Chinese electronics giant Huawei on Saturday announced it would provide free repair services for Huawei and Honor smartphones damaged in the Kerala floods.

In order to ensure the availability of services in the state, the company has activated technical teams across all operational authorised and exclusive service centres in Kerala, the company said in a statement.

“We have deployed our customer service team in full action to support customers affected by Kerala floods. We will be providing free of cost service to Huawei smartphones damaged due to water-logging,” said Allen Wang, Director, Product Centre, Huawei Consumer Business Group, India.

The free repair services would continue till August 31.

[IANS]

New Delhi The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation is gearing up to set up more than 100 railway stations and terminals — all of them “specially designed” — along the 3,360-km-long, much-delayed network linking the eastern and western seaboards to the northern heartland.

Besides, the dedicated freight corridor, known as DFC, will have as many as 12 private freight terminals, 15 private sidings and 10 goods sheds to cater to over 300 million tonnes of traffic a year from 2020-21.

Designs of these new DFC buildings will be influenced by local culture and architecture so that they become iconic structures of the area’s skyline, a senior official of the Corporation said.

“Special care has been taken that all the station buildings reflect the heritage of the region,” the official told IANS, not wishing to be identified.

Passing through nine states and 60 districts, the Rs 81,459 crore project will have 48 stations and junctions along the Western DFC and 58 in the Eastern DFC.

While the Western DFC will cover 1,504 km from Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust near Navi Mumbai to Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, traversing through Vadodara-Ahmedabad-Palanpur-Phulera-Rewari, the Eastern DFC covers 1,856 km from Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni, near Kolkata in West Bengal, and will traverse the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand.

“Many private players have shown interest to build multi-modal logistics parks and terminals along the corridor to facilitate value addition — including packaging, labelling, retailing and transportation of goods on the dedicated route,” the official said.

All the newly-designed station buildings are expected to be ready before the corridor becomes operational in 2020-21.

There is a focus on station buildings as economic activities get a boost around the rail stations and terminals.

The Western DFC — a section of which (between Ateli in Haryana and Phulera in Rajasthan) opened for a trial run on August 15 — is expected to largely carry petroleum products, imported fertilisers and coal besides steel and iron among others in double-stack containers.

According to initial estimate, Western DFC will carry about 152.24 milliion tonnes (MT) of goods in 2020-21.

The Eastern DFC aims to speed up the movement of coal, cement, fertilisers, foodgrain and general goods, among others. The expected traffic on the Eastern DFC is 153.23 MT in 2020-21.

The Western and Eastern DFCs — both of which will be fully electrified — will intersect at Dadri, near Delhi.

Also, in a first for Indian Railways, there will be a time table for freight trains once the DFCs are operational.

The eastern wing of the DFC is being funded by the World Bank and western side is being financed by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, or JICA.

[IANS]

New York US stocks closed higher as investors digested a batch of economic data.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday rose 133.37 points, or 0.52 per cent, to 25,790.35. The S&P 500 was up 17.71 points, or 0.62 per cent, to 2,874.69, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Nasdaq Composite Index increased 67.52 points, or 0.86 per cent, to 7,945.98.

New orders for manufactured durable goods in July decreased $4.3 billion or 1.7 per cent to $246.9 billion, said the Commerce Department on Friday. The decrease followed a 0.7 per cent increase in June.

Excluding transportation, new orders increased 0.2 per cent. Excluding defence, new orders decreased 1 per cent.

US weekly jobless claims slipped by 2,000 to 210,000 last week despite the ongoing trade worries, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The 4-week moving average was 213,750, a decrease of 1,750 from the previous week’s unrevised average.

Meanwhile, investors also paid close attention to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s speech delivered at the Jackson Hole Symposium in Wyoming, where leading central bankers are meeting to discuss the future of monetary policy.

“If the strong growth in income and jobs continues, further gradual increases in the target range for the federal funds rate will likely be appropriate,” said Powell.

On Wednesday, the US central bank released the minutes of its latest monetary policy meeting, where Fed officials saw an escalation in international trade disputes as a potentially “consequential downside risk” for the US economy.

While many Fed officials signalled that the central bank was ready to raise interest rates as soon as next month, some worried that current trade disputes could force the central bank to rethink its interest rate hike plans.

[IANS]