News in Short

• President Donald Trump threatened to deploy the military if states and cities failed to quell the demonstrations sparked by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man.
• Trump stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act, an archaic law from 1807 that would allow Trump to deploy active-duty U.S. troops to respond to protests in cities across the country.
• Trump pressured the governors to mobilize more National Guard units, called for 10 year prison sentences for violent protesters, and effectively blamed the governors themselves for the racial unrest  in their states.

• Online travel aggregator MakeMyTrip (MMT) will lay off around 350 employees, comprising 10% of the workforce, citing slowdown in the business due to global travel restrictions to contain the spread covid-19.
• Globally, the travel and tourism sector has been the worst hit following the covid-19 pandemic. In India, with commercial flights suspended till recently, homestays and hotels have also been hit.
• The Indian government has now allowed resumption of domestic flights in a staggered manner but many states have opposed the move, following a surge in cases after interstate movement was allowed.

• Global ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service downgraded India’s sovereign rating to the lowest investment grade.
• It said that  the country’s policy making institutions would be challenged in enacting and implementing policies which mitigate the risks of a sustained period of low growth, significant further deterioration in the government fiscal position and stress in the financial sector.
• The downgrade by Moody’s comes nearly 22 years after it lowered India’s rating on June 19, 1998 in the aftermath of the country’s nuclear tests.
• The lowering of the rating, from Baa2 to Baa3, brings it on a par with S&P and Fitch which rate India at BBB (minus), the lowest investment grade.

• Tropical storm "Nisarga", which is headed towards the coasts in Maharashtra and Gujarat, is likely to intensify into a cyclone in the next 12 hours and is expected to make a landfall close to Mumbai.
• This would be the first cyclonic storm to impact India's financial capital, which has logged over 41,000 coronavirus cases so far, since 1882.
• The name Nisarga is suggested by Bangladesh and it will be the first to be used from a new list of names for cyclones for North Indian Ocean cyclones released in 2020.

• A new Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) study has found that a high dosage of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) correlates with a lower Covid-19 infection rate in health care workers.
• The study also found that there was no significant association between HCQ and adverse drug reactions, as indicated by some researchers.
• The study stands in contrast to a recent World Health Organisation (WHO) decision to halt their HCQ trial because a study published in medical journal The Lancet found that the drug had no therapeutic benefits and even increased mortality in Covid-19 cases.