More than 500 people, many in their cultural attire, attended the April 1, 2023, Ugadi festival in New York at the Ganesh Temple auditorium in Flushing, hosted by the Telugu Literary and Cultural Association (TLCA), under the leadership of President of TLCA Nehru Kataru. Among the high-profile attendees was NYC Mayor Eric Adams, and his Deputy Commissioner Dilip Chauhan. The Sreeramanavami festival was also celebrated alongside Ugadi on the same day.
Others who attended the event included Vice President Kiran Parvatala, and the Secretary Sumanth Ramsetty. Also attending were the TLCA Board of Trustees Chairman Dr. Prasad Ankineedu, Secretary Nagendra Gupta, Treasurer Rao Voleti, Past Chairman’s Krishna Maddipatla, Venkatesh Mutyala, Dr. Purna Atluri, and many life trustees.
Ugadi is a Spring festival celebrating the start of the Telugu New Year. Each Telugu year is given a name and the year 2023-24 is named Shubhakruth.
The TLCA is one of the oldest Telugu associations in North America and has been promoting Telugu literature and culture in the New York Tristate region for the past 52 years, organizers said.
A strong contingent of 140 plus children and adults presented songs, dance, and drama items showcasing Telugu culture, mythology and history before a captivated the audience.
“It is the goal of TLCA to nurture and pass on the rich Telugu culture to the generations and every year Gurus and parents from this region strive to train the children for the programs,” the press release noted.
The mythological drama, Maya Joodam, a snippet from the epic Mahabharata, a dance-drama based on the theme of Ugadi, poetry recitals, classical dances and popular numbers from Telugu movies were the prime attractions. Guests enjoyed authentic festival food and delicacies bought from India, organizers said.
This was the first time in the history of the TLCA, that a Mayor was the Chief Guest of the day. “It was the most exciting experience for the community as this is the first ever visit by a Mayor of the City to the TLCA celebrations,” the press release noted.
Deputy Commissioner for Trade, Investment and Innovation Dilip Chauhan, introduced the Mayor and explained the initiatives of the Mayor for bettering the lives of every New Yorkers.
In his speech Mayor Adam congratulated TLCA’s President Kataru for the wonderful show put up by his team. Adams said it is always in his agenda to promote diversity and encourage the communities to come together and work for the overall progress of the region. He said the Telugu community is blessed with highly qualified professionals such as doctors, engineers, and software professionals, contributing to the economic development of the region. He assured full support from his Office for any requests from TLCA.
Deputy commissioner Chauhan said he has been associated with the Telugu community in New York City and Long Island for decades. He said the community is very humble, peaceful and lives in harmony.
The Special guest of the evening, actress, Laya, honored the Mayor and the Deputy Commissioner with traditional shawls and bouquets.
President Kataru thanked the Mayor for attending and delivering an inspiring speech, as well as his assurance of support. He thanked Chauhan for his efforts to bring the Mayor to the event. Mr. Kataru said, the community treats Mr. Dilip Chauhan as part of the family for his continued encouragement for decades.
President Kataru said the Executive Committee under the guidance of the Chairman Ankineed Prasad Napaneni and the Board of Trustees, worked hard to mark the beginning of the Telugu New Year which is auspicious for all the Telugus in the community. He praised the parents of the budding young generation for their devotion to Telugu culture and for nurturing it in the children. He noted that the poetry recital was a new feature introduced this year and promised many more during his tenure to encourage the youth. He expressed great appreciation for the donors without whose support these events would not have been possible.
Chairman Nannapaneni explained the efforts of TLCA for over 5 decades to preserve and promote Telugu culture and pass it on to the next generation. The organization provides a popular platform to showcase young talent. TLCA encourages artists, art forms, and literature by bringing eminent artists from all over the world, he noted. Secretary Ramisetty presented vote of thanks for the overwhelming support from the community.
US President Joe Biden announced that the United States had placed the nomination of Ajay Banga to be the next head of the World Bank, established in 1944. There will be no other official candidates for this job since—by convention—the US nominee is automatically selected for the post. This has been the case for the 13 previous presidents of the World Bank—the one exception was the acting president Kristalina Georgieva of Bulgaria, who held the post for two months in 2019. Georgieva is currently the managing director of the IMF.
In the official history of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), J. Keith Horsefield wrote that US authorities “considered that the Bank would have to be headed by a US citizen in order to win the confidence of the banking community, and that it would be impracticable to appoint US citizens to head both the Bank and the Fund.” By an undemocratic convention, therefore, the World Bank head was to be a US citizen and the head of the IMF was to be a European national . Therefore, Biden’s nomination of Banga guarantees his ascension to the post.
A month later, the New Development Bank’s Board of Governors—which includes representatives from Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa (the BRICS countries) as well as one person to represent Bangladesh, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—elected Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff to head the NDB, popularly known as the BRICS Bank.
The BRICS Bank, which was first discussed in 2012, began to operate in 2016 when it issued its first green financial bonds. There have only been three managing directors of the BRICS Bank—the first from India (K.V. Kamath) and then the next two from Brazil (Marcos Prado Troyjo and now Rousseff to finish Troyjo’s term). The president of the BRICS Bank will be elected from its members, not from just one country.
Banga comes to the World Bank, whose office is in Washington, D.C., from the world of international corporations. He spent his entire career in these multinational corporations, from his early days in India at Nestlé to his later international career at Citigroup and Mastercard. Most recently, Banga was the head of the International Chamber of Commerce, an “executive” of multinational corporations that was founded in 1919 and is based in Paris, France.
As Banga says, during his time at Citigroup, he ran its microfinance division, and, during his time at Mastercard, he made various pledges regarding the environment. Nonetheless, he has no experience in the world of development finance and investment. He told the Financial Times that he would turn to the private sector for funds and ideas. His resume is not unlike that of most US appointees to head the World Bank.
The first president of the World Bank was Eugene Meyer, who built the chemical multinational Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation (later Honeywell) and who owned the Washington Post. He too had no direct experience working on eradicating poverty or building public infrastructure. It was through the World Bank that the United States pushed an agenda to privatize public institutions. Men such as Banga have been integral to the fulfillment of that agenda.
Dilma Rousseff, meanwhile, comes to the BRICS Bank with a different resume. Her political career began in the democratic fight against the 21-year military dictatorship (1964-1985) that was inflicted on Brazil by the United States and its allies. During Lula da Silva’s two terms as president (2003-2011), Dilma Rousseff was a cabinet minister and his chief of staff.
She took charge of the Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (Growth Acceleration Program) or PAC, which organized the anti-poverty work of the government. Because of her work in poverty eradication, Dilma became known popularly as the “mãe do PAC” (mother of PAC). A World Bank study from 2015 showed that Brazil had “succeeded in significantly reducing poverty in the last decade”; extreme poverty fell from 10 percent in 2001 to 4 percent in 2013. “[A]pproximately 25 million Brazilians escaped extreme or moderate poverty,” the report said.
This poverty reduction was not a result of privatization, but of two government schemes developed and established by Lula and Dilma: Bolsa Família (the family allowance scheme) and Brasil sem Misería (the Brazil Without Extreme Poverty plan, which helped families with employment and built infrastructure such as schools, running water, and sewer systems in low-income areas). Dilma Rousseff brings her experience in these programs, the benefits of which were reversed under her successors (Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro).
Banga, who comes from the international capital markets, will manage the World Bank’s net investment portfolio of $82.1 billion as of June 2022. There will be considerable attention to the work of the World Bank, whose power is leveraged by Washington’s authority and by its work with the International Monetary Fund’s debt-austerity lending practices.
In response to the debt-austerity practices of the IMF and the World Bank, the BRICS Health/Sciencecountries—when Dilma was president of Brazil (2011-2016)—set up institutions such as the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (as an alternative to the IMF with a $100 billion corpus) and the New Development Bank (as an alternative to the World Bank, with another $100 billion as its initial authorized capital).
These new institutions seek to provide development finance through a new development policy that does not enforce austerity on the poorer nations but is driven by the principle of poverty eradication. The BRICS Bank is a young institution compared to the World Bank, but it has considerable financial resources and will need to be innovative in providing assistance that does not lead to endemic debt. Whether the new BRICS Think Tank Network for Finance will be able to break with the IMF’s orthodoxy is yet to be seen.
The Finance Minister of India arrived in the US Capital this week embarking on an official visit from April 10 to 16, accompanied by officials of her ministry and the Reserve Bank of India. Nirmala Sitharaman will attend key meetings of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (FMCBG) starting Monday, the finance ministry said.
The US Chamber of Commerce’s US-India Business Council (USIBC) co-hosted India’s Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman for an exclusive member roundtable at US Chamber headquarters in Washington DC, Monday, April 11, 2023 in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
The round table focused on how the US and India could strengthen trade and investment ties amidst a dynamic macroeconomic environment, and India’s increasingly important role as a destination for global investment.
In addition to Finance Minister Sitharaman, the roundtable was attended by Ambassador Taranjit Singh Sandhu, Indian Ambassador to the United States, Ajay Seth, Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Rajat Kumar Mishra, Additional Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, V Ananth Nageswaran, Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, USIBC Board Chair Edward Knight, members of the USIBC Global Board of Directors, and representatives from companies across key sectors.
In her remarks, Minister Sitharaman emphasized that policy consistency and pursuit of reforms despite the pandemic have been a hallmark of the government’s approach. The Minister highlighted the impact of digitization and economic formalization at length, stating that India meets the requirements of a fair transparent economy due to its achievements in transitioning to digital payments and integrating the informal sector. In the end, she invited the investor community to participate in and make the most of the opportunities that India has to offer, now and going forward.
The Indian Ambassador to the United States, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, also addressed the roundtable attendees and highlighted that as the President of G20, India is committed to multi-stakeholder engagement.
During her visit, Sitharaman will interact with investors, economists and think tanks; participate in bilateral engagements, including a meeting with US treasury secretary Janet Yellen, and discuss key issues such as strengthening of multilateral development banks, digital public infrastructure and crypto assets, the ministry said in a statement. Sitharaman and India’s central bank governor Shaktikanta Das will jointly chair the second G20 FMCBG meeting on April 12-13, 2023.
Key engagements of the minister include spring meetings of IMF-WB, the Second G20 FMCBG meeting under India’s presidency, other G20-related side events, World Bank Development Committee and IMF Committee plenaries, bilateral engagements with countries and international organisations, interaction with global business leaders and investors in roundtables and engagement with the Indian diaspora, it said.
The FMCBG meeting is expected to be attended by about 350 delegates from G20 countries, 13 invitee nations and various international and regional organizations. The meeting will take stock of the progress made on outcomes envisaged under India’s G20 Finance Track agenda, the ministry said.
On the sidelines of the spring annual meetings of the World Bank, Sitharaman will have bilateral engagements with counterparts from G20 countries and heads of other delegations, including international organizations, to discuss issues and areas of mutual interest and cooperation under India’s G20 presidency.
On April 11, the finance minister will meet US treasury secretary Janet Yellen to discuss issues of mutual interest. On April 14, she will attend a seminar to review the financial implications of crypto assets and discuss policies to leverage benefits and contain risks.
The U.S. dollar has dominated global trade and capital flows over many decades. However, many nations are looking for alternatives to the greenback to reduce their dependence on the United States.
This graphic catalogs the rise of the U.S. dollar as the dominant international reserve currency, and the recent efforts by various nations to de-dollarize and reduce their dependence on the U.S. financial system.
The global de-dollarization campaign is gaining momentum, as countries around the world seek alternatives to the hegemony of the US dollar.
The global de-dollarization campaign is gaining momentum, as countries around the world seek alternatives to the hegemony of the US dollar. China, Russia, Brazil, India, ASEAN nations, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are now using local currencies in trade.
The Dollar Dominance
The United States became, almost overnight, the leading financial power after World War I. The country entered the war only in 1917 and emerged far stronger than its European counterparts.
As a result, the dollar began to displace the pound sterling as the international reserve currency and the U.S. also became a significant recipient of wartime gold inflows.
The dollar then gained a greater role in 1944, when 44 countries signed the Bretton Woods Agreement, creating a collective international currency exchange regime pegged to the U.S. dollar which was, in turn, pegged to the price of gold.
Picture : Elements of visual capitalist
By the late 1960s, European and Japanese exports became more competitive with U.S. exports. There was a large supply of dollars around the world, making it difficult to back dollars with gold. President Nixon ceased the direct convertibility of U.S. dollars to gold in 1971. This ended both the gold standard and the limit on the amount of currency that could be printed.
Although it has remained the international reserve currency, the U.S. dollar has increasingly lost its purchasing power since then.
Russia and China’s Steps Towards De-Dollarization
Concerned about America’s dominance over the global financial system and the country’s ability to ‘weaponize’ it, other nations have been testing alternatives to reduce the dollar’s hegemony.
As the United States and other Western nations imposed economic sanctions against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow and the Chinese government have been teaming up to reduce reliance on the dollar and to establish cooperation between their financial systems.
Since the invasion in 2022, the ruble-yuan trade has increased eighty-fold. Russia and Iran are also working together to launch a cryptocurrency backed by gold, according to Russian news agency Vedmosti. In addition, central banks (especially Russia’s and China’s) have bought gold at the fastest pace since 1967 as countries move to diversify their reserves away from the dollar.
How Other Countries are Reducing Dollar Dependence
De-dollarization it’s a theme in other parts of the world as well. In recent months, Brazil and Argentina have discussed the creation of a common currency for the two largest economies in South America.
In a conference in Singapore in January, multiple former Southeast Asian officials spoke about de-dollarization efforts underway. The UAE and India are in talks to use Rupees to trade non-oil commodities in a shift away from the dollar, according to Reuters.
For the first time in 48 years, Saudi Arabia said that the oil-rich nation is open to trading in currencies besides the U.S. dollar. Despite these movements, few expect to see the end of the dollar’s global sovereign status anytime soon. Currently, central banks still hold about 60% of their foreign exchange reserves in dollars.
Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” This accelerating trend is reshaping the U.S. religious landscape, leading many people to wonder what the future of religion in America might look like.
For years, church leaders and commentators have warned that Christianity is dying in America. They say the American church is poised to follow the path of churches in Western Europe: soaring Gothic cathedrals with empty pews, shuttered church buildings converted into skate parts and nightclubs, and a secularized society where one theologian said Christianity as a norm is “probably gone for good — or at least for the next 100 years.”
About 64% of Americans call themselves Christian today. That might sound like a lot, but 50 years ago that number was 90%, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center study. That same survey said the Christian majority in the US may disappear by 2070.
People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions – including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – totaled about 6%.
Picture : Wikipedia
Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely, the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.
As millions of Americans celebrated the holiest day in the Christian calendar on Sunday, a prediction about the future of Christianity in the US has come as a pleasant surprise. CNN asked some of the nation’s top religion scholars and historians recently about the future of Christianity in the US, they had a different message.
They said the American church is poised to find new life for one major reason: Waves of Christians are migrating to the US. And they said the biggest challenge to Christianity’s future in America is not declining numbers, but the church’s ability to adapt to this migration.
Joseph P. Slaughter, a historian and assistant professor of religion at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, says people have been predicting the extinction of Christianity in the US for over two centuries, and it hasn’t happened yet.
He pointed to Thomas Jefferson, one of the nation’s founding fathers, who predicted in the 1820s that Christianity would be replaced in the US by a more enlightened form of religion that rejected Jesus’ divinity and belief in miracles.
Instead, Jefferson’s prophecy was followed by a series of revivals, including the Second Great Awakening, which swept across America and reasserted Christianity as a dominant force in American life. “I’d never bet against American Christianity — particularly evangelicalism,” Slaughter says, “and its ability to adapt and remain a significant shaper of the American society.”
What’s happening in Europe is the church’s nightmare scenario
If one only looks at the numbers, Slaughter’s optimism seems misguided. Virtually every recent poll about Christianity in America has been brutal for its followers. The Covid-19 pandemic also hurt the church in America. Church attendance has rebounded recently but remains slightly below pre-pandemic levels. A 2021 Gallup poll revealed another grim number for Christians: church membership in the US has fallen below 50% for the first time.
In addition, a cascade of headlines in recent years have stained the church’s reputation, including sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention; the spread of White Christian nationalism; and the perception that the church oppresses marginalized groups such as LGBTQ people.
Church leaders in the US also have fretted about the rise of “nones.” These are people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked their religious identity.
The ascent of nones will transform the country’s religious and political landscape, says Tina Wray, a professor of religious and theological studies at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island. About 30% of Americans now call themselves nones.
“The interest of the nones will soon outweigh those of the religious right in just a matter of years,” Wray says. “Nones are going to vote as a bloc and they’re going to be pretty powerful. White evangelicals will eventually be eclipsed by the unaffiliated.”
Wray says those who are optimistic about the future of the American church underestimate how quickly Christianity can lose its influence even in a place where it once thrived. She cites what’s happened in the Republic of Ireland, an overwhelmingly Catholic country.
The Catholic Church prohibits divorce and was once so powerful in Ireland that the country wouldn’t legally grant its citizens the legal right to a divorce until 1995, says Wray, author of “What the Bible Really Tells Us: The Essential Guide to Biblical Literacy.” But Wray adds that she recently traveled to Ireland and discovered many of its citizens have left the religion. Churches are being closed and turned into apartment buildings, she says.
“People who went to mass everyday stopped going,” she says. “There’s this cultural Catholic identity, but as far as practicing their faith, it’s just disappearing. So within a generation, that’s all it took. It’s just shocking.”
Why the American church’s future may be different than Europe’s
Most of the religious scholars CNN spoke to said the American church may find salvation in another demographic trend: the booming of Christianity in what is called the “Global South,” the regions encompassing Latin America, Africa and Asia.
The world’s largest megachurch, for example, is not in the US. It’s in South Korea. The Yoido Full Gospel Church has a weekly attendance of about 600,000 members.
Perry Hamalis spent time as a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea, where he personally witnessed the vitality of the Christian church in the Global South. He says the church is not perceived in South Korea as an instrument of oppression, but one of liberation. When South Korea was colonized by the Japanese in the early 20th century, the church aligned with Koreans to protest.
“Christianity was looked at not as a religion of empire and of the colonizers, but as the religion of the anti-colonial movement and of pro-democracy,” says Hamalis, a religion professor at North Central College in Illinois.
The US has more immigrants than any other country. People from Latin America and Asia now make up the overwhelming majority of immigrants to the US, and many are bringing their religious fervor with them.
This migration is known as the “Browning of America,” a phrase describing a demographic shift that is expected to make White people the minority in the US by 2045. Those who predict that the church in America will collapse often overlook how the migration of Global South Christians to America will revitalize the country’s religious landscape, scholars say. Christianity could rebound in America if White Christians embrace this one change, they say.
Tish Harrison Warren, a New York Times columnist, pointed out recently that Latino evangelicals are now the fastest-growing group of evangelicals in the US. “We cannot assume that America will become more secular so long as the future of America is less white,” Warren wrote.
The influx of Black and brown Christians from places like Latin America and Asia collides with another trend: a burgeoning White Christian nationalist movement that insists, incorrectly, that the US was founded as a White, Christian nation. It is hostile to non-White immigrants.
“Many congregations don’t realize how much of their Christian identity is wrapped up with a kind of (Christian) nationalist narrative,” Hamalis says. “There’s nothing wrong with loving one’s country, but from a Christian perspective that ought to always be secondary to the mission of building the body of Christ and witnessing to the Gospel in the world.”
How Christianity could re-establish its dominance
There are other factors hiding in plain sight that point to the continued vitality of Christianity, others say. For one, declining church membership doesn’t automatically translate into declining influence.
Consider some recent landmark events. White evangelicals played a critical role in getting former President Trump elected. Conservative Christian groups played a crucial role in the recent passage of state laws limiting LGBTQ rights. And the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn Roe vs. Wade was a massive victory for many conservative Christians.
And atheism remains a taboo in American politics. American voters still prefer candidates – including presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden – who profess or evoke Christian beliefs. “Christianity still holds a lot of capital in this country,” says Lee M. Jefferson, an associate professor of religion at Centre College in Kentucky.
“There has always been a popular notion that a religious community’s strength or influence is connected to numbers and attendance,” Jefferson says. “Even if there is ample space in cathedrals, Christianity will still hold some strong relevance in different landscapes in the US.”
Even the rise of the “nones,” the growing number of Americans who say they don’t care about religion, is not as much of a threat to the church as initial reports suggest, scholars say.
A growing number of Americans may no longer identify as Christian, but many still care about spirituality, says Hans Gustafson, author of “Everyday Wisdom: Interreligious Studies for a Pluralistic World.”
“Just because more Americans are disaffiliating with institutionalized religion — most notably Christian traditions — this does not always mean that people are becoming less religious,” says Gustafson, director of the Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
“Many still practice spirituality: prayer, meditation… and sometimes even regularly attend religious houses of worship,” he says. Among Americans with no religious affiliation, some still pray daily and say religion is very important in their lives, Gustafson says.
He cites a surprising finding from a 2018 Pew Research Center study of religion in Western Europe. The study found that nones in the US are “much more likely” to pray and believe in God than their European counterparts, said Neha Sahgal, a vice president of research at Pew.
“In fact, by some of these standard measures of religious commitment, American ‘nones’ are as religious as — or even more religious than — Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany and the UK,” Sahgal wrote.
Why the Easter message offers a note of hope
Despite the optimism of many religious scholars, the future of Christianity in America still seems uncertain. Poll numbers about the decline of religiousness in the US cannot be ignored, along with something more intangible: the frailties of human nature.
What if the US enters another xenophobic period and limits migration from non-White Christians?
What if progressive Christians prove unwilling to align with non-White immigrants who tend to be more conservative on issues of sexuality and gender?
And what if some Christians still cling to the belief that America is supposed to be a White Christian nation, even if that assumption causes them to close their church doors to non-White immigrants who could be their salvation?
If that happens, an Easter morning symbol in American churches won’t just be an empty tomb, but empty pews.
But Hamalis, the religion professor who saw Christianity boom in South Korea, says Christians who fear that kind of future can take solace in the Easter message.
“From a Christian perspective, there’s nothing to fear because even death has been conquered,” Hamalis says. “When we are liberated from that fear, we can embrace the person who’s different from us, who speaks a different language or comes from a different culture. We can put ourselves out there in a way that we can’t if we’re just afraid.”
He and other scholars envision a vibrant future for Christianity in the US that’s shared by Warren, the New York Times columnist:
“The future of American Christianity is neither white evangelicalism nor white progressivism,” Warren wrote. “The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants of the children of immigrants.”
If the American church can embrace this future and reverse its shrinking membership, it will have experienced its own resurrection. (Courtesy: CNN)
The Consulate General of India in New York in cooperation with GOPIO Manhattan organized the ‘Meet and Greet Students from India’ studying in the Northeast to connect them to the community and providing mentoring opportunities as well as to raise awareness of Consular services to students from the Consulate. Students from many universities across the Northeast participated in person and via Facebook Live at the event hosted by the Indian Consulate on march 31st, 2023.
The program started with a welcome by Dr. Varun Jeph, Deputy Consul General with his welcome to the 135+ students in attendance and many more online. He summarized the event introducing the speakers and the topics that will be discussed by them and informed the services offered by the Consulate to the Students. He invited the students Consul General of India at New York Mr. Randhir Kumar Jaiswal to begin the evening’s proceedings.
The host for the evening, Ambassador Randhir Kumar Jaiswal, commented, “Namaste to all Young friends. A very warm welcome to the Consulate, your Home and my office.”
He further highlighted there are two sets of students we deal with, one that are here and the others that come here from India. This Student Meet & Greet is an effort in the direction of you connecting with each other and being there as you grow in this new land of opportunities. We are the fifth largest economy and climbing to become the third largest economy. He added that there are 1 million students among the 34 million diaspora are going to play a very important role in that and be the real champions.”
Photo-01: Consul General Randhir Kumar Jaiswal and GOPIO Chairman Dr. Thomas Abraham addressing the students
Consulate official Ms. Satpadi Tagore invited GOPIO International Chairman Dr. Thomas Abraham for his remarks. Dr. Abraham serves as an advisor to GOPIO-Manhattan and started with “Namaskar and addressed the students by reflecting on his journey fifty years ago with an example that a simple phone call back home would cost around $3/minute. There was a concept of host families. With the advancement of technologies and ease of communication and growth in students, there is no more such need of host families. Starting in 2021 and following session in Oct 2022, and today, we are hosting these sessions to connect you with the community, professional achievers and the Consulate for help with issues or in case of emergency. He noted the number of students across Columbia, NYU, Pace, SUNY Bufallo, Touro College, UPenn, NJIT and other universities represented in the room.”
Photo 02: Deputy Consul General Dr. Varun Jeph, speaker Dr. Bernadine Waller, Bhavya Gupta and Siddharth Jain
GOPIO Manhattan Co Secretary and Chair for the event and emcee Ms. Bhavya Gupta then introduced and invited the panelists for the evening Mr. Akshat Tewary, an immigration attorney, Ms. Sanjyot Dunung, CEO & Founder of Atma Global, Moderator Prof Srikant Jagabathula from NYU, Mr. Anthony Irudhyanathan, President Zillion Technologies and Prof. Rajashekar Vangapaty.
Photo-03: Top, L to R: Mr. Akshat Tewary esq., Ms. Sanjyot Dunung, Prof. Srikant Jagabathula and Mr. Anthony Irudhyanathan, Prof. Rajashekar Vangapaty engaging in a Panel Discussion with students
Mr. Srikanth Jagabathula, Robert Stansky Research Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Tech, Ops, and Stats at the NYU Stern School of Business, moderated the panel starting with giving each speaker a min to talk about their background. He channeled the conversations across the topics of immigration to job search to internships, teaching assistantships etc. with the fellow speakers and engaged the audience. He shared his experiences with the students and said, “Wear different hats, multi-task, go out of your comfort zone, explore and discover.”
GOPIO-Manhattan Executive Vice President Professor Rajasekhar Vangapaty spoke about the importance of on-campus job and securing the teaching assistant role while at campus and its importance in job search. He added that “every skill-set you learn in your life will definitely benefit you somewhere in your lifetime. Never get discouraged, if you get hurdles.” He emphasized on the fact that “do not guess the answers. If you don’t know, ask. Whether you’re given or not that’s a different story.”
Ms. Sanjyot Dunung, CEO & Founder of Atma Global, shared her experiences with the students about her journey from India to England to Chicago as she experienced the culture shifts. She added that it doesn’t necessarily matter at what age you move to a new country. The concept of culture shock, learning new values, attitudes, understanding how people do things, can be startling at the very beginning. She bridged the two cultures with every summer trip to India to retain and touch that Indian cultural experience. She indulged the panel to assist students in formulating their choices of major and career path.
Mr. Anthony Irudhyanathan, President Zillion Technologies shared his journey as an Entrepreneur in the technology sector, started with $400. He reflected on his journey and cited his motivation to be here was based on the fact that the Students from India have the chance to be a Game Changer and that he invests in the ideas from Students, a support not available when he started his journey in 1998. This platform of Meet & Greet is a good opportunity for Students to excel in being a game changer as 60% of top 100 companies have Indians as CIO/CTOs today. He added “students should immerse within the system, learn and connect with the people.”
Mr. Akshat Tewary, an immigration attorney added “reflected on his journey to the USA in Jan 1986 highlighting the sense of expectation, optimism, growth etc. as the cultural differences between homeland and USA.”
Photo-04: Speakers and organizers at the ‘Students Meet & Greet’.
1st Row l. to r.: Speaker Akshat Tewary, GOPIO Manhattan EVP & Speaker Professor Rajasekhar Vangapaty, Speaker Srikanth Jagabathula, Speaker Sanjyot Dunung, Ambassador Randhir Kumar Jaiswal, Speaker Dr. Bernadine Waller and Dy. Consul General Dr. Varun Jeph.
2nd Row l. to r.: Raj Punjabi, GOPIO Manhattan Board Member Siddharth (Sid) Jain, GOPIO Manhattan Board Member Chitranjan Belwariar, GOPIO Chairman Dr. Thomas Abraham, GOPIO Manhattan VP Dr. Vimal Goyle, GOPIO Manhattan Board Member & Program Coordinator Bhavya Gupta, GOPIO Manhattan Treasurer Braj Aggarwal &GOPIO Manhattan Member Tara Shajan.
Dr. Bernadine Waller, Columbia University “reflected on the mental health issues ranging from anxiety to depression and all in between. She highlighted the various reasons the stresses that are faced by Students such as job search, internship search, competitiveness, loneliness etc. The optimal way to deal with it is “One Bite At A Time.” She further added that we encourage the students to think of the career, plan for the present, think about the future, but come back to the present.
Mr. Shivender Sofat, President GOPIO-Manhattan, who joined virtually told the importance of mentoring to the students, discussed chapter activities and motivated everyone to volunteer and become members at future events held by GOPIO Manhattan.
Mr. Siddharth Jain, GOPIO Manhattan Board Member concluded with a quote from Rumi: “It’s your road, and yours alone, others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.”
Mr. Jain followed the quote with the vote of thanks to Host Ambassador Shri Randhir Kumar Jaiswal, Dy. Consul Shri Varun Jeph, Dr. Thomas Abraham, Distinguished Panelists, Ms. Satabdi Tagore and the Consulate staff. Other GOPIO-Manhattan officials present at the meeting included President Shivender Sofat (attended virtually), EVP Professor Rajasekhar Vangapaty, Treasurer Braj Aggarwal, VP Vimal Goyle, Board Member & Program Coordinator Bhavya Gupta, Board Member Chitranjan Belwariar, Members Raj Punjabi, & Tara Shajan.
“The students had an excellent time networking with students from different universities as well as with speakers and the Consulate and GOPIO officials and we plan to do a much bigger event next year,’ Dr. Abraham added.
Photo Students from different universities and colleges with Consulate and GOPIO officials and speakers
In accordance with its mission to serve the larger society and those in need, GOPIO-Manhattan Chapter has taken several initiatives in the recent past. A Community Feeding is organized by the Chapter providing vegan or avegetarian lunch for the homeless and needy at Tomkins Square Park in Manhattan on the last Monday of every month. The chapter appeals to the community to support the initiative by being a volunteer and/or a sponsor.
Xavier University School of Medicine has announced the opening of Xavier University School of Veterinary Medicine. Xavier University School of Veterinary Medicine will begin with the inaugural class in Fall 2023.
The Xavier University School of Veterinary Medicine program is a four-year program for students who will receive their Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) degree. The program is divided into two phases – for the first three years (nine semesters), students will be located in Aruba completing their preclinical semesters. During the student’s final year (three semesters) in the program, they will attend clinical training at one of our internationally approved training facilities and complete the NAVLE exam to be eligible to practice in the USA.
“We are excited to announce the opening of Xavier University School of Veterinary Medicine in September 2023,” said Ravishankar Bhooplapur, President of Xavier University School of Medicine. “The mission of Xavier University School of Veterinary Medicine is to prepare veterinary physicians to practice veterinary medicine of the highest standard, and the opening of our new veterinary school will provide students with a quality veterinary education at an affordable price.”
“The curriculum for Xavier’s DVM program is an integrative approach that enables students to understand the science, gain experience in practice, and receive clinical skills instruction beginning from their first semester,” added Dr. Arun Dubey, Chief Academic Officer. “We are thrilled to welcome our first set of veterinary students in the fall!”
Students will be able to live at Xavier’s new academic campus in Aruba. This all-inclusive housing option ensures that students have a safe and supportive environment during their medical school journey.
In addition, construction is in progress for a new $70-million academic campus in Aruba that is set to open in Fall 2024. This new academic area of campus will include a theater-style auditorium, state-of-the-art classrooms and labs, research facilities, seminar rooms, a new library, study areas for individuals, small groups, and large groups, student lounges, and a walk-in clinic. Inaugural class of September 2023 will receive 50% tuition scholarships.
Three major religious holidays coincide this week. As the Islamic holy month of Ramadan reaches its halfway point, Jews begin celebrating Passover at sundown tonight, and Sunday marks Easter for many Christians around the world.
A religious knowledge survey conducted in 2019 also found that most U.S. adults overall know that Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus (81%) and that Ramadan is an Islamic holy month (60%).
Picture : Christianity Today
On Friday, Jewish people celebrate Passover to mark the exodus of Israelites from enslavement in Egypt. On the same day, Christians observe Good Friday to commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus before celebrating Easter Sunday when he rose from the dead. Over the weekend, Muslims will continue observing Ramadan, a month of prayers and fasting to memorialize the transmission of the Koran.
The overlap of the three observances occurs about every 33 years, according to Lees McCrae College. Religious groups and others use the rare occasion to call for harmony between the traditions.
The coincidence is so uncommon because the three observances are based on different calendars and factors that determine when the holidays occur. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox. Good Friday marks the crucifixion of Jesus, God’s messiah, under the Roman governor of Judea to atone for humanity’s sins.
Passover occurs in the middle of Nisan, a month in the Hebrew calendar, on the first full moon, putting it in proximity to Easter. The holiday begins at sundown and includes seder, a special meal meant to remind Jewish people of the hardship they endured in Egypt.
Ramadan is Islam’s holiest month using the lunar calendar. Because the calendar follows the cycles of the moon, unlike the Gregorian calendar commonly used in the West, Ramadan falls on different times each year.
During Ramadan, Muslims believe God revealed the sacred text of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad, the first verses of which were passed down on “The Night of Power” (Laylat al-Qadr in Arabic). Muslims abstain from food or drink from dawn to sunset for the entire month and are encouraged to contemplate their relationship with God.
On the sidelines of the March 22, 2023, United Nation’s World Water Day commemoration, Dr. Rajendra Singh, referred to popularly as the “Water Man” of India, was hosted by Save Indian Farmers, a non-profit in the U.S., and the Gandhian Society in collaboration with Parikh Worldwide Media in Edison, New Jersey.
Dr. Singh also visited the offices of Parikh Worldwide Media, where he was felicitated, and gave an interview to PWM’s 24/7 television channel ITV Gold.
