, president and CEO of Land O'Lakes; and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano R.Amon.

On December 31 last, Renjen retired as Deloitte Global CEO after having served in the role since June 2015. He now serves as Deloitte Global CEO Emeritus.

President Joe Biden is nominating Julie Su, the current deputy and former California official, as his next labor secretary, replacing the departing incumbent, former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.

A transgender woman in Scotland convicted of raping two women before beginning to transition was on  Feb 28 given eight years’ jail, in a case that has stoked political controversy in the United Kingdom.

According to The Straits Times, Isla Bryson was handed the prison sentence at the High Court in Edinburgh, and will also spend a further three years on license.

The 31-year-old was convicted in January of raping two women in 2016 and in 2019 when she was a man known as Adam Graham.

Holding the bulky brick cellphone he’s credited with inventing 50 years ago, Martin Cooper thinks about the future.

Little did he know when he made the first call on a New York City street from a thick gray prototype that our world — and our information — would come to be encapsulated on a sleek glass sheath where we search, connect, like and buy.

He's optimistic that future advances in mobile technology can transform human lives but is also worried about risks smartphones pose to privacy and young people.

The 94-year-old told The Associated Press at MWC, or Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest wireless trade show where he was getting a lifetime award this week in Barcelona.

Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a Manhattan street on April 3, 1973, using a prototype device that his team at Motorola had started designing only five months earlier.

Cooper used the Dyna-TAC phone to famously call his rival at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T. It was, literally, the world's first brick phone, weighing 2.5 pounds and measuring 11 inches. Cooper spent the best part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market.

Britain and the European Union proclaimed on Feb 27 a "new chapter" in relations after years of Brexit tensions as they agreed on a sweeping overhaul of trade rules in Northern Ireland.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen adopted the deal at a meeting in Windsor, west of London.

The deal follows more than a year of tense talks over the "Northern Ireland Protocol", which has unsettled the province 25 years on from a historic peace deal that ended three decades of armed conflict.

Agreed in 2020 as part of Britain's EU divorce, the original pact kept the province in the European single market for physical goods and subject to different customs rules than the rest of the United Kingdom, angering pro-UK unionists there and eurosceptics in London.

The UK government under Boris Johnson had threatened a unilateral rewrite of the protocol unless the EU agreed to wholesale changes, souring diplomatic ties and risking a wider trade war.

Take back control

The new framework creates a "green" check-free lane for goods coming from the rest of the UK that are intended to stay in Northern Ireland, without heading into Ireland and the EU's single market.

UK-approved food and medicines will be fully available in Northern Ireland. The deal will also limit, but not scrap, oversight of the arrangements by the EU's European Court of Justice (ECJ).

 The Centre’s fiscal deficit in the first 10 months of the current financial year has widened by 27% to Rs 11.90 lakh crore compared to Rs 9.4 lakh crore in the same period last year. The fiscal deficit in the April-January period has reached 68% of the revised full year target of Rs 17.55 lakh crore, data from the Comptroller General of Accounts (CGA) showed. On a month-on-month basis the fiscal deficit increased 20% to over Rs 9.93 lakh crore in December.

The widening of the fiscal deficit could be attributed to moderate growth in net tax revenues (9% year-on-year) amid sharp contraction (21%) in non-tax revenues, and a 29% month-on-month growth in capex during the month. Revenue expenditure, or expenses on salaries and pensions, grew at 9.7% y-o-y during first 10 months of the financial year.

The government’s gross tax collection during April-January 2022-23 showed a 12.6% growth at Rs 23.62 lakh crore largely driven by a strong growth in GST (24.5%) and income tax (18.9%) collections. Corporate tax collections grew at 14.84%. However, excise duty collections fell by 19.26% during the April-January period.

For the current financial year, the government targets to keep its fiscal deficit at 6.4% of the GDP. For the next financial year, the government has budgeted a fiscal deficit target of 5.9%.

Country’s largest commercial bank, State Bank of India (SBI) on Feb 28 announced completion of a $1 billion Syndicated Social Loan Facility.

This syndicated transaction is significant for SBI and the Indian ESG financing market since it is the biggest ESG (environment, social and governance) loan by a commercial bank in the Asia Pacific and the second-largest social loan globally. Additionally, this is the bank’s inaugural social loan and the first syndicated loan in the past five years.

US tech giant Apple has provided nearly 1 lakh jobs in the past one-and-a-half years in the country, Union Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said.

In 2022, the Cupertino-based company shifted its focus to India after its prime manufacturers and assembling plants in China faced a complete shutdown in 2022 due to its zero Covid policy.

Last month (January 2022), Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal said Apple Inc is planning to ramp up its production in the country from 5-7% to 25%. The country’s telecom sector has been conferred on “global government leadership award” by the London-based telco body GSM Association (GSMA). Talking about the major shift in the smartphone industry in the country, Vaishnaw said India used to import 99% smartphones from all over the world just 10 years ago, but thanks to the scheme, 99% of smartphones (in India) are now made in India.

This year,  according to Vaishnaw, India will export mobile phones worth $10 billion. On the deployment of 5G in the country, the minister said India will cover 100% of the 5G network by the end of December 2024. So far, 5G services have been launched in 387 districts by Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel across the country. Jio is deploying a 5G standalone (SA) network, whereas rival Airtel is deploying a 5G non-standalone (NSA) network. 

The government will table Telecom Bill 2022 in the Monsoon session as the second draft of the bill is almost ready.