We’ve all looked up and seen the white lines trailing behind aircraft in the sky.

Known as contrails, these icy clouds contribute to climate change, and scientists have been trying to work out how to stop them.

Now, a £5m UK trial will test whether AI can help, by predicting where warming contrails are likely to form and getting planes to avoid those areas.

It will focus on the Shanwick Oceanic airspace in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor which accounts for approximately 5% of global contrail warming.

The 30-month Operation Blue Skies project brings together Google, the UK government, the Met Office, air traffic control provider National Air Traffic Services (NATS) and researchers at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

Contrails – also known as vapour trails – are made when the hot exhaust from aircraft engines meets the cold air at high altitude, creating ice crystals.

Many disappear quickly, but in particularly cold and humid conditions they can persist and spread, forming clouds which trap heat that would otherwise escape from the Earth.

Dr Paul Hodgson, Google’s technical lead for the operation, told the BBC’s Tech Life programme his five-year-old has a more colourful description for the white lines – “sky graffiti”.

“We think that contrail warming is responsible for something like a third of all aviation climate warming,” he said.

Dr Hodgson acknowledged there was uncertainty around the precise figure, but said scientists were confident it was “either quite a large problem or a very large problem”.

The project also comes as the government backs expansion of UK airports, raising the wider question of whether tech solutions can sufficiently reduce aviation’s environmental impact as demand for flying grows.

Google is also one of many big tech companies spending billions on new data centres – the giant, power-hungry banks of computer chips which power AI – which environmentalists are concerned will contribute even more to climate change.

India’s headline equity index, the Nifty50, could nearly double to 50,000 within the next six to nine years and reach the milestone anytime before 2035, Raamdeo Agrawal, chairman of Motilal Oswal Financial Services, said, laying out three distinct timelines based entirely on how price-to-earnings multiples move from here.

Speaking at the 22nd Motilal Oswal Annual Global Investor Conference in Mumbai, Agrawal said there is a high probability of Nifty hitting 50,000 anytime before 2035.

Raamdeo Agrawal’s Nifty math: 3 scenarios

Agrawal’s timeline hinges on a single assumption: Nifty earnings compounding at roughly 12% a year, in line with an expected 11% nominal GDP growth rate. From there, the path to 50,000 splits three ways depending on the multiple the market is willing to pay. If the P/E multiple holds steady at 20–21x, the Nifty target of 50,000 will take roughly 8 years. If the multiple expands to around 24x, it will take roughly 6 years and if the multiple compresses to around 18x, which is below the ten-to-twenty-year historical average, then the journey to 50k will take roughly 9 years.

For the near term, Agrawal pointed to an earnings recovery already underway. “Nifty earnings growth of around 12% is a reasonable expectation,” he said, adding that current-quarter growth looks stronger still, in the 16–20% range.

Underpinning the bull case is what Agrawal called an “unprecedented” surge in retail market participation. Demat accounts in India have grown from roughly 40 million to 234 million as of last month, with 2.9 million added in that single month alone, a pace he said is “likely unmatched anywhere in the world.”

Mutual fund folios rose about 19%, from 55 million to 74 million, over the past year. Monthly SIP flows have crossed ₹31,000 crore, and equity mutual fund AUM has compounded at roughly 30% a year over the past decade, climbing from about ₹4 lakh crore to about ₹86 lakh crore.
Agrawal likened the moment to a structural shift in the US four decades ago: “This feels like India’s ‘401(k) moment’ — comparable to when U.S. retail investors began participating heavily in markets in the early 1980s.” The U.S. now sees roughly $750 billion a year in 401(k) contributions flowing into stocks and bonds; India’s expanding demat base, he said, is becoming the domestic equivalent.Also Read |Equity investments should give about 15% annual returns over next 5 years: Raamdeo Agrawal

FII selling overdone

The retail boom is unfolding even as foreign institutional investors pull back sharply. FIIs sold about $18 billion of Indian equities last year and roughly $25 billion more in the first half of this year, Agrawal said while calling it a marked reversal for a group that, aside from 2022, had historically stayed committed to Indian markets.