As part of the occasion, Mayor of Edison, N.J., Sam Joshi, issued a proclamation declaring March 23 as Rajendra Singh Day, in recognition of the Indian environmental activist’s lasting contributions to society. The proclamation was read out at the reception.
Picture : TheUNN
Dr. Sudhir Parikh, chairman of PWM, who presented an award to Dr. Singh, spoke at the event praising the water conservation specialist for his commitment and hard work. Dr. Parikh also affirmed his own commitment to humanitarian and philanthropic work after he turned 60 years old. Currently, Dr. Parikh is 76 years old, and his goal is to empower the younger generation of Indians “to love Mother India,” as much as he did. Not only does PWM publish 4 newspapers, it also runs the 24/7 ITV Gold station which partners with Door Darshan India.
“That is all philanthropic work. It is my passion. And for the last 12 years I am running these at my own expense,” Dr. Parikh said. However, he emphasized, nothing compares to the philanthropic work Dr. Singh had been doing, and how he had met villagers and convinced them to bring about change. “And I saw the result. It was so impressive,” he said, and offered his support.
Dr. Singh, in his speech, talked about the world being in a water crisis, and how the World Water Day at the UN was spent discussing ways in which planet earth could “free from that.” The phenomenon of floods and droughts happening around the world, needed to be controlled. “If we don’t find ways to save ourselves from these then our planet earth and humanity, both will face grave danger,” Dr. Singh said. “We are here for this work.”
Bhadra Butala, founder of Gandhian Society, noted the “big function” being held in Edison to honor Dr. Singh. And he praised Dr. Parikh for presenting an award to Dr. Singh. The Gandhian Society does humanitarian work around the world, particularly to familiarize youth with Gandhian principles.
Tejoo Bambulkar, vice president of Save Indian Farmers which was started in Arkansas by a few friends, described how the board members went beyond just funding various organizations in India.
Dr. Hemant Joshi, founding member and secretary of Save Indian Farmers said that the organization has more than 80 volunteers, some 25 active program directors, and about 20 ongoing projects.
In an interview with ITV Gold, Dr. Rajendra Singh outlined the discussions at the UN, and how the water crisis had become worse over the years since WW Day was declared.
“Our planet is sick,” he said noting that when it rains, the water dissipated instead of being controlled, cutting through the land and rivers which flood towns and cities.
“We had begun Word Water Day so that the world would learn the importance of water. But it seems that where we were standing before … we have regressed. Where the world could have worked for our health and planet’s health, we have polluted our water … amrit became poison.”
He also contended that, “Ancient Indian knowledge about water has been lost. … We appear to have forgotten the relationship to water. Even the UN seems to have forgotten.”
Dr. Rajendra Singh, famous for his water conservation work, seen here being interviewed by ITV Gold host Nidhi Kathuria, at the Parikh Worldwide Media offices in Edison, N.J., during his recent visit to the U.S., on the sidelines of United Nations World Water Day which falls on March 22, 2023. Photo: videograb from ITV Gold video on YouTube
Dr. Singh gave an account of his own journey from working in the government to stepping out and working at the grassroots. “Go to the people who have lost everything.” He chose Alwar Jila to help people. There, when he was just 26 years old, he met an old man who inspired him to make the world his canvas.
Dr. Singh proceeded to educate himself about various environmental sciences and engineering. “And I never looked back, and have never felt despair,” he said, despite all odds including some 377 lawsuits which “were put against me whenever I worked to get water to the people.”. (Courtesy: ITV Gold)
Right now, many U.S. travelers have the same worry on their minds: Why are passports taking so long? If you’re hoping to renew a U.S. passport in time for an international trip this summer, or receive your first-ever document, you’ll likely have a bureaucratic headache ahead of you, as wait times for passports are once again on the rise.
The State Department is facing “unprecedented demand” for passports, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in a Congressional budget hearing on March 23. As such, routine processing will take 10 to 13 weeks, while expedited processing—available for an extra $60 fee—is taking seven to nine weeks. And those estimates don’t include the time it takes to mail your passport to and from the processing center.
Officials say that it’s normal for passport demand to see upticks during certain times of the year, like in the lead-up to the peak summer travel season. However, this year’s demand is record-shattering, and it’s currently 30 to 40 percent higher than 2022’s surge in applications. Last year, the department issued its highest-ever number of passports—a whopping 22 million—and Blinken said the record is on-track to be broken.
“We’ve had an unprecedented demand for renewed travel, which is a good thing,” Blinken said in the hearing. “Historically the demand’s been cyclical. The busy season is March to late summer. Basically it’s full time now. We’re getting 500,000 applications a week for passports.” The department is hiring more customer service agents to help address the new and growing backlog of applications, Blinken added.
So what should travelers do if they need a passport fast? For dire situations—like an international flight that departs within two weeks or emergency travel for a life-or-death reason—you can try to snag an in-person appointment at one of the 26 Regional Passport Agencies. If your situation fits within the stipulations, which also includes needing to obtain a foreign visa within four weeks, you can call for an appointment at your nearest agency. You’ll need to provide evidence that you have flights booked and proof of a qualified emergency, if applicable.
From one-week turnarounds to renewals in as little as one day. Of course, aside from using the expedited service from the government, there are other strategies to getting a passport fast. But they’ll cost you. Third-party expediter companies, like GenVisa or RushMyPassport, offer services like handling appointment requests at the passport agencies or passport renewal turnarounds as quick as one week. But these services can cost anywhere from $150 to $799 and above—on top of the government’s fees and postage costs.
If you have an international flight booked that departs within 48 hours, you can try to get a same-day appointment at one of the agencies for the fastest passport processing. But, as the appointments at the regional agencies need to be in person, they might not be a convenient option for those who don’t live nearby one of the locations. (Depending on your situation, it might be worth flying to one of the agencies with an open timeslot—a feat that is hardly unheard of these days.)
In the future, officials want to simplify the process by offering online renewal options on a large scale. “This is something I have great hope for,” Blinken said of online processing. The State Department ran a pilot project last year to test how online submission would work. “We have 500,000 renewal requests submitted through this pilot project,” Blinken said. “We’ve now halted it to make sure we can fine tune it and improve it before we roll it out in a bigger way. But here’s the bottom line: We expect that 65 percent of renewal customers for passports will be able to do so online once this program is fully up and running.”
Individual happiness is subjective, but some factors contribute to a happy society no matter where you are, according to the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. For the past 11 years, the nongovernmental organization has ranked more than 150 countries based on their citizens’ self-evaluations of their quality of life, including social support, income, health, freedom, generosity, and lack of corruption.
Picture : CNN
And while the big winners continue to be the Nordic countries of Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, the report also points out that despite multiple world crises, including the war in Ukraine, global life satisfaction is “just as high as in the pre-pandemic years.”
“The overall goal is a happier society,” professor Richard Layard, co-director of the Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics and editor of the report, said in a press release. “But we only get there if people make each other happy (and not just themselves). It’s an inspiring goal for us as individuals. And it includes the happiness of future generations — and our own mental health.”
Now, check out the top 10 countries that seem to have figured out the formula for a happy society.
Finland
This Nordic nation has been crowned the happiest in the world for a record sixth time. While its final score (7.804) is slightly lower than last year’s (7.821), Finland is still considerably ahead of other countries. And it’s not keeping its secret to happiness to itself. The country recently announced that it’s holding a “Masterclass of Happiness” to help people “find their ‘inner Finn’ and master the Finnish state of mind.” On the agenda? Professional coaches will help participants connect with nature among the peaceful scenery of Kuru Resort in the Lakeland region, known for its stunning landscapes and lakes.
Denmark
With a total score of 7.586, Denmark maintains its status as a runner-up this year, too. The country where hygge is a way of life is also proof that high taxes don’t necessarily mean an unhappy nation. While Danish people pay the highest personal income tax in Europe (almost 56 percent), its citizens benefit from a comprehensive social welfare system, including free education and health care that seems to leave them pretty content.
Iceland
Not only is the Land of Fire and Ice one of the happiest in the world, it’s also the safest. The country tops the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, having closed more than 90 percent of its gender gap. What else makes Icelandic people happy? A high income, a stable economy, a lack of corruption, generosity, free education, and a strong sense of community, to name a few. And we’re certain that having access to some of the most stunning natural landscapes in the world helps, too.
Israel
The most significant change in this year’s ranking is Israel, which jumped five spots to number four — its highest since the report’s launch in 2012. Experts explain this with the country’s fast recovery post-COVID (the economy expanded by 6.5 percent and GDP per capita increased 4.4 percent). Additionally, Israelis have strong social connections and high life expectancy, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Netherlands
The Netherlands comes in fifth with a score of 7.403, mirroring last year’s ranking. Aside from its endless tulip fields (which makes us happy), the country’s economy was recently praised for its resilience and robust recovery compared to the rest of the EU in the latest report by the International Monetary Fund. Plus, affordable higher education, an excellent job market, a strong sense of community, and high civic engagement all reinstate a sense of happiness in Dutch society.
Sweden
Sweden moved up one spot to sixth this year. Despite recording more deaths from COVID-19 than other Nordic nations, the country’s score was slightly higher than last year’s. Air and environmental pollution in Sweden are the second lowest after Finland, resulting in better life expectancy, according to data from OECD. A high employment rate and gender equality (more than 80 percent) also lead to better life satisfaction in Sweden.
Norway
It’s easy to see why Norwegians consider themselves a happy nation. With tuition-free education, a high income rate, low levels of corruption, and a robust social support network, Norway has been a fixture on the top 10 happiest countries ranking, and it even topped it in 2017. With an abundance of natural attractions such as fjords, mountains, lush forests, lakes, and regular northern lights sightings, people don’t have to travel far to find a quiet spot to unwind and recharge.
Switzerland
While Switzerland fell four spots since last year, the country is still home to some of the happiest (and healthiest) people in the world, thanks to low crime rates, a high GDP per capita, and beautiful mountain scenery that welcome year-round recreation. According to the World Happiness Report, Swiss people also relate positive life satisfaction with “prosociality,” like volunteering and charitable donations.
Luxembourg
Luxembourg made its debut among the top 10 happiest countries last year under number six, but it fell to number nine in 2023 with a score of 7.228. While it’s one of the smallest and least populous nations in Europe (it’s slightly smaller than Rhode Island), Luxembourg is actually one of the wealthiest countries in the world when it comes to GDP per capita. Safety, high public trust, and diversity all contribute to a greater sense of happiness in locals here (half of which have a foreign nationality).
New Zealand
Similar to last year, New Zealand occupies the tenth spot on the list of world’s happiest countries. After the nation opened post-COVID in April 2022, it has seen a steady stream of visitors helping it recover and, in some industries, even beat pre-pandemic levels.
Amusement and pleasant surprises — and the laughter they can trigger — add texture to the fabric of daily life. Those giggles and guffaws can seem like just silly throwaways. But laughter, in response to funny events, actually takes a lot of work, because it activates many areas of the brain: ones that control motor, emotional, cognitive and social processing.
People begin laughing in infancy, when it helps develop muscles and upper body strength. Laughter is not just breathing. It relies on complex combinations of facial muscles, often involving movement of the eyes, head and shoulders.
Laughter — doing it or observing it — activates multiple regions of the brain: the motor cortex, which controls muscles; the frontal lobe, which helps you understand context; and the limbic system, which modulates positive emotions. Turning all these circuits on strengthens neural connections and helps a healthy brain coordinate its activity.
Laughing with others helps to create social bonds and can increase intimacy.
By activating the neural pathways of emotions such as joy and mirth, laughter can improve your mood and make your physical and emotional response to stress less intense. For example, laughing may help control brain levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, similar to what antidepressants do. By minimizing your brain’s responses to threats, it limits the release of neurotransmitters and hormones such as cortisol that can wear down your cardiovascular, metabolic and immune systems over time. Laughter’s kind of like an antidote to stress, which weakens these systems and increases vulnerability to diseases.
Laughter’s cognitive power
A good sense of humor and the laughter that follows depend on an ample measure of social intelligence and working memory resources.
Laughter, like humor, typically sparks from recognizing the incongruities or absurdities of a situation. You need to mentally resolve the surprising behavior or event — otherwise you won’t laugh; you might just be confused instead. Inferring the intentions of others and taking their perspective can enhance the intensity of the laughter and amusement you feel.
To “get” a joke or humorous situation, you need to be able to see the lighter side of things. You must believe that other possibilities besides the literal exist — think about being amused by comic strips with talking animals, such as those found in “The Far Side.”
Laughter’s social power
Many cognitive and social skills work together to help you monitor when and why laughter occurs during conversations. You don’t even need to hear a laugh to be able to laugh. Deaf signers punctuate their signed sentences with laughter, much like emoticons in written text.
Laughter creates bonds and increases intimacy with others. Linguist Don Nilsen points out that chuckles and belly laughs seldom happen when alone, supporting their strong social role. Beginning early in life, infants’ laughter is an external sign of pleasure that helps strengthen bonds with caregivers.
Later, it’s an external sign of sharing an appreciation of the situation. For example, public speakers and comedians try to get a laugh to make audiences feel psychologically closer to them, to create intimacy.
By practicing a little laughter each day, you can enhance social skills that may not come naturally to you. When you laugh in response to humor, you share your feelings with others and learn from risks that your response will be accepted/shared/enjoyed by others and not be rejected/ignored/disliked.
In studies, psychologists have found that men with Type A personality characteristics, including competitiveness and time urgency, tend to laugh more, while women with those traits laugh less. Both sexes laugh more with others than when alone.
Laughter’s mental power
Positive psychology researchers study how people can live meaningful lives and thrive. Laughter produces positive emotions that lead to this kind of flourishing. These feelings — such as amusement, happiness, mirth and joy — build resiliency and increase creative thinking. They increase subjective well-being and life satisfaction. Researchers find that these positive emotions experienced with humor and laughter correlate with appreciating the meaning of life and help older adults hold a benign view of difficulties they’ve faced over a lifetime.
Laughter in response to amusement is a healthy coping mechanism. When you laugh, you take yourself or the situation less seriously and may feel empowered to problem-solve. For example, psychologists measured the frequency and intensity of 41 people’s laughter over two weeks, along with their ratings of physical and mental stress. They found that the more laughter experienced, the lower the reported stress. Whether the instances of laughter were strong, medium or weak in intensity didn’t matter.
Maybe you want to grab some of these benefits for yourself — can you force laughter to work for you?
A growing number of therapists advocate using humor and laughter to help clients build trust and improve work environments; a review of five different studies found that measures of well-being did increase after laughter interventions. Sometimes called homeplay instead of homework, these interventions take the form of daily humor activities — surrounding yourself with funny people, watching a comedy that makes you laugh or writing down three funny things that happened today.
You can practice laughing even when alone. Intentionally take a perspective that appreciates the funny side of events. Laughing yoga is a technique of using breathing muscles to achieve the positive physical responses of natural laughing with forced laughter (ha ha hee hee ho ho).
Researchers today certainly aren’t laughing off its value, but a good deal of the research on laughter’s influence on mental and physical health is based on self-report measures. More psychological experimentation around laughter or the contexts in which it occurs will likely support the importance of laughing throughout your day, and maybe even suggest more ways to intentionally harness its benefits. (Courtesy: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/health/laughter-mind-body-wellness-partner/index.html)
In an immigration-friendly move, a judge has ruled that spouses of highly-skilled H-1B visa holders in tech sector can now work in the US, thus upholding an Obama-era rule under which partners were issued H-4 visas.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Tuesday dismissed arguments by Save Jobs USA, who claimed that the Congress never granted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authority to allow foreign nationals, like H-4 visa-holders, to work during their stay in the US.
“That contention runs headlong into the text of the (Immigration and Nationality Act), decades of executive-branch practice, and both explicit and implicit congressional ratification of that practice,” Chutkan wrote in her ruling.
She further said that the DHS has authorised employment not just for students, but also for their spouses and dependents.
The lawsuit was also opposed by big tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. H4 visas are issued to dependent spouses and children who accompany H-1B, H-2A, H-2B, and H-3 visa holders to the US.
The spouses of H-1B visa holders tend to be highly educated, many of them in STEM fields, and previously had careers of their own or worked to support their families.
In 2021, Google filed a legal brief with over 40 companies to protect the work authorisation program that allows the spouses of H-1B visa holders to work in the US.
As part of his anti-immigration policy, former President Donald Trump had proposed to end the issuing of work authorization (H-4 EAD) for certain spouses of high-skilled talent who came to the US on H-1B visas .
According to a National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis, 90 per cent of the spouses of H-1B visa holders are female, two-thirds are from India and 6 per cent from China.
“The US can reap significant economic benefits, ease labor shortages, and attract more workers in the global competition for talent if it expanded current rules on work eligibility for the spouses of H-1B visa holders,” the 2022 study by NFAP said. (IANS)
Indian-origin software and robotics engineer, Amit Kshatriya has been appointed as first head of NASA’s new Moon to Mars Program Office at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. The new office aims to carry out NASA’s human exploration activities at the Moon and Mars for the benefit of humanity.
“The Moon to Mars Program Office will help prepare NASA to carry out our bold missions to the Moon and land the first humans on Mars,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, in a statement. “The golden age of exploration is happening right now, and this new office will help ensure that NASA successfully establishes a long-term lunar presence needed to prepare for humanity’s next giant leap to the Red Planet.”
As directed by the 2022 NASA Authorization Act, the Moon to Mars Programme Office focuses on hardware development, mission integration, and risk management functions for programmes critical to the agency’s exploration approach that uses Artemis missions at the Moon to open a new era of scientific discovery and prepare for human missions to Mars.
This includes the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, supporting ground systems, human landing systems, spacesuits, Gateway, and more related to deep space exploration.
The new office will also lead planning and analysis for long-lead developments to support human Mars missions. The office resides within the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD), and Kshatriya, appointed as deputy associate administrator, will report to its Associate Administrator Jim Free.
Kshatriya previously served as acting deputy associate administrator for Common Exploration Systems Development, providing leadership and integration across several of the programmes that now fall within the new office.
In the new role, Kshatriya is responsible for programme planning and implementation for human missions to the Moon and Mars. He will direct and lead the programmes to ensure Artemis and Mars planning, development, and operations are consistent with ESDMD requirements, and will serve as the single point of focus for risk management.
Kshatriya began his career in the space program in 2003, working as a software engineer, robotics engineer, and spacecraft operator primarily focused on the robotic assembly of the International Space Station.
From 2014 to 2017, he served as a space station flight director, where he led global teams in the operations and execution of the space station during all phases of flight. From 2017 to 2021, he became deputy, and then acting manager, of the ISS Vehicle Office, where he was responsible for sustaining engineering, logistics, and hardware programme management.
In 2021, he was assigned to NASA Headquarters in the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate as an assistant deputy associate administrator, where he was an integral part of the team that returned a spacecraft designed to carry humans to the Moon during the Artemis I mission.
Son of first-generation Indian immigrants to the US, Kshatriya holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and a Master of Arts in Mathematics from The University of Texas at Austin.
He has also been decorated with the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal for actions as the lead flight director for the 50th expedition to the space station, as well as the Silver Snoopy — an award that astronauts bestow for outstanding performance contributing to flight safety — for his actions as lead robotics officer for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Dragon demonstration mission to the orbiting laboratory. (IANS)
India, which has the third-most billionaires, with 169, had a more mixed year. Indian billionaires as a group – worth $675 billion – are $75 billion poorer than in 2022, as per the Forbes World’s Billionaires List 2023.
As per the list, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) is the richest India with a net worth of $63.4 billion. Ambani is the 9th richest in the world as per the list.
The Us still boasts the most billionaires, with 735 list members worth a collective $4.5 trillion. China (including Hong Kong and Macau) remains second, with 562 billionaires worth $2 trillion, followed by India, with 169 billionaires worth $675 billion.
Nearly half of all billionaires are poorer than they were a year ago, as per the Forbes World’s Billionaires List 2023.
Falling stocks, wounded unicorns, and rising interest rates translated into a down year for the world’s wealthiest people.
Globally, the list counted 2,640 ten-figure fortunes, down from 2,668 last year. Altogether, the planet’s billionaires are now worth $12.2 trillion, a drop of $500 billion from $12.7 trillion in March 2022.
Nearly half the list is poorer than a year ago, including Elon Musk, who falls from No. 1 to No. 2 after his pricey acquisition of Twitter helped sink Tesla shares.
Bernard Arnault, head of luxury goods giant LVMH, takes his place as the world’s richest person, marking the first time a citizen of France leads the ranking.
Despite a down year in the markets, rising inflation and war in Eastern Europe, more than 1,000 billionaires are actually richer than they were on Forbes’ 2022 list – some by tens of billions of dollars.
Luxury goods tycoon Arnault has had the best run. His net worth surged by $53 billion since last year, a bigger gain than anyone on the planet. Shares of his LVMH, which owns brands like Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Tiffany & Co, rose by 18 per cent on the back of strong demand. Now worth $211 billion, Arnault has taken the top spot on the World’s Billionaires ranking. It’s his first time at No 1 – and the first time a citizen of France has led the list.
Michael Bloomberg is ranked 7th on the list with a net worth of $ 84.5 billion. (IANS)
The US Supreme Court is set to consider in two pending cases whether the country’s colleges may continue to use race as a factor in student admissions.
The decision may change the future of affirmative action policy, introduced to redress historic discrimination, in higher education, reports Xinhua news agency.
A study released on March 28 by Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce warns that racial and ethnic diversity on university campuses could decline even if the institutions give more weight to factors, such as the socio-economic class of applicants.
“Without race-conscious admissions, the role selective colleges play in creating equal opportunity in our society is likely to diminish,” said Zack Mabel, co-author of the study.
Picture : Nebraska Examiner
According to the study titled “Race-Conscious Affirmative Action: What’s Next”, colleges would have to “fundamentally alter their admissions practices” to achieve diversity, particularly among Blacks, Hispanics and Indigenous students, if the Supreme Court bans affirmative action in college admissions.
According to the study, an alternative admissions process that includes socio-economic status would achieve a high level of racial and ethnic diversity if colleges eliminate preferences for legacy applicants, student athletes, those with ties to donors and other such factors that mostly benefit White, affluent applicants.
About 60 per cent of top US colleges consider race as a factor in admissions, according to 2015 estimates.
In addition, schools would have to expand their recruitment of high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds for a class-based alternative to produce a similar outcome to race-conscious admissions, the study found.
In 2022, the court heard two cases that had arguments challenging affirmative action admission policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that use race and ethnicity among other factors.
In the case at Harvard University, the group named Students for Fair Admissions accused the school of holding Asian-American students to a higher educational standard than it did African-American or Hispanic students.
According to experts, if the Supreme Court rules against the colleges, the landscape of college admissions would change drastically, and many schools fear losing what they have gained in diversity over the years. (IANS)
Indian-American physician and community activist, Dr. Sampat Shivangi of Mississippi, participated in an event at the Parliament of the United Kingdom held at the House of Lords in British Parliament on March 7-8, 2023, to honor the Indian diaspora. The event was attended by Indians from European countries, United States, and diaspora elsewhere, Dr. Shivangi said.
House of Lords member Swaraj Paul was instrumental in organizing the event along with Lord Karan Bilimoria, and Lord Rami Ranger a business tycoon. “It was such a wonderful experience and opportunity to meet these British Indian billionaires who have made their strides in UK,” Dr. Shivangi said in his note about the visit.
Dr. Shivangi was also invited to the home of Lord Paul, who is in his 90s and “still very active and much involved in Indian diplomacy and Indian diaspora,” Shivangi said, adding, “He mentioned to me that London Zoo will be named after his family in recognition of his services to Britain.” Lord Paul also scheduled a visit to the House of Lords March 8, for Dr. Shivangi.
A conservative lifelong member of the Republican Party, Dr. Shivangi is the founding member of the Republican Indian Council and the Republican Indian National Council. Dr. Shivangi is the National President of Indian American Forum for Political Education, one of the oldest Indian American Associations. Over the past three decades, he has lobbied for several Bills in the US Congress on behalf of India through his enormous contacts with US Senators and Congressmen.
A close friend to the Bush family, he was instrumental in lobbying for the first Diwali celebration in the White House and for President George W. Bush to make his trip to India. He had accompanied President Bill Clinton during his historic visit to India.
Dr. Shivangi is a champion of women’s health and mental health whose work has been recognized nationwide. Dr. Shivangi has worked enthusiastically in promoting India Civil Nuclear Treaty and recently the US India Defense Treaty that was passed in US Congress and signed by President Obama.
Dr. Shivangi is a member of the U.S. National Advisory Council for Substance Abuse and Mental Health SAMHSA, Center for National Mental Health Services, in Washington, D.C.
Indian Overseas Congress, USA, an advocacy organization for democracy and freedom in India, held a meeting in Long Island, N.Y., April 1, 2023, where it appointed new leadership and restructured the organization. It also held a protest against the disqualification of Rahul Gandhi from Lok Sabha following his conviction in a defamation case. The supporters held placards that said ‘save democracy, save India,’ ‘Modi-Adani Bhai Bhai,’ ‘Adani & 20,000 Crores Rs’, and ‘Rahul Gandhi Zindabad’ and shouted the slogans.
Picture : TheUNN
Delegates from ten states were present—over one-hundred-chapter delegates of IOCUSA attended, the organization said in a press release. The keynote address was delivered by Sam Pitroda, chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress, who challenged the conviction of Rahul Gandhi as an overreach, and expansion of control over various institutions in India. “We are in a situation where the 2024 election becomes very important for the country. It is the idea of India we are fighting.”
Pitroda also emphasized the importance of “recalibrating collaborative efforts to canvass, educate, and respond to the electorate in India on what they are looking for from their elected representatives,” the press release said.
Picture : TheUNN
Pitroda appointed five regional new working presidents to cover the five zones that he had delineated of the USA for this purpose: Working President, North-East Zone – Pradeep Samala; Working President, South-East Zone – Dr. Sajan Kurian; Working President, South-West Zone – Srivatsa Ramanathan; Working President, Mid-West Zone – Kulraj S. Grewal; Working President, West Coast Zone. –Devenderpal S. Bhullar.
Other Changes/Appointments: Vice President, Community Liaison – Rajendar Dichpally; Chairman, Disciplinary Committee -Gurmit Gill; Chairman, Membership Committee -Nikhil Thagadur; Chairman, Social Media Committee- Avinash Dandiya; General Secretary -Sandeep Vangala; General Secretary -Balinder Singh Kundu.
Picture : TheUNN
Several individuals spoke at the meeting criticizing the developing political scene in India and discussing the upcoming 2024 elections. Among them were Secretary General Mohinder Singh Gilzian, George Abraham, vice-chairman, Minhaj Khan, Gurmit Singh Gill, Pradeep Samala, John Joseph, Rajendar Dichpally, Balinder Singh Kundu, Dr. Dayan Naik, Sabu Sakaria, Pavan Darsi, Gurinderpal Singh, Gurpreet Singh, Amel Singh, Gulshan Singh Ghotra, Sharath Chandra, Gourishankar Ranganagoudra, Dr.Jayesh Patel, Devindarpal Bhullar, Kulraj Grewal, Srivatsa Ramanathan, Sharod Chandra, Johnson Myalil, Sukhy Dho, Verghese Pothanikadu, Zinda Singh and Pappy Badosh.
Krishna Sree Gandham and Sharath Chandra Vemuganti sang the Indian National Anthem, Secretary Secretary-General Harbachan Singh, Master of Ceremony, declared the event open. Pitroda bestowed “The Chairman’s” award upon Secretary General Harbachan Singh Esq., for his “untiring efforts and outstanding performances.”
Indian-origin CEO Rajesh Subramaniam was conferred with the prestigious 2023 Horatio Alger Award along with twelve other distinguished business leaders for embodying the ”power of the American Dream.” The award was given to exceptional business, civic and cultural leaders from across North America at the 76th Horatio Alger Award Induction Ceremonies in Washington, D.C. on April 1, 2023.
Each year, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, Inc., a nonprofit educational organization, honors present outstanding leaders who have displayed extraordinary perseverance in overcoming challenges with the Award.
In his congratulatory message to Subramaniam, Indian Ambassador to the US, Taranjit Singh Sandhu tweeted, “Happy to see the journey of a young man from Thiruvananthapuram to Tennessee, which also underlines the potential of India-U.S.partnership, felicitated at the iconic event.”
Picture : TheUNN
The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans annually confers the award to esteemed individuals who have succeeded despite facing adversities and have remained committed to education and charitable efforts in their communities, a press release by the organisation said.
Subramaniam, who grew up in Thiruvananthapuram, was selected in 2022 to serve as president and CEO of FedEx, the USD 94 billion transportation company. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai and after winning a scholarship immigrated to America to attend Syracuse University, where he earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering.
In 1991, he graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with an MBA and joined FedEx as an associate analyst. According to the press release, over the next 30 years, Subramaniam served in various executive-level positions and became known as a strategic leader who confidently saw the company through a period of tremendous growth.
“Mr Subramaniam embodies the power of the American Dream,” the executive director of the Horatio Alger Association, Terrence J. Giroux, said. “His commitment to education and building a better life for himself is admirable, and he will undoubtedly serve as an inspiration for our scholars,” he said.
Subramaniam serves on the board of directors of FedEx Corporation, the Procter & Gamble Company, the US Chamber of Commerce’s China Center Advisory Board, FIRST, the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, and the US-China Business Council. He is also a member of the US-India CEO Forum. For 76 years, the Horatio Alger Award has been conferred annually, and the association inducts the awardees as lifetime members. According to the press release, members support promising young people with the resources and confidence needed to overcome adversity in pursuing their dreams through higher education.
An IIT alumnus, the CEO earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Syracuse University and a master’s degree in business administration from The University of Texas at Austin.
“I strongly believe that through hard work and perseverance, one can overcome adversity to achieve success,” the press release quoted 55-year-old Subramaniam as saying. “It is a privilege to accept membership into the Horatio Alger Association, an organization whose mission reflects this ideal. I’m honored to join an incomparable list of Members and look forward to meeting the Scholars and supporting them through their college years and beyond.”
Indian wellness brand and leader in organic premium teas retailer VAHDAM® India has launched spices exclusively in the United States. To celebrate the launch, the company has appointed world-renowned Michelin star Chef, restaurateur, and host of MasterChef India, Vikas Khanna as a brand ambassador for VAHDAM® Spices.
Commenting on the product, Khanna said, “The farmers in India take pride in the spices they grow, which elevates VAHDAM® India’s spices and their taste above what’s currently available on the market. VAHDAM® India’s Spices can help anyone take their cooking up a notch and it will bring more flavor into all of our lives.”
According to the company, the single origin spices are sourced from Indian regions and states, packaged at state-of-the-art facility in India and shipped directly to consumers. The brand has expanded its partnership with farmers and cooperatives to bring high quality and authentic Indian spices to the consumers.
Aimed at creating fresher products for an increasingly health-conscious world, VAHDAM® India has expanded its partnership with Indian farmers and cooperatives to bring high quality and authentic Indian spices to consumers to help them achieve their wellness goals.
VAHDAM® India has also welcomed world-renowned, Michelin star Chef, restaurateur, and host of MasterChef India, Vikas Khanna as a brand ambassador to celebrate the launch of VAHDAM® Spices with a variety of new recipes.
With VAHDAM® Spices, the brand is introducing a collection of India’s finest spices, all sourced garden-fresh, packaged at VAHDAM® India’s BRC Certified facility state-of-the-art facility in India & shipped directly to consumers.
All of the spices are single-origin from states and regions known for high quality products. Each batch of spices is tested for purity in accredited labs in Europe to ensure VAHDAM® brings only the healing benefits of Indian spices.
According to a press release, VAHDAM® Spices have zero adulterants, pesticides, color, or toxins. Because VAHDAM® Spices are grown at the top farms, sealed fresh at the source, and brought directly to consumers’ households, they achieve a higher product potency and nutritional value.
“India is a magical ‘land of spices’ and provides the world with the largest variety of delicious spices. However, there is an absence of a home-grown brand, and the broken supply chain ensures that consumers don’t get a fresh product, while farmers do not get the right price for their produce. Additionally, spices are globally grown by spraying copious amounts of pesticides, Moneyinsecticides & toxins to increase farm yield, which causes a serious health risk to consumers,” said Bala Sarda, CEO & Founder of VAHDAM® India.
“We wanted to solve this problem and have spent the last two years building a supply chain of India’s finest organic spice farms with our partners. We made a conscious decision to bring sustainable, clean, and fresh spices to consumers around the world for all their cooking, wellness, and beauty needs.”
The average price for a new vehicle hit $49,500 at the end of last year, compared to $38,948 just three years earlier. Skyrocketing interest rates pushed the average monthly car payment on a five-year loan to $723 in March.
New vehicles priced under $25,000, a range that the average American might deem affordable, now account for less than 5 percent of all sales.
Customers who walk onto a dealer’s lot expecting such enticements as zero-APR financing and thousand-dollar rebates are in for a surprise: For the first time in recent memory, the automobile industry is a seller’s market.
“It is no longer a $25,000, $30,000 transaction. It is a $50,000, $60,000 transaction,” said Patrick Rosenberg, director of automotive finance intelligence at J.D. Power, the car-consumer company. “It is a greater financial commitment than it has ever been.”
The car-and-truck marketplace went haywire during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with much of the American economy. A global shortage in semiconductors, the chips that control everything from airbags to windshield wipers, seeded massive production delays. Toss in pandemic shutdowns and other supply-chain kinks, and the conveyor belt of new cars slowed to a crawl.
At that point, simple economics kicked in. Demand overwhelmed supply. The customer-friendly, let’s-make-a-deal milieu of the typical new-car dealership vanished as quickly as that new-car smell. It hasn’t returned.
Generations of automotive customers have come to expect deep discounts, four-figure rebates and zero-interest financing. In a new-car negotiation, the sticker price was a mere starting point. No longer.
“Most people don’t expect to pay sticker price. People are paying sticker price,” said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds, the automotive information-services company. “Vehicles are coming off the truck, and they’re being sold immediately.”
The semiconductor crisis has eased, the supply chain has loosened, and vehicle production has resumed. But most of the cars and trucks rolling off the assembly lines are luxury items.
