India growth forecast lowered; No sympathy -- IMF chief to Greeks; Private space run makes history; A cry for quiet in the office; Myths, realities and India; Renesas may cut 14,000 jobs

1 Economists cut India growth forecasts (The Financial Times) Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch became the latest global banks to downgrade India's economic growth outlook on Friday, in a sign that the sharp slowdown affecting Asia's third-largest economy is worsening. Goldman cut India's growth estimates to 6.6% from 7.2% for the fiscal year ending in March 2013, while BofA revised its forecast to 6.5% from 6.8% for the same period. The two join Morgan Stanley, which revised its annual outlook for India's economic growth to 6.3% this week, blaming parliamentary deadlock for its downward revision. New Delhi is due to release its latest growth figures next Thursday.

India's economy has been slowing for more than a year as corruption scandals involving senior members of the Congress-led coalition government have paralysed parliament and blocked key reforms to boost investment. India's macroeconomic landscape has deteriorated further since the start of the year. New Delhi's fiscal and trade deficit have ballooned to 5.8% and 9.9% of GDP respectively, while inflation has shot back into double digits. The Indian rupee also weakened to a record low against the dollar this week, which is likely to fuel inflation further in coming months.

2 IMF chief to Greeks: No sympathy (The Guardian) The International Monetary Fund has ratcheted up the pressure on crisis-hit Greece after its managing director, Christine Lagarde, said she has more sympathy for children deprived of decent schooling in sub-Saharan Africa than for many of those facing poverty in Athens. Lagarde insists it is payback time for Greece and makes it clear that the IMF has no intention of softening the terms of the country's austerity package. Using some of the bluntest language of the two-and-a-half-year debt crisis, she says Greek parents have to take responsibility if their children are being affected by spending cuts. "Parents have to pay their tax," she says.

Greece, which has seen its economy shrink by a fifth since the recession began, has been told to cut wages, pensions and public spending in return for financial help from the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank. Asked whether she is able to block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs, Lagarde replies: "I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens."

3 Private space runs makes history (The Wall Street Journal) The aerospace industry reached a milestone Friday, when Space Exploration Technologies Corp. became the first private company to dock a spacecraft with the International Space Station, some 240 miles above Earth. After two days of complex maneuvering, the capsule's propulsion systems and sensors were validated and the spacecraft slowly inched toward the orbiting station until it was close enough to be snared by a robotic arm.

The test flight culminates years of planning to demonstrate Space Exploration's ability to reliably launch cargo missions to supply the orbiting laboratory, a venture supported by a group of 16 nations. The brainchild of 40-year-old Elon Musk, former Internet whiz kid and co-founder of PayPal Inc., SpaceX, as it's known, is under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to begin shuttling cargo to the space station.

4 Facebook shows a sucker is born every minute (The Wall Street Journal) If you're one of the shareholders suing Facebook Inc. because the social-networking company and its underwriters played favorites about disclosing changes to analysts' forecasts, then you deserve to be compensated for your losses or have your trades wiped out if the allegations turn out to be true. Still, that doesn't mean you aren't an old-fashioned Wall Street sucker.

The reason: You didn't have to follow Facebook's initial public offering with the zeal of Robert Caro to recognize there were significant problems. Consider that as Facebook readied its IPO, there was a lot of shifty business: On May 15, the price was boosted to $38 from a range that bottomed at $28. The next day, the offering size swelled by 50 million shares. Then came a disclosure that insiders would sell 53% more shares, or 84 million shares, in the IPO than previously planned. Sure, there still was lots of interest in Facebook's deal. But the warning signs pointed to a big flush: insiders and longtime investors selling out the maximum number of shares at the highest possible price.

5 A cry for quiet in the office (The New York Times) The walls have come tumbling down in offices everywhere, but the cubicle dwellers keep putting up new ones. They barricade themselves behind file cabinets. Or they follow an “evolving law of technology etiquette,” as articulated by Raj Udeshi at the open office he shares with fellow software entrepreneurs in downtown Manhattan. “Headphones are the new wall,” he said, pointing to the covered ears of his neighbors. Companies are redesigning offices, piping in special background noise to improve the acoustics and bringing in engineers to solve volume issues. “Sound masking” has become a buzz phrase. After surveying 65,000 people over the past decade in North America, Europe, Africa and Australia, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, report that more than half of office workers are dissatisfied with the level of “speech privacy,” making it the leading complaint in offices everywhere.

6 Spain’s Bankia seeks 19bn-euro bailout (BBC) Spain's fourth-largest bank, Bankia, has asked the government for a bailout worth 19bns euros ($24bn). Bankia also restated its results - now saying it made a 2.98bn-euro loss for 2011 rather than the 309m euros in profit it announced in February. Earlier on Friday, trading in Bankia shares was suspended on the Madrid stock exchange while its management put together a restructuring plan. Bankia has already been bailed out because of its bad property loans. Its shares fell 7.4% on Thursday to close at 1.57 euros, which is 58% down from their listing price in July 2011.

