EDITION 38

SPORTS SCOREBOARD

*INDIA BIG HEADLINES*

1 ASIAN GAMES 2026 – DAY 6 – NAGOYA, JAPAN – INDIA SHINES TODAY
– India entered Day 6 at 15th position with 17 medals (1 Gold, 7 Silver, 9 Bronze) at end of Sep 24
– Today morning GOLD: Kamaljeet and Suruchi Inder Singh won gold in 10m air pistol mixed team final with Asian Record 484.6 – South Korea silver 478.0, Iran bronze. They topped qualification with 587-29x, just 4 short of world record
– SILVER: Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar, Rudrankksh Patil and Niraj Kumar won silver in men’s 50m rifle 3 positions team event with 1762-94x, behind China gold 1766-95x
– KABADDI: Indian women’s kabaddi team beat Nepal 48-24 in semifinal, enter final on Saturday
– Table tennis: Manush Shah and Diya Chitale assure medal, reach mixed doubles semifinal – rare medal for India
– Squash: Joshna Chinappa and Velavan Senthilkumar also in mixed doubles semifinal
– Overall medal tally now 19 medals and climbing. China crossed 100 medals (67 Gold)

2 FOOTBALL – INDIA vs PANAMA TODAY
– Venue: Sree Kanteerava Stadium, Bengaluru – Time: Today 25 Sep evening
– Match rescheduled from 26th to 25th because stadium will host Bengaluru Marathon on 27th as start/finish point
– Panama ranked 44th FIFA, played in FIFA World Cup 2026 (vs Ghana, Croatia, England). First ever meeting between India and Panama, 9th CONCACAF opponent for India
– India schedule: vs Brazil on Oct 3 Salt Lake Stadium Kolkata, vs Uruguay Oct 6 Kolkata, vs New Zealand Nov 12 Auckland and Nov 15 Christchurch

3 INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL
– FIFA ASEAN CUP starts today in Jakarta – Inaugural edition, 14 teams. Opening: Malaysia vs Bangladesh, then Indonesia vs Singapore. FIFA President Infantino said tournament provides meaningful competition in international window

*INTERNATIONAL HEADLINES*

4 FENCING, ATHLETICS, SURFING at Asian Games
– Full India schedule today: Surfing 4:14 AM Sugar Shanti Gayen, Kamali Prakash; Athletics heptathlon Anamika Aneesh, Pooja; Equestrian dressage Gaurav Pundir, Shruti Vora; Fencing team foil; Badminton Dhruv Kapila/Tanisha Crasto vs Maldives

5 PHILIPPINES STAR
– Carlos Yulo – after winning Philippines first gold in men’s floor exercise – back today in vault final and parallel bars final at 2 PM and 3:50 PM

WORD OF THE WEEK
Asian Record – Best score ever achieved in Asia in that event. Kamaljeet/Suruchi set Asian Record in pistol mixed team.

Teen Takeaway
From pistol shooting to kabaddi – India wins when teamwork + focus combine. Gold today came because pair topped qualification and kept calm in final.

Top story:  China crossed 100 and now 135 medals. Japan host at 97. India jumped from 15th to 12th today.

HEAL THE WORLD

After 200 years, a birth of the world’s last truly wild horse on Kazakhstan’s steppe

In the early morning hours of 22 August, conservationist Albert Salemgareyev got an excited call from a colleague.  A seven-year-old Przewalski’s horse, one of the rarest equines in the world, had just given birth at a remote wildlife sanctuary on Kazakhstan’s steppe. Experts believe the foal, a male, may be the first Przewalski’s horse born on these grasslands in two centuries.  As soon as the call was over, Salemgareyev hopped in his car and drove a grueling 12 hours from Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, to the Alibi Reintroduction Centre, where he leads an effort to return Przewalski’s horses to the wild. When he arrived, the foal, still a little shaky on its feet, was huddled beside its mother.  “For me, it was a very emotional moment,” says Salemgareyev. “It’s not just another horse for me. It’s the beginning of a new generation here in Kazakhstan.”