Between December 2017 and December 2022, the share of all new auto sales priced above $60,000 more than tripled, from 8 percent to 25 percent, according to research by Cox Automotive.
In the same five years, the share of sales under $25,000, a standard cutoff for economy vehicles, shrank from 13 percent to 4 percent.
“The manufacturers have been steering the market toward more expensive products,” said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox. “All those bells and whistles, nav-screens, cruise control, all those fantastic and lifesaving technologies cost money.”
More than 90 vehicle models now fetch $60,000 or more, Cox reports. Meanwhile, in five years, the number of models priced under $25,000 has dwindled from 36 to 10.
U.S. automakers have walked away from economy-priced sedans because of thin profit margins and because consumers don’t seem to want them.
“Ford Focus, Ford Fusion, Chevy Malibu, Chevy Cavalier: There’s a long history of the Detroit three making passenger cars,” Chesbrough said. “But they decided, seven, eight years ago, that the margins just weren’t there for them.”
As a result, actual cars now make up only about one-fifth of the Detroit auto market, an industry dominated by high-priced pickups and SUVs. (The Hill)
Elon Musk has officially been dethroned from the top of Forbes’ annual “World’s Billionaire’s List.” The Tesla and Twitter chief is now the second-richest billionaire, worth an estimated $180 billion, which is $39 billion less than the previous year. The top spot has been awarded to Bernard Arnault, the chairman of French luxury goods giant LVMH. His net worth increased more than $50 billion in the past year to $211 billion.
However, Tuesday’s list tracks his wealth annually. Forbes explained that Musk’s wealth had fallen because his $44 billion Twitter purchase, funded by Tesla shares, scared investors and sent Tesla stock sinking sharply last year. Tesla gained much of those losses back this year but is still significantly lower than before Musk bought Twitter.
Picture : Bussiness Insider
Forbes said that “Musk has mostly tweeted himself out of the top spot on the ranks” because Tesla shares are down 50% since his Twitter takeover a year ago. SpaceX is a bright spot for the billionaire, the magazine notes, since its valuation has increased $13 billion to $140 billion over the past year.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos lost the most amount of money of any billionaire on the list ($57 billion), knocking him down from second position to third. The loss can be attributed to Amazon shares losing nearly 40% of their value last year.
As for Arnault, Forbes said the Frenchman had a “banner year” in 2022 because of record-high profits at the luxury conglomerate, which comprises Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Tiffany & Co. Shares of LVMH have climbed 25% over the past year and the patriarch has recently unveiled succession plans to his children.
Forbes said that the total number of billionaires on this year’s list fell to 2,640 (down from 2,668), marking the second-straight year of decline.
“It’s been another rare down year for the planet’s richest people,” said Chase Peterson-Withorn, Forbes senior editor of wealth, in a release. “Nearly half the list is poorer than they were 12 months ago, but a lucky few are billions — or even tens of billions — of dollars richer.”
With roots dating back to the 1800s, April is Sikh Heritage Month — a time to celebrate and honour the rich history and culture of Canada’s Sikh community.
“With 800,000 Sikhs calling Canada home, we have the largest Sikh diaspora, with roots of the first Sikh in Canada dating back to the 1800s,” said Punjab-origin Member of Parliament (MP) from Brampton West, Kamal Khera.
At 26, Khera was the youngest to have won in the elections in Canada in 2015. She represents Canada’s ruling Liberal party.
“As a Sikh, I am proud of the contributions and achievements of our community!” she tweeted.
In one of her visits to Punjab, she said: “My counterpart in India is always with heavy security, I move freely.”
Proud of vibrant Sikh community, Sonia Sidhu, MP from Brampton South, tweeted, “April 1 marks the beginning of Sikh Heritage Month in Canada and as Canadians, we are proud of our country’s strong and vibrant Sikh community.”
“This month, let’s continue to learn about Sikh Heritage in Canada.”
Mayor of Brampton, Patrick Brown, said this year “we celebrate 10 years of Sikh Heritage Month in Ontario”.
Among many of the events listed, he said he would also be hosting a special event to award Gurbax Singh Malhi the key to the Brampton city on April 18.
Picture : Daily Hire
As a mark of respect for Canada making it the second largest Sikh population in the world, the Mississauga Civic Centre clock tower was lighted with orange, part of the city’s Community Recognition Programme.
Learning the faith of the Sikhs, another MP Francesco Sorbara said, “During this month we recognise the contributions to our country by the more than 800,000 Canadians of Sikh heritage, learn about their faith and rich history.”
Randeep Sarai, Member of Parliament for Surrey Centre, said, “This month, I encourage you all to take this opportunity to learn more about the Sikh faith!”
India-origin Minister of National Defence, Anita Anand, said Sikh Heritage Month “is a time to recognise the many contributions of the Sikh community across Canada. Today, I joined members of the Oakville and Halton Sikh community at the flag raising at Oakville Town Hall”.
“This is an opportunity for Ontarians to come together to learn more about the Sikh faith and celebrate the many ways Sikh Ontarians help build a stronger and better Ontario,” said Ontario’s Minister of Citizenship and Multiculturalism, Michael Ford.
MP for Vancouver South, Harjit Sajjan, said, “Learn about how the Sikh values of equality and ‘seva’ (selfless service) are reflected in what we as Canadians strive toward.”
Another Punjab-origin Aman Singh, MLA for Richmond-Queensborough, added, “On behalf of our British Columbia New Democratic Party government, our caucus and colleagues at your opening gala for Sikh Heritage Month. I know there are many events planned throughout the month.”
According to Sikh Heritage British Columbia, its philosophy is providing a space where the Sikh community can connect with each other and with neighbouring communities to help each other prosper, learn and grow.
Its promise is, “Create a space where Sikhs and non-Sikhs can come together to create connections and relationships for prosperity.” (IANS)
While overindulgence could dig you an early grave, a daily alcoholic drink may neither be harmful nor offer any health benefits, according to a new study of 4.8 million people.
The benefits and drawbacks of alcohol have been much debated. While some studies claim that even a small portion can lead to death, others say it has health benefits.
Researchers from the universities of Victoria and Portsmouth in Canada and UK respectively, conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 107 studies published between 1980 and 2021.
The findings showed that low and moderate drinkers have similar mortality rates to those who abstain entirely. On the other hand, women who enjoy more than one standard drink per day are at least 20 per cent likely to die prematurely.
“In this updated systematic review and meta-analysis, daily low or moderate alcohol intake was not significantly associated with all-cause mortality risk,” the researchers wrote in the paper, published on the JAMA Open Network.
However, “increased risk was evident at higher consumption levels, starting at lower levels for women than men,” they added.
The study also found no significant protective associations of occasional or low-volume drinking (moderate drinking) with all-cause mortality.
But it showed an increased risk of all-cause mortality for drinkers who drank 25 g or more and a significantly increased risk when drinking 45 g or more per day.
When they looked at previous studies that suggest people who drink a little are less likely to die early or from heart disease than people who don’t drink at all, they found the evidence was skewed by systematic bias.
“For example, light and moderate drinkers are systematically healthier than current abstainers on a range of health indicators unlikely to be associated with alcohol use, (like) dental hygiene, exercise routines, diet, weight (and) income,” they wrote. (IANS)
Donald Trump became the first former American president to be indicted. He was accused by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney of orchestrating a hush-money scheme to help him win the presidency and then covering it up once he was in the White House.
“There is no crime and it should never have been brought” former US President Donald Trump raged in his first public address after being charged with dozens of offenses. Trump was pictured in court on Tuesday, April 4th in a historic first as the former President pleaded not guilty to 34 charges.
In the Manhattan Court, Trump looked defiant as he left Trump Tower and again a few minutes later, when he arrived at court. He raised a pumped fist and stared straight at the waiting cameras, then minutes later waved outside the court.
Picture : NBC
Wearing a grim expression, Trump was arrested and pleaded not guilty in New York City to 34 felony counts of falsifying his business records “to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” according to a somewhat novel indictment disclosed after the former president’s history-making arraignment. He denied any wrongdoing.
Trump was only seen briefly outside the district attorney’s office, where he surrendered to authorities and was booked and fingerprinted behind closed doors. His mugshot was not taken, according to two law enforcement officials who could not publicly discuss details of the process and spoke on condition of anonymity.
In an unprecedented case, Trump faces charges including at least one felony offense related to hush money payments to women during his 2016 presidential campaign, to cover allegations he had an extramarital affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump pleaded not guilty to “34 counts of falsifying business records and conspiracy for his alleged role in hush money payments to two women toward the end of his 2016 presidential campaign.” Charges also include conspiracy and involve two women.
The indictment charges Trump with 34 separate counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, a felony. A separate document laying out the factual basis for Bragg’s allegations against Trump points to a complicated web of arrangements between Trump, his former lawyer Michael Cohen (who is identified as “Lawyer A”), and David Pecker, the CEO of American Media, the company that publishes the National Enquirer.
Bragg alleges that these three men worked together to identify two women who allegedly had sex with Trump, and to pay them to remain silent. The women are identified as “Woman 1” and “Woman 2” by Bragg, but the first woman appears to be former Playboy model Karen McDougal, and the second appears to be porn actress Stormy Daniels.
The actual felony counts arise out of allegedly false entries that Trump made in various business records in order to make the payment to Daniels appear to be ordinary legal expenses paid to Cohen.
Trump “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” according to the charging documents. The 13-page “statement of facts” detailed in plain language how Trump allegedly committed crimes to help him get elected to the White House in 2016.
“From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects,” the statement of facts says. Prosecutors described a “catch and kill scheme” to suppress negative stories about Trump – “in furtherance of his candidacy for President.”
Pornstar Stormy Daniels poked fun at former President Donald Trump on the day he was arraigned in court. She released a graphic tweet which cannot be published in full. She added later in the tweet: “It’s definitely more fun being under my sexy man instead of under arrest.”
Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche said during the hearing that Trump is “absolutely frustrated, upset and believes that there is a great injustice happening” in the courtroom.
Legal analysts vary in their assessments of the strength of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s charges against Trump. Doubts allow some Republican officials to criticize Bragg’s case without defending the former president’s ties to a porn star or any of the other misadventures or falsehoods Trump has accumulated in private or political life.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who twice voted for Trump’s impeachment and says Trump is unfit for office, said in a statement that Bragg “stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda.” Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) accused Bragg of “attempting to interfere” with the democratic process with “politicized charges.”
The next in-person hearing is scheduled for December 4th, though Trump’s attorneys have vowed to do all they can to stop the case beforehand.
During his speech, he said: “I never thought that anything like this could happen in America. The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.” He said, “Our country is going to hell” and launched attacks on the judge in the case.
Trump was defiant in his speech, ranting about – among other things – his two impeachment trials during his presidency. He went on to call the New York indictment the latest in an “onslaught of fraudulent investigations. This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election and it should be dropped immediately,” Trump said.
In a social media post from his plane on his flight home from New York, former President Donald Trump said that Tuesday’s court hearing “was shocking to many in that they had no ‘surprises,’ and therefore, no case. Virtually every legal pundit has said that there is no case here. There was nothing done illegally!”
Finland officially became the 31st member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Tuesday, April 4th, 2023 marking a major shift in the security landscape in northeastern Europe that adds some 1,300 kilometers (830 miles) to the NATO Alliance’s frontier with Russia.
The Nordic nation’s accession was sealed during a formal ceremony at the NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg were on hand as the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Pekka Haavisto, established Finland’s accession.
“Finland has today become a member of the defense alliance NATO. The era of military non-alignment in our history has come to an end. A new era begins,” the Finnish presidency said in a statement.
“Each country maximizes its own security. So does Finland. At the same time, NATO membership strengthens our international position and room for maneuver. As a partner, we have long actively participated in NATO activities. In the future, Finland will make a contribution to NATO’s collective deterrence and defense,” it added.
Reports say, Finland’s acceptance into the US-led security alliance presents a blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long sought to undermine NATO, and before invading Ukraine, demanded the bloc refrain from further expansion.
The invasion instead drove non-aligned Finland and Sweden to abandon their neutrality and seek protection within NATO, though Sweden’s attempt to join the bloc has been stalled by alliance members Turkey and Hungary.
On the eve of induction ceremony, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg heralded the raising of the Finnish flag for the first time at the alliance’s headquarters in Belgium, saying “it will be a good day for Finland’s security, for Nordic security, and for NATO as a whole.”
But Russia has warned that further NATO expansion will not bring more stability to Europe, and on Monday said it would scale up forces near Finland if the alliance sent any troops or equipment to the new member country.
“We will strengthen our military capabilities in the west and northwest if NATO members deploy forces and equipment on Finnish territory,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reiterated that Finland’s accession will force Moscow to “take counter-measures to ensure our own security, both tactically and strategically.”
Prior to Tuesday, Russia shared about 1,215 kilometers (755 miles) of land border with five NATO members. Finland’s accession more than doubles NATO’s land border with Russia.
Stoltenberg said Putin had “failed” in his attempt to “slam NATO’s door shut. Today, we show the world that he failed, that aggression and intimidation do not work. Instead of less NATO, he has achieved the opposite – more NATO – and our door remains firmly open,” he added.
“Joining NATO is good for Finland. It is good for Nordic security and it’s good for NATO as a whole. Finland brings substantial and highly capable forces expertise on national resilience and years of experience working side by side with NATO allies.”
What it means for Finland and the alliance
Finland’s NATO membership guarantees the northern European nation access to the resources of the entire alliance in the event of attack.
It includes the protection offered by NATO’s Article 5 principle, which states that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all members. It’s been a cornerstone of the 30-member alliance since it was founded in 1949 as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.
NATO membership also better integrates Finnish forces in training and planning with NATO allies.
The country is no stranger to working with NATO, with its troops regularly participating in NATO exercises under a partner status.
The Finnish Defense Force also operate some of the same weapons systems as other NATO members, including US-made F/A-18 fighters, German-designed Leopard main battle tanks and K9 Howitzers used by Norway and Estonia among others.
Helsinki has also signed on the F-35 stealth fighter program, which will allow its air force to work smoothly with NATO members including the US, UK, Norway, Italy, Canada, Poland, Denmark and the Netherlands.
A November report from the Washington-based Wilson Center lists three key areas where Finland benefits NATO: reserve forces, technology access and artillery forces.
“Finland’s artillery forces are the largest and best-equipped in western Europe,” the report said.
“With some 1,500 artillery weapons, including 700 Howitzer guns, 700 heavy mortar, and 100 rocket launcher systems, the Finnish artillery has more artillery firepower than the combined militaries of Poland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden can currently muster,” it said.
The Wilson Center report also noted Finland’s strong cyber security record, pointing out the country is home to Nokia, “a major provider of 5G infrastructure,” and one of three major providers of 5G infrastructure in the world, along with Sweden’s Ericsson and China’s Huawei.
And it said Finland can muster 900,000 reserves who have been trained as conscripts in its armed forces. The wartime strength of Finnish forces is 280,000 troops, it says.
Sweden still waiting
Finland’s accession comes days after Turkey’s parliament voted to ratify the country’s membership, clearing the final hurdle for the country to join NATO and putting an end to months of delays.
Finnish and Swedish public support for joining NATO surged following the invasion of Ukraine. “Everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine,” outgoing Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said last April. “People’s mindset in Finland, also in Sweden, changed and shifted very dramatically.”
NATO has an open-door policy, meaning that any country can be invited to join if it expresses an interest, as long as it is able and willing to uphold the principles of the alliance’s founding treaty. However, under the accession rules, any member state can veto a new country from joining.
An overwhelming majority of NATO members welcomed Finland and Sweden’s applications, but two countries – Turkey and Hungary – began to stall the process. Turkey and Hungary later softened their stance on Finland’s accession, opening the door to its membership in March, while continuing to block Sweden’s membership application.
There is hope for Sweden’s bid, however. Stoltenberg said Finland’s accession is “in itself something we should celebrate” but that it was also good for Sweden. “It makes Sweden more integrated into NATO and makes Sweden even more safer,” Stoltenberg said. “At the same time we celebrate and enjoy that Finland is now a full-fledged member, we should continue work to finalize the Swedish accession process.”
Finland’s fold into the alliance also reignited calls from Ukraine to join.
“Finland’s accession is a clear message that the time to revise old strategies and old perceptions has come and there is no better solution to ensuring Euro-Atlantic security as a whole than eventual membership of Ukraine in NATO,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said as he was welcomed to the NATO headquarters by Stoltenberg on Tuesday.
World leaders welcome Finland’s accession
A chorus of NATO members congratulated Finland as it joined the alliance on Tuesday. “Finland, welcome to NATO,” Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tweeted. “This is a historic day for you and for our alliance. It’s a step that makes every one of us safer. All NATO members now need to take the necessary steps to admit Sweden, so we stand together as one to defend freedom in Europe and across the world.” He also called on Turkey and Hungary to ratify Sweden’s bid for NATO membership.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also hailed Finland’s accession to NATO. “Finland is now a member of #NATO – this is good news and a victory for transatlantic security. With #Finland, our defense alliance has gained a strong friend,” he tweeted. Scholz also gave his backing to Sweden’s bid to join the military alliance.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, tweeted: “I warmly welcome the accession of #Finland to @NATO. This historic step will strengthen the Alliance, reinforce European & Transatlantic security and contribute to further fostering our #EU-NATO strategic partnership.”
The US Senate has confirmed Indian-American lawyer, diplomat and executive Richard Verma as the Deputy Secretary of State, Management and Resources, a position which is normally seen as the CEO of the powerful State Department in the US government. Verma, 54, was confirmed by a vote of 67-26 on March 3oth, 2023.
In his new role, Verma will be responsible for directing, coordinating, and supervising State Department operations such as foreign assistance and civilian response programs. Verma previously served as US Ambassador to India (2015-17) during the Obama Administration, becoming the first person of Indian descent to hold that position.
He is presently the Chief Legal Officer and Head of Global Public Policy at Mastercard. He also served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs, where he led the State Department’s efforts on Capitol Hill.
He served as the US ambassador to India from January 16, 2015, to January 20, 2017, and is currently the chief legal officer and the head of global public policy at Mastercard. A US Air Force veteran, Verma served on active duty as a Judge Advocate. His military decorations include the Meritorious Service Medal and Air Force Commendation Medal.
During the previous Obama administration, Verma served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs. Earlier in his career, he was National Security Advisor to United States Senator Harry Reid and was Democratic Whip, Minority Leader and then Majority Leader of the United States Senate.
Picture : MSN
Richard Verma has served as Vice Chairman of The Asia Group, Partner and Senior Counsellor at Steptoe and Johnson LLP, and Senior Counsellor at the Albright Stonebridge Group. Verma was appointed to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and is a former member of the Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism Commission. He serves as a trustee of The Ford Foundation and is on numerous other boards, including that of the National Endowment for Democracy and Lehigh University.
Verma is the recipient of the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award, the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship, and was ranked by India Abroad as one of the 50 most influential Indian Americans.
Verma, who was born in 1968 to an Indian immigrant, grew up in Pennsylvania. He attended a private college on a US Air Force scholarship. He earned a B.S at Lehigh University, a J.D. cum laude at American University, an LLM with distinction at Georgetown University Law Center, and a PhD at Georgetown University.
A new model has predicted that Earth’s population is likely to decrease in all scenarios across the next century and will peak nowhere near the 11 billion previously forecast.
Population growth could grind to a halt by 2050, before decreasing to as little as 6 billion humans on Earth in 2100, a new analysis of birth trends has revealed.
The study, commissioned by the nonprofit organization The Club of Rome, predicts that if current trends continue, the world’s population, which is currently 7.96 billion (opens in new tab), will peak at 8.6 billion in the middle of the century before declining by nearly 2 billion before the century’s end.
The forecast is both good and bad news for humanity: A plummeting human population will slightly alleviate Earth’s environmental problems, but it is far from being the most important factor in solving them.
And falling populations will make humanity older as a whole and lower the proportion of working-age people, placing an even greater burden on the young to finance health care and pensions. The researchers — members of the Earth4All collective (opens in new tab), which is made up of environmental scientists and economists — published their findings March 27 in a working paper (opens in new tab).
“We know rapid economic development in low-income countries has a huge impact on fertility rates,” Per Espen Stoknes (opens in new tab), director of the Centre for Sustainability at Norwegian Business School and the project lead of Earth4All, said in a statement (opens in new tab). “Fertility rates fall as girls get access to education and women are economically empowered and have access to better healthcare.”
The study is a follow-up to The Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth study, which warned the world of an imminent “population bomb.” The new result diverges from other recent population forecasts. For instance, in 2022, the United Nations estimated (opens in new tab) that the world population would reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and rise to 10.4 billion by 2100. U.N. estimates from a decade ago suggested the population would reach 11 billion (opens in new tab).
Other models forecast population growth based on factors that affect women’s social independence and bodily autonomy, such as access to education and contraception. Earth4All’s model is slightly more complex, integrating variables connected to the environment and the economy. These include energy abundance, inequality, food production, income levels and the impacts of future global warming.
The model predicted two possible outcomes for the future human population. The first, “business-as-usual” case — in which governments continue on their current trajectories of inaction, creating ecologically fragile communities vulnerable to regional collapses — would see populations rise to 9 billion people by 2050 and decline to 7.3 billion in 2100. The second, more optimistic scenario — in which governments invest in education, improved equality and green transitions — would result in 8.5 billion people on the planet by the century’s halfway point and 6 billion by 2100.
The team also investigated the connection between population sizes and the planet’s ability to sustain human populations. They found that, contrary to popular Malthusian narratives, population size is not the key factor driving climate change. Instead, they pinned the blame on high levels of consumption by the world’s richest individuals, which they say must be reduced.
“Humanity’s main problem is luxury carbon and biosphere consumption, not population,” Jorgen Randers (opens in new tab), one of the modelers at the Norwegian School of Business and a member of Earth4All, said in the statement. “The places where population is rising fastest have extremely small environmental footprints per person compared with the places that reached peak population many decades ago.”
A media outlet cannot be muzzled just because it criticizes the government, India’s Supreme Court said on April 5th, as it lifted curbs on a Malayalam news channel, ordered by the centre on “national security” grounds. “National security can’t be raised to deny people their rights… it was raised by the Home Ministry in a cavalier manner in this case,” the Supreme Court said.
The court said that the channel MediaOne’s criticism of the government’s policies and actions cannot be construed as anti-national or anti-establishment, and that an independent press is essential for a vibrant democracy.
Scrapping an order by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting that refused to renew the channel’s broadcast license for want of security clearance, the Supreme Court pulled up the Home Ministry for raising national security claims out of “thin air”.
“National security can’t be raised to deny people their rights… it was raised by the Home Ministry in a cavalier manner in this case,” the court led by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud said, overruling the Kerala High Court which had upheld the centre’s decision.
The judges said the center had failed to show any material facts or evidence to justify its decision to impose the broadcast ban on MediaOne, which was one of the few channels that reported extensively on the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests in 2020 and the riots in Delhi that it spawned.
“There is nothing to show terrorist links. National security claims cannot be made on the basis of thin air. It is seen that none of the material is against national security or threatens public order,” the court said.
The court observed that the government cannot be allowed to have a stand that the press must support the government. It said criticism of the government cannot be a ground to revoke the license of a TV channel.
Coming down heavily on the center’s attempt to keep its rationale under wraps, and file them under “sealed cover”, the court said, “Sealed cover proceedings cannot be adopted to avoid the harm caused by public immunity proceedings. We are of the opinion that public immunity proceedings are a less restrictive means to safeguard the public interest.”
“There cannot be a blanket immunity to the government for disclosure of information to the other parties in a proceeding before the court… All investigation reports cannot be termed secret as these affect the rights and liberty of the citizens,” the Supreme Court said.
MediaOne, which had several run-ins with the BJP-led government at the centre, had gone off the air last year on January 31 after its name was removed from the list of permitted channels by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. On March 15 last year, the Supreme Court had put the Kerala High Court order, which had backed the center’s decision, on hold.
Dr. Nitya Abraham, an Associate Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Program Director for the Montefiore Urology residency program has been honored with the Young Urologist Award this week.
“I’m grateful to my mentors over the years, my chair at Montefiore Medical Center, and of course, my parents and supportive husband, for molding and equipping me to win this award. At a time when rates of physician burnout are increasing, it is wonderful that the American Urological Association and its leaders are recognizing the hard work of many young urologists across the country,” said Dr. Nitay Abraham, the daughter of Dr. Thomas Abraham, Chairman of GOPIO International.
A communique issued by the organizers of the award said, Dr. Nitya Abraham has been chosen from the New York Region for her accomplishments and contributions.
Dr. Nitya Abraham has mentored countless students, residents, fellows and junior faculty both at her institution and others in the New York region. She serves as the Chair of the Executive Curriculum Committee for Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Dr. Abraham has served the AUA as an Oral Board Review Course faculty member and QIPS/MEP member. She is a member of the Society for Urodynamics, Female Pelvic Medicine, and Urogenital Reconstruction (SUFU) Young Urologists Committee and social media committee.
Describing her as a prolific researcher with a clinical research focus on the impact of social determinants of health on pelvic floor health, the awards committee has noted that, Dr. Nitya Abraham has received funding from the US Department of Defense for urinary diagnostic markers of interstitial cystitis, and is also a co-author of the AUA White Paper on Rationale and Strategies for Reducing Urologic Post-Operative Opioid Prescribing.
A graduate of UConn, Dr. Nitya Abraham completed Medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center and the Urology residency at the same place. She did a fellowship at Cleveland Clinic, following which she joined the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. She lives with her husband Terrence and two daughters in Stamford, CT.
Along with Dr. Abraham, others who were chosen for the award included: Rena Malik, MD from Mid-Atlantic Section at the University of Maryland; Jesse D. Sammon, DO from New England Section at Maine Medical Partners Urology; Sarah Vij, MD from North Central Section at Cleveland Clinic; Alexander J. Ernest from MD, Society of Government Service Urologists at Brooke Army Medical Center; Kerri Thurmon, MD from South Central Section at the Denver Health and the University of Colorado School of Medicine; Zachary Klaassen, MD from Southeastern Section at the Medical College of Georgia; and, Yahir Santiago- Lastra, MD from the Western Section at the UC San Diego Health.
Established by the 2012-2013 AUA Young Urologists Committee (YUC) Chair, Dr. Michael C. Ost, the Young Urologist of the Year Award is presented annually to select early-career AUA members in recognition of their efforts and commitment to advancing the development of fellow young urologists. The following members were selected by their colleagues who serve on the Young Urologists Committee and endorsed by their respective Section/Society to receive this special honor for 2023.
The annual report is compiled by a bureau within the State Department and is mandated by the US Congress where the records of all countries are inspected.
The US State Department released a report on human rights practices in India highlighting the country’s challenges to freedom of expression, cases of arbitrary arrests and detentions, extrajudicial killings, confiscation and destruction of property without due process, discrimination against minority groups among others.
Picture : Tribune India
On freedom of expression, the report said, “The government generally respected freedom of expression, but there were instances in which the government or actors considered close to the government allegedly pressurised or harassed media outlets critical of the government, including through online trolling.”
The department in its report also flagged the use of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), claiming that civil society organizations have “expressed concern that the central government sometimes used UAPA to detain human rights activists and journalists”.
Erin M Barclay, acting assistant secretary of the bureau of democracy, human rights and labour, said that the US and India regularly consult “at the highest levels on democracy and human rights.”
“We have and we will continue to strongly urge India to uphold its human rights obligations and commitments. Not surprisingly, we also regularly meet with civil society both in the US and in India to hear their perspectives and learn from their experiences, and we encourage the Government of India to consult with them as well,” Barclay said at a State Department briefing in Washington DC on March 20.
It also flagged reports from civil society organizations alleging that both state and Union government intimidated media “through physical harassment and attacks, pressuring owners, targeting sponsors, encouraging frivolous lawsuits, and in some areas blocking communication services, such as mobile telephones and the internet, and constraining freedom of movement”.
The case of Kashmiri human rights defender Khurram Parvez whose “pretrial detention has been extended at least five times by the NIA Special Court in New Delhi” was highlighted along with the arrest of Umar Khalid “for making a speech during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019.” It also mentioned the denial of bail to the majority of the 16 activists “incarcerated on conspiracy charges related to the Elgaar Parishad Bhima Koregaon protests.”
Mentioning discrimination and violence, the report highlighted forced religious conversion for the purpose of marriage and instances of killings, both of Hindus and Muslims, during episodes of communal violence.
(APP): The erosion of the rights of human rights defenders and religious minorities, use of repressive laws including counter-terrorism and money laundering to silence dissent, prolonged detentions, and killings feature today’s India as exposed by Amnesty International in its latest report.
The report “The State of the World’s Human Rights 2022/23” said the Indian government “selectively and viciously cracked down on religious minorities, and explicit advocacy of hatred by political leaders and public officials towards them was commonplace and went unpunished.”
It said that during the said period, the punitive demolitions of Muslim family homes and businesses were carried out with impunity.
Picture : Fortune
“Peaceful protesters defending minority rights were presented and treated as a threat to public order. Repressive laws including counter-terrorism legislation were used rampantly to silence dissent. Authorities intimidated human rights defenders using digital technologies, including unlawful surveillance,” the report said.
Amnesty highlighted that Adivasis and marginalized communities including Dalits continued to face violence and entrenched discrimination.
It said that in a continuing pattern of harassment and intimidation, unlawful and politically motivated restrictions were placed on civil society organizations and human rights defenders including activists, journalists, students and academics.
On 14 July, the lower house of parliament banned a number of ordinary words from being spoken during parliamentary debates including, among others, “corrupt”, “sexual harassment”, “criminal”, “eyewash”, “incompetent” and “hypocrisy” to police the speeches of opposition members of parliament.”
In September last, mass raids were carried out against the NGO Popular Front of India (PFI) and its affiliates across India which was later declared an “unlawful association” under counterterrorism law, for its alleged involvement in the “funding of terrorism and terrorist activities”, despite no such charges and trials and against those arrested.
The Indian Supreme Court had upheld provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (2002) relating to the powers
of arrest, confiscation of property. These powers have been repeatedly abused to repress civil society and limit dissent.
Throughout the year, the authorities routinely used international travel bans to stifle independent voices including the human
rights activist and former head of Amnesty International India, Aakar Patel, journalist Rana Ayyub and at least two Kashmiri
journalists who were scheduled to speak abroad on India’s human rights situation.
The government cracked down on critics by resorting to arbitrary arrests, including without following due process, under
draconian and repressive laws.
On June 28, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of the independent fact-checking website ALT News, was arrested by police in New Delhi, for denouncing discrimination against minorities and criticizing increased censorship.
Eleven human rights activists continued to be detained without trial in Maharashtra state under the UAPA. They were academics Shoma Sen and Hany Babu; tribal rights activist Mahesh Raut; poet Sudhir Dhawale; lawyer Surendra Gadling; civil rights activists Rona Wilson, Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves; and three members of the cultural group Kabir Kala Manch – Ramesh Gaichor, Jyoti Jagtap and Sagar Gorkhe.
Journalist Siddique Kappan and three others remained detained under laws on sedition and the UAPA. The authorities imposed new restrictions on freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. The High Court of Karnataka upheld a state order restricting all protests to a designated area in the state capital, Bengaluru. The Gujarat state police detained human rights activist Sandeep Pandey along with seven others who were due to participate in a march demanding a public apology to gang-rape survivor Bilkis Bano as the convicts been released from prison by the Gujarat government.
The Indian government used criminal laws disproportionately against religious minorities, particularly Muslims as the police routinely arrested Muslims for acts including offering prayers, conducting legitimate business transactions, and eating beef.
In the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Gujarat, public calls were made by some Hindu groups for the economic boycott of Muslim businesses.
Hate crimes including violence against Dalits and Adivasis were committed with impunity. More than 50,000 suspected crimes against members of Scheduled Castes and more than 9,000 crimes against Adivasi people were reported in 2021.
Several Kashmiri journalists were arrested, including Fahad Shah, Aasif Sultan and Sajad Gul. After being granted bail by local courts, they were re-arrested almost immediately under the UAPA. Journalists Aakash Hassan and Sanna Irshad Mattoo were prevented from travelling abroad by the immigration authorities without a court order, warrant or even a written explanation.
According to official data, Jammu and Kashmir accounted for the highest proportion of deaths involving the police in India between April 2020 and March 2022.
As per the report, the perpetrators continued to commit sexual and domestic violence with impunity. The government of the state of Karnataka imposed a ban on women and girls wearing headscarves (hijab) in public schools which also led to harassment of Muslim women and girls.
Laid-off H1-B visa holders breathed a sigh of relief when the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) confirmed that business or tourist visa holders can apply for new jobs and even appear for interviews. However, the visa status must be changed to an employment based visa before starting the job and must get their visa status changed.
“Many people have asked if they can look for a new job while in B-1 or B-2 status. The answer is, yes. Searching for employment and interviewing for a position are permissible B-1 or B-2 activities,” the US Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a series of tweets.
USCIS issued the confirmation on Twitter comes after many laid-off H1-B visa holders, majority of whom are Indians, feared they they will have to leave the country within 60 days of their termination from their previous job. The new information gives the terminated employees more time to stay in the country and look for new jobs.
B-1 and B-2 visas are the most common types of visa issued for a wide range of uses in the United States. The B-1 visa is issued mainly for short-term business trips, while the B-2 visa is issued mainly travelling for tourism purposes.
The USCIS explained that nonimmigrant workers are not aware of the rules and often assume that if they lose their job in the US then they have to leave the country within 60 days.
President Joe Biden, on March 21, 2023, presented the 2021 National Humanities Medal to Indian American actress and producer Vera Mindy Chokalingam, popularly known as Mindy Kaling, during a White House ceremony.
The National Medal of Arts and Humanities is the highest award the government confers upon individuals who have made significant contributions to arts and humanities.
“Mindy Kaling’s work across television, film, and books inspires and delights—capturing and uplifting the experiences of women and girls across the nation,” Kaling’s award citation issued by the White House read.