Domestic flows have more than offset the exodus: from just $5–10 billion a year around 2020 to roughly $90 billion annually more recently, including $54 billion in the first half of this year alone.

“FIIs have oversold India,” Agrawal said, noting that India’s weight in global allocation benchmarks like MSCI sits at only around 7–8%, underweight relative to its economic size. He argued that even if foreign selling continues, or simply stops, “domestic demand alone is strong enough to sustain a healthy market”, a dynamic he said keeps valuations structurally elevated.

Also Read |Exclusive: Motilal Oswal opens up on succession, 10X profit goal and his 39-year partnership with Raamdeo Agrawal

A Bigger Bet: India’s Path From $4 Trillion to $16 Trillion

Agrawal framed the Nifty call within a much larger economic thesis. India crossed $1 trillion in GDP around 2007–08; the journey since has been uneven as the $2 to $4 trillion stretch took ten to eleven years, delayed by demonetization and COVID. But Agrawal projects the economy now moving from $4 trillion to $8 trillion in about seven years, and to $16 trillion within another seven to eight years after that.

“India is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity,” he said, arguing that the jump from $4 trillion to $16 trillion represents a fundamentally different scale of opportunity than the earlier climb from $1 trillion to $4 trillion.

He tied this to savings: over the last seventeen years, India saved a cumulative $15 trillion; over the next seventeen, minimum cumulative savings are projected at $47 trillion, with $1.3 trillion saved last year alone.

Agrawal situated his India and Nifty forecasts inside a broader global wealth thesis drawn from a 2002 book, The Wealthy World, written by a finance professor who Agrawal said correctly anticipated the scale of global financial wealth creation decades in advance — from $13 trillion in 1980 to a projected $6,000 trillion by 2050.

“There is no absolute upper limit to financial wealth creation,” Agrawal said, “not for a country, and, increasingly, not even for a single corporation.”

He pointed to Nvidia and Apple, each having touched roughly $5 trillion in market value, as evidence that corporations are now rivaling, and in some cases surpassing, the size of nations. Global market capitalization has risen from about $200 billion in 1950 to roughly $164 trillion today, against a global GDP of about $120 trillion — a market-cap-to-GDP ratio that has climbed from 0.2–0.3 to about 1.3 over 75 years.

India’s own market-cap-to-GDP ratio now sits at 1.2–1.3x, up from well below 1x historically, with market cap around ₹500 lakh crore against GDP of ₹360–370 lakh crore. India’s share of global market capitalization has risen from about 2% a decade ago to about 3% today, among the very few major markets, alongside the U.S., Taiwan and South Korea, to have gained global share over that period.

Earnings, Profitability and the AI Wildcard

Corporate profit as a share of India’s GDP has recovered to about 5.7%, up from a low of 1.7% around 2019–20, though still well below its 2000 peak of 6.2% and further behind the near-double-digit levels seen in the US. Agrawal suggested artificial intelligence could push that ratio higher still, as “the return on capital may increasingly outpace the return on labor.”

“I think we shouldn’t focus too much on the Nifty number itself,” Agrawal said, adding that the real takeaway is that the world is getting wealthier and India is getting wealthier faster than almost anywhere else.

His conclusion: it’s “highly probable that Nifty reaches 50,000 sometime before 2035” — with the exact timing, he acknowledged, ultimately hinging on policy execution and how India navigates whatever “potholes” lie ahead.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

Disney and ABC have filed a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from launching an early licence renewal process, arguing that the network is being unfairly targeted over its editorial content.

“Government censorship is deeply un-American,” the lawsuit says. “This case concerns the Administration’s sustained effort to do just that.”

The lawsuit says the Federal Communication Commission – the government’s media regulator – is being pressured to renew broadcast licences years early. It alleges the push stems from complaints from, and under the direction of, President Donald Trump.

FCC chairman Brendan Carr has said that the renewal requests were focused on “public interest”, not retaliation.

“If broadcasters don’t like that, that’s okay,” Carr told CNBC in July.

“They can become a cable channel, they can become a podcast, they can stream online. But if you want to uniquely be on the public’s airwaves, you have to comply with those obligations.”