The foal’s birth was the result of a decades-long effort to save the Przewalski’s horse from extinction and “rewild” Kazakhstan’s grasslands, where human encroachment had sent biodiversity into a tailspin.

“The community-based protection of these rangelands that led to the birth of this foal is one of the great conservation success stories of the last decade,” says Susan Gardner, the Director of the Ecosystems Division at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “It shows that when we put our minds to it, we can restore ecosystems and give species a second chance,”

Pushed to the brink

Przewalski’s horses once roamed the plains of Central Asia in large numbers, their short, stocky bodies ideal for retaining heat during the region’s brutal winters. But by the mid-1900s, hunting, habitat loss from farming and competition from livestock had decimated herds. The last of the horses was spotted in the wild in 1969, roaming the Gobi Desert alone.  But the animals survived in European zoos, where an elaborate breeding programme helped keep their genetic pool diverse – and intact.

That, conservationists say, is important. Przewalski’s horses occupy a unique branch of the equine family tree. They have two more chromosomes than other horses, and unlike their free-roaming counterparts in Australia and the United States of America, they have never been domesticated. (So-called “wild” horses like mustangs are the feral offspring of domesticated horses.)

Experts consider Przewalski’s horses the world’s last truly wild horses, and their demeanor exemplifies that: the animals are hard to handle and almost impossible to ride.

The comeback

In 2005, the Kazakh government launched an effort to restore 75,000 square kilometres of steppe and semi-desert that had been damaged by overgrazing, unsustainable farming practices and climate change. Known as the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, the longstanding partnership has been named a UN World Restoration Flagship, an award that honours ground-breaking efforts to revive natural spaces.

“Well-managed pastoralism can help keep these landscapes healthy, for both wildlife and livelihoods,” said UNEP’s Gardner.

Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel is published today
The wait for Miss Marple’s return is finally over. Readers in the UK and US, as well as those in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Finland, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Turkey can get their copy of Lucy Foley’s incredible new novel Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel today. Mystery lovers in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece and Hungary won’t have long to wait either.  We’re giving you the thrilling opening chapters to get you hooked.

The trailblazing detective returns in No.1 bestseller Lucy Foley’s chilling murder mystery

High in the Swiss Alps, with glorious mountain views and exclusive access to powdery slopes, the Grand Alpine Hotel draws guests from far and wide.

The notorious actress
The high-flying politician
The inscrutable political wife
The reckless friend
The shrewd doctor

But when a guest enters a gondola alive, only to be found dead at the top of the mountain, it’s clear there’s a killer in their midst.

As tensions rise, and old grudges emerge like cracks in the ice, someone watches from the shadows. An unassuming woman with an extraordinary mind: Miss Marple.

She suspects everyone in the hotel, and she’s right to. For it isn’t just a question of who has a motive, but who’s next…

The Dollar’s Quiet Exit from Asian Trade
In July 2023, Indian Oil Corporation paid for a shipment of Abu Dhabi crude in rupees. The standard procedure for international trade has been to pay and settle transactions through the US dollar, an external and unrelated currency. The transaction was settled through a vostro account in Mumbai, and similarly, trades have been settled across ASEAN and South Asia through the use of Local Currency Transaction (LCT) frameworks. This movement now represents three ASEAN central banks, a $30 billion
India-Indonesia trade relationship, and almost a full LCT framework in ASEAN.

Asia is dominated by two strong international institutions and coalitions such as ASEAN and BRICS, covering more than 40% of Global GDP, reflecting the transition from the Western-dominated global political stage. While these economies may have been dependent on the dollar for trade, a rapid de- dollarisation movement has taken hold, most prominently within ASEAN and Southeast Asia. While ASEAN has implemented operationalized, real-time, local-currency payments across 8 member states
using standardized QR linkages, proposing a parallel financial system that makes transactions cheaper and quicker, the BRICS idea of a unified currency and a strongly motivated de-dollarisation plan remain fully aspirational. However, the economic impact and the impact of this movement on the political stage remain widely shared.