Picture : TheUNN
Presenting the award to Kaling, Biden said that she is the first woman of color to create, write and star in a primetime sitcom. “She is hardworking and an adoring mom, just like her own mom was. And, Mindy, we know your mom is always with you in your spirit. We know that” the President added.
Kaling, 43, is a daughter of Indian immigrants and was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1979. She was earlier nominated for the prestigious Emmy Award recognizing her work in the NBC sitcom The Office.
The 12 recipients of the 2021 National Humanities Award include; Richard Blanco, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Walter Isaacson, Walter Isaacson, Henrietta Mann, Ann Patchett, and Amy Tan.
Three children and three staff members were fatally shot at the Covenant School in Nashville, which one expert describes as part of an “astronomical increase” in violence on school campuses in recent years.
There is no universal definition of a school shooting, explains Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology and the president of the Violence Project, a non-profit research center.
“In my research, we focus on school mass shootings, which is a really narrow definition where somebody comes, is heavily armed, fires indiscriminately, and kills four or more people,” she said.
The White House is blaming Republicans in Congress for the lack of action on guns, turning up the heat on the GOP to address rampant gun violence while appealing to voters fed up with America’s epidemic of mass shootings.
President Biden is focusing his anger over the elementary school shooting in Nashville this week squarely on Republicans, calling for lawmakers to show courage and warning that Congress will have to answer to families that have lost loved ones through gun violence.
“The Congress has to act. The majority of the American people think having assault weapons is bizarre, it’s a crazy idea. They’re against that,” Biden said on Tuesday. “I can’t do anything except plead with Congress to act reasonably.”
The federal government currently does not track the specifics of shootings that occur in schools. And while Peterson says they have been relatively rare over the past few years, there has been an increase in frequency in overall violence on school campuses that is undeniable, regardless of the methodology involved in data collection.
“I used to say mass shootings are rare, school shootings are rare,” Peterson said. “But it’s hard to keep saying that, you know, even though statistically they are, it’s getting harder to convince parents of that.”
By the Post’s measure, the total for 2022 was 46 — but that is only during school hours.
If the parameters are widened to incidents after school, over the weekend, when a gun is brandished, fired, or when a bullet hits school property, that number leaps to 303 in 2022, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, an independent research project.
The K-12 database definition also includes gang shootings, suicides, and accidents.
“This information is recorded to document the full scope of gun violence on school campuses,” its website reads.
Peterson says that the database, which works in partnership with the Violence Project, demonstrates how community violence is bleeding into schools.
“That includes things motivated by interpersonal conflicts, domestic violence, retaliation, all of those things, fights that escalate because people are armed,” she said.
In 2023, the K-12 database has recorded 89 gun-related incidents at a school so far, nearly one for every day this year.
It finds that, including the deaths in Nashville this week, there have been 74 people killed or injured this year alone, not including the shooters. That includes 18 people fatally shot, and 56 more who were injured.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 130 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023. That definition includes four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter.
Another category that Peterson says has seen a surge in frequency are threats of violence made, online or in person, which can be difficult for schools to track and manage.
Peterson, who is the parent of three elementary school-aged children says that community engagement can be vital in managing those threats, and preventing more tragedies.
“One thing we do know is that the most likely perpetrator of a school shooting is a child in that school. It is a classmate,” she said. “It’s somebody that is getting seen every day. And so they are likely to tell their classmates that they’re planning on it. They give out warning signs.”
Part of Peterson’s research includes studying the life histories and pathways to violence for the perpetrators. And in many cases, they follow the same steps, including telling others about their plans, a term called “leakage.”
Because of this, Peterson says giving students a clear pathway to sharing any suspicions of these warning signs is crucial.
“The best thing we can do is actually just have really good relationships with our kids, making sure that they feel comfortable reporting,” she said.
She also says schools need to take steps to have crisis intervention teams, suicide prevention teams, school based mental health, and anonymous reporting systems to give at-risk students resources, in addition to campaigning for improved gun safety among parents that are firearms owners.
“I think pushing for safe storage campaigns [is key] because the majority of school shooters are taking guns from home. So the more we can help parents who own firearms make sure those are secured, that’s helpful,” she added.
The White House is blaming Republicans in Congress for the lack of action on guns, turning up the heat on the GOP to address rampant gun violence while appealing to voters fed up with America’s epidemic of mass shootings.
President Biden is focusing his anger over the elementary school shooting in Nashville this week squarely on Republicans, calling for lawmakers to show courage and warning that Congress will have to answer to families that have lost loved ones through gun violence.
“The Congress has to act. The majority of the American people think having assault weapons is bizarre, it’s a crazy idea. They’re against that,” Biden said on Tuesday. “I can’t do anything except plead with Congress to act reasonably.”
The president’s broadsides came one day after the deadly shooting at a private Christian elementary school in an upscale Nashville neighborhood. The 28-year-old suspect was armed with three guns, two of which were assault-type weapons, according to local authorities. The shooter killed three children and three adults before being killed by police.
While calling for an assault weapons ban on Tuesday, Biden said people ask him why he keeps urging reforms that Republicans repeatedly reject.
“Because I want you to know who isn’t doing it, who isn’t helping. Put pressure on them,” he said, adding that there’s “a moral price to pay for inaction.”
Picture : Politico
Monday’s tragedy has revived the on-again, off-again debate over gun violence on Capitol Hill, where the parties have vastly different ideas about how to address the epidemic. Democrats have, for decades, pushed tougher gun laws designed to keep firearms out of the hands of violent people, and they’re joining the White House in accusing Republicans of sitting on their hands while kids are killed.
“Every time one of these tragedies happens it’s a reminder of just how pathetic this institution is at addressing this,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).
Republicans have defended their position, arguing that tighter gun restrictions would do little more than erode liberties guaranteed under the Second Amendment. The more effective strategy, they say, would be to focus on efforts to treat mental illness and fortify schools.
“We’ve talked about things that we can do, and it just seems like on the other side, all they want to do is take guns away from law-abiding citizens,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was severely injured in a shooting in 2017, told reporters Tuesday.
In an effort to move new reform legislation, some House Democrats are eyeing a procedural move, known as a discharge petition, to compel floor votes even over the opposition of GOP leaders. Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D), a Virginia moderate, floated that idea at a closed-door meeting in the Capitol Tuesday morning. The strategy has little chance of bearing fruit, but Democrats hope it will draw a clear distinction between the parties when it comes to gun violence prevention.
“We should not assume that the House — or the Senate, for that matter — are impervious to public opinion,” said Rep. Joe Neguse (Colo.), who heads the Democrats’ messaging arm.
The White House’s strategy to blame Republicans has been fueled by recent comments from GOP lawmakers, some of whom say gun violence is simply an unavoidable fact of life.
“My daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me … ‘Buddy, if somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it,’” he added.
Nonetheless, the White House maintains that an assault weapons ban, among other reforms, would help to stop the uptick of mass shootings. Biden was in the Senate when the last assault weapons ban, which expired after 10 years, passed under former President Clinton in 1994.
“The reality is, we need Republicans in Congress to get on board with an assault weapons ban, to get on board with universal background checks, to get on board with requiring safe storage … These are policies that work — it’s not rocket science here,” White House principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton said on Tuesday.
“I think the president will do everything in his power to continue to urge them to act,” she added. “All we can do is continue to fight.”
From the White House, Biden argues that he has done his part, between issuing executive orders on gun safety and signing the most comprehensive gun safety legislation in decades, which passed last year.
Just two weeks ago, Biden signed an executive order that aims to increase the number of background checks conducted before gun sales. The order builds on the bipartisan gun legislation that Biden signed into law in June.
“This president has been extremely forward-leaning and aggressive in trying to tackle this issue of gun safety,” Dalton said. “There’s a limit to his executive power, and there’s a need for Congress to do more in this moment.”
The debate comes ahead of the president officially announcing that he will run for reelection next year. Gun violence could play a factor in the next election, and the president is expected to tout his own gun safety agenda while highlighting the GOP’s inaction.
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), who was a lead GOP negotiator on last year’s bipartisan gun reforms, said Monday that he doesn’t think the Senate will take further steps before next year’s elections. And other Republicans are already pushing back against Biden’s finger-pointing in the wake of the Nashville shooting.
“It doesn’t get much lower than blaming Republicans in Congress for a transgender killer who targeted a Christian school. Shameful,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) wrote on Twitter. The suspect in the Nashville shooting identified as transgender.
Meanwhile, Democrats argue it’s a good strategy for the White House to keep up the blame on Republicans lawmakers ahead of 2024 in the face of tragedies like Monday’s school shooting.
“If Republicans think that running on increasing access to guns is a winning argument, the White House should make them own every bit of the destruction and despair that they are creating,” said Democratic strategist Michael Starr Hopkins. “Most Democrats aren’t anti-gun, they’re anti dangerous people getting their hands on guns. I expect the president to hammer that message home.”
Another Democratic strategist, Antjuan Seawright, said the White House framing the gun debate as an issue for Republicans to come around on is the right move because people are frustrated and looking to Washington for solutions every time they hear of another mass shooting.
“I think the president is doing the right thing by saying look, it’s not that he’s not willing, it’s not that the Democrats are not willing, it’s not even that some Republicans are not willing,” he said. “It’s the majority of the Republicans who are not willing, so it’s the Republican Party.”
Argentina captain Lionel Messi passed 100 international goals as he scored his seventh international hat-trick in a friendly win at home to Curacao.
The 35-year-old forward reached the landmark when he opened the scoring on 20 minutes in Santiago del Estero.
He added two more before the break to complete a quickfire treble.
Chelsea midfielder Enzo Fernandez also scored, before Argentina paraded the World Cup trophy in front of more than 42,000 supporters.
It was Argentina’s second match on home soil since beating France in Qatar on penalties in December to win the World Cup.
Picture : Arab News
Messi scored his 800th career goal – and 99th for Argentina – in a 2-0 win over Panama in Buenos Aires last week as part of the team’s World Cup homecoming tour.
The Paris St-Germain striker reached three figures for his country when he took a pass from Villarreal’s on-loan Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Giovani lo Celso and fired a low shot into the bottom corner.
Three minutes later Nicolas Gonzalez outjumped goalkeeper Eloy Room to head home from four yards before the Fiorentina winger set up Messi for his second of the night.
Fernandez made it 4-0 with a shot from distance before Lo Celso released Messi to notch his third in just the 37th minute.
Angel di Maria and Gonzalo Montiel rounded off the scoring in the second half but the night belonged to Messi, who extended his record as Argentina’s all-time record scorer – Gabriel Batistuta is a distant second on 56.
He remains third on the men’s all-time international scoring list behind Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo (122) and Iran’s Ali Daei (109).
A new study of human intelligence posits a narrative that may surprise the general public: American IQs rose dramatically over the past century, and now they seem to be falling.
Cognitive abilities declined between 2006 and 2018 across three of four broad domains of intelligence, the study found. Researchers tracked falling scores in logic, vocabulary, visual and mathematical problem-solving and analogies, the latter category familiar to anyone who took the old SAT.
In the 12-year span, IQ scores dipped up to 2 points in the three areas of declining performance. Scores declined across age groups, education levels and genders, with the steepest drops among younger and less-educated test-takers.
IQ scores rose in just one area, spatial reasoning — a set of problems that measure the mind’s ability to analyze three-dimensional objects.
The study, authored by researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Oregon, appears in the May-June issue of the journal Intelligence.
Researchers across the globe have been tracking an apparent decline in human IQs, starting around the turn of the millennium. Theories abound as to why scores are dropping, but the smart money says our cognitive skills may have plateaued, teetering into an era of intellectual lethargy.
If you want to ascribe blame, look no further than this screen.
Cognitive researchers hypothesize that smartphones and smart speakers, autocomplete and artificial intelligence, Wi-Fi and runaway social media have conspired to supplant the higher functions of the human brain. In its quest for labor-saving tech, the world may be dumbing itself down.
“We’re all getting super lazy in our cognition because it’s getting super easy to do everything,” said Ruth Karpinski, a California psychologist who studies IQ. “We’re using Waze and Google Maps to get where we need to go. We’re losing our whole sense of compass.”
The new study joins a growing body of research on something called the Flynn effect. James Flynn, a New Zealand intelligence researcher, tracked a dramatic rise in IQ scores across the 20th century.
How dramatic? If you gave an early-1900s IQ test to a person of average intelligence in 2000, the test-taker would rate in the top 5 percent of the Teddy Roosevelt-era population in cognitive ability.
“IQs rose all over the world, over the course of the century, about 30 points,” said Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell who studies intelligence. “To give you a sense of what 30 points means, the average is 100. Usually, gifted would start around 130. So, we’re talking about the difference between an average IQ and a gifted one.”
Until recently, IQ scores had been rising for nearly as long as we had IQ tests. The first tests emerged around 1905, tailored for struggling schoolchildren in France.
Intelligence testing in the United States “took off after World War I” as a selection tool in the military, said Stefan Dombrowski, a psychology professor at Rider University who studies IQ. “We needed some means to distinguish the cannon fodder from officer material.” Army IQ tests evolved into the SAT, which became the dominant college entrance exam, a rite of passage for the upwardly mobile.
Flynn’s research found that IQ scores rose by 3 to 5 points per decade, a finding that implied humans were getting gradually smarter. Cognitive researchers spent decades debating the reasons for the Great Smartening.
“Some people thought it was nutrition, some thought it was schooling, some thought it was better parenting,” Sternberg said. Over the course of the 20th century, Americans generally ate better, stayed in school longer and refined brutalist parenting techniques.
Flynn himself believed rising IQs reflected the growing complexity of human affairs. As farms gave way to factories, horses to cars, typewriters to computers, “it became more complicated to live in the world,” Sternberg said. “And so, IQs went up.”
To some researchers, the Flynn effect undermines the credibility of the IQ. Human intelligence is supposed to be largely innate, inherited, fixed. How, then, to explain the 30-point rise, an arc that seems to have transformed the average American into Wile E. Coyote?
“The level of gain makes it absurd to continue to believe that the tests are measuring some innate, supremely important, fixed quantity that is central to human existence,” Sternberg said.
The Flynn effect suggests that humans can, indeed, learn the skills measured on IQ tests.
“Children, I believe, have gotten better at taking tests,” said Donna Ford, distinguished professor of education and human ecology at the Ohio State University. “They’ve gotten wiser at taking tests because they’re so used to taking tests.”
Test-taking skills suffused American culture well before the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, perhaps the high-water mark of high-stakes testing in American schools.
Another perennial concern with intelligence testing is racial and socioeconomic bias. Some historians argue that the testing movement is rooted in sustaining white privilege.
“When these tests are made,” Ford said, “the items favor white, middle-class populations.”
She cites an old IQ test item that asked children to explain the saying, “One swallow does not make a summer.” Children from low-income urban homes often thought the question alluded to human digestion.
Whatever its flaws, the IQ test remains a fixture in American culture, used in various forms to document cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients, to flag children for special-education instruction and to spare mentally disabled inmates from execution.
“IQ is the most researched construct in all of psychology,” Dombrowski said. Innumerable studies have linked higher or lower IQ scores to better or worse life outcomes, from academic attainment to career success. Colleges and employers often select candidates with high scores on ersatz IQ tests, whereupon the benefits of a high IQ become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And now, with IQ scores appearing to fall, researchers are embracing the notion that the Flynn effect may have run its course.
“The line can’t go up forever,” said Elizabeth Dworak, lead author of the new study. “It’s called the ceiling effect. You eventually hit that threshold.” Dworak is a research assistant professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Previous research hinted that IQ scores may have plateaued around the turn of the millennium. One Finnish study found IQ scores had dipped by 2 points between 1997 and 2009. A French study found a 4-point drop from 1999 to 2009.
Perhaps human society has reached a cognitive peak. Computers and smartphones are more complex than ever, but human routines are oddly simpler. Generations ago, dishwashers and clothes dryers eased physical labors in daily life. Today, iPhones and the Amazon Echo eliminate mental labors.
“When you can just say, ‘Alexa, do this,’ or, ‘Siri, do that,’ as software becomes more and more sophisticated, there’s less that the human mind has to do,” Sternberg said.
The research design was far from perfect. The test-takers were somewhat better-educated than the overall U.S. population. The test wasn’t delivered in a controlled setting. Test subjects “might have been sitting on the bus,” Dworak said.
A 2018 write-up in the Washington Post sent a flood of readers to the test-taking website. “The sample started skewing older,” Dworak said.
If cognitive ability has indeed plateaued, then the next logical question is: When? Dworak would like to analyze scores by birth year.
One day, perhaps, researchers will identify a specific moment — the launch of Wi-Fi, or the rollout of the first smart speaker — when American intelligence turned south.
Dr. Ravi Kolli, President of the American Association of the Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI), the largest ethnic medical organization in the United States was invited to be part of the 13th-anniversary celebrations of the Affordable Care Act on March 13th, 2023, at the White House in Washington, DC.
“It was such a privilege and an honor to be at the White House representing AAPI, to commemorate 13th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act. It was a memorable day to cherish,” Dr. Kolli described his experience joining with several other healthcare leaders at the White House to commemorate the Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Barack Obama. Other AAPI team members attending the White House ceremony included, Drs. Rupak Parikh, Roshan Shah, Sameer Gupta and Jay Bhat
Surrounded by several healthcare professionals, industry leaders, and heads of federal agencies, President Joe Biden along with Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi marked the 13th anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act in the same room where his predecessor, Obama signed into law the historic Act benefitting millions.
Picture : TheUNN
The landmark Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare was signed into law in 2010. The act aimed to provide affordable health insurance coverage for all Americans. The ACA was also designed to protect consumers from insurance company tactics that might drive up patient costs or restrict care. Millions of Americans have benefitted by receiving insurance coverage through the ACA. Many of these people were unemployed or had low-paying jobs. Some couldn’t work because of a disability or family obligations. Others could not get decent health insurance because of a preexisting medical condition, such as a chronic disease.
“Many of you joined us that day after fighting for decades to make it happen, and I remember three words I used at the time, I thought it was –” Biden said, smiling to invited guests in the White House East Room. “I thought it was a big deal. And I stand by the fact, it was a big deal.”
The president touted the progress his administration has made to advance health care policy through legislation, the Affordable Care Act. “Folks, look, we’re making health care more affordable in many other ways as well.” Biden also highlighted recent moves by several pharmaceutical companies to cap the price of insulin. “Well, I value everyone having a decent shot. It is about fairness. It is about dignity. My budget continues to build on the progress we made in the Affordable Care Act.”
Calling it historic, Dr. Kolli praised the current administration for the efforts to insure millions, providing them with affordable health benefits. Quoting statistics, Dr. Kolli pointed out, “During 2023 open enrollment a record high 16.4 million people signed up, with 4.4 million more people enrolled for health insurance since 2021. A new HHS report shows more than 40 million people are currently enrolled in Marketplace or Medicaid expansion coverage related to provisions of the Affordable Care Act — the highest total on record.”
Dr. Kolli thanked the Biden administration for the Open Enrollment outreach that was tailored to reach audiences that experience lower access to health care through cultural marketing experts to connect more people to resources including Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, African Americans, Spanish and English-speaking Latinos, and in multiple languages.
HHS released a report from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) that shows more than 40 million people are currently enrolled in Marketplace or Medicaid expansion coverage related to provisions of the ACA — the highest total on record.
Referring to studies, Dr. Kolli said, ACA has helped a total of 40.2 million Americans gain coverage related based on 2022 and early 2023 enrollment data, the highest total on record. This represents 9.3 million more people enrolled than in 2021 (a 30% increase) and 27.6 million more people enrolled than in 2014 (a 219% increase, or more than triple). Survey results indicate that all 50 states and the District of Columbia have experienced substantial reductions in the uninsured rate since 2013, the last year before the implementation of the ACA.
Among the many benefits, Dr. Kolli pointed out that ACA covers many screenings and preventive services, which has been a theme advocated by AAPI: Focus on Preventive Care. “These usually have low copays or deductibles. The hope is that if you are proactive in your healthcare, you can avoid or delay major health problems later. This will benefit healthier consumers having to pay lower costs over time. For example, a diabetes screening and early treatment may help prevent costly and debilitating treatment later,” he pointed out.
Serving 1 in every 7 patients in the US, AAPI members care for millions of patients every day, while several of them have risen to hold high-flying jobs, shaping the policies and programs, and inventions that shape the landscape of healthcare in the US and around the world. For more details, please visit: www.appiusa,org
Mayor Eric L. Johnson announced last week he has appointed Arun Agarwal to serve as Chair of the Community Bond Task Force (CBTF) Committee as part of the 2024 Capital Bond Program development process.
Agarwal currently serves as the President of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board, the CEO of Dallas-based textile company Nextt, and the Vice Chair of the Texas Economic Development Board, in addition to his other civic and business endeavors.
The CBTF is a 15-member group that will assist the Dallas City Council and city staff in reviewing and selecting projects for possible inclusion in the 2024 Capital Bond Program. Agarwal and his colleagues on the task force will assess the city’s $13.5 billion needs inventory and recommend to the Dallas City Council a $1 billion package of priorities. The City Council will ultimately make the final decisions on ballot propositions and whether to call a bond election.
Picture : ET
Mayor Johnson said that he wants the city’s next bond program to focus primarily on improving the “Three P’s” — public safety, potholes, and parks. “We are working every day to make Dallas a safer, stronger, and more vibrant city — and we are making substantial, measurable progress,” Mayor Johnson said. “The upcoming bond program will provide us with a critical opportunity to build for our future by investing in public safety, in infrastructure, and in our most significant needs. Arun Agarwal has proven to be an effective and engaged leader in our city, and I am confident he will advocate for the right priorities for the people of Dallas.”
Bond programs, which must receive voter approval, are meant to pay for the city’s capital needs. That means the authorized funds cannot legally pay for salaries, benefits, and other ongoing programmatic costs.
Mayor Johnson said Agarwal’s appointment underscores his administration’s commitment to ensuring that parks are treated as a top priority in the bond program.
“While Dallas has many needs to address through our bond program, I believe parks, trails, playgrounds, and recreation centers are critical infrastructure in a modern city,” Mayor Johnson said. “When I was growing up in West Dallas and Oak Cliff, families like mine — folks who didn’t have access to private swimming pools, gym memberships, or country club memberships — depended on our city’s parks, trails, and recreation centers. Parks are a great equalizer for our communities, as well as an excellent driver of economic development. And I am confident that Arun Agarwal will be a strong advocate for our green spaces.”
Agarwal said he is “honored to be appointed as chair of this community-focused group that will help guide critical discussions about our city’s future.”
“I am particularly excited to help make major investments in parks, trails, and recreational facilities,” Agarwal said. “Mayor Johnson has been a true champion for our city’s parks and for the efforts to build a safer and more vibrant city. I look forward to working with Mayor Johnson, my colleagues on the task force, and the residents of Dallas as we prioritize our city’s most pressing needs.”
Even as the brouhaha over the incident of the tricolour being pulled down at the Indian High Commission building in London had barely died down, videos of a mob attacking the Indian consulate in the US city of San Francisco have surfaced.
As per reports, with loud music playing in the background, a large mob is seen in the video, attacking the Indian consulate, spray-painting a huge graffiti on its outer wall, saying “Free Amritpal”.
In fact, according to reports, several videos, apparently filmed by the miscreants themselves, showed men breaking glass doors and windows of the consulate building with butts of poles with Khalistani flags.
Employees of the consulate were later seen removing the flags in the videos, when suddenly a mob can seen breaking through a barricade from behind which they were shouting slogans. The employees can be seen running inside the building with the protestors trying to follow them.
Videos further showed that after doors of the consulate were slammed shut on their faces, the protestors starting hitting them with flags, while one of them smashed the windows of the building with a sword. (IANS)
(RNS) — In 2012, Erika Menendez shoved Sunando Sen, 46, onto the New York City subway tracks in front of an oncoming train. A new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York suggests the city can’t be understood without religion.
“I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up,” she is quoted as having told police shortly after the fatal crime. Sen was born in India and raised Hindu.
In popular culture, New York City is often portrayed as distinctly secular. But “City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space,” a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, suggests that the city — and the public spaces, scents, acts of solidarity and, yes, the hate crimes therein — can’t be understood without religion.
“I think religion is a subtext in the various spaces and conversations where we imagined it to be absent,” the exhibition’s curator, Azra Dawood, told Religion News Service in a recent interview at the museum. “And I’m really hoping that the exhibition surfaces some of the ways in which religion is actually a part of the city.”
Curator Azra Dawood with the “City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. RNS photo by Kathryn Post
Picture : RNS
With a collection of original portraits, maps and interactive installations (featuring curated scents and soundtracks), Dawood challenges New York’s nonreligious reputation, arguing that the city’s perceived secularism is really covert Protestantism. Against this backdrop — in which Protestantism dominates (via land, money and politics) and Catholic and Jewish communities have made inroads — South Asian communities can become both indistinguishable and hypervisible.
As a Muslim and South Asian woman, Dawood is personally familiar with this dynamic, and as an architectural historian, she often considers how religion shows up in concrete and visible ways.
“(Religion) is not siloed off in explicitly religious institutions, such as churches, synagogues, temples, mosques,” Dawood observed. “You find it in the city’s shared public spaces, on streets and sidewalks and waterways, foodways.”
Dawood pointed to Johannes Eisele’s photo of a man praying next to a halal food cart in midtown Manhattan as an example of unexpected religion featured in the exhibit.
“The halal food carts began as a way of providing cheap halal food to Muslim communities working in different kinds of businesses,” she said. “Now it’s a gastronomic delight for all New Yorkers.”
Photographs displayed throughout the exhibit highlight how minority religious communities refuse to be boxed in by stereotypes. Photographed portraits by MIPSTERZ, a Muslim arts and culture collective, show Muslims grinning and striking poses in New York’s public landscape to reclaim the space. Portraits of New York-based Sikhs by Amit Amin and Naroop Jhooti celebrate people such as former NYC subway operator Sat Hari Singh. Singh, who saved 800 lives by reversing his train during 9/11, also successfully sued the Metropolitan Transportation Authority after it required employees to brand their religious headgear with MTA logos. These images provide a counterpoint to reductionist narratives.
While majority religions have the luxury of blending into a cultural landscape, the exhibit suggests Sikh, Hindu and Muslim groups don’t have that privilege. The flattening and racialized profiling of these communities is captured in the installation “CURB,” a sprawling book of poems encased in glass and placed in the center of one of the exhibit’s two rooms.
The poems — shown here as part of a limited-edition illustrated book that expands several feet when opened — explore violence against South Asian Americans in U.S. public spaces and are presented alongside two short films inspired by the poems.
Poet Divya Victor, who was also an adviser on the exhibition, describes her poems as emerging from “the long wake of the Patriot Act,” the era of the Muslim registry and the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies.
“I knew that poets and writers would need to begin paying special attention to surveillance, spectatorship, supremacist vigilance, and monetized public confession,” she told RNS. “I also knew that I needed to document the fear that my family members began to experience in public spaces with the rise of anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Asian acts.”
“City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space” is now open at the Museum of the City of New York. RNS photo by Kathryn Post
Victor added that the poems, which are available in paperback, also reflect the resistance to “both white and Hindu supremacist forces” taking root in South Asian communities.
Though the exhibit largely focuses on moments of beauty and solidarity among South Asian communities, it doesn’t shy away from grappling with the fraught realities of anti-Blackness and the legacy of the caste system. South Asian artist Utsa Hazarika’s “Pilgrims/This Is Not That Dawn,” for instance, is a commissioned multimedia piece that explores the complex relationship between Black and South Asian communities in America.
Beneath a large, stylized image of a stamp from India depicting Martin Luther King Jr., museumgoers are invited to put on headphones and hear the soundtrack Hazarika designed. Listeners overhear Martin Luther King Jr. reflect on his encounter with the caste system during his 1959 trip to India and are reminded by comedian Hasan Minhaj of how the civil rights movement paved the way for the growth of South Asian communities in the U.S.
“The only reason so many of us are here is because of the Immigration Act of ’65. That law rode the wave of the Civil Rights Act of ’64,” Minhaj says in the soundtrack. A Love Supreme (2022)” is a scent installation commissioned from perfumer and author Tanaïs, on display at the Museum of the City of New York. The piece is made of hand-braided Nepali lokta paper dipped in fragrant oils and filled with powdered incense. It is inspired by speculation that John Coltrane’s album “A Love Supreme” refers to the phrase “Allah Supreme.” RNS photo by Kathryn Post
“The exchanges between American civil rights activists and the anti-colonial movement in South Asia mark a period of internationalism that has largely fallen away from mainstream consciousness,” Hazarika told RNS in an email. “In the United States specifically, the potential of these movements has been obscured by both a loss of this internationalist history, and the racial structure within which South Asians have often tended towards a proximity to whiteness, rather than embracing their anti-colonial histories to oppose racialized violence.”
Other installations — such as the bold-colored portraits of South Asian American feminist activists by artist and South Asian Women’s Creative Collective founder Jaishri Abichandani — also uplift examples of South Asian activism both within and beyond cultural and religious circles.
Though New York is filled with the art, architecture, collective action and history of South Asian communities, this is the first exhibit at the century-old Museum of the City of New York to focus on them, according to Dawood. She hopes this exhibit, which closes in October, will prompt people to recognize the vibrant religious expressions of South Asian groups and to observe the subtle ways religion operates in the world around them.
“It is often really difficult to talk about religion. … I hope the exhibition shows how multilayered the conversation about religion is, and how much it’s a part of our landscape.”
(RNS) — With no time even to wash her clothes as the Russians approached Mariupol a year ago, in southern Ukraine, Kalakeli Devi Dasi fled her native city with only a small suitcase filled with her dirty laundry. She also took with her a letter she was unable to deliver to her mother before Kalakeli and her friends joined a large convoy of cars heading southwest to the city of Berdyansk.
“It was very scary and we did not know what to expect,” said Kalakeli of the escape. “We saw much destruction. I saw burnt and torn bodies. It was a terrible and frightening sight. … We kept chanting the holy names of the Lord the whole way.”
Picture : RNS
Kalakeli is one of an estimated 15,000 Hare Krishnas who call Ukraine home, many of whom have continued their daily practice and serve their neighbors, even as several of their roughly 30 ISKCON temples have been damaged or destroyed and their communities scattered.
The Hare Krishna movement, whose formal name is the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, has been active in Eastern Europe since 1971, when ISKCON’s founder, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, traveled to the Soviet Union in the company of Shyamsundar Das, a close friend of Beatle George Harrison.
Prabhupada arrived in New York in 1965 from Calcutta to spread in the West faith in the Hindu deity Lord Krishna. Related to the nearly 500-year-old Krishna consciousness movement in India, ISKCON is a monotheistic tradition within Hinduism whose main spiritual text is the Bhagavad Gita. Its adherents practice vegetarianism and meditation, Bhakti yoga and public chanting of Krishna’s names, and in the U.S. it is best known for its groups of saffron-clad devotees chanting mantras in public spaces or passing out literature on the street.
Having planted the seeds of ISKCON in the U.S., Prabhupada went to the Soviet Union in 1971 to teach the faith. From there, the theology spread underground by word of mouth, despite the Communist Party’s anti-religious agenda, eventually finding its way to Ukraine.
Other Hare Krishnas from abroad followed Prabhupada to continue to nurture the movement in the former Soviet Union. One of them, Niranjana Swami, a convert to ISKCON from Massachusetts, entered the U.S.S.R. under the guise of a tourist in the late 1980s but broke away from his tour at night to lecture in small, packed apartments, teaching as many as 100 people on an evening.
“I felt these people were so sincerely looking for God, because it had been suppressed in their lives for so long by the regime, that I felt the regime actually did much to expand God consciousness,” said Niranjana Swami. “Anything beyond the party line was, to them, seen as a potential message from the divine.”
He was in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. “I happened to be in Moscow when Yeltsin was standing on the tanks around the parliament building.”
Now 70 and a governing body commissioner for ISKCON, Niranjana Swami oversees communities in Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine, traveling widely and visiting Ukraine when he can.
When the war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, local devotees turned to Niranjana Swami for support and guidance, and he began lecturing via Zoom. His collection of lectures about the war were recently compiled and published in a book titled, “Krishna Protects His Devotees.”
Niranjana Swami also helped mobilize the worldwide ISKCON community to raise thousands of dollars for those suffering from the effects of the war. Share Your Care, based in Kyiv, aims to help Hare Krishnas and their families relocate from conflict zones, supplement their loss of income and distribute food. Since the war began, an estimated 2 million plates of food have been distributed by ISKCON to Ukrainians in need.
The war has claimed the lives of at least five Hare Krishna devotees, and devastation in Kramatorsk and Bakhmut has cost the local communities its temples. In the face of this violence, deities have been relocated while larger temple rooms have been closed and their basements converted into bomb shelters.
Temple services and programs have resumed in cities in safer locales, while on the streets of Kyiv and other cities west of there, public chanting and book distribution have also resumed.
Much of this activity is overseen by Acyuta Priya, ISKCON’s zonal supervisor for Ukraine. Born to a staunchly Communist family when Ukraine was still a Soviet state, he joined the underground movement in 1980. “Of course I hated the Communist regime, because it wasn’t allowing me to dedicate my life to God,” he said.
The war has ended his normally itinerant existence; he is currently staying in a contact’s basement sauna in Chernivtsi, though he travels to various cities when possible. According to Acyuta Priya, 71 of the nearly 100 Hare Krishna community groups are still operating, serving Hare Krishnas and their neighbors. He said they continue to see new people joining the movement.
“People just come, they want to help and they have this volunteer spirit,” said Acyuta Priya. “I will tell you honestly, I am native Ukrainian, here from my birth, and I have never seen people be so united. It was unexpected for me.”
He attributes the Hare Krishnas’ resilience to their faith. “You have to understand that the Lord controls everything, and we need to see this war as an opportunity to raise up and to grow, and to grow mostly by giving and not just be in survival mode… There is a need to dedicate yourself to a higher cause, and it should be practical, not just theoretical,” said Acyuta Priya.