7 Myths, realities and India (Sidin Vadukut in Khaleej Times) When I look at the incompetence in the corridors of government in New Delhi, the sheer social depravity showcased in Aamir Khan’s television show, the insensitive squabbling over what daily income qualifies you to be poor, the diseased semi-corpse that is the Indian rupee, the mediocrity of media and the daily self-flagellation that my fellow Indians engage in on a daily basis on Twitter, Facebook and other online avenues, there is only one thought that can come to the mind of a young, passionate, patriotic, idealistic and ruggedly handsome Indian like me: This is a wonderful opportunity for foreigners to come and write profoundly moving books about the riveting contradictions that is India and its people!

For instance just the Indian Premier League is a phenomenon positively heaving with “book about India” possibilities and delightful contradictions. However, as far as I know, not a single foreign writer has stepped up to leverage this pregnant opportunity. This injustice must end now. Remember, the ultimate objective here is simple: Indians cannot wait to read your books about them. Please write them urgently.

Idea 1: Columnist with major American magazine moves into a slum in Mumbai and closely observes how a family of seven are responding to the Indian Premier League. He contrasts this with how another family, chock full of typically eccentric Oxford and Cambridge graduates, enjoy Test cricket in England. Idea 2: Rising star Canadian journalist simultaneously profiles $2 million dollar man Ravindra Jadeja and Jadeja’s driver Sanjay Singh. The idea is to investigate the lives of two people who are so near, yet so far. Realising, halfway through, that both Jadeja and Singh are as interesting as used towel socks, the writer cleverly decides to include one more profile: that of Mahatma Gandhi. The book, immediately banned in India, sells 123,000 copies in Delhi alone.

8 Of two Olympians from Bhutan (Dawn) In a remote Himalayan valley, an archer and a shooter are calmly preparing for a trip of a lifetime to represent Bhutan at the London Olympics, but winning is not the main target. Archer Sherab Zam and shooter Kunzang Choden, both 28-year-old women, are the only two athletes to represent the remote kingdom at the 2012 Games, competing on wildcard entries allocated to ensure all 204 National Olympic Committees can take part even if no athletes have qualified.

Neither Sherab nor Kunzang expect to win medals for Bhutan, an impoverished, largely Buddhist country between India and China which only opened up to foreigners in 1974, banned television until 1999, and uses happiness to measure its success. Competing against highly-funded athletes with state-of-the-art equipment from richer countries is tough, but Sherab and Kunzang – who do not own a bow or rifle – are both realistic and their aim is to try to beat their personal best. “Participation is more important than winning a medal,” Sherab said in Thimphu, which claims to be the only world capital without a traffic light. Kunzang added: “Bhutan is just a small country of just 700,000. There is a lot of pressure on us but we must be realistic about our chances. We just want to do well.”

9 Chip-maker Renesas may cut 14,000 jobs (Straits Times) Japanese semiconductor maker Renesas Electronics is considering cutting up to 14,000 jobs or 30% of its workforce as part of a major restructuring plan, news reports said. The company is also considering selling a major factory to a Taiwanese firm, while closing or scaling down other plants, said the Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun newspapers as well as Kyodo News. Renesas, which lost 62.6 billion yen in the year to March, also plans to raise 100 billion yen, mainly from its top shareholders NEC, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric, the Nikkei said.

10 Zuckerberg loses $3.2bn in a week (Sydney Morning Herald) Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg lost $3.2 billion during the week as shares of his social-networking company fell 16.5%, according to list of the world's richest people. Zuckerberg, 28, was the biggest loser among the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a $16.2 billion fortune ranking him as the 35th richest person in the world.

11 Asian ‘honour’ killings in Britain (Brisbane Times) A taxi driver, Iftikhar Ahmed, 52, and his wife, Farzana, 49, are now on trial for their daughter's murder. They have pleaded not guilty and the jury is still hearing the evidence. But the case has turned the spotlight on so-called ''honour'' crimes in some of Britain's migrant communities. About a dozen women a year die in acts of revenge over breaches of ''honour'' that might include refusing to wear traditional clothes or accept an arranged marriage, or choosing a man of whom the family disapproves.

UK police recorded more than 2,800 honour attacks in 2010, a figure that is understated because only 39 of the country's 52 police forces revealed their numbers. Among the 12 forces able to provide comparison figures from 2009, there was an overall rise of 47% in such incidents. Five hundred of the attacks were in London. The suicide rate among south Asian women in Britain is three times the national average, thought to be the result of women taking what they see as the only way out of an intolerable situation - or being forced to kill themselves.

12 Welcome the rupee’s fall (TN Ninan in Business Standard) A falling currency is a sign of weakness, and the decline of the rupee reflects the many ways in which the economy has been mismanaged; the loss of competitiveness gets neutralised through a cheaper currency. Some players may have got caught unawares by the sudden drop, but commentators have woken up to the positive macroeconomic effects of the rupee’s depreciation. Players should be relieved that a key element of macro-adjustment has been more or less achieved — partly through fortuitous commodity price movements.

While it is always dangerous to make short-term forecasts about markets, it is logical to assume that the rupee has found an appropriate level. The currency depreciation should give a boost to exports and to import substitution; both will give a fillip to domestic economic activity. This is not the end of the economy’s many problems; the fiscal deficit is still large, and the rupee depreciation will add to inflation. Still, an important macroeconomic imbalance has been addressed.

13Khaleej Times cartoon, Face-to-Facebook

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