Economically and financially, this de-dollarisation move has the greatest potential benefit. Businesses and trading partners only have to convert currency once or less per transaction, whereas previously they had to convert it twice. De-dollarisation also addresses another problem in this pricing mechanism: transactions and trade were heavily driven by hedging and speculation in the US dollar, creating noise and excess costs in trade and increasing costs for businesses when exchange rates fluctuate. Moreover, without the need for US dollar foreign currency reserves, countries can divert funds domestically or internationally, resulting in potential economic and infrastructure benefits. However, the primary goal of this exercise is that, without the need for an external currency, economies can shield and protect themselves from Western currency-specific enforcement tools (freezing dollar reserves, cutting off dollar clearing), bolstering independence while ensuring economies remain open to global trade channels, maintaining economic pragmatism.

Aside from the obvious threat of tariffs and sanctions as a justification for a de-dollarisation framework, other important developments also contribute. First, after 2022, when Russia found $300 bn of its dollar reserves frozen overnight, it showed that the dollar portion of any country's reserves still runs through US-controlled financial infrastructure, no matter whose asset it technically is. Therefore, countries andeconomies, especially in such troubling, tumultuous times, cannot risk their access to trade being revoked.

Even with the LCT framework ongoing, much of ASEAN's dollar exposure remains the same. Oil, key metals, and other commodities are still priced in dollars on global exchanges, so the LCT framework cannot address those essential products. Capital markets and dollar-denominated debt sit outside LCT entirely as well. And the mechanism itself has a narrow use case, since it only operates where both sides want to hold each other's currency, limiting some international trade connections.
India's own experience with Russia shows what happens when that condition isn't met. Indian refiners bought vast amounts of Russian oil after 2022 and paid in rupees. Because India bought much more than it sold to Russia, Russian firms accumulated billions of unspent rupees in Indian banks that they could not easily move or use. The rupee settlement system functioned as intended, but failed because the trade between the two countries was unbalanced. Settlement currency and sanctions exposure are also different problems. LCT changes which currency a trade clears in, but the ships, insurers, and
correspondent banks behind that trade often still sit inside networks that US, EU, or UK sanctions can reach, so paying in rupees does not by itself remove that exposure. Furthermore, as de-dollarisation plans and the US dollar loses its strong foothold in trade, a power vacuum forms, which China naturally fills, embedding the Renminbi deep into Southeast Asian supply chains and challenging India’s prospects as a leading Asian economy. This clearly demonstrates the power transition the geopolitical
landscape has witnessed; as power shifts from the West to the East, now the question is, who can capitalise?

To address this issue, instead of focusing on region-wide LCT and shared currency frameworks, the RBI is instead pushing for a select few high-value LCT deals, such as with the UAE and Indonesia, while prioritising a simpler UPI payment system and other digital payment frameworks with ASEAN countries like Indonesia, acting as a direct geopolitical counterweight to keep the Rupee competitive against the Yuan in ASEAN, and ensuring a multilateral alliance and connection.

While trade in US dollars is universal, LCT frameworks can restrict trade to one country and may require separate reserves of different currencies. To address this core issue, countries could maintain a single main currency such as the Singapore dollar (most stable against the US dollar, allowing for cheaper conversion and international trade), ensuring universality and tradability within ASEAN and internationally. This anchor currency cannot be the Yuan. Even though China is ASEAN’s largest trading
partner, an anchor currency has to carry no political weight for the countries using it, and the Yuan fails that test for the same reason LCT and UPI exist in the first place.

Furthermore, central banks within the region could unify and combine their transnational QR code and digital payment systems with state-level LCT frameworks so the retail and wholesale de-dollarization tracks reinforce each other instead of running separately. However, the problem of commodities still relying on the USD cannot be effectively addressed by LCT frameworks, with the only option being securing commodity trade only within the LCT and ASEAN regional systems, which seems highly unlikely. For consumers, the rise of local currency systems can mean cheaper and more efficient imports of goods as well as greater flexibility and adaptability of cross-border payments.

Especially in the case of Indonesia and other ASEAN member states, with increasing tourism and collaborative economicpotential through the setup of easy-to-use LCT QR code payment systems for consumers. Therefore, the world will never truly achieve full de-dollarisation, but with the current state of the world, steps that ASEAN, BRICS and India are taking seem like steps in the right direction.