The BBC has contacted the FCC for comment.

Disney and its eight owned-and-operated TV stations are plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed on Tuesday against FCC and its chairman.

The FCC ordered licence renewals for the Disney-owned ABC stations in April.

Disney previously had been under investigation for its alleged diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices and for ABC’s daytime talk show, The View.

But the notice for early renewal of licence from the FCC came a day after ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about first lady Melania Trump.

In the lawsuit, Disney calls the order by the FCC “unprecedented”, saying that before then the commission had not called for early renewal in over 50 years.

“Acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the lawsuit says.

It cites Trump’s own social media posts as evidence, including one in which Trump complained about ABC’s coverage of him being “almost 100% negative”.

In the same social media post, Trump also questioned whether their broadcast licences should “be terminated”, and answered his own question: “I say, Yes!”.

Under pressure from FCC chairman Carr, Disney pulled Kimmel off air in September 2025, after he made remarks about the murder of conservative activist and Trump ally, Charlie Kirk.

But Kimmel was quickly returned to his role after widespread public backlash over alleged free speech violations, including from Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

The FCC gave ABC and Disney 30 days to file applications, which, according to plaintiffs in the lawsuit, “ordinarily take months to prepare”.

The lawsuit also notes that the FCC has never demanded early renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned by a single broadcast network.

ABC and Disney have requested a “speedy hearing” from the court and a temporary restraining order.

Pay growth in the private sector slowed to 2.8 per cent in the three months to June, the weakest rate in almost six years, while pay in the public sector rose by 6.1 per cent, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics published on Tuesday.

The annual rate of private sector pay growth was down from 2.9 per cent in the previous quarter and is the lowest since the three months to October 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, the ONS said.

Public sector pay growth rose from 5.5 per cent in the previous three months. The ONS said the increase was driven by NHS staff receiving their pay award this year compared with 2025.

The unemployment rate held steady at 4.9 per cent. Vacancies fell by around 4,000 over the quarter to 707,000 in the three months to June, down from a peak of nearly 1.3 million in 2022 and the lowest level outside the pandemic since 2014, as job openings have continued to fall across the economy.

Single-month estimates for June alone, which the ONS says should be treated with caution, showed the unemployment rate climbed to 5.4 per cent from 4.6 per cent in May. The reliability of the ONS’s labour market data has weakened in recent years because of a decline in responses to the survey that underpins it.

Unemployment among people aged 18 to 24 edged down to 14.6 per cent from 14.8 per cent, although it remains close to an 11-year high. The economic inactivity rate, which measures the share of people not in work or looking for a job, was unchanged at 20.9 per cent.

Liz McKeown, director of economic statistics at the ONS, said: “Regular wage growth has remained broadly stable in recent months. However, private sector pay growth has continued to ease, while public sector pay growth remains elevated due to the timing of the latest NHS pay awards.

“The labour market picture is little changed overall, with some softening still evident. Employment, unemployment and inactivity rates have all remained steady, while the number of employees on payroll fell slightly in the latest quarter.”

The figures come as the Bank of England weighs its next move on interest rates. Bank Rate has been held at 3.75 per cent since December, and the Bank’s governor has played down the prospect of near-term cuts.

Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG UK, said the labour market figures “will provide the Bank of England with further evidence that its cautious approach to monetary policy remains the most appropriate path”.

She added: “Pay growth continues to show little sign of generating significant inflationary pressure, while wider labour market conditions appear to have bottomed out.”

James Smith, a developed markets economist at ING, said: “Barring a severe and persistent spike in energy prices [caused by the Middle East war], we think the Bank will keep rates on hold until next Spring, before cutting rates at least twice in 2027.”

After accounting for inflation, average pay excluding bonuses across the economy rose by 1 per cent in real terms in June, the ONS said, with real-terms pay under pressure in parts of the private sector. Inflation figures due on Wednesday are expected to show the annual rate climbed to 2.9 per cent in July from 2.6 per cent the previous month.

The ONS also said on Tuesday that productivity, measured by output produced per hour of work, rose by 0.7 per cent in the second quarter compared with the same period in 2025.

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