But some, like Kalakeli, have found homes outside the country. She moved frequently during the early weeks of the invasion, moving from Berdyansk to Zaporizhia, then to Dnipro, before finally leaving Ukraine and finding shelter with a community of fellow devotees in Denmark.
For nearly two months, Kalakeli was unable to contact or locate her mother, sister and nephews back in Mariupol.
“My life became just an existence. Only ‘kirtan’ (devotional singing) dulled my pain for a while,” said Kalakeli. “Totally desperate, I began to have thoughts of going back and looking for my family.”
In April of last year, she was finally able to connect with her family via phone. They had all managed to stay safe back in Mariupol, but their home was destroyed in the war. They recently joined Kalakeli in Copenhagen.
“The war taught us a lot,” said Kalakeli. “The main thing I have learned is that no one can take God away from me. In such difficult situations, there was nothing else we could do but trust in Krishna. Love for God will end all wars.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday pushed back against a GOP congressman who voiced skepticism about the threat of climate change, suggesting the issue was being used by the Biden administration to secure funding and was not a serious concern.
“Can you provide to me, or do you know any research on your own to justify this drastic climate change that we have to do today or the next four or five years this world’s going to come to an end?” Rep Jerry Carl (R-Ala.) asked Yellen at a hearing on the banking system.
When Yellen pointed to an “enormous amount of research” summarized by a United Nations group about the threat of climate change, Carl claimed that the global organization “makes a lot of money off the climate change scenario.”
“There is a strong scientific consensus and enormous body of research,” Yellen responded.
Picture : YouTube
Carl, who is a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, downplayed the significance of the changing climate by pointing to the environment in his home state of Alabama. Carl noted one could go 300 feet above sea level and find oyster shells in an embankment, then travel 40 feet below sea level and find a petrified forest under water.
Carl said he believes the literal definition of climate change, but questioned the idea that it is a grave threat to the planet. He argued that the issue of climate change was being used by the Biden administration so it could secure funding for its various priorities.
“The way it’s being used now is like a Trojan horse. Everything you want to use it for to get into the conversation is climate change related,” Carl said.
“We’re seeing enormous increases in concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Yellen said. “Where in America are we seeing that?” Carl asked.
“It’s a global phenomenon; it’s not just in the United States,” Yellen replied, noting that an increase in the intensity of hurricanes is another cause of concern.
“Climate change, I believe, is an existential threat, and we will leave a world to our grandchildren and great grandchildren that will become uninhabitable if we don’t address climate change,” Yellen continued. “We have let decades pass in which we have understood that this was a problem and not taken meaningful action.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) said he believed there is general skepticism among critics of the Biden administration that the billions of dollars being spent on the environment will meaningfully change the temperature of the planet.
Yellen has made fighting climate change a key part of her work as Treasury secretary, arguing that the U.S. economy will suffer if the planet continues to warm. The department previously created a climate hub, a division meant to drive investments toward projects to reduce carbon emissions and insulate the economy from extreme weather and other risks.
The Inflation Reduction Act, the administration’s signature piece of legislation passed last year, contains $27 billion in funding for green banks, credit unions, housing finance agencies and projects to cut pollution and energy costs.
Are tech companies moving too fast in rolling out powerful artificial intelligence technology that could one day outsmart humans?
That’s the conclusion of a group of prominent computer scientists and other tech industry notables such as Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who are calling for a 6-month pause to consider the risks.
Their petition published Wednesday is a response to San Francisco startup OpenAI’s recent release of GPT-4, a more advanced successor to its widely-used AI chatbot ChatGPT that helped spark a race among tech giants Microsoft and Google to unveil similar applications.
WHAT DO THEY SAY?
The letter warns that AI systems with “human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity” — from flooding the internet with disinformation and automating away jobs to more catastrophic future risks out of the realms of science fiction.
It says “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”
Picture : Fox
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the letter says. “This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”
A number of governments are already working to regulate high-risk AI tools. The United Kingdom released a paper Wednesday outlining its approach, which it said “will avoid heavy-handed legislation which could stifle innovation.” Lawmakers in the 27-nation European Union have been negotiating passage of sweeping AI rules.
WHO SIGNED IT?
The petition was organized by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which says confirmed signatories include the Turing Award-winning AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio and other leading AI researchers such as Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus. Others who joined include Wozniak, former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a science-oriented advocacy group known for its warnings against humanity-ending nuclear war.
Musk, who runs Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX and was an OpenAI co-founder and early investor, has long expressed concerns about AI’s existential risks. A more surprising inclusion is Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, maker of the AI image generator Stable Diffusion that partners with Amazon and competes with OpenAI’s similar generator known as DALL-E.
WHAT’S THE RESPONSE?
OpenAI, Microsoft and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday, but the letter already has plenty of skeptics.
“A pause is a good idea, but the letter is vague and doesn’t take the regulatory problems seriously,” says James Grimmelmann, a Cornell University professor of digital and information law. “It is also deeply hypocritical for Elon Musk to sign on given how hard Tesla has fought against accountability for the defective AI in its self-driving cars.”
IS THIS AI HYSTERIA?
While the letter raises the specter of nefarious AI far more intelligent than what actually exists, it’s not “superhuman” AI that some who signed on are worried about. While impressive, a tool such as ChatGPT is simply a text generator that makes predictions about what words would answer the prompt it was given based on what it’s learned from ingesting huge troves of written works.
Gary Marcus, a New York University professor emeritus who signed the letter, said in a blog post that he disagrees with others who are worried about the near-term prospect of intelligent machines so smart they can self-improve themselves beyond humanity’s control. What he’s more worried about is “mediocre AI” that’s widely deployed, including by criminals or terrorists to trick people or spread dangerous misinformation.
“Current technology already poses enormous risks that we are ill-prepared for,” Marcus wrote. “With future technology, things could well get worse.”
Did you know that 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water? Okay, maybe that one was too easy. But try this one on for size: Did you know that there’s an absolutely massive supply of water hidden underneath the Earth’s crust that’s three times bigger than the oceans that sit on the surface?
Back in 2014 scientists discovered that we essentially have a reservoir of water hidden beneath our feet – though it might not look that way at first.
This huge supply of water is buried a whopping 400 miles underground, so it’s not exactly accessible. Plus, it’s contained inside a blue rock known as ‘ringwoodite’ in the Earth’s mantel, which acts as a sort of sponge for that huge body of H2O.
Picture :UNILAD
So it’s not a liquid, solid, or gas, but a fourth molecular structure of water contained inside the mantle rock. “The ringwoodite is like a sponge, soaking up water, there is something very special about the crystal structure of ringwoodite that allows it to attract hydrogen and trap water,” said geophysicist Steve Jacobsen, who was part of the monumental discovery. “This mineral can contain a lot of water under conditions of the deep mantle.”
The watery rock was discovered by scientists from Northwestern University in Illinois using seismometers to measure the waves being generated by earthquakes across the US.
In their research, they found that the waves weren’t limited to the Earth’s surface, but moving throughout the planet’s core.
By measuring the speed and depth of those waves, researchers were able to work out what sort of rocks the water was being contained in – landing on ringwoodite in the end. Research has found that ringwoodite can contain up to 1.5 percent water.
If the ringwoodite under the surface has just 1 percent water in its molecular build-up, it would mean that it holds three times more water than all of the oceans on the Earth’s surface.
It’s also contained inside a rock called ringwoodite – so good luck getting to it. Credit: Pixabay
This discovery could help scientists determine how Earth was formed, furthering the theory that the Earth’s water ‘came from within’, rather than from asteroids and comets.
Jacobsen explained at the time: “I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet.
The watery rock was discovered by scientists from Northwestern University in Illinois using seismometers to measure the waves being generated by earthquakes across the US.
In their research, they found that the waves weren’t limited to the Earth’s surface, but moving throughout the planet’s core.
By measuring the speed and depth of those waves, researchers were able to work out what sort of rocks the water was being contained in – landing on ringwoodite in the end.
Research has found that ringwoodite can contain up to 1.5 percent water.
This discovery could help scientists determine how Earth was formed, furthering the theory that the Earth’s water ‘came from within’, rather than from asteroids and comets.
Jacobsen explained at the time: “I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet.
For now, researchers have only found evidence of the ringwoodite rock beneath the surface of the US. Now, Jacobsen and his team want to determine whether or not this layer wraps around the entire planet Earth.
As artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT aim to become a part of our everyday lives and we learn more about how powerful they can be, there’s one thing on everyone’s mind: how AI could impact jobs.
“Significant disruption” could be on the horizon for the labor market, a new Goldman Sachs report dated Sunday said. The bank’s analysis of jobs in the U.S. and Europe shows that two-thirds of jobs could be automated at least to some degree.
In the U.S., “of those occupations which are exposed, most have a significant — but partial — share of their workload (25-50%) that can be replaced,” Goldman Sachs analysts said in the resarch paper.
Around the world, as many as 300 million jobs could be affected, the report says. Changes to labor markets are therefore likely – although historically, technological progress doesn’t just make jobs redundant, it also creates new ones.
The use of AI technology could also boost labor productivity growth and boost global GDP by as much as 7% over time, Goldman Sachs’ report noted.
The jobs most and least affected by A.I. automation
Certain jobs will be more impacted than others, the report explains. Jobs that require a lot of physical work are, for example, less likely to be significantly affected.
In the U.S., office and administrative support jobs have the highest proportion of tasks that could be automated with 46%, followed by 44% for legal work and 37% for tasks within architecture and engineering.
The life, physical and social sciences sector follows closely with 36%, and business and financial operations round out the top five with 35%.
On the other end of the scale, just 1% of tasks in the building and ground cleanings and maintenance sector are vulnerable to automation. Installation, maintenance, and repair work is the second least affected industry with 4% of work potentially being affected, and construction and extraction comes third from the bottom with 6%.
Data for Europe is slightly broader, but paints a similar picture with clerical support roles being most affected as 45% of their work could be automated, and just 4% of work in the crafts and related trades sector being vulnerable.
Overall, 24% of work in Europe could be automated — just below the 25% average in the U.S.
The countries most affected
These figures shift when looking at automation through AI on a global scale. “Our estimates intuitively suggest that fewer jobs in EMs [emerging markets] are exposed to automation than in DMs [developed markets], but that 18% of work globally could be automated by AI on an employment-weighted basis,” the Goldman Sachs report said.
According to the bank’s analysis, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Sweden and the U.S. are likely to be the top five most affected countries. Meanwhile, employees in mainland China, Nigeria, Vietnam, Kenya and, in last place, India, are the least likely to see their work being taken over by AI technology.
But while the data shows that AI will undoubtedly impact the labor market, it’s not yet clear how disruptive it will really be, the report concludes.
“The impact of AI will ultimately depend on its capability and adoption timeline,” it says, adding that two key factors will be how powerful AI technology really becomes and how much it is used in practice.
First, the weakness: I can be a little impatient, maybe even a little bit lazy. I’ll follow through on my word, but sometimes my more complicated plans wind up abandoned.
But the powerful strength? It’s that I’ve developed radar for simple things you can do to improve your life.
Truly, the simpler the better, because I’ve learned that otherwise I’m not likely to do them.
Picture : Science of People
I think that’s part of why I’ve been so drawn to the concept of emotional intelligence, and especially to the idea that there are very simple things you can change about your behavior — as simple as memorizing a few basic words and concepts — to leverage emotions and increase the odds that you’ll achieve your goals.
For example, people with high emotional intelligence keep five simple words in mind when they hope to persuade someone else of something, because remembering them guides their verbal behavior.
It will all make more sense if we simply list the words and explain what they’re meant to symbolize, one by one.
They’re alliterative — starting with p, just like persuasion: prefacing, prioritizing, pausing, politeness, and phrasing. Here’s why they matter:
Prefacing
Emotionally intelligent people become more persuasive by using a smart preface to whatever else they have to say.
If you want to persuade someone of anything — that they should buy your product, or go out with you on a date, or join your side of the jury and vote not guilty — you’re often best off starting out by being up front about what you’re going to say next.
Sometimes, you can be very direct: “I need you to show more interest at work, or I’m afraid you’ll risk losing your job. Here’s why … ”
But sometimes, you want to be more subtle:
“I have an idea I’d like to ask you to consider.”
“I noticed something about your performance today. Do you mind if I offer some advice?”
“I want to tell you a story; I hope you’re going to find it interesting — maybe even instructive.”
I’m sure you can appreciate the differences. The point is that you signal to the other person in a conversation that you’d like them to pay attention to what comes next, but you also work to signal that what you have to say is both useful and nonthreatening.
Prioritizing
Emotionally intelligent people become more persuasive by organizing their arguments so that their most important points don’t get lost.
There’s an old saying that if you don’t know where you’re going, any route will take you there. People with high emotional intelligence basically try to do the opposite of that.
In short (and, “short” is usually a good thing in this context), if you can’t quickly explain the pillars of whatever position you want to advocate, you probably haven’t thought it through well enough. And the easiest and most tried and true method to prioritize is probably to use the Rule of 3.
We’re hardwired to look at things in groups of three: everything from the Christian Trinity, to children’s stories like the “Three Little Pigs,” to the three bullet-pointed quotes in the previous section of this article.
Sometimes you’ll want to announce the road map of your argument to the person you’re talking to; sometimes you won’t. But you’ll always want to have it mapped out in your head, so that you satisfy the other person’s hardwired emotional desire for conversational geometry.
Pausing
Emotionally intelligent people become more persuasive by using pauses in conversation as a tool to trigger desired responses.
A decade ago, a Dutch psychologist named Namkje Koudenburg of the University of Groningen wrote about an experiment she’d done in which she calculated what happens when people pause for about four seconds in their conversations.
In short, that’s the point at which people start to feel emotional responses including, sometimes, fear and anxiety. So people with high emotional intelligence learn to leverage that knowledge.
Want to offer relief and comfort? Pause two seconds or less in your discussion.
Want to raise the possibility that the other person will feel more compelled to respond or engage to what you have to say — maybe sometimes even concede? Have the discipline to wait as many as four full seconds after making a point.
Politeness
Emotionally intelligent people default toward politeness, and leverage it to avoid creating resistance where it doesn’t need to exist.
There’s a bagel shop within walking distance of my house. The bagels are good, the price isn’t too high, and my daughter used to like to go there with me when she was little. But just one time, the owner of the place was rude to me.
A few weeks later, I realized that while I hadn’t made a conscious decision to avoid the place, I simply hadn’t gone back. None of the practical reasons why it was a good place to buy bagels mattered anymore; the fact that I hadn’t been treated politely trumped everything.
Another example: A few years back, researchers published a study in MIS Quarterly showing that even when the substance of answers was identical, people responded better to answers that were also polite.
The point is that we all have these emotional reactions; emotionally intelligent people understand that you should only be impolite when you have a good, strategic reason for doing so. But the default is politeness.
Phrasing
Emotionally intelligent people tend toward specific phrases that they’ve thought through so that they don’t accidentally trigger unintended emotions.
Truly, this is the simplest habit — symbolized by a single word. Think through the phrases you plan to use at different points in conversation ahead of time.
For example, imagine a situation in which you think someone else is just flat-out mistaken and stubborn. You plan that if this happens, you’ll want to respond with one of the following three phrases, depending on the reaction you hope to prompt:
“You’re flat out wrong.”
“I can’t understand how you could possibly think that.”
“Can you help me think this through and understand your position better?”
I can (and have) written entire articles about specific phrases and how they can spur positive or negative reactions. But before we move on, let’s talk about one other specific type of phrase.
These are the ones to have thought through for situations in which you realize that no matter how many tricks of emotional intelligence you try, you’re unlikely to persuade the other side. I’m thinking of responsive phrases like:
“Lots to think about here. Let’s pick it up at the next meeting.”
“Please, don’t make a decision now. Let me get the answers to the questions you posed.”
“It seems like we have a few issues to resolve. Why don’t I write up a draft on what we’ve agreed on, and we can go from there?”
Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — if you can’t seem to win, you might be better off making sure that the game hasn’t actually ended.
Look, as I write in my free e-book 9 Smart Habits of People With Very High Emotional Intelligence, increasing your emotional intelligence is a lot easier when you focus on things that are simple. Bonus points if helps you overcome a personal weakness like my impatience.
Indian-origin Sikh Manmeet Colon has been sworn in as first assistant police chief of Connecticut’s New Haven city, becoming the department’s first Indian-American and second female assistant chief of color to rise to the top position.
The Board of Police Commissioners in New Haven unanimously approved the appointment of Colon, 37, who was previously a lieutenant in the internal affairs office, The New Haven Independent reported.
Mumbai-born Colon moved with her family to Queens when she was 11, and studied criminal justice at the University of New Haven.
Picture : Daily Pioneer
Colon hoped that her status as the department’s first Indian-American assistant chief inspires others from similar backgrounds to pursue careers in law enforcement.
“I come from a Sikh family. I speak Punjabi. I’m very proud of my heritage,” Colon was quoted as saying in The New Haven Independent.
“More important is the mission and the values of the department. To me, it’s all about being fair and impartial. My background, my morals, my family values and traditions a I feel like I bring a lot to the table. I’m glad there’s a space for me at the table,” she added.
Colon’s daughter pinned the new assistant chief badge on her mother’s uniform, as Mayor Justin Elicker then administered the oath of office earlier this month.
“A trailblazer, AC Colon is the 2nd woman of colour & the 1st of Indian descent to serve in the position in the history of the NHPD – and I’m confident she will continue to serve our city w/honor & distinction in this new role,” Elicker tweeted.
In her tenure with the New Haven Police Department (NHPD), Colon has worked in patrol, as a detective in the special victims unit, as a sergeant supervising the robbery and burglary unit, as a lieutenant and district manager for Newhallville and Dixwell, and most recently as the head of the Internal Affairs division.
Police Chief Karl Jacobson, who had recommended Colon, hoped that the Indian-American’s appointment will inspire more women to join the New Haven Police Department, which is currently 17 per cent female.
“This is a great day for the City of New Haven, and also for the Indian community and women of colour in the city and state; another glass ceiling has been broken,” Police Commission Chair Evelise Ribeiro said. (IANS)
Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has named an eight-year-old US-born Mongolian boy as the reincarnation of a spiritual leader.
He has been recognised as the reincarnation of the third most important leader in Tibetan Buddhism as the 10th Khalkha Jetsun Dhampa Rinpoche.
The elderly spiritual leader was pictured with the boy during a ceremony recognising him as the 10th Khalkha Jetsun Dhampa Rinpoche. The ceremony took place earlier this month in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama (87) lives in exile.
“We have the reincarnation of Khalkha Jetsun Dhampa Rinpoche of Mongolia with us today,” the Dalai Lama said during the ceremony which was attended by 5,000 monks and nuns, 600 Mongolians and other members.
Picture : Republic World
Pointing to the small boy sitting to his left, the Dalai Lama told the gathering, “We have the reincarnation of Khalkha Jetsun Dhampa Rinpoche of Mongolia with us today. His predecessors had a close association with the Krishnacharya lineage of Chakrasamvara. One of them established a monastery in Mongolia dedicated to its practice. So, his being here today is quite auspicious.”
As the session came to a close on that day, the Dalai Lama met briefly with a significant contingent of Mongolians who are the patrons of this teaching.
“Tantra spread widely in Tibet. With regard to Chakrasamvara, the Ghantapada and Luipa traditions were popular, but this Krishnacharya lineage was quite rare. I received it from Tagdrag Rinpoche and have long felt a close affinity for the practice.
“Chakrasamvara is classified as a mother tantra. It belongs to the highest yoga tantras. While Guhyasamaja emphasises the illusory body, Chakrasamvara focuses on the clear light. However, if you make the illusory body your primary practice, the clear light also arises.
“As I said, I feel a close affinity to the Krishnacharya tradition. I have received the empowerment and undertaken the requisite retreat. This may seem somewhat boastful, but I also feel I have some connection with the great Mahasiddha Krishnacharya.
“This empowerment requires the preliminary practices that we’ll do today. I’ve done the self-generation and visualised myself as Chakrasamvara.”
The crowd dispersed and the view in every direction was filled with the upstanding stems of kusha grass the initiates held in their hands, said a post on the official website of the Dalai Lama. (IANS)
(AP) — Bending to a wave of mass protests, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed his contentious judicial overhaul plan Monday and said he wanted “to avoid civil war” by making time to seek a compromise with political opponents.
The announcement appeared to calm some of the tensions that have fueled three tumultuous months of unrest. But it failed to address the underlying issues that have polarized the nation, and the anti-government protest movement vowed to intensify its efforts.
In his prime-time address, Netanyahu, who had previously rejected calls to delay the legislation, took a more conciliatory tone than in recent speeches. He acknowledged the deep divisions in the country and said he was hitting the pause button “to prevent a rift in the nation.”
“When there’s an opportunity to avoid civil war through dialogue, I, as prime minister, am taking a timeout for dialogue,” he said. He vowed to reach a “broad consensus” during the summer session of parliament, which begins on April 30.
He spoke after tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrated outside parliament, and the country’s largest labor union launched a nationwide strike in a dramatic escalation of the mass protest movement against his plan.
Netanyahu and his religious and ultranationalist allies presented the overhaul in January just days after forming their government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history.
The proposal has plunged Israel into its worst domestic crisis in decades. Business leaders, top economists and former security chiefs have all come out against the plan, saying it is pushing the country toward an autocracy. Fighter pilots and military reservists have threatened not to report for duty, and the country’s currency, the shekel, has tumbled in value.
The plan would give Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges, and his allies the final say in appointing the nation’s judges. It would also give parliament, which is controlled by his allies, authority to overturn Supreme Court decisions and limit the court’s ability to review laws.
Netanyahu has argued that the overhaul is needed to rein in a liberal and overly interventionist court of unelected judges. But his opponents say the package would damage the country’s system of checks and balances by concentrating power in the hands of Netanyahu’s allies. They also say that he has a conflict of interest as a criminal defendant.
Tens of thousands of people, largely secular, middle-class Israelis, have regularly joined mass protests against the plan.
Those demonstrations ramped up Sunday night after Netanyahu abruptly fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who had urged the prime minister to put his plan on hold, citing concerns about damage to the Israeli military.
The firing sparked a spontaneous outburst of anger, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets in just one hour.
Chanting “the country is on fire,” they lit bonfires on Tel Aviv’s main highway, closing the thoroughfare and many others throughout the country for hours.
Demonstrators continued Monday outside the Knesset, or parliament, turning the streets surrounding the building and the Supreme Court into a roiling sea of blue-and-white Israeli flags dotted with rainbow Pride banners.
“This is the last chance to stop this move into a dictatorship,” said Matityahu Sperber, 68, who joined a stream of people headed to the protest outside the Knesset. “I’m here for the fight to the end.”
Israel’s main trade union, the histadrut, declared a general strike in what it said was the first time it has carried out such an action over a political issue.
The chaos shut down much of the country and threatened to paralyze the economy. Departing flights from the main international airport were grounded, stranding tens of thousands of travelers.
Large mall chains and universities closed their doors, and the union called for its 800,000 members to stop work in health care, transit, banking and other fields.
Diplomats walked off the job at foreign missions, and local governments were expected to close preschools and cut other services. The main doctors union announced that its members would also strike.
In a sign of easing tensions, the union said late Monday that it was halting the strike in response to Netanyahu’s delay.
The announcement appeared to buy the embattled Netanyahu several weeks of quiet. But it was far from clear whether the disputes could be resolved.
The country’s figurehead president, Isaac Herzog, said pausing the legislative blitz was “the right thing.”
“This is the time for frank, serious and responsible discussion that will lead urgently to calming spirits and lowering the flames,” he said.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid said he was willing to hold a “genuine dialogue” under Herzog’s sponsorship.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who has pushed for quick passage of the package, said he would respect the delay but showed few signs of compromise.
“The reform will pass,” he tweeted. “No one will scare us.”
The first of a series of laws — giving the coalition control over judicial appointments — had been scheduled to pass this week.
Before Netanyahu’s speech, some 20,000 right-wing Israelis attended a counter demonstration in support of the prime minister. That demonstration also took place near parliament and passed without violence.
“They won’t steal the election from us,” read a flyer for event, organized by Religious Zionist party. Netanyahu said he was “moved” by the show of support.
Shikma Bressler, one of the leaders of the anti-government protest movement, said the campaign would continue until the legislation is canceled.
“This is just an attempt to weaken the protests in order to enact Netanyahu’s dictatorship,” she said. “Now is not the time to reduce the pressure, but to increase it.”
Dozens of protesters from rival sides faced off late Monday in central Tel Aviv. The sides, kept apart by police, exchanged insults, but there was no violence. Police used a water cannon to disperse anti-government protesters.
Israel’s Palestinian citizens have largely sat out the protests. Many say Israel’s democracy is tarnished by its military rule over their brethren in the West Bank and the discrimination they themselves face.
The Biden administration, which has been uneasy with Netanyahu and the far-right elements of his government, welcomed the announcement as “an opportunity to create additional time and space for compromise,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
Newswise — Physicists at Delft University of Technology have built a new technology on a microchip by combining two Nobel Prize-winning techniques for the first time. This microchip could measure distances in materials at high precision, for example underwater or for medical imaging. Because the technology uses sound vibrations instead of light, it is useful for high-precision position measurements in opaque materials. The instrument could lead to new techniques to monitor the Earth’s climate and human health. The work is now published in Nature Communications.
Simple and low-power technology
The microchip mainly consists of a thin ceramic sheet that is shaped like a trampoline. This trampoline is patterned with holes to enhance its interaction with lasers and has a thickness about 1000 times smaller than the thickness of a hair. As a former PhD candidate in Richard Norte’s lab, Matthijs de Jong studied the small trampolines to figure out what would happen if they pointed a simple laser beam at them. The trampoline’s surface started vibrating intensely. By measuring the reflected laser light from the vibrating surface, the team noticed a pattern of vibrations in the shape of a comb that they hadn’t seen before. They realised that the trampoline’s comb-like signature functions as a ruler for precision measurements of distance.
This new technology could be used to measure positions in materials using sound waves. What makes it special is that it doesn’t need any precision hardware and is therefore easy to produce. “It only requires inserting a laser, and nothing else. There’s no need for complex feedback loops or for tuning certain parameters to get our tech to operate properly. This makes it a very simple and low-power technology, that is much easier to miniaturise on a microchip”, Norte says. “Once this happens, we could really put these microchip sensors anywhere, given their small size.”
Unique combination
The new technology is based on two unrelated Nobel Prize-winning techniques, called optical trapping and frequency combs. Norte: “The interesting thing is that both of these concepts are typically related to light, but these fields do not have any real overlap. We have uniquely combined them to create an easy-to-use microchip technology based on sound waves. This ease of use could have significant implications for how we measure the world around us.”
Overtones
When the researchers pointed a laser beam at the tiny trampoline, they realised that the forces that the laser exerted on it were creating overtone vibrations in the trampoline membranes. “These forces are called an optical trap, because they can trap particles in one spot using light. This technique won the Nobel Prize in 2018 and it allows us to manipulate even the smallest particles with extreme precision”, Norte explains. “You can compare the overtones in the trampoline to particular notes of a violin. The note or frequency that the violin produces depends on where you place your finger on the string. If you touch the string only very lightly and play it with a bow, you can create overtones; a series of notes at higher frequencies. In our case, the laser acts as both the soft touch and the bow to induce overtone vibrations in the trampoline membrane.”
Bridging two breakthrough fields
“Optical frequency combs are used in labs around the world for very precise measurements of time, and to measure distances”, Norte says. “They are so important to measurements in general that their invention was given a Nobel Prize in 2005. We have made an acoustic version of a frequency comb, made out of sound vibrations in the membrane instead of light. Acoustic frequency combs could for instance make position measurements in opaque materials, through which vibrations can propagate better than light waves. This technology could for example be used for precision measurements underwater to monitor the Earth’s climate, for medical imaging and for applications in quantum technologies.”
I am fighting for India’s voice, ready to pay any price: Rahul Gandhi
Hours after being expelled from the Parliament following his conviction in a criminal defamation case, senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Friday that he is ready to pay any price for expressing the voice of India.
Rahul Gandhi was suspended from the Lok Sabha following his conviction in a criminal defamation case last week. The Lok Sabha Secretariat also declared his constituency in Kerala’s Wayanad as vacant.
According to the Representation of the People Act, a lawmaker sentenced to imprisonment for two years or more shall be disqualified “from the date of such conviction” and remain disqualified for another six years after serving prison time.
Last week, a court in Surat found Rahul Gandhi guilty and sentenced him to two years in prison in a 2019 criminal defamation case over his remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surname. The Congress leader, however, was granted bail and his sentence was suspended for 30 days to allow him to appeal the Surat court verdict.
The case was filed against Rahul Gandhi by BJP MLA and ex-Gujarat minister Purnesh Modi for saying “how come all thieves have the common surname Modi” while campaigning in Karnataka ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. (IANS)
It was the culmination of an arduous tournament in which she had to overcome as many as six challengers owing to her unseeded status.
Teary eyes and a roar towards the camera — Nikhat Zareen went through the full wringer of emotions after a closely-fought gold-medal match that saw her emerging as World Champion for the second straight year. It was the culmination of an arduous tournament in which she had to overcome as many as six challengers owing to her unseeded status.
Winning back-to-back golds at the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships was a feat achieved only by the legendary Mary Kom. At just 26 years, Nikhat is slowly filling those giant shoes. The crowd-favourite beat Vietnam’s Nguyen Thi Tam 5-0 at a packed KD Jadhav Indoor Hall in New Delhi on Sunday. But the unanimous decision was no reflection of how close the bout was.
“It’s a special day, a second World Championship gold, that too in a new weight category. Today’s bout was my toughest so far, facing an Asian champion. The next target is the Asian Games, so to win against her, in the first big championships since changing categories… The strategy was to use all the energy I had left, despite a tough tournament, and I threw everything at it,” said Nikhat after the match.
Shortly after Nikhat’s bout, Lovlina Borgohain won a contentious 5-2 decision against Australia’s Caitlin Parker to claim her first ever Women’s World Boxing Championship gold medal. The middleweight Assam boxer was awarded the fight 3-2 in a split decision. She then got two points from the evaluator and the observer under IBA’s new bout review system.
These two wins capped a dream weekend for Indian boxing after the two gold medals on Saturday.
It was a change in weight category, from 52 kg to 50 kg, that had left Nikhat unseeded at these World Championships. In her six gruelling, physically taxing bouts, she spent a cumulative 45 minutes ducking, weaving and charting a path over the roughest of seas to get her second World Championship gold.
In all these bouts, Nikhat was rarely allowed to play her natural game. She needed to think on her feet, change strategy and innovate. A mid-range boxer, she has the ability to stay just beyond the reach of her opponent, while being close enough to avoid an attack and then land a punch of her own. It’s that unique ability, mastered over years of practice with multiple international coaches, that has resulted in her becoming one of India’s top boxers.
“I think it’s because she’s got so much confidence in her own abilities. She actually enjoys boxing. She actually enjoys the challenge of having that combat,” said John Warburton, the boxing head of Inspire Institute of Sport and one of the international coaches who worked with Nikhat recently. “The way she’s fighting, she’s making a statement. ‘I can beat you in any way I want to beat you. I can beat you at long range, I can brawl with you and beat you’, and that’s her mindset,” he told The Indian Express.
Nikhat’s boxing journey came into prominence when she won the gold medal at the 2011 Youth World Boxing Championships. The Nizamabad native has now added the World Championship medals as well as the 2022 Commonwealth gold to that initial spark. Her next stop: the Asian Games in Hangzhou. And if the same performances continue: the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
It is a target that has been part of her life since the day she won her Youth World Championship medal. Early in her career, Nikhat had been under the towering shadow of Mary Kom. She has had her own fair share of battles against the celebrated Manipuri boxer, most notably before the last Olympics where she demanded a trial and lost. With Mary Kom’s age ruling her out of the next Olympics, Nikhat has positioned herself to finally take over that weight category.
While still bitter about missing out previously, her father Mohammad Jameel Ahmed feels that it was just a matter of time: “She has missed out on two Olympics at the peak of her career. Not just as a father, as a mentor and as someone who plans her career, it was disappointing for me to see things go this way. But there was nothing we could do except focus on the next target. Upar wala likhega, toh bilkul aayega. Hum toh chhodne wale nahi hai (If god wills, our time will come. But we won’t stop trying),” he said.
Sunday’s bout was among the toughest Nikhat faced at this competition. Her Vietnamese opponent, taller and longer in range, won the second round and almost seemed to have taken the third. But the judges scored all rounds in favour of the Indian.
Warburton thinks her abilities are special, and now with an Olympic weight category solely hers, she just has to continue boxing in the same vein as she has been doing over the last couple of years.
“She’s going to be World Champion two years running. She will likely be the Asian Champion. She will qualify for the Olympics, and in my opinion, she will win gold. I’ve worked with lots of people who have won Olympic medals, gold medallists, silvers, bronzes and World medallists. She has all the same characteristics that they have. The attitude, the willpower, and the technical and tactical abilities — she’s got the lot,” said Warburton.
As for Lovlina, luck may have played its part in her bout. The judges scored the contest in her favor and so did the evaluator and observer, despite a shaky performance and an especially poor third round.
She recently made the move to the 75-kg weight category as her previous weight was not a part of the 2024 Paris Olympics boxing programme. Before this win, her trophy cabinet was adorned with two World Championship bronze medals and an Olympic bronze, all in the 69-kg category.
Speaking about her gold later, she said: “I was a little stressed before the final. I tried to play how the coaches asked me to play. It wasn’t a complete success but I thought it was 90 per cent successful. It feels very good to win a gold medal and become a champion.”
Innocent, a versatile film actor and former member of the Indian Parliament, who also served as the president of A.M.M.A for 15 years, passed away on Sunday, march 26th, 2023, ending a long career as an actor who has touched millions of lives through his brilliance and ability to make people laugh though his innovative natural talents. The iconic actor will be cherished for his flawless ability to elicit laughter, both on and off-screen.
Innocent breathed his last on Sunday at the age of 75 after battling cancer several times over the last 10 years. The former Lok Sabha member, who also served as the president of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (A.M.M.A) from 2003 to 2018, was taken to the VPS Lakeshore Hospital in Kochi on March 3 due to breathing issues and uneasiness.
