Bloomberg Palm oil imports by India probably fell for a third month in July as some buyers switched to soybean oil. Imports dropped 20 percent to 585,000 metric tons in July from a year earlier, according to the median of five estimates in a Bloomberg survey of processors, brokers and analysts. Total vegetable oil purchases rose 11 percent to …

  Bloomberg India’s coal ministry, at the urging of state miner Coal India Ltd., is asking the government to levy an environmental tax on a competing fuel in effort to maintain coal’s cost-competitiveness, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Petcoke, an oil-refining by product and a coal substitute, is more polluting than coal and should be subject to …

  Bloomberg An apartment-construction boom in Brooklyn is putting a cap on rents in the New York borough as a surge of new units erodes landlords’ pricing power. The median monthly rent declined last month for the first time this year, dropping 0.8 percent from last July to $2,826, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and …