Cancer Wardile Chiri (Laughter in the Cancer Ward) was the title Innocent gave to his memoir which detailed his battle with cancer, and it was a fitting one. “Innocent is the cure to cancer. His comedic approach to the illness proved to be more successful than the medical care he had, I can attest,” cancer specialist Dr VP Gangadharan, under whom the actor began the treatment in 2012, said commenting on the book.
An actor par excellence, Innocent was, for many decades, the epitome of comedy for Malayalam film audiences. In his illustrious career spanning over 50 years, which started with AB Raj’s Nrithasala (1972), Innocent has acted in 750+ films.
Though Innocent started his journey in the early 1970s, his acting career didn’t really take off until 1981. That year, he donned the hat of a producer for the first time and, along with David Kachappilli, brought to life the film Vida Parayum Munpe which was directed by Mohan and scripted by John Paul.
Picture : Indian Express
Innocent, the actor, too turned a lot of heads when the movie debuted to widespread critical acclaim. With Bharathan’s Ormakkayi (1982) and K G George’s Panchavadi Palam (1984), he continued the run. Although Innocent received only three to four films a year till 1984, the tide turned in 1985 and the actor starred in at least 17 films that year. The number increased further in 1986 when he appeared in over 30 movies, becoming a staple of Malayalam cinema, and Innocent was never forced to look back.
The most appealing aspect of Innocent was his ability to effortlessly adopt any persona and reveal all of its nuances. Some of the characteristics that made Innocent an unrivalled talent included his facial expressions, gestures, diction, and how naturally he used his body. This was demonstrated by his roles in movies like Akkare Ninnoru Maran (1985), Gandhinagar 2nd Street (1986), Unnikale Oru Kadha Parayam (1987), Nadodikkattu (1987), and Vadakkunokkiyantram (1989). He rarely dropped any stones while performing comedic scenes. Because of the pair’s no-holds-barred performances, people still chuckle at Innocent and actor Jagathi Sreekumar’s superb combination scenes in Priyadarshan’s Mukunthetta Sumitra Vilikkunnu (1988).
Innocent’s career, however, peaked in 1989 with Siddique-Lal’s debut film, Ramji Rao Speaking, in which he played a character named Mannar Mathai, the owner of a theatre troupe. Much attention was drawn to his comedic timing and the subtleties he added to the character. To put it into other words, for non-Malayalis to understand how great his performance was, it was based on this character (and the movie) that Priyadarshan later developed the character Baburao Ganpatrao Apte aka Babu Bhaiya (and the 2000 film Hera Pheri). Due to the abundance of humour the director duo Siddique and Lal, who also penned the story, managed to include in the film, the part offered Paresh Rawal one of his biggest career hits and did the same for Innocent. Since Ramji Rao Speaking was a slapstick comedy, the character Mannar Mathai had various scenes that were exaggerated versions of actual events. But Innocent demonstrated his mastery of comedy by never going overboard and staying in line at all times while making sure the exaggerated components persisted.
Further, his performances in Peruvannapurathe Visheshangal and Mazhavil Kavadi (1989), Thoovalsparsham, Gajakesariyogam and Dr Pasupathy, No.20 Madras Mail, and Kottayam Kunjachan (1990) awed spectators.
The year 1991 witnessed a never-seen-before Innocent as he played a wide range of characters that appeared to be outside of his comfort zone, but in reality, never were. While his portrayals of Kittunni in Kilukkam and Yashwant Sahai, a politician from north India, in Sandesham brought about laughter, the actor’s performances as Lazer, the crooked antagonist, in Bharathan’s Keli and Sheshadri Iyer, a corrupt police officer in Priyadarshan’s Adhwaytham, made it clear that he could play any role and that he was underutilised. Innocent replicated the feat in 1993 as well with his outstanding performances in Siddique-Lal’s Kabooliwala and Vietnam Colony, and IV Sasi’s Devaasuram. Warrier in Devaasuram is considered one of the best performances of the veteran actor.
Even while associating with filmmakers who predominantly made comedy movies, Innocent was always one of the favourites of parallel cinema makers too. He also worked in the films of master directors like K G George, G Aravindan, Padmarajan, Bharathan and Lenin Rajendran, among others. In addition to Vida Parayum Munpe, the actor produced three movies at the beginning of his career: Ilakkangal, Ormakkayi, and Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback; and, needless to say, all of them were unconventional works that later gained a cult status. Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback by K G George, said to be based on the tragic life of yesteryear actor Shoba, is now regarded as a seminal work in Malayalam cinema. The actor also penned stories for two films – Pavam IA Ivachan (1994) and Keerthanam (1995).
For Malayali moviegoers, his collaborations with actors Mohanlal, KPAC Lalitha, Jagathi Sreekumar, Thilakan, Kalpana, Urvashi, Jagadish, Mukesh, and Nedumudi Venu are still highly memorable.
Yet with all of this, the most potent weapon in his arsenal was his capacity to make people laugh, both on and off-screen. Even when his battle with cancer was at its worst Innocent never missed an opportunity to make people laugh, including those who were taking care of him at the hospitals and his colleagues within the film industry and political circles.
Speaking to Mumbai Mirror in 2015, Kerala Minister M B Rajesh dearly recalled Innocent’s humour sense while the two were members of the Lok Sabha. “In the middle of a heated debate, when tempers are high, Innocent will creep up behind you and slowly whisper, ‘Shall I jump into the well? I am not scared of anyone.’” According to the Mumbai-based newspaper, stories about him were legends in the Central Hall of Parliament. He, apparently, once asked businessman and then Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Mallya to get him three cups of coffee, confusing the latter for a Coffee Board waiter.
At the same time, the actor’s bravery in his fight against cancer and the way he used to talk about it without inhibitions have been praised numerous times by people, including his coworkers. He was also one of the first Malayalam celebrities to openly discuss his battle with cancer, an illness that still carries a lot of taboos. In one of the episodes of Kairali TV’s JB Junction, a Malayalam chat show hosted by CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP and the channel’s managing director John Brittas, Innocent spoke candidly about this and stated: “I think a lot of people gained from that (him addressing his disease). Fear ebbed away for them. There is a lot of false information floating around regarding cancer. There are a lot of fake doctors who offer bogus medical care around us.”
But the one time Malayalis witnessed an entirely broken Innocent was when his wife Alice was diagnosed with breast cancer. Even then, the two did not concede defeat and both of them emerged victorious yet again. The three-time recipient of the Kerala State Film Awards shared a close with his family, especially his grandkids Anna and Innocent Jr.
Even after being diagnosed with cancer, Innocent never left the silver screen. Even while receiving treatment, he balanced acting with his duties at the A.M.M.A. Since 1980, the only year in which Innocent did not appear in any movies was 2020, as he was undergoing treatment. But he returned to the world of motion pictures in 2020 and did five more movies. The actor was last seen in Shaji Kailas’ Kaduva (2022). Nonetheless, thousands of moviegoers will have the opportunity to bid farewell to the legend as his final movie, Paachuvum Albhuthavilakkum by Akhil Sathyan, will be released posthumously on April 28.
As India overtakes China as the world’s most populous nation, there is a crisis of population in parts of the country where fertility has fallen below replacement levels and migration has left behind ghost towns inhabited by the elderly. The BBC’s Soutik Biswas travels to Kumbanad, a town in Kerala state which is grappling with the consequences of an ageing society.
For years, schools in a drowsy town in Kerala have been facing an unusual problem: students are scarce and teachers have to go out looking for them. They also have to pay from their pockets to bring students to the school.
A 150-year-old government upper primary school – which educates students up to the age of 14 – in Kumbanad has 50 students on its rolls, down from about 700 until the late 1980s. Most of them are from poor and underprivileged families who live at the edge of the town. With only seven students, grade seven is the largest class. In 2016, the class had only one student.
Picture : BBC
Getting enough students to the school is a challenge. Each of its eight teachers fork out 2,800 rupees ($34; £28) every month to pay for auto rickshaws (tuk-tuks) ferrying students from home to school and back. They also go door-to-door looking for pupils. Even the few private schools in the area are sending out teachers to look for students – the biggest one has barely 70 students.
On a muggy afternoon recently at the upper primary school, you could barely hear the hum of lessons and hubbub of squeals that form the soundscape of a busy schoolhouse. Instead, teachers taught a few children in dark, quiet classrooms. Outside, in the sun-baked courtyard ringing the building, a few students wandered around desultorily.
Some 15% of the homes are locked up because residents have migrated or are staying with their children abroad. “What can we do? There are no children in this town. I mean, there are barely any people living here,” said Jayadevi R, the principal, wryly.
She is right. Kumbanad lies at the heart of Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district where the population is declining and ageing. This in a country where 47% of people are below the age of 25; and two-thirds were born after India liberalised its economy in the early 1990s.
Kumbanad and half-a-dozen verdant villages around it are home to some 25,000 people. Some 15% of the 11,118 homes here are locked up because the owners have migrated or live with their children abroad, says Asha CJ, the local village council chief. There are 20 schools, but very few students.
One hospital, a state-run clinic, more than 30 diagnostic centres and three old-age homes are pointers to its greying population. More than two dozen banks – including eight branches within less than half a kilometre – vie for remittances from townspeople who live and work all over the world. Around 10% of the $100bn in remittances that India mopped up from Indians living abroad last year came to Kerala.
Kerala – along with neighbouring Tamil Nadu – is some sort of an outlier in teeming India: the decadal rise in population here between 2001 and 2011 – when the last census was conducted – was lowest (4.9%) among states. A new-born in Kerala can expect to live for 75 years against the national average of 69.
Fertility rates in the state have dipped below replacement levels – 1.7 to 1.9 births per woman – for at least 30 years now. Smaller families ensure that children are educated well. This leads to the young migrating quickly within and outside the country for opportunities, leaving their parents at home.
“Education makes children aspire for better jobs and lives, and they migrate,” said Prof KS James of the Mumbai-based International Institute for Population Sciences.
“Their native places are then populated by their elderly parents, many of them living alone.” Behind the tall metal security gates of her two-storey red tiled home in Kumbaud, Annamma Jacob, 74, has been living alone for as long as she can remember.
Her husband, a mechanical engineer with a state-owned oil company, passed away in the early 1980s. Her 50-year-old son has been living and working in Abu Dhabi for more than two decades. A daughter lives a few miles away, but her husband has been working as a software engineer in Dubai for three decades.
Her next-door neighbours are absent: one locked up her house and took her parents to Bahrain, where she worked as a nurse; the other moved to Dubai and rented their place to an elderly couple.
The neighbourhood is a picture of desolation. Amidst a lush landscape of tapioca, banana, and teak trees, handsome houses with expansive yards stand vacant, their driveways scattered with dried leaves and cars covered in dust. CCTV cameras have taken the place of guard dogs.
In vivid contrast to the cacophony of India’s chaotic and bustling towns, swathes of Kumbanad are surreally deserted and half-frozen in time. It is a town abandoned by many of its inhabitants but it is not languishing in ruins. The deserted houses are painted regularly, almost like they expect people any day. Except, they hardly come. “It is a very lonely life. I am also not keeping good health,” Ms Jacob said.
Despite her heart disease and arthritis, Ms Jacob has travelled abroad to spend time with her son and grandchildren, and has vacationed in Jordan, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Israel with her children.
The things strewn around in her carpeted living room tell you something about her links with the world: imported paracetamol tablets, pistachios and cashew nuts, yellow paper flowers stuffed in China-made vases; and a bottle of imported body wash.
I asked her why she built a sprawling 12-room house only to live alone. “Everyone builds big houses here,” she smiled. “It’s about status.”
She spends a lot of time in her backyard farm where she grows tapioca, bananas, ginger, yam and jackfruit. At other times, she meditates and reads newspapers. She has a dog called Diana in a kennel outside. “Some days, I only talk to Diana. She understands me.”
At her age and with her failing health, it is exhausting to work on the farm. Ms Jacob said she cannot afford a farm hand. A shortage of labour has meant steep work wages for the few who look for work. A daily labourer charges a thousand rupees for a six-hour day looking after the farm. Even Ms Asha’s village council is not able to find and afford people to digitise its records.
A few lanes away, Chacko Mammen, who suffers from heart disease and diabetes, works in his little farm for four hours every day, growing bananas. The 64-year-old worked in Oman for three decades as a salesperson before returning home. He shut a small business after six years because he did not find enough people to work for him. Now, after a lot of effort, he grows and sells about 10kg of bananas every day from his farm. “I just cannot afford a worker,” he said.
Shoring up the work force in an ageing society is always difficult. Even migration of workers from other states doesn’t always work, sometimes because of a distrust of outsiders. Ms Jacob said she did not prefer hiring a migrant. “I live alone. What if they kill me?” she said.
In this mellow town of elderly people and shuttered homes, there is very little crime. The police said thefts are rare because people don’t keep much money and valuables at home. They don’t remember the last time a murder took place here.
“It’s all very peaceful. We only get complaints about cheating. Old people being cheated by their relatives or domestic helps who forge their signatures and withdraw their money from banks,” said Sajeesh Kumar V, the chief inspector of the local police station.
A year ago, a relative of an elderly resident embezzled nearly 10m rupees by faking her signature. Last year the police arrested four promoters of a private financial firm which set up shop in the town and promised steep returns on deposits. When it began to default in what looked like a ponzi scheme, some 500 local depositors went to the police.
“That was a big crime for this area,” said Mr Kumar. “Otherwise we are mainly dealing with minor fights among residents – about some noise, or rubbish being dumped outside their home, someone’s wild tree branch encroaching on a neighbour’s farm. Those sort of things.”
The lack of crime means that the police spends most of its time looking after the old. They regularly check in on 160 single and ailing people; and have given away mobile alarms in some of their homes so they can alert neighbours during emergencies. In 2020, the police broke down the door of a house when no one answered the doorbell and found the resident, an elderly woman, lying on the floor.
“We took her to the hospital, where she recovered, One of our jobs is also moving residents to old-age homes. We check on old people, we take them to doctors,” said Mr Kumar.
“Old age is the only problem here,” said Father Thomas John, who runs a geriatric centre in Kumbanad.
The town has three wheelchair accessible old-age homes with open spaces, wide doorways and hallways. The Alexander Marthoma Memorial Geriatric Centre, a five-storey building alongside a 150-bed hospital, takes care of more than 100 locals, aged between 85 and 101. Almost all are bedridden, and their families pay 50,000 rupees every month for their care. Sometimes the children come and stay with them at the 16-year-old centre.
“Most of the children live abroad and have no option but to move the very old parents to old-age homes,” said Father John.
Not far away, the 75-year-old Dharmagiri Old Age Home houses 60 locals, all above 60 years of age. Last year there were 31 new admissions. There are separate buildings for men and women. The waiting list is growing: a new 30-room building that can accommodate 60 elders is coming up.
“Most of the women who stay with us are victims of cheating. Some of them have been abandoned by their families,” said Father KS Mathews, who runs the home.
The ailing elderly, old-age homes, labour shortages, migration of the young, declining population, ghost towns.
“This is a story of any demographic change. This will be the story of the whole of India, finally,” said Prof James.
BBC News India is now on YouTube. Click here to subscribe and watch our documentaries, explainers and features. (Courtesy: BBC.com)
In addition to being home to the most expensive city to live in worldwide, New York is the least affordable U.S. state to retire in.
That’s according to WalletHub’s “2023 Best States to Retire,” which compared all 50 states across three main categories: affordability, quality of life and health care.
Picture : Money Talks News
For the affordability metric, WalletHub used data from various agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau and the Council for Community and Economic Research. The ranking looked at adjusted cost of living, general tax-friendliness and annual cost of in-home services, as well as other factors.
While New York ranked 10th in the quality-of-life category and 16th in health care, it came in 50th for affordability. That’s likely due to having the second-highest adjusted cost of living, behind Alaska, and the third-highest tax rate, according to WalletHub.
Even $1 million in retirement savings would cover your living costs for only about 14 years, a fraction of the 25 years or more retirement typically lasts.
Don’t expect to find affordability across the Hudson River either: New Jersey ranks as the second most expensive state to retire in.
Here are the top 10 most expensive states to retire in, according to WalletHub:
New York
New Jersey
Vermont
Massachusetts
Maryland
Washington
Connecticut
Maine
Illinois
Oregon
Retirement will look different to everyone, and there are several factors to consider.
While a state’s cost of living is often important, retirees may also think about how close they’ll be to family and how easily they’ll be able to access health care and engage in social activities, Alan Castel, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging,” said in WalletHub’s report.
If you’ll be living on a fixed income in retirement, it’s important to regularly review your budget and future financial commitments, said Castel.
“Sometimes our spending habits need to be re-evaluated, and many senior discounts can be utilized to lower bills,” he said. “It may also be useful to consider downsizing or minimizing certain costs that are no longer needed.”
Get CNBC’s free Warren Buffett Guide to Investing, which distills the billionaire’s No. 1 best piece of advice for regular investors, do’s and don’ts, and three key investing principles into a clear and simple guidebook.
New York Telangana Telugu Association (NYTTA) held Maha Shivratri and Women’s Day celebration March 4, 2023, at the Hindu Temple Auditorium in Flushing, NY.
NYTTA founder Srivinas Guduru told Desi Talk that Shiv Ratri is celebrated in Telangana with fasting during the day and keeping a ‘jaagran’ at night, singing devotional songs. Shiv Ratri is also the day when the mother goddess Parvati was married to Shiva, Guduru said. “We thought it would be apt to celebrate Women’s Day offering prayers to Parvathi on Maha Shivratri,’ he said.
Attended by more than 600 devotees and special guests from New York, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, the 8-hour long celebrations included dance and music performances by children and adults, and by visiting artists from India. A highlight of the celebration was a dinner with special Telangana items, some of which were specially brought from India, Guduru said.
Congratulating the gathering, Chief guest Dilip Chauhan, Deputy Commissioner for Trade, Investment and Innovation at the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, said it was heartening to see that Telugu families were promoting their culture in their children in the U.S. Chauhan said the Telugu community has emphasized professional education and had been contributing to the local economy.
Founder Guduru spoke about the goals of NYTTA. Chairman, Dr. Rajender Jinna, and President Mr. Sunil Reddy Gaddam, spoke about the upcoming events and the social work by the organization in India.
The Bihar Foundation of USA (East Coast) hosted the “Bihar Diwas Celebration” on Tuesday, March 21, 2023, evoking memories of home for the Indian-origin community living abroad.
On the occasion, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar sent a special congratulatory message, lauding the efforts of Bihar Foundation USA in promoting the state’s heritage and traditions in America and for supporting a wide range of voluntary and philanthropic activities.
Consul General of India in New York Randhir Jaiswal appreciated the contributions of the diaspora from the state in the U.S., and also noted their philanthropic activities. He said through their determination and eagerness to work for the betterment of their home state, the aim of Bihar 2.0 will be achieved and fulfilled in 2023.
Picture : TheUNN
“From the famous ‘Litti Chokha’ to the popular ‘Jhijhiya’ song and dance, traditional dialects, and textiles, the celebration was seeped in colors and vibrant traditions of Bihar and invoked among those present memories of their homes and childhood,” organizers said in a press release March 26.
Bihar Foundation of US (East Coast Chapter) Chairman and former President of the Federation of Indian Associations (FIA) Alok Kumar said the foundation aims to act as a bridge to support and guide members of the diaspora who wish to take up development and social projects in their state. It also seeks to offer assistance to those coming from Bihar, including students, as they navigate in the U.S.
Vice Chairman Ranjeet Kumar congratulated and thanked the team, Secretary Chandan Trivedi, Treasurer Alok Kashyap, and Joint Treasurer Anand Gupta for their efforts in making the event successful.
Trivedi thanked executive committee members Santa Mishra, Rajnish Ojha, and Manish Kumar who drove from the neighboring states to participate in the events. He conveyed special thanks to Sanjeev Jha and Pramod Kumar who drove all the way from Boston.
Three individuals hailing from the state were honored with the ‘Bihar Vishwa Gaurav’ award for their achievements and contributions. They included Padma Bhushan awardee, renowned sociologist and social entrepreneur, founder of Sulabh International Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak; entrepreneur Ajay Singh who leads the Pokhrama Foundation and is the founder and CEO of Slayback Pharma, and Washington-based journalist and member of the White House Press Lalit Jha. In a special video message for the occasion, Super 30 founder Anand Kumar congratulated the honorees.
Hindu University of America (HUA) in association with Hindus of Greater Houston (HGH) hosted a Friends of HUA Gala evening on 26 March 2023, at VPSS Haveli, Houston. The gala, which was attended by about 500 community members, honored Kiran and Ramesh Bhutada and their family for their generous gift of one million dollars to HUA. Ramesh Bhutada, CEO of Star Pipe Products, is a successful Houston-based businessman and philanthropist.
The Gala opened with the auspicious lighting of the lamp followed by a scintillating music performance by HUA faculty Dr Kanniks Kannikeswaran. His ensemble of Hindu classical singers accompanied by western music instrumentalists set the tone for the evening. He engaged the audience by having them hum along as well as sing some of the lyrics. His performance received a standing ovation.
This was followed by a short video on HUA’s courses and programs, as well as the experiences of students and faculty. Chairman of the HUA Board and Padma Bhushan awardee Ved Nanda and HUA President Kalyan Viswanathan spoke about the rejuvenation of HUA, its current state, and future roadmap. Houston-based faculty members Dr. Raj Vedam and Chandra Raghu shared their thoughts as well.
Picture : TheUNN
The evening’s highlight was Ramesh Bhutada’s address where he shared why he chose to support HUA. Despite being born and raised in a traditional Hindu family and a member of several prominent Hindu organizations and traditions, he stated that he “did not really understand the essence of Hindu Dharma.” It took him 60 years to recognize the silver spoon that he was born with, that is, to understand the true essence of Hindu Dharma “which teaches us how to live in harmony within ourselves, with our family, friends, colleagues, and with the entire world. Other universities may impart knowledge for students to earn a livelihood. Only an institution like HUA can impart Hindu knowledge that teaches a student how to live their life.”
Stressing the fact that he did not want the next generation of Hindus to take as long as he did, Ramesh Bhutada urged the attendees to support HUA so that the youth of today and tomorrow can gain the knowledge and understanding of Hinduism much earlier in life, enabling them to live happy, productive lives for themselves and for the benefit of the entire world.
Drawing on his personal experiences as well as narratives from the Hindu American community, Ramesh Bhutada noted that the traditional Hindu upbringing and teachings about Hinduism within the family and home environment alone is not sufficient. Knowledge, he underlined, imparted by established educational institutions in the modern academic setting is critical to ensure the younger generations understand and apply Hinduism in their lives.
HUA President Kalyan Viswanathan also called on all the attendees to “come together to build a Hindu university that lasts a 1000 years just like the Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur which has stood strong for over 1000 years, or like the Nalanda University that was a beacon to the world for 1700 years before it was destroyed.” He further shared that “over the next five years, HUA aspired to become self-sustaining, and establish itself as a shared platform for all Hindu traditions and organizations to offer their teachings.”
Proclaiming that the institution belongs to the entire Hindu community, HUA Chairman Ved Nanda stated that HUA “will seek to become an authoritative voice in the academic domain for all matters pertaining to Hindu Dharma, not only in the United States, but also globally.” He invited friends and well-wishers from all Hindu-American organizations, community leaders and members to support HUA’s efforts in becoming a leading hub for Hindu knowledge and learning.
Other remarks included well known Houston-based Physicist and Yoga Instructor Robert Boustany who stated that the “awareness dinner of HUA highlighted the necessity of all our seva in developing an educational system true to the deepest history of India in order to preserve that wisdom and value for our children and grandchildren” Chairman of HGH Board of Advisors Rasesh Dalal said, “Hindus can work wonders when they work diligently with unity. The success of the HUA event is a live example!” Emcee Ahimsa Yukta, a freshman at University of Texas, Dallas, said that HUA’s motto – “That is knowledge which liberates”, was so inspiring that he was motivated to take a course at the university. Volunteer support was provided by members of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, Houston.
As per an assessment, India may need an additional 1,000 pilots every year over the next five years. India’s civil aviation regulatory body, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)’s which released statistics on the country’s pilot strength informed that fifteen per cent of the pilots in the country are women, which is three times the global average of five per cent.
As per the data released from various Indian scheduled airlines, a total of 244 pilots have been recruited in 2021. And, data estimates that India may need an additional 1,000 pilots every year over the next five years.
However, currently, there is no special programme in the government to encourage pilot training for women and backward classes including SCs/STs, the regulatory body said. As of now, India has 67 foreign pilots working with different air operators, it said.
According to the release, there are 35 DGCA-approved Flight Training Organisations (FTOs) in the country, operating at 53 bases.
The International Society of Women Airline Pilots’ report on gender equality in the aviation sector in 2021 underlined that at 12.4 per cent India ranked top in gender equality at the flight deck in 2021, followed by Ireland, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Germany, USA, UK, and New Zealand.
There will be two shows in Hindi with English subtitles on April 21 and 22, and two shows in English with Mandarin subtitles on April 22 and 23.
India’s leading live theatre producer AGP World, along with Arte Compass and Zee TV APAC, inspired by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic novel, brings Ashvin Gidwani’s ‘Devdas – The Musical for the world’ premiere in Singapore on April 21, 2023, at the Esplanade Theatre. The news release said that the 100-minute multi-starrer explores the saga of star-crossed lovers Devdas and Paro, torn apart by unfortunate circumstances.
Picture : TheUNN
This multifaceted production features performances from popular Bollywood actors such as Sunil Kumar Palwal, Aanchal Chauhan, Bhavna Pani, Jayesh Thakkar and Smita Jaykar, who play key roles in the musical. Actor Arif Zakaria w plays Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, the writer of the classic tale. The musical also features songs from the Bollywood movie Devdas such as Woh Zindagi Hi Kya, Shyam Tore Rang Me, and Toota Re Manwa, sung by prominent singers, including Shaan, Kailash Kher, Alka Yagnik, Suresh Wadkar, Shail Hada, Bhoomi Trivedi and Antara Mitra.
Ashvin Gidwani, Producer & MD, AGP World, expressed delight to bring this classic on stage and showcase the first World Premiere in Singapore. The press statement said that there will be two shows in Hindi with English subtitles on April 21 and 22, and two shows in English with Mandarin subtitles on April 22 and 23. British theatre director, writer, actor, and teacher Toby Gough is the creative director for the grand musical which is co-directed by Indian director Ranga Godbole. The team also includes technical director and production designer Tom Kitney.
“Devdas has witnessed several renditions in the Indian cinema, yet there is something about the epic that connects with the audience. A saga of love presented by multiple onstage and offstage talents; Devdas promises to be a production never seen before on the Indian Stage,” Gidwani said.
Sanmesh Thakur, EVP – APAC, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, said, “Zee in Singapore has been known to support and co-produce high-quality productions. We are extremely proud and excited to be associated with Devdas, one of the most highly awaited shows of 2023!”
Featured speakers at the two-day, cultural pop-up included industry professionals from business, tech, film, TV, theater, music, and fashion. SAH also hosted a networking event with happy hour each day, as well as live music and a DJ set each night. Local Bollywood dance company Sway With Pray organized flash mobs around the city, and to conclude the weekend, Tasveer presented a Red Carpet Awards Ceremony and a live Oscar Viewing Party on Sunday, March 12. Several South Asian nominees and celebrities were cheered on by the House during the Academy Awards.
The inaugural event opened with welcome remarks from the co-founders of the South Asian House and from SXSW’s Director of Sales, Neil Minocha, followed by a fireside chai & chat moderated by Ms. Media CEO and SAH co-founder Monika Samtani and featured movie producer Rishi Rajani (CEO, Hillman Grad Productions), actor Reema Sampat (Orange is the New Black), and journalist/entrepreneur Snigdha Sur (Founder & CEO, The Juggernaut). The fireside was sponsored by Catalyst Media and Lalit Vadlamani & Shubha Iyengar. SAH’s programming also included two noteworthy panels on film and television Saturday. Warm SriLankan Chai was provided by Kola Goodies.
The first, “Creating South Asian Content for a Global Audience,” was an hour-long discussion with actor Rizwan Manji (“Schitt’s Creek,” “Peacemaker”), Executive Producer of VICE TV, Falguni Adams, and Apoorva Bakshi, Emmy award-winning producer of the hit TV series “Delhi Crime,” moderated by CEO of Jingo Media and co-founder of SAH, Jitin Hingorani.
The second panel, “Investing in the Future of Our South Asian Stories,” was an important conversation that included CEO and Co-founder of URL Media S. Mitra Kalita, actor Kausar Mohammed (“4400,” “The Flash”), and Atit Shah, CEO of Create Entertainment, moderated by co-founder of Box Office Guru Media Gitesh Pandya.
Women in Film and Television, Austin presented the Pilot reading hour of Rehana Lew Mirza’s script ‘Don’t Hate’ with a full slate of talent cast by Ashley Guaragna Casting with this pilot to be produced by SAH co-founder Rohi Mirza Pandya under the sisters joint production company banner. EarlierThe Leadership Program took a deep dive into the successful leadership mindset followed by one-on-one mentorship sessions with industry leaders Pooja Kumar (Actress/Producer & former Miss India USA), Milan Chakraborty (Head of Film at Marginal MediaWorks), Sid Shah (Founder of Trackmind), and James A. Mathew (CEO of The Outer Voice Company). The Leadership Program was facilitated by SAH co-founders, Rohi Mirza Pandya and Monika Samtani, as well as their production company Catalyst Media+ sponsors Lalit Vadlamani & Shubha Iyengar.
South Asian House attendees enjoyed Happy Hours hosted by our partners Brown Girl Magazine and Austin’s very own Indie Meme Film Festival.
The Auntie Network, a Texas dating and marriage website for South Asian singles, presented The StoryLounge Variety Show, hosted by Vick Krishna and Samrat Chakrabarti, and included comics Proma Khosla, Tanveer Arora, and Aizzah Fatima, with musical guest on the table, Mayookh Bhaumik. The evening’s entertainment concluded with live music by Chloe Choudhury with SUNNN, Meetu Chilana, Aditya Rao, and DJ Anupi. The world renowned percussionist Drums Sivamani surprised all guests with an impromptu performance.
Fashion brand One Minute Saree presented Sunday’s Desi Drag Brunch, featuring New York drag queen Tara Ryst and local drag queens Darshan and Jayan, who draped the sarees on stage during their live Bollywood performances. The event was supported by Austin’s South Asian LBGTQ+ organization, Khush Texas.
The afternoon included a series of shorts content, curated by Jitin Hingorani, Founder and Festival Director of DFW South Asian Film Festival, which culminated with the launch of the title track music video from an upcoming Austin based AAPI project WHERE THE STARS ARE, a Banskota Productions feature film co-directed by Kirtana Banskota and Andy Yang. Oscar Sunday evening kicked off with a red carpet and the Uniquely South Asian awards ceremony presented by Tasveer’s Founder Rita Meher. Awardees included all the afore-mentioned panelists and other thought leaders who are uplifting the Diaspora through their unique contributions to the community at large. The Oscar Watch Party was followed by live sets from Kiss Nuka Live (Mumbai & Goa) and Austin’s DJ Anup USA.
“And that’s a wrap!” exclaimed producers Mirza Pandya, Hingorani, Samtani, and Banskota. “We are just thrilled at the reception we’ve received from the South Asian community at SXSW, and we can’t wait to come back bigger and stronger next year. A huge shoutout to all our volunteers without whom this event would not be possible.”
About South Asian House: An initiative that aims to connect a thriving community of thought leaders from various sectors in the business, tech, film, television, fashion, music, ad theater idustries from seven different South Asian countries including Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The initiative was created by veteran producers, curators, and programmers Rohi Mirza Pandya (Box Office Guru Media), Jitin Hingorani (Jingo Media), Monika Samtani (Ms. Media), and Kirtana Banskota (Banskota Productions). For more information on SXSW’s first ever South Asian House please visit HERE.
Members of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association testified in support of New Jersey Assembly Bill 1958, which advances several key components of AAHOA’s 12 Points of Fair Franchising to sustain a mutually beneficial relationship between Franchisors and Franchisees.
The Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee reported the bill out of Committee with amendments. Six members voted yes, zero members voted no, and three members abstained. About 30 AAHOA Members attended the hearing and several offered testimony.
AAHOA, the largest hotel owners association in the world, has been at the forefront of advocating for fair franchising standards that protect hotel owners’ investments, safeguard a mutually beneficial relationship with hotel brands, and promote the hospitality industry and top-notch guest experiences. AAHOA Members own 45.4% of New Jersey hotels, representing 46,124 rooms.
“As the largest hotel owners association, representing the exclusive interests of America’s hotel owners, AAHOA showed up in New Jersey to testify in support of amendments to the legislation to improve the franchise model,” said AAHOA Chairman Nishant (Neal) Patel. “I’m heartened by the strong show of support by AAHOA Members who came to Trenton to speak on behalf of our industry.”
“Multiple major hotel franchises are helping to pave the way for fair franchising that is both fair and free – free from arbitrary and undisclosed fees, free from one-sided terms and conditions, and free from anti-competitive procurement rules,” said AAHOA President and CEO Laura Lee Blake. “As a state that is home to thousands of hard-working entrepreneurs, including immigrants from around the world, New Jersey can be an example to the rest of the country in supporting franchising practices that allow hotel owners to achieve the American dream.”
“Yesterday, there was a strong showing of testimony and support from our local members concerning the most important principles of this bill, which we have been underscoring from the beginning,” said Bharat Patel, AAHOA Vice Chairman. “The Committee heard us and voted to pass this bill with the changes we had identified. We thank the New Jersey Assembly Members for understanding our concerns, and we look forward to continuing to work together to address these important issues.”
Assembly Bill 1958 has four key provisions that support fair franchising practices:
Franchisors and Hotel Brands should not require hotel owners to purchase goods and services only from mandated vendors if the same goods and services of comparable quality are available from other sources at competitive prices.
If a Franchisor or Hotel Brand receives commissions / rebates from a vendor based on purchases by the Franchisee hotel owners, then such commissions / rebates must be fully disclosed and returned to the Franchisee hotel owners for the betterment of the system.
New franchise fees should not be unilaterally added that were not previously disclosed in the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD) without prior approval from the FACs or the Franchisee hotel owners.
AAHOA shall not support the Hotel Franchisors or Brands selling loyalty points for a profit without providing reasonable compensation for the hotel owners.
A grand jury has reportedly indicted Donald Trump on criminal charges stemming from his role in a hush-money payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels. This historic event is a tragedy for the American republic not because of what it has revealed about Trump, but because of what it is revealing about us as voters and citizens.
Picture : Forbes
Donald Trump is said to have been charged with crimes in New York. This is a good day for America, because it shows, in the most direct way possible, that no one in this country is above the law. Trump’s status as a former president has not shielded him from answering for his alleged crimes.
The indictment itself is shot through with tension, because Trump is, in fact, a former president and a current leading presidential candidate—which underscores the ghastly reality that no matter how much we learn about this crass sociopath, millions of people voted for him twice and are still hoping that he will return to power in the White House.
The Manhattan DA’s office wanted Trump to surrender on Friday, but Trump’s lawyers “rebuffed the request, saying that the Secret Service, which provides security detail for the former president, needed more time to prepare”, Politico reports, citing an unnamed source but saying the exchange was confirmed by Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina.
A grand jury in Manhattan voted Thursday to indictDonald Trump — the first time a former U.S. president has faced criminal charges. The historic indictment comes in a case centered on $130,000 in payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels claimed she slept with the married Trump in 2006, a claim the former president has denied. Trump had classified his reimbursement of the payout as a legal expense.
A spokesperson for the DA’s office confirmed the indictment in a statement Thursday night. “This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s Office for arraignment on a [New York] Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal,” the spokesperson said. “Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected.”
Trump attorney Susan Necheles told NBC News that the former president, who lives in Florida, is expected to be arraigned on Tuesday. He is expected to surrender to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Trump attorney Joe Tacopina said earlier Thursday.
“President Trump has been indicted. He did not commit any crime. We will vigorously fight this political prosecution in Court,” Necheles and Tacopina said in a joint statement.
The tentative plan is for Trump to appear before acting Justice Juan Merchan after 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday for his felony arraignment, two officials familiar with the matter said. Merchan presided over the DA’s successful tax fraud prosecution of Trump’s company last year.
Trump blasted the news in a statement Thursday evening. “This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history,” Trump said in a statement. “The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable — indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.”
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing related to the probe and called the investigation by Democratic Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office a continuation of the partisan “witch hunt” against him. He’s also accused Bragg, who’s Black, of being a “racist.”
The decision is sure to send shockwaves across the country, pushing the American political system – which has never seen one of its ex-leaders confronted with criminal charges, let alone while running again for president – into uncharted waters.
The polls do not bear well for President Joe Biden if he chooses to stand for reelection in 2024. Biden is locked in close hypothetical races with the two leading candidates for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, according to a new poll.
A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found Biden leading former President Trump in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, with Biden receiving 48 percent support and Trump getting 46 percent among registered voters.
In a hypothetical election between Biden and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), the other front-runner at the moment for the GOP nomination, Biden trails 46 percent to DeSantis’s 48 percent.
Picture : NBC
The poll found Trump leading DeSantis in a head-to-head Republican primary matchup, with the former president earning 52 percent support to DeSantis’s 42 percent.
Biden, Trump, and DeSantis all had similar favorability ratings among registered voters, as well. For Biden, 37 percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of the president, compared to 56 percent who had an unfavorable view.
Meanwhile for Trump, 36 percent had a favorable view, and 58 percent had an unfavorable view. And 36 percent had a favorable view of DeSantis, while 39 percent had an unfavorable view, and 24 percent said they did not know enough about the governor.
The poll surveyed 1,600 registered voters from March 23-27. It has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
The results reflect that Biden may be vulnerable in a reelection bid, with voters consistently concerned about his handling of the economy in particular. But it also underscores a persistent concern among Republicans, that Trump may be the one candidate who would lose to Biden in 2024.
Trump has already declared his candidacy for 2024, as has former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. DeSantis is widely expected to enter the race in the coming months, but he has not yet formally launched a bid.
And while Biden’s intention to run for a second term does not seem to be in significant doubt, the president thus far has only reiterated his “intention” to run for the White House again.
(NPR) The economy continues to dominate as the most important issue facing the country, followed by preserving democracy, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
Democrats face vulnerabilities when it comes to the economy, crime and whether to ban TikTok, while Republicans risk overstepping on transgender rights and business practices, the survey found.
“The image of the Republican Party has gotten even more extreme than it was” before the 2020 election, said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the survey. “If winning the election in 2024 is predicated on picking up some swing voters in the middle, they’re moving in the opposite direction.
“For the Democrats, as much as the progressive wing is allowing President Biden some freedom to move toward the middle, you look at the issues on the economy and crime, and he is not where he wants to be in tying down the middle, either.”
The survey of 1,327 adults, including 1,226 registered voters, was conducted March 20 through Thursday, March 23 via live telephone callers to cellphones and landlines, through online research panels and via text message in English and in Spanish. It has a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percentage points, meaning results have a range of about 4 points lower or higher than the number reported.
The top issues facing the country
With inflation stubbornly high and interest rates increasing, there is plenty of economic uncertainty at the moment, and it remains the top issue for respondents in the survey — 31% said so, followed by preserving democracy (20%).
No other issue broke double-digits. Health care was third at 9%, then immigration and climate change at 8%. Crime, gun policy, abortion and education rounded out the topics people were asked about.
The policy priorities, as expected, are different by party — with Republicans and independents more focused on the economy and Democrats saying preserving democracy is tops, followed by the economy, health care and climate change.
Immigration and preserving democracy followed the economy for Republicans.
Biden struggles on the economy and crime
When it comes to the economy, Biden continues to get poor marks.
Just 38% approve of how he’s handling it, including just 28% of independents. The White House and Democratic strategists know Biden, who is expected to run for reelection, has to improve in how Americans view him on the economy in the next year and a half before the 2024 election.
Overall, Biden gets a 42% job approval rating. That’s about where it had been before his State of the Union address in February. An NPR survey that month, taken after Biden’s address, showed him getting a slight bounce. That appears to have receded.
On crime, Biden is particularly vulnerable. Just 35% approve of how he’s handling it, including just 27% of independents. There is a lack of approval across some key Democratic coalition groups, too, like nonwhites (37%) and people under 45 (34%).
Even though crime continues to not register as a top issue in polling, most people, by a 68%-to-31% margin, said it is a real threat to most communities and not an issue blown out of proportion by politicians as a way to win voters.
That includes 58% of Democrats and 7 in 10 independents. Notably, nonwhites, who are a pillar Democratic group, are among the most likely to say it’s a real threat. That’s in line with several core groups vital to former President Donald Trump’s political fortunes — whites without college degrees, white evangelical Christians and people who live in small towns.
Republicans have focused on increases in crime and brazen acts like smash-and-grabs and carjackings in big cities across the country.
Republicans vulnerable on transgender rights and business practices
Republican governors, legislatures and candidates across the country have focused on gender identity issues, something they see as a political wedge issue.
There is some evidence for that — 50% in the 2022 midterm exit polls, for example, said society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the worse.
And there has been an increase in support for criminalizing gender transition-related medical care for minors, from 28% in April of 2021 to 43% now. Almost two-thirds of Republicans support it.
But Republicans risk going too far. A majority, 54%, still oppose criminalizing this type of medical care, including 56% of independents.
There is also a big split between parents of children who are under 18 and those without kids — 59% of parents support criminalizing the practice, while 59% of people who aren’t parents are opposed.
What’s more, a majority of respondents said they oppose laws that would restrict drag shows or performances in their states. Earlier this month, Tennessee passed a bill to do just that, while in more than a dozen other states, there are GOP efforts afoot to do the same.
But the majority is not on their side — 58% oppose such laws. Republicans, on yet another issue, stand out against the majority, as 61% support these laws. Just a quarter of Democrats and fewer than 4 in 10 independents do.
It’s a similar story when it comes to socially conscious business practices.
Three-quarters said it would be more important to invest their money with companies that make money, but are also mindful of their business practices and impact on the environment and society, as opposed to investing in companies that make the most money regardless.
Even 63% of Republicans said they would rather invest with companies mindful of their impact on the environment and society. Many in the GOP have made ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) practices in companies bogey men.
Some Republicans blamed the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, for example, on these practices, when, in reality, the bank’s collapse was the result of bad investments, increased interest rates and depositors asking for their money back.
Younger people, in particular, believe in universal health care
Despite the patchwork health care system in this country, 83% said they believe that all Americans have a basic right to health care coverage. That includes 7 in 10 Republicans.
The disagreement comes in the intensity of that belief — and with who provides it.
Three-quarters of Democrats and 61% of independents strongly agree that health care is a basic right, while just a quarter of Republicans feel that way.
When asked if people think it’s the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage, almost two-thirds say yes. That includes 9 in 10 Democrats, a majority (57%) of independents, but just a third of Republicans.
While “government” continues to be the brightest of dividing lines in this country, what also stands out on this question is the generational divide. Three-quarters of members of the Gen Z and Millennial generations say it’s the government’s responsibility, but just 60% of Gen Xers do, followed by 56% of Baby Boomers and 49% of the Silent/Greatest generation.
The finding is yet another example of younger Americans being more likely to want the government to step in on pocketbook issues, like raising taxes on the wealthy to help close the national debt and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The clock is ticking on TikTok, but there’s a risk for Biden
A majority of Americans support a ban on the popular social media app TikTok — 57% said so.
Three quarters said TikTok represents either a major or minor threat to national security. And it’s bipartisan — 7 in 10 Democrats and 8 in 10 Republicans see it the same way, though Republicans are more likely to see TikTok as a major threat.
Nearly two-and-a-half years after the Trump administration threatened to ban TikTok in the United States if it didn’t divest from its Chinese owners, the Biden administration is now doing the same.
The new directive comes from the multiagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), following years of negotiations between TikTok and the government body. (CFIUS is the same group that previously forced a sale of LGBTQ dating app Grindr from Chinese ownership back in 2019.)
There’s a generational divide here, which is to be expected, considering younger Americans are more likely to use the app. Gen Z and Millennials, though they are split, are less likely to support a ban, and they are far less likely to see it as a national security threat.
Fifty-one percent of Gen Z/Millennials oppose banning TikTok, the most of any group, and just 27% see it as a major threat, the least of any group.
Biden has a precarious decision to make on TikTok. Ahead of his expected run for reelection, he has to balance whether to ban something the intelligence community clearly sees as a potential national security risk — or to finesse something less than a ban to stem the potential loss of support among a key voting demographic group that lives online.
Some in Washington have expressed concerns that the app could be infiltrated by the Chinese government to essentially spy on American users or gain access to US user data. Others have raised alarms over the possibility that the Chinese government could use the app to spread propaganda to a US audience. At the heart of both is an underlying concern that any company doing business in China ultimately falls under Chinese Communist Party laws.
Other concerns raised are not unique to TikTok, but more broadly about the potential for social media platforms to lead younger users down harmful rabbit holes.
Wait, didn’t all of this happen before?
If this latest development is giving you déjà vu, that’s because it echoes the saga TikTok already went through in the United States that kicked off in 2020, when the Trump administration first threatened it with a ban via executive order if it didn’t sell itself to a US-based company.
Oracle and Walmart were suggested as buyers, social media creators were in a frenzy, and TikTok kicked off a lengthy legal battle against the US government. Some critics at the time blasted then-president Donald Trump’s crusade against the app as political theater rooted in xenophobia, calling out Trump’s unusual suggestion that the United States should get a “cut” of any deal if it forced the app’s sale to an American firm.
Describing India as the mother of democracy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 29th, 2023 said the India has become the fastest-growing major economy despite many global challenges and this proves that democracy can deliver. In a virtual address to the Summit for Democracy 2023, Modi said every initiative of his government is powered by collective efforts of the citizens of India.
“India is a democracy because we believe in saamanjasya (harmony)….. We are often told that India is the largest democracy. I would like countrymen to remember that we are not just the largest; India is the mother of all democracies,” Modi said.
“Democracy is not just a structure; it is also a spirit. It is based on the belief that the needs and aspirations of every human being are equally important. That is why, in India, our guiding philosophy is “Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas”, meaning ‘’striving together for inclusive growth‘’, he went on to say.
The US State Department has said that respect for the rule of law and judicial independence is the cornerstone of any democracy and that Washington was watching Rahul Gandhi’s court case that resulted in his disqualification from the Lok Sabha. The US reaction came in the wake of large-scale protests by the Congress inside and outside Parliament over the issue.
The second Summit for Democracy is being co-hosted by US President Joe Biden, Costa Rica President Rodrigo Chaves Robles, Zambia President Hakainde Hichilema, the Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte and South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol.
In his address, Modi said the idea of elected leaders was a common feature in ancient India long before the rest of the world — “Our epic Mahabharata describes the first duty of citizens as choosing their own leader. Our sacred Vedas speak of political power being exercised by broad-based consultative bodies. There is also historical evidence of republic states in ancient India where rulers were not hereditary.”
“There are also many historical references to republic states in ancient India where the rulers were not hereditary. India is, indeed, the mother of democracy,” Modi said.
Modi had earlier referred to India as the “mother of democracy” in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September 2021, countering the generally held perception that the Athenian city-state, founded in Greece in the 6th century BCE, which gave the terms ‘Demos’ and ‘Kratos’ to mean people’s rule, preceded it.
India was among about 120 countries invited to the second edition of the virtually held Summit for Democracy. In a repeat of the first edition in 2021 the U.S. decided to invite India, Nepal and Maldives, while not including Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to the event.
A major theme of this week’s summit is to working to ensure technology is used to benefit democracy. Biden on Monday signed an executive order prohibiting the use of commercial spyware that poses a security risk to the U.S. government or risks improper use by foreigners.
A senior administration official said the summit is intended to highlight “a critical issue of our time. As President Biden has said, we’re currently at an inflection point when it comes to the future of democracy both within the United States and globally,” the official said. “When the president came into office, he said that a defining question of this moment is whether democracies will deliver for their people.”
The Biden administration hosted the first edition of the summit in late 2021 as part of the president’s broader efforts to strengthen democracies globally and combat the influence of authoritarian nations like Russia and China.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month held talks amid concerns from the U.S. that China could provide support to Russia in its war effort.
This week’s summit is also taking place as concerns play out over whether some U.S. allies are backsliding with moves to weaken democratic institutions.
Biden administration officials have raised alarm over a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give lawmakers more control over the country’s top court. Netanyahu agreed to pause the judicial reforms in the face of widespread protests this week.
Mexico in February passed a law that critics said weakened the agency that helps administer and oversee the country’s elections.
And Brazil in January saw supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro storm federal government buildings after he was defeated in the country’s elections last year in images that evoked the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.
Opening the first session on Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made a special mention of attacks against democratic principles and freedom of the media worldwide.
“Freedom of expression is in freefall, dissenting voices are silenced. Human Rights Defenders face persecution, while prosecutors fighting corruption face reprisals, journalists confront censorship, detention and violence. The number of media workers killed across the world last year rose by a horrific 50%,” Mr. Guterres said, referring to a rise in the “siren songs of enlightened despotism”, which isn’t very “enlightened”, worldwide.
Speaking during the same session on “Democracy Delivering Growth and Shared Prosperity”, several leaders, particularly from the EU, referred in their speeches to the war in Ukraine, casting Russia, which was not invited, as carrying out an “attack on a democratic country”.
US-based consumer tech conglomerate Honeywell has announced that Vimal Kapur, President and Chief Operating Officer, will succeed Darius Adamczyk as CEO on June 1.
Having graduated from the Thapar Institute of Engineering in Punjab’s Patiala as electronics engineer with a specialization in instrumentation, Kapur was also appointed to the company’s board of directors, effective March 13.
Adamczyk will continue to serve as Executive Chairman of Honeywell, said the company, adding that these moves ensure a seamless leadership transition and position Honeywell for continued outperformance versus peers.
“Kapur brings 34 years of deep knowledge about our businesses, end markets and customer needs. His ability to drive our key sustainability and digitalisation strategic initiatives, along with his advancement of our world class operating system – Honeywell Accelerator – throughout the organization, gives him an outstanding platform to drive continued outperformance for our shareowners,” said Adamczyk.
Kapur, 57, was named President and COO in July 2022, and has been leading the creation of new solutions to help customers drive their sustainability transformations and accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
As COO, Kapur has also overseen the continued integration of Honeywell Accelerator across the organization and furthering its adoption as an operational system for everything that Honeywell does.
Prior to his role as COO, he served as President and CEO of Performance Materials and Technologies (PMT), an $11 billion global leader in the development of high-performance products and solutions.
Kapur said that it has been a privilege to work in a variety of businesses and functions over his three decades with Honeywell. “Honeywell is playing a major role in making the world a better place, and I am both proud and humbled to take on the CEO role of this great company,” he said.
Prior to leading PMT, Kapur served as President and CEO of HBT, a $6 billion global leader in building technology offerings. Adamczyk, 57, was named COO in 2016, CEO in 2017 and Chairman and CEO in 2018, and has led Honeywell to significantly and consistently outperform peer companies. Under his leadership, Honeywell’s market capitalisation grew from $88 billion to $145 billion. (IANS)
People get happy as they earn more, according to a new study which overturns the dominant thinking that money cannot buy happiness.
The study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, shows that, on average, larger incomes are associated with ever-increasing levels of happiness.
Two prominent researchers, Daniel Kahneman from Princeton University and Matthew Killingsworth from the University of Pennsylvania, surveyed 33,391 adults aged between 18 and 65 who live in the US, are employed and report a household income of at least $10,000 a year.
For the least happy group, happiness rose with income until $100,000, then showed no further increase as income grew. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.
“In the simplest terms, this suggests that for most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness,” said lead author Killingsworth.
“The exception is people who are financially well-off but unhappy. For instance, if you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help. For everyone else, more money was associated with higher happiness to somewhat varying degrees,” he added.
The researchers said that the study shows both a happy majority and an unhappy minority exist.
For the former, happiness keeps rising as more money comes in; the latter’s happiness improves as income rises but only up to a certain income threshold, after which it progresses no further.
These findings also have real-world implications, according to Killingsworth.
For one, they could inform thinking about tax rates or how to compensate employees. And, of course, they matter to individuals as they navigate career choices or weigh a larger income against other priorities in life, Killingsworth said.
However, he adds that for emotional well-being money isn’t all. “Money is just one of the many determinants of happiness,” he says. “Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.” (IANS)
The Swiss firm IQAir in its ‘World Air Quality Report’ released last week ranked India the world’s eighth most polluted country in 2022, dropping from fifth place the previous year. In the list of most polluted cities in the world, out of the 50 cities, 39 are in India.
Chad, Iraq, Pakistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Kuwait, India, Egypt and Tajikistan were the top 10 most polluted countries while Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, and New Zealand met the World Health Organization (WHO) PM2.5 guideline (annual average of 5 Aug/m3 or less).
The data from 131 countries was taken from over 30,000 ground-based monitors, either government or non-government operated.
As per the report, In India, the transportation sector causes 20-35 per cent of the PM2.5 pollution while other sources of pollution are industrial units, coal-fired power plants and biomass burning.
After the two top most-polluted cities, Lahore in Pakistan and Hotan in China, Rajasthan’s Bhiwadi is in third place and Delhi ranked fourth.
Delhi’s PM2.5 level is almost 20 times the safe limit, the report stated.
Delhi has so far been the most polluted capital in the world and the report made a distinction between ‘greater’ Delhi and New Delhi the capital. Both are in the top 10 and the infamous distinction of being the world’s most polluted capital goes to Chad’s N’Djamena.
National Capital’s peripherals– Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurugram and Faridabad have seen a decline in pollution levels. The report said that there is a 34 per cent decline in Gurugram to 21 per cent in Faridabad if compared to the average PM2.5 levels reported in previous years.
Delhi has seen a decline of eight per cent.
The report said that worldwide, poor air quality accounts for 93 billion days lived with illness and over six million deaths each year.
“The total economic cost equates to over $8 trillion dollars, surpassing 6.1 per cent of the global annual GDP. Exposure to air pollution causes and aggravates several health conditions which include, but are not limited to, asthma, cancer, lung illnesses, heart disease, and premature mortality,” the report said.
According to the report, 31 cities including 10 cities in Uttar Pradesh and seven in Haryana, have seen a steep percentage decline in pollution levels.
“A total of 38 cities and towns have seen a rise in pollution compared to an average of previous years,” stated the report.
As per the report, among the six metro cities, Kolkata was ranked the most polluted after Delhi. However, Chennai was stated to be the cleanest with pollution ‘just’ 5x the WHO’s safe level. The metro cities — Hyderabad and Bengalurua — saw pollution levels uptick over the average since 2017. (IANS)
India secured a 2-1 series win over Australia after the fourth Test petered out into a draw last week in Ahmedabad, India. The tourists batted throughout day five in Ahmedabad and declared on 175-2 with a lead of 84 before the teams shook hands.
India’s place in the World Test Championship final against Australia is locked in after New Zealand ended Sri Lanka’s slim hopes of reaching the decider.
Sri Lanka needed to win their series in New Zealand 2-0 and rely on India not winning their fourth and final Test against Australia in Ahmedabad.But a classic knock of 121 not out from Black Caps star Kane Williamson steered New Zealand to a thrilling two-wicket win against Sri Lanka on the final ball of the match in Christchurch.
Australia started the day trailing by 91 runs on first innings after India amassed 571, with Virat Kohli scoring a majestic 186. But Australia’s batters defied India on a flat wicket as Marnus Labuschagne finished unbeaten with a gritty 63 from 213 balls.
Earlier, opener Travis Head made 90 from 163 balls in a partnership of 139 for the second wicket with Labuschagne. Nightwatchman Matthew Kuhnemann was the first wicket to fall for six to Ravichandran Ashwin, with spinners bowling the majority of the overs in batter-friendly conditions.
With India avoiding defeat, it means Sri Lanka can no longer qualify even if they beat New Zealand in the second Test of their series, which starts on Friday.
The draw also ensured India won the Border-Gavaskar trophy for the fourth successive time. India will next face Australia in three one-day internationals, with the first on Friday. India and Australia will meet in the second WTC final at The Oval in London, starting on 7 June.
Meta, the parent firm of Facebook and Instagram, is working on a standalone, text-based social network app. It could rival both Twitter and its decentralized competitor, Mastodon.
A spokesperson told the BBC: “We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. “We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”
“We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement.
A Twitter-like app would allow Meta to take advantage of the current chaos at the Elon Musk-led company, where cost-cutting has been rampant. Twitter has been struggling to hold on to its advertising base since Mr Musk’s takeover of the platform late last year.
Companies have pulled back spending following Twitter’s move to restore suspended accounts and release a paid account verification which resulted in scammers impersonating firms. According to MoneyControl, the new app is codenamed P92, and will allow users to log in through their existing Instagram credentials.
Meta’s app will be based on a similar framework to the one that powers Mastodon, a Twitter-like service which was launched in 2016. The new app would be decentralized – it cannot be run at the whim of a single entity, bought or sold.
Meta’s plans come at a time when its biggest platform, Facebook, is struggling to attract the attention of a younger audience. It has also heavily invested in the metaverse, a virtual world where users interact and work – which has yet to come to fruition.
Its video-sharing app, Instagram, is also facing stiff competition as content makers or hit influencers abandon the platform for TikTok. It was not immediately clear when Meta would roll out the new app.
It was not immediately clear when Meta would roll out the new app. “The history of Meta is that they are much better acquirers than they are innovators or developers … as far as copying Twitter, this is just a defensive move,” said Thomas Hayes, chairman and managing member of New York-based Great Hill Capital.
“They’re just trying everything… at least with a mini blogging site like Twitter, there’s some expectation that it could start to make money out of much quicker timeline than the metaverse investment.” Meta’s investments in the metaverse will not drive revenue growth until 2030, analysts have said.
Meta shares were marginally higher at $181.7 in early trade on Friday. They have gained about 51% so far this year.
Saudi oil giant Aramco has announced a record profit of $161.1bn (£134bn) for 2022, helped by soaring energy prices and bigger volumes. It represents a 46.5% rise for the state-owned company, compared with last year.
It is the latest energy firm to report record profits, after energy prices spiked following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
America’s ExxonMobil made $55.7bn, and Britain’s Shell reported $39.9bn. Aramco also declared a dividend of $19.5bn for the October to December quarter of 2022, to be paid in the first quarter of this year.
Most of that will go to the Saudi government, which owns nearly 95% of the shares in the company. Brent crude oil, the benchmark oil price, now trades at around $82 a barrel – though prices exceeded $120 a barrel last March, after Russia’s invasion, and June.
“Aramco rode the wave of high energy prices in 2022,” said Robert Mogielnicki of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “It would have been difficult for Aramco not to perform strongly in 2022.”
In a statement on Sunday, Aramco said the company results were “underpinned by stronger crude oil prices, higher volumes sold and improved margins for refined products”.
Aramco’s president and CEO Amin Nasser said: “Given that we anticipate oil and gas will remain essential for the foreseeable future, the risks of underinvestment in our industry are real – including contributing to higher energy prices.”
To address those challenges, he said, the company would not only focus on expanding oil, gas and chemicals production – but also invest in new lower-carbon technologies.
Aramco – the world’s second-most valuable company only behind America’s Apple – is a major emitter of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.
Responding to Aramco’s announcement, Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard said: “It is shocking for a company to make a profit of more than $161bn in a single year through the sale of fossil fuel – the single largest driver of the climate crisis.”
She added: “It is all the more shocking because this surplus was amassed during a global cost-of-living crisis and aided by the increase in energy prices resulting from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Saudi Arabia is the largest producer in the oil cartel OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). The Gulf kingdom has been condemned for a range of human rights abuses: its involvement in the conflict in neighboring Yemen, the murder in 2018 of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, for jailing dissidents, and for the widespread use of capital punishment.
In a separate development on Sunday, Iran said its oil exports had reached their highest level since the re-imposition of US sanctions in 2018. Oil Minister Javad Owji said exports increased by 83 million barrels in 2022 compared with the previous 12 months. In Iran, a new year starts in March.
Analysts say the rise is due to greater shipments to Iranian allies China and Venezuela. Tehran’s export revenues took a significant hit after then-US President Donald Trump pulled out of a landmark nuclear deal five years ago.
The US sanctions, coupled with economic mismanagement and corruption, have meant that the Iranian economy has not had any substantive growth in the past decade. And by some measures, it is still 4-8% smaller than it was back in 2010.
President Biden went big in his $6.8 trillion annual budget proposal to Congress by calling for $5 trillion in tax increases over the next decade, more than what lawmakers expected after the president downplayed his tax agenda in earlier meetings. It’s a risky move for the president as he heads into a tough reelection campaign in 2024.
Senate Democrats will have to defend 23 seats next year, including in Republican-leaning states such as Ohio, Montana and West Virginia, and Americans are concerned about inflation and the direction of the economy.
Republicans say Biden’s budget plan marks the return of tax-and-spend liberal politics; they warn higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy will hurt the economy. Biden, however, thinks he can win the debate by pledging that he won’t raise taxes on anyone who earns less than $400,000 a year.
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, called Biden’s ambitious tax plan “jaw-dropping.”
“This is exactly the wrong approach to solving our fiscal problems,” he said of the $5 trillion aggregate total of proposed tax hikes. “I think this sets a new record, by far.”
Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that advocates for lower taxes, said “in dollar terms, it’s the largest tax increase in American history.”
A surprise and a ‘negotiating position’
Many lawmakers were expecting Biden to propose between $2 trillion and $2.5 trillion in tax increases, based on what he said in his State of the Union address on Feb. 7 and on what media outlets reported in the days before the White House unveiled its budget plan.
The $5 trillion in new tax revenues is more than what the president called for last year, when Democrats controlled the House and Senate.
In October of 2021, when Biden was trying to nail down a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on the Build Back Better agenda, he proposed a more modest $2 trillion in tax increases.
The headline number even surprised some Democratic policy experts, though they agree the federal government needs to collect more revenue.
“I didn’t expect to see a number that big, but I’m not alarmed by it. I think it’s a negotiating position,” said Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.
Biden told lawmakers at his State of the Union address that his budget plan would lower the deficit by $2 trillion and that he would “pay for the ideas I’ve talked about tonight by making the wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share.”
The president then surprised lawmakers with a budget proposal to cut $3 trillion from deficit over the next decade and to do it almost entirely by raising tax revenues.
Biden has called for a 25 percent tax on the nation’s wealthiest 0.01 percent of families. He has proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and the top marginal income tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent. He wants to quadruple the 1 percent tax on stock buybacks. He has proposed taxing capital gains at 39.6 percent for people with income of more than $1 million.
Kessler noted that Biden’s budget doesn’t include significant spending cuts nor does it reform Social Security, despite Biden’s pledge during the 2020 election to reduce the program’s imbalance. Kessler defended the president’s strategy of focusing instead on taxing wealthy individuals and corporations.
“The amount of unrealized wealth that people have at the top dwarfs anything that we’ve ever seen in the past,” he said. “These are opening bids” ahead of the negotiations between Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to raise the debt limit.
Senate Republicans are trying to chip away at Biden’s argument that his tax policy will only hit wealthy individuals and companies. “It’s probably not good for the economy. Last time I checked, most tax increases on the business side are passed on to consumers, and I think we need to control spending more than adding $5 trillion in new taxes,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
Norquist, the conservative anti-tax activist, warned that if enacted, raising the corporate tax rate would reverberate throughout the economy. “The corporate income tax, 70 percent of that is paid by workers and lower wages,” he said.
He said raising the top marginal tax rate and capital gains tax rate would hit small businesses that file under subchapter S of the tax code. “When you raise the top individual rate, you’re raising taxes on millions of smaller businesses in the United States,” he said. “Their employees end up paying that because that’s money they don’t have in the business anymore.”
How does Biden compare to predecessors?
Norquist noted that Obama and Clinton both cut taxes during their administrations, citing Clinton’s role in cutting the capital gains rate and Obama’s role in making many of the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. “Both of them ran a more moderate campaign. This guy is going Bernie Sanders,” he said of Biden, comparing him to the liberal independent senator from Vermont.
Biden’s budget is a significant departure from the approach then-President Obama took 12 years ago, when he also faced a standoff with a GOP-controlled House over the debt.
In his first year working with a House GOP majority, Obama in his fiscal 2012 budget proposed cutting the deficit by $1.1 trillion, of which he said two-thirds should come from spending cuts and one-third from tax increases. Obama later ramped up his proposal in the fall of 2011 by floating a plan to cut the deficit by $3.6 trillion over a decade and raise taxes by $1.6 trillion during that span.
Concerning for some Democrats
Republican strategists say they’ll use Biden’s proposed tax increases as ammunition against Democratic incumbents up for reelection next year. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines (Mont.) said Biden’s budget provides “a contrast” ahead of the election.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who faces a tough re-election in a state that former President Trump with 57 percent of the vote, said he’s leery about trillions of dollars in new taxes.
Asked last week if he’s worried about how Montanans might react to Biden’s proposed tax increases, Tester replied: “For sure. I got to make sure that will work. I just got to see what he’s doing.”
Manchin, who is up for reelection in another red state, has called on his fellow Democrats to focus more on how the federal budget has swelled from $3.8 trillion in 2013 to $6.7 trillion today.
“Can we just see if we can go back to normal? Where were we before COVID? What was our trajectory before that?” he asked in a CNN interview Thursday. “How did it grow so quickly? How do we have so many things that are so necessary that weren’t before?” he said of the federal budget and debt.
The White House branded the House Freedom Caucus’ deficit plan as “tax breaks for the super wealthy and wasteful spending for special interests,” as the two sides continued to trade jabs amid an escalating debt ceiling battle.
“MAGA House Republicans are proposing, if spread evenly across affected discretionary programs, at least a 20 [percent] across the board cut,” White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt said in an initial analysis of the proposal.
LaBolt pointed to several typically Republican issue areas that would be impacted by such cuts, including law enforcement, border security, education and manufacturing.
“The one thing MAGA Republicans do want to protect are tax cuts for the super-wealthy,” he added. “This means that their plan, with all of the sacrifices they are asking of working-class Americans, will reduce the deficit by…$0.”
The Freedom Caucus on Friday unveiled its initial spending demands for a possible debt ceiling increase, as the potential for default looms this summer. The proposal would cap discretionary spending at fiscal 2022 levels for 10 years, resulting in a $131 billion cut from current levels. Defense spending would be maintained at current levels.
LaBolt claimed that the proposal would also defund police and make the border less secure, turning around two accusations that Republicans have frequently lobbed at the Biden administration.
Such spending cuts would, according to LaBolt’s analysis, eliminate funding for 400 state, local and tribal police officers and several thousand FBI agents and personnel and “deny the men and women of Customs and Border Protection the resources they need to secure our borders.”
He also criticized the Freedom Caucus’s calls to end President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and to rescind unspent COVID-19 and Inflation Reduction Act funds, claiming they would increase prescription drug and energy costs and ship manufacturing jobs overseas.
The analysis also accused the group of hard-line conservatives of making plans that would actually increase the federal deficit by $114 billion, and allow “the wealthy and big corporations to continue to cheat on their taxes.” Biden’s $6.8 trillion budget released on Thursday included tax hikes on the wealthy.
LaBolt’s 20 percent number represents a slight adjustment from Biden’s claim on Friday that the plan would require a 25 percent cut in discretionary spending across the board.
“If what they say they mean, they’re going to keep the tax cuts from the last president … no additional taxes on the wealthy — matter of fact reducing taxes — and in addition to that, on top of that, they’re going to say we have to cut 25 percent of every program across the broad,” Biden said during remarks on the economy. “I don’t know what there’s much to negotiate on.”
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.) hit back at the president on Friday, accusing him of misrepresenting their proposal. “For him to mention things like firefighters, police officers and health care — obviously, either he didn’t watch the press conference, he can’t read, or someone is, you know, got their hand up his back and they’re speaking for him, because those are just abject lies,” Perry told The Hill. “It’s the same old, you know, smear-and-fear campaign by the Biden administration.” (Courtesy: CNN)
Mayor Eric L. Johnson announced last week he has appointed Arun Agarwal to serve as Chair of the Community Bond Task Force (CBTF) Committee as part of the 2024 Capital Bond Program development process.
Agarwal currently serves as the President of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board, the CEO of Dallas-based textile company Nextt, and the Vice Chair of the Texas Economic Development Board, in addition to his other civic and business endeavors.
Picture : ET
The CBTF is a 15-member group that will assist the Dallas City Council and city staff in reviewing and selecting projects for possible inclusion in the 2024 Capital Bond Program. Agarwal and his colleagues on the task force will assess the city’s $13.5 billion needs inventory and recommend to the Dallas City Council a $1 billion package of priorities. The City Council will ultimately make the final decisions on ballot propositions and whether to call a bond election.
Mayor Johnson said that he wants the city’s next bond program to focus primarily on improving the “Three P’s” — public safety, potholes, and parks. “We are working every day to make Dallas a safer, stronger, and more vibrant city — and we are making substantial, measurable progress,” Mayor Johnson said. “The upcoming bond program will provide us with a critical opportunity to build for our future by investing in public safety, in infrastructure, and in our most significant needs. Arun Agarwal has proven to be an effective and engaged leader in our city, and I am confident he will advocate for the right priorities for the people of Dallas.”
Bond programs, which must receive voter approval, are meant to pay for the city’s capital needs. That means the authorized funds cannot legally pay for salaries, benefits, and other ongoing programmatic costs.
Mayor Johnson said Agarwal’s appointment underscores his administration’s commitment to ensuring that parks are treated as a top priority in the bond program.
“While Dallas has many needs to address through our bond program, I believe parks, trails, playgrounds, and recreation centers are critical infrastructure in a modern city,” Mayor Johnson said. “When I was growing up in West Dallas and Oak Cliff, families like mine — folks who didn’t have access to private swimming pools, gym memberships, or country club memberships — depended on our city’s parks, trails, and recreation centers. Parks are a great equalizer for our communities, as well as an excellent driver of economic development. And I am confident that Arun Agarwal will be a strong advocate for our green spaces.”
Agarwal said he is “honored to be appointed as chair of this community-focused group that will help guide critical discussions about our city’s future.”
“I am particularly excited to help make major investments in parks, trails, and recreational facilities,” Agarwal said. “Mayor Johnson has been a true champion for our city’s parks and for the efforts to build a safer and more vibrant city. I look forward to working with Mayor Johnson, my colleagues on the task force, and the residents of Dallas as we prioritize our city’s most pressing needs.”
Even as the brouhaha over the incident of the tricolour being pulled down at the Indian High Commission building in London had barely died down, videos of a mob attacking the Indian consulate in the US city of San Francisco have surfaced.
As per reports, with loud music playing in the background, a large mob is seen in the video, attacking the Indian consulate, spray-painting a huge graffiti on its outer wall, saying “Free Amritpal”.
In fact, according to reports, several videos, apparently filmed by the miscreants themselves, showed men breaking glass doors and windows of the consulate building with butts of poles with Khalistani flags.
Employees of the consulate were later seen removing the flags in the videos, when suddenly a mob can seen breaking through a barricade from behind which they were shouting slogans. The employees can be seen running inside the building with the protestors trying to follow them.
Videos further showed that after doors of the consulate were slammed shut on their faces, the protestors starting hitting them with flags, while one of them smashed the windows of the building with a sword. (IANS)
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Moscow this week for a bilateral Summit. As per reports, the meetings yielded no breakthrough on resolving the conflict in Ukraine.
Both leaders called for the cessation of actions that “increase tensions” and “prolong” the war in Ukraine, according to their joint statement released by China’s Foreign Ministry. The statement did not acknowledge that Russia’s invasion and military assault were the cause of ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.
The leaders also urged NATO to “respect the sovereignty, security, interests,” of other countries – a reference that appeared to echo long-standing rhetoric from both countries blaming the Western security alliance for provoking Russia to invade.
Discussion of China’s murky proposal to end the war in Ukraine appeared only in the last section of their joint statement, offering no specifics about a way forward. In a warning to Western countries supporting Ukraine, it said that any settlement to the crisis must “prevent the formation of confrontational blocs that add fuel to the flames.”
China’s peace plan for Ukraine could be used as a basis to end the war, Vladimir Putin has said. But, Putin said the plan could be put forward only when they are ready “in the West and Kyiv”.
China’s plan, published last month, does not explicitly call for Russia to leave Ukraine.
Listing 12 points, it calls for peace talks and respect for national sovereignty, without specific proposals. But Ukraine has insisted on Russia withdrawing from its territory as a condition for any talks – and there is no sign that Russia is ready to do that.
In a joint news conference after talks with Xi, Putin said: “Many provisions of the Chinese peace plan can be taken as the basis for settling of the conflict in Ukraine, whenever the West and Kyiv are ready for it.” But Russia had yet to see such “readiness” from the other side, he added.
Xi Jinping has wrapped up a state visit to Moscow, where he held nearly three full days of talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The two men have a close relationship and have met 40 times now in the last decade.
Putin had long been shunned by Western leaders over the invasion. And yet in meetings with Xi before cameras, the Chinese leader praised Putin’s “strong leadership” — even encouraging Russians to support another term for their president when he stands for reelection in 2024.
Xi said he was “very happy” to be in Moscow and described talks with President Putin as “frank, open and friendly”. His visit to Russia came days after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Putin on war crimes allegations.
The New York Times summed up the visit this way: “Talk of Ukraine was overshadowed by Mr. Xi’s vow of ironclad solidarity with Russia as a political, diplomatic, economic and military partner: two superpowers aligned in countering American dominance and a Western-led world order. The summit showed Mr. Xi’s intention to entrench Beijing’s tilt toward Moscow against what he recently called an effort by the United States at the full-fledged “containment” of China.”
“Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) – Connecticut Chapter is a vibrant organization that brings rich contributions for Stamford spanning education to business, innovation, arts and culture,” said Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons who was present to administer the Oath of office for the newly elected GOPIO-CT executive council and board of trustees on Friday, March 17, 2023 at the Stamford Hampton Inn and Suites in Stamford, Connecticut.
The program, put together by Ms. Ashvini Persaud and Dr. Anita Mathur, started with a prayer and an introduction about GOPIO by its founder and chairman Dr. Thomas Abraham, who said that Indian Diaspora has achieved political mainstream in many countries and currently serves heads of state in the UK, Ireland, Guyana, Suriname, Seychelles and Mauritius.
Dr. Abraham said, “Indian Diaspora is proud of its achievement in the political arena as well as in the corporate world with many persons of Indian origin heading large multinational companies.”
All through the evening, fabulous singers Sreenivas Gunupuru, Sonali Gannu and Anthony Persaud with DJ Ryan Persaud, entertained the audience.
Mayor Simmons started off thanking Dr. Abraham, all members of GOPIO-CT and the entire leadership team for everything they do for Stamford City and the generous contributions for the local community.
“How proud we are to the Indian American community and the rich contributions brought to our city for so many years – everything from education to business, innovation, arts and culture as well as the organization’s activities have brought so much vibrancy to our city,” said Mayor Simmons.
Picture : TheUNN
GOPIO-CT has been funding a local community service organization every year. For 202, the chapter selected Mill River Park Collaborative (MRPC) which organizes activities for children and adults of all ages as well. A check for $5000 was presented by GOPIO-CT’s immediate past president Ashok Nichani to the MRPC Board Chairman Arnold Karp and the Director of Operations Dianne Houtz in the presence of Mayor Simmons. The activities for the year were inaugurated by the Chief Guest Mayor Caroline Simmons.
Mayor Simmons said that she and her team look forward to working with GOPIO-CT and supporting its initiatives to build a more inclusive and equitable society. She then administered the oath of office to the newly elected 2023 Executive Committee, Board, Trustees and the new president. Delegates from various service organizations were present at the event including Women’s Mentoring Network, Future 5 and Stamford Public Library.
President Dr. Jaya Daptardar officially welcomed new GOPIO CT Executive board members team Executive VP Mahesh Jhangiani, Vice President Prachi Narayan, Secretary Sushanth Krishnamurthy, Joint Secretary Ashwini Persaud, Treasurer Srinivas Akarapu, Immediate past President Ashok Nichani who served from 2019 to 2022; Board members: Meera Banta, Dilli Bhatta, Ruby Chadda, Ravi Dhingra, Sonali Gannu, Nandu Kuppusamy, Manish Maheswari, Dr. Anita Mathur, Vikas Mathur, Ravi Nichani, Mangal Shah and Dr. Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox; Trustees: Shelly Nichani, Prasad Chintalapudi, Joe Simon, Shailesh Naik, Dr. Thomas Abraham and Neelam Narang. “We will all work together with GOPIO Chairman, trustees and board members to serve the community and will make sure to make the difference,” Dr. Daptardar added.
The newly elected President Dr. Jaya Daptardar spoke about the recent fundraiser. She said “On Feb 6th earthquake struck southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria. GOPIO CT executive team came together in raising funds for Turkey disaster relief. Our GOPIO CT immediate past president Mr. Ashok Nichani contacted Turkey embassy and found resources to send the required aid. We couldn’t find reliable resources to send relief to Syria but we did as much as we could for the survivors in Turkey. Together 5000 dollars of needed supplies such as food, tent, men’s and women’s jackets, baby formulae, children’s clothes and orthopedic supplies were sent by Turkish Airlines.”
Dr. Daptardar presented the 2023 GOPIO events and activities overview which includes a seminar on investments and tax tips in April, Health and Wellness seminar in May on Mental Health as part of the Mental Health Awareness, “Hope in Motion’ Walkathon on June 11th to raise funds for Bennet Cancer Center of the Stamford Hospital, India Day Celebration on August 6th, Welcome Dinner for Indian students at UConn in September, Diwali party in November and partnering with community Diwali event at Ferguson library in Stamford and finally Holiday Party in December which will raise funds for a local charity.
Sponsors of the event were International Museum of the Saree (Queens, NY), Infinity Solutions (Stamford, CT), Wayne Purville of Cero Communications (Mount Vernon, NY), Braj Agrawal CPA (Jackson Heights, NY), Dr. Rajesh Kalra of NCR Care (Queens, NY). GOPIO-CT Vice President Prachi Narayan gave the vote of thanks. The program continued with Bollywood music and dance.
Over the last 17 years, GOPIO-CT, a chapter of GOPIO International has become an active and dynamic organization hosting interactive sessions with policy makers and academicians, community events, youth mentoring and networking workshops, and working with other area organizations to help create a better future. GOPIO-CT – Global Organization of People of Indian Origin – serves as a non-partisan, secular, civic and community service organization – promoting awareness of Indian culture, customs and contributions of PIOs through community programs, forums, events and youth activities. It seeks to strengthen partnerships and create an ongoing dialogue with local community.
The International Criminal Court has reported that it has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes, accusing him of personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.
According to reports, this is the first time the global court has issued a warrant against a leader of one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The ICC said in a statement that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of (children) and that of unlawful transfer of (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
ICC President Piotr Hofmanski said in a video statement that while the ICC’s judges have issued the warrants, it will be up to the international community to enforce them. The court has no police force of its own to do so.
The ICC said its pre-trial chamber found “reasonable grounds” that Putin “bears individual criminal responsibility” for the child abductions “for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others” and for failing to “exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts.”
If tried and found guilty, the ICC can impose a maximum sentence of life imprisonment “when justified by the extreme gravity of the crime,” according to its founding treaty, the Rome Statute, that established it as a permanent court of last resort to prosecute political leaders and other key perpetrators of the world’s worst atrocities — war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The move was immediately dismissed by Moscow — and welcomed by Ukraine as a major breakthrough. Its practical implications, however, could be limited as the chances of Putin facing trial at the ICC are highly unlikely because Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction or extradite its nationals.
But the moral condemnation will likely stain the Russian leader for the rest of his life — and in the more immediate future, whenever he seeks to attend an international summit in a nation bound to arrest him.
Ukraine’s human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, has said that based on data from the country’s National Information Bureau, 16,226 children were deported. Ukraine has managed to bring back 308 children.
“So, Putin might go to China, Syria, Iran, his … few allies, but he just won’t travel to the rest of the world and won’t travel to ICC member states who he believes would … arrest him,” said Adil Ahmad Haque, an expert in international law and armed conflict at Rutgers University.
Others agreed. “Vladimir Putin will forever be marked as a pariah globally. He has lost all his political credibility around the world. Any world leader who stands by him will be shamed as well,” David Crane, a former international prosecutor, told The Associated Press.
The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation. The AP reported on her involvement in the abduction of Ukrainian orphans in October, in the first investigation to follow the process all the way to Russia, relying on dozens of interviews and documents.
Still, the chances of Putin or Lvova-Belova facing trial remain extremely remote, as Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction — a position it vehemently reaffirmed last week. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia doesn’t recognize the ICC and considers its decisions “legally void.” He called the court’s move “outrageous and unacceptable.” Peskov refused to comment when asked if Putin would avoid making trips to countries where he could be arrested on the ICC’s warrant.
Lvova-Belova, who was also implicated in the warrants, reacted with dripping sarcasm. “It is great that the international community has appreciated the work to help the children of our country, that we do not leave them in war zones, that we take them out, we create good conditions for them, that we surround them with loving, caring people,” she said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a “historic decision, from which historic responsibility will begin.” Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador, recalled that on the night of Russia’s invasion, “I said at the Security Council meeting that there is no purgatory for war criminals, they go straight to hell. Today, I would like to say that those of them who will remain alive after the military defeat of Russia will have to make a stop in The Hague on their way to hell.”
In Washington, President Joe Biden called the ICC’s decision “justified,” and that Putin “clearly committed war crimes.” While the US does not recognize the court either, Biden said it “makes a very strong point” to call out the Russian leader’s actions in ordering the invasion.
While Ukraine is also not a member of the global court, it has granted it jurisdiction over its territory and ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has visited four times since opening an investigation a year ago. Besides Russia and Ukraine, the United States and China are not members of the 123-member ICC.
During a visit this month, ICC prosecutor Khan said he went to a care home for children 2 kilometers (just over a mile) from front lines in southern Ukraine. “The drawings pinned on the wall … spoke to a context of love and support that was once there,” he said in a statement. “But this home was empty, a result of alleged deportation of children from Ukraine to the Russian Federation or their unlawful transfer to other parts of the temporarily occupied territories. As I noted to the United Nations Security Council last September, these alleged acts are being investigated by my office as a priority. Children cannot be treated as the spoils of war,” Khan said.
And while Russia rejected the allegations and warrants, others said the ICC action will have an important impact. “The ICC has made Putin a wanted man and taken its first step to end the impunity that has emboldened perpetrators in Russia’s war against Ukraine for far too long,” said Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “The warrants send a clear message that giving orders to commit, or tolerating, serious crimes against civilians may lead to a prison cell in The Hague.”
Crane, who indicted Liberian President Charles Taylor 20 years ago for crimes in Sierra Leone, said dictators and tyrants around the world “are now on notice that those who commit international crimes will be held accountable.” Taylor was eventually detained and put on trial at a special court in the Netherlands. He was convicted and sentenced to 50 years’ imprisonment.
On Thursday, a U.N.-backed inquiry cited Russian attacks against civilians in Ukraine, including systematic torture and killing in occupied regions, among potential issues that amount to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. The sweeping investigation also found crimes committed against Ukrainians on Russian territory, including deported Ukrainian children who were prevented from reuniting with their families, a “filtration” system aimed at singling out Ukrainians for detention, and torture and inhumane detention conditions.
Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued a warrant for President Vladimir Putin’s arrest, it is no more than the first step in a very long process. The United Nations clearly believes there is sufficient evidence to accuse the Russian leader of war crimes in Ukraine.
The court was established in 2002 by a treaty known as the Rome Statute. This statute lays down that it is the duty of every state to exercise its own criminal jurisdiction over those responsible for international crimes. The ICC can only intervene where a state is unable or unwilling to carry out the investigation and prosecute perpetrators. In all, 123 states have agreed to abide by it, but there are some significant exceptions, including Russia.
The idea of trying people for crimes against humanity pre-dates the existence of the ICC. It began in 1945 after World War Two with the Nuremberg Trials, which were held to punish key members of the hierarchy in Nazi Germany for the Holocaust and other atrocities.
Those included Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and died by his own hand in 1987. Putin has not actually been charged with crimes against humanity, even though US Vice-President Kamala Harris has argued that he should be.
The arrest warrant is being seen as a signal from the international community that what is taking place in Ukraine is against international law. The court says the reason it is going public with these warrants is that these crimes are continuing. In doing so, it is trying to deter further crimes taking place.
After years of facing investigation after investigation, former President Donald Trump says one of those probes will lead to his arrest. President Trump reported that he expects to be arrested, and has urged his supporters to launch mass protests. Trump claimed in a post on his social media platform that he would be arrested related to the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
On Saturday last week, Trump wrote on his social networking site Truth Social that “illegal leaks” from the Manhattan district attorney’s office “indicate” he would be arrested on Tuesday, March 21st. As part of the post, Trump also called on his supporters to protest.
His lawyer is reported to have said there had been no communication from law enforcement and the former president’s post was based on media reports. Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, said her team had not heard anything from law enforcement officials. The district attorney’s office has not yet commented. “Since this is a political prosecution, the district attorney’s office has engaged in a practice of leaking everything to the press, rather than communicating with President Trump’s attorneys as would be done in a normal case,” she said.
In a statement, a Trump spokesperson appeared to walk back the comments. The spokesperson said there is no notification the DA “has decided to take his Witch-Hunt to the next level. President Trump is rightfully highlighting his innocence and the weaponization of our injustice system. He will be in Texas next weekend for a giant rally.”
This case focuses on alleged hush money paid on Trump’s behalf by his lawyer to porn star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election. It is one of several cases in which the 76-year-old is currently being investigated, although he has not yet been charged in any and denies wrongdoing in each.
The Stormy Daniels case is about how Trump reimbursed his lawyer Michael Cohen after Cohen paid Ms Daniels $130,000. The record for the payment reimbursing Cohen says the payment was for “legal fees”. Prosecutors may say this amounts to Trump falsifying business records, a misdemeanor in New York.
Cohen has said that at Trump’s direction, he arranged payments totaling $280,000 to porn actor Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. According to Cohen, the payouts were to buy their silence about Trump, who was then in the thick of his first presidential campaign.
Cohen and federal prosecutors said the company paid him $420,000 to reimburse him for the $130,000 payment to Daniels and to cover bonuses and other supposed expenses. The company classified those payments internally as legal expenses. The $150,000 payment to McDougal was made by the then-publisher of the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, which kept her story from coming to light.
The case of Stormy Daniels is one of several legal woes facing the former US President. Donald Trump faces a separate criminal investigation over efforts to overturn his narrow loss in the state of Georgia in the 2020 presidential election – though it is not known if the former president is being directly investigated.
The Department of Justice is also looking at whether classified government documents were handled incorrectly after Trump left office, as well as broader efforts to undermine the results of the presidential election three years ago – including the January 6th attack.
Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to continue his campaign to become the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election, even if he is indicted. Any indictment would create a complicated calculation for Trump’s rivals within the Republican Party, as they decide whether to up their attacks on the former president while he is potentially distracted or keep their heads down and hope for the best.
Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and ex-aides Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, are among those reported to have given evidence so far. The Trump team has said the former president declined an invitation to appear, a sign the case is almost over, according to experts. Reports suggest one final witness could give evidence, possibly on Monday.
Once the investigation is complete, the grand jury votes on whether to recommend criminal charges. However, their verdict is not binding. Ultimately, it is up to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to determine what, if any, charges to bring. There is no deadline for this. It is a legal decision – what does he believe can he prove beyond a reasonable doubt to win a conviction – but also a deeply political one.
A former US president has never been indicted before but Trump’s lawyer said he would follow normal procedure. Typically, a defendant is either arrested or surrenders to the authorities – if they are facing a more serious felony charge they would be handcuffed. They then have their photo and fingerprints taken. After an initial hearing – called an arraignment – a defendant in a white-collar crime case like this is usually released until the next court date.
The Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, has hit out at the investigation, calling it “an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA [district attorney]”. In a tweet, he also promised to investigate whether federal money was being used to interfere in elections “with politically motivated prosecutions”.
According to analysts, past efforts to investigate him, including two impeachment trials, the Russia investigation and the Mar-a-Lago raid, have tended to make him more popular with his base, so an indictment could have a similar effect.
Trump has a loyal base of followers, and the January 6th attack on the US Capitol by his supporters following his repeated calls to protest has proven that a fraught situation can quickly escalate into violence.
Trump denies the encounters occurred, says he did nothing wrong and has cast the investigation as a “witch hunt” by a Democratic prosecutor bent on sabotaging the Republican’s 2024 presidential campaign. “Democrats have investigated and attacked President Trump since before he was elected — and they’ve failed every time,” campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement Thursday about the inquiry.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has apparently been examining whether any state laws were broken in connection with the payments or the way Trump’s company compensated Cohen for his work to keep the women’s allegations quiet.
As per reports, prosecutors have been looking at a possible indictment of Trump. Reports say it could come next week. If he is indicted, it would be the first criminal case ever brought against a former US president. There has been no public announcement of any timeframe for the grand jury’s secret work, including any potential vote on whether to indict the ex-president.
Law enforcement officials in New York are making security preparations for the possibility that former President Donald Trump could be indicted in the coming weeks and appear in a Manhattan courtroom in an investigation examining hush money paid to women who alleged sexual encounters with him, law enforcement officials have been quoted to have said.
US media organizations say law enforcement agencies in New York are preparing for the possibility of Trump being indicted and appearing in a Manhattan courtroom as early as next week. According to the Associated Press, they are considering the practicalities of taking a former president into court, including questions around security.
It is not yet known if he is going to be criminally charged this week or even, beyond broad strokes, what those charges might be. But with the former president predicting an arrest, and calling for mass protests, this is a journey into unknown territory.
US Senators Bill Hagerty and Jeff Merkley have introduced a bipartisan Senate resolution reaffirming the US’ recognition of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as an “integral part of the Republic of India”.
The resolution comes following a major clash between India and China in the Eastern Sector along the Line of Actual Control in six years.
China claims India’s Arunachal Pradesh as part of its territory, calling it “Southern Tibet”. The two countries fought a bloody battle in 1962 in the region.
Named after British official Sir Henry McMahon, it’s a frontier between Tibet and colonial India in the eastern sector which was negotiated during the 1914 Simla Convention. China has never recognized this boundary though.
The present de facto border, the Line of Actual Control (LAC), runs from Arunachal Pradesh in the east to Ladakh in the west.
Picture : Monday India
“This bipartisan resolution expresses the Senate’s support for unequivocally recognizing the state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of India, condemning China’s military aggression to change the status quo along the Line of Actual Control,” Senator Bill Hagerty, who along with Senator Jeff Merkley introduced a resolution in the Senate, said on Tuesday.
Furthermore, the resolution commends India for taking steps to defend itself against aggression and security threats from China. These efforts include securing India’s telecommunications infrastructure; examining its procurement processes and supply chains; implementing investment screening standards; and expanding its cooperation with Taiwan in public health and other sectors.
“At a time when China continues to pose grave and gathering threats to the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, it’s critical for the US to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our strategic partners in the region — especially India,” said Senator Hagerty in a statement.
“This bipartisan resolution expresses the Senate’s support for unequivocally recognizing the state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of India, condemning China’s military aggression to change the status quo along the Line of Actual Control, and further enhancing the US-India strategic partnership and the Quad in support of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific.
“America’s values supporting freedom and a rules-based order must be at the center of all of our actions and relationships around the world — especially as the Chinese government pushes an alternative vision,” said Senator Merkley.
“This resolution makes clear that the US views the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of India — not China — and commits the US to deepening support and assistance to the region, alongside like-minded international partners and donors.”
The resolution reaffirms that the US recognizes the McMahon Line as the international boundary between China and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and pushes back against China’s claims that Arunachal Pradesh is its territory, which is a part of China’s increasingly aggressive and expansionist policies, the statement said.
The Senators’ resolution condemns additional Chinese provocations, including China’s use of military force to change the status quo along the Line of Actual Control, construction of villages in contested areas, publication of maps with Mandarin-language names for cities and features in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and expansion of Chinese territorial claims in Bhutan.
Furthermore, the resolution commends the Indian government for taking steps to defend itself against aggression and security threats from China. These efforts include securing India’s telecommunications infrastructure; examining its procurement processes and supply chains; implementing investment screening standards; and expanding its cooperation with Taiwan in public health and other sectors, the Senators said.
A bipartisan bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to properly utilize the employment-based visas currently allocated each year under existing federal immigration law.
Democrat Indian-American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi and Republican Larry Bucshon introduced the Eliminating Backlogs Act of 2023 to provide “greater flexibility to use existing allotted work visas”.
“Even as our country’s high-skilled immigration system helps us draw top talent from around the world, current law caps the number of employment-based visas available based on workers’ country of origin, leaving thousands of visas that would otherwise help our economy unused,” Krishnamoorthi said. The legislation is aimed at ending country-based discrimination in high-skilled immigration to ens
Every year Congress allows for a set number of foreign nationals with specific skills and training to come to the U.S. for work. This helps ensure that American businesses have access to the skilled labor force they need to succeed. Each nation is capped at receiving only seven percent of the allotted employment-based slots in any year. Due to this per-country limitation and bureaucratic delays, U.S. immigration officials failed to utilize approximately 9,100 employment-based visas in FY2020 and over 66,000 in FY2021.
In 2022, the U.S. saw record demand for technology workers, which resulted in a lower likelihood of being selected than in previous years, overall. USCIS received 483,927 registrations in 2022, which was a 57% increase over the 308,613 received in 2021 and a 76% increase over the 274,237 received in 2020. Individuals from India and China account for an estimated 80% of registrations, per USCIS.
While USCIS selected 42% of the registrations in 2021 over three different rounds of selection, in 2022 USCIS completed the cap in a single round of selection, selecting 127,600 registrations for the 85,000 spots available. This amounted to a 26% selection rate, a significant decrease over the year prior.
By removing the per-country cap, individuals from countries with higher numbers of H-1B applicants, like India and China, will be available to fill much-needed roles.
This is the latest effort to address employment-based visa backlogs. In 2022, the Equal Access to Green cards for Legal Employment (EAGLE) Act proposed a similar approach, among other efforts. The Build Back Better Act also included proposed changes to immigration processes. Neither of those proposed efforts saw any forward movement around immigration law.
Senator Charles Schumer, Senate Majority Leader, who has just returned from a trip to India, wherein he led a Congressional delegation of nine Senators followed up with a meeting with the Indian American community here to address the concerns of the fast growing community in the United States. Following his visit to New Delhi, the powerful Senate Leader and a close friend of India has stated, India is precisely the kind of partner the US needs to provide a check against China, powerful American Senator Chuck Schumer told his colleagues.
The meeting with the Indian America leaders was initiated by Dr Raj Bhayani, Mohinder Taneja, Sunil Modi, Dr Sunil Mehra, and Govind Batheja, and was attended among others virtually by New York state Assembly woman Jenifer Rajkumar, Consul General Randeep Jaiswal, Dr. Sudhir Parikh, Dr Raj Narayan, Dr Raj Jinnah, Bobby Kalote and Dr. Mihir Meghani along with 200 national Indian leaders.
Dr Raj Bhayani, Sunil Modi and Mohinder Taneja moderated the meeting and welcomed Majority leader. Sen. Schumer provided an update about his India visit last month. He was exuberantly happy about his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He applauded various programs initiated by Modi government such as gas connections and easy remote internet access empowering rural India.
The Senate Majority Leader led one of the most powerful United States Delegations to India, comprising of eight Senators and several other leaders as part of the US delegation to India, Several initiatives were launched along with strong emphasis on stronger U.S.-India ties in view of the rising Chinese threat. Sen. Schumer said, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appreciates that the two largest democracies of the world need to work together against the hegemony of the China.
In response to a question asked by Dr Raj Bhayani, Sen. Schumer promised to reverse the Medicare cuts this year. In addition, he assured that the Green Card backlog will be cleared soon. He believes high skilled workers such as physicians should be given direct Green Cards instead of H1 or J1 visa and he will work on making it happen.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says ties between the U.S. and India are a “crucial counterweight to outcompete China.” Among the countries’ shared strategic interests, Schumer listed “outcompeting China, combating climate change, increasing trade and deepening bonds between our two countries” as well as “close cooperation between the U.S. and India in areas such as AI, green hydrogen and advanced tech manufacturing.”
The delegation visited several sites such as Raj Ghat and Jaipur foot and had dinner hosted by Anand Mahindra apart from various joint meetings with Indian government. “I strongly believe the continued and strengthened U.S.-India relationship will be the great story that will define the 21st century,” Schumer said.
At the conclusion of meeting, the Senate Majority Leader promised that he plans to organize regular meetings every quarter with an objective of strengthening Indo-US relationship and to address the concerns of the Indian Americans in the United States.
In addition to India making a remarkable mark on world stage, the 95th Academy awards were significant for another reason. It was not just India’s night, but all of Asia, with ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ making a clean sweep of almost every award it was nominated for. Michelle Yeoh as the first Asian Best Actress winner, and only the second person of colour to win that trophy after Halle Berry in 2002 for ‘Monster’s Ball’, spoke of her Oscar as ‘a beacon of hope and possibilities’.
The manic multiverse fantasy, about a fractured family swept up in an interdimensional adventure, also delivered wins for best actress, best director, best supporting actor, best supporting actress, best editing and best original screenplay at the 95th Academy Awards ceremony held on Sunday, March 12th, 2023. It was the most nominated film of the night.
Michelle Yeoh became only the second woman of color to win the best actress Oscar, following in the footsteps of Halle Berry in 2002. “For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight this is a beacon of hope and possibility,” she said, before adding: “Ladies don’t ever let anyone tell you you are past your prime.”
Ke Huy Quan was named best supporting actor for his role in the film, beating Barry Keoghan and Judd Hirsch. He is the first Vietnam-born actor to win an Oscar. “Mom, I just won an Oscar!” he said tearfully. “They say stories like this only happen in the movies, I cannot believe this is happening to me.”
Picture : Rolling Stone
The win built on the tremendous 2020 ‘Parasite’ sweep when Bong Joon Ho won the best director, and the film won both the best picture AND the best international feature film. EEAAO won seven, yes count them, Oscars. Vietnam-born Ke Huy Kwan won Best Supporting Actor, Jamie Lee Curtis, who really should have won for her breakout perf in A Fish Called Wanda ( yes, way back in 1988), finally got hers with a Best Supporting Actress, the Daniels won the Best Director: the film also picked up awards for Best Original Screenplay and Editing.
In an industry where race and representation have mostly stayed buzz words, the ‘Everything Everywhere..’ triumph feels like a shift, where people of colour are being seen and celebrated for who they are, and what they bring to the table, even if the film often feels laden with too many nods to Asians-in-America stereotypes. But what a performance from Yeoh, and a well-deserved win: there was no better film to have got this award in this year.
I’m sad that the fabulous ‘Banshees of Insherin’, a tale of two most unusual best friends buoyed by a terrific performance from Colin Farrell (an infinitely harder one to pull off as compared to Brendan Fraser’s prosthetic-laden turn in ‘The Whale’, which won the latter the Best Actor) and the gentle donkey Jenny, lost out the Best Picture to EEAAO, but I’m very happy that the latter won, won big, and won so emphatically. Thus proving that it is quite possible to be happy and sad at the same time. Now excuse me while I play ‘Naatu Naatu’ at full volume, all over again.
Indian startups that have millions of dollars stuck with the troubled Silicon Valley Bank are waiting for business hours in the US to resume Monday and could withdraw all their money from the bank en masse. The only thing that could stop that is if the US government manages to find a buyer for the beleaguered bank, reports said.
Courtesy a maneuver of the US government on March 12th, businesses with accounts at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will have full access to their deposits, unlike a previous measure where only an insured amount of $250,000 would have been immediately accessible. As of December 2022, SVB had $209 billion in total assets and about $175 billion in total deposits.
SVB collapsed Friday morning after a stunning 48 hours in which a bank run and a capital crisis led to the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history. The chaos instigated by high interest rates led to an old-fashioned bank run on Thursday, in which depositors yanked $42 billion from SVB.
When the FDIC took control of the bank Friday, it said it would pay customers their insured deposits on Monday, which only covers up to $250,000. But there’s a lot of money – and influence – at stake. SVB provided financing for almost half of US venture-backed technology and health care companies. At the end of 2022, the bank said it had $151.5 billion in uninsured deposits, $137.6 billion of which was held by US depositors.
Though a lot of money may have come out during the bank run and customers could receive some uninsured funds as the government liquidates SVB, they are still unsure if they can recover all their cash.
Fearing a larger fall out from the bank collapse, the United States government mobilized immediately in response to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, working over the weekend to insure depositors who had more than $200 billion of venture capital and high-tech start-up money stored in the two banks.
But unlike the 2008 financial crisis, during which Congress passed new legislation in order to salvage the country’s largest banks, the current rescue plan is smaller in scale, pertains to only two banks, and isn’t additional taxpayer money — for now.
In order to make sure depositors can still withdraw funds from their accounts — the vast majority of which exceeded the $250,000 limit for standard insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) — regulators say they’re pulling from a special fund maintained by the FDIC called the deposit insurance fund (DIF).
“For the two banks that were put into receivership, the FDIC will use funds from the deposit insurance fund to ensure that all of its depositors are made whole,” a Treasury official told reporters on Sunday night. “In that case the deposit insurance funded is bearing the risk. This is not funds from the taxpayer.”
Where the money comes from
The money in the DIF comes from insurance premiums that banks are required to pay into it as well as interest earned on funds invested in U.S. bonds and other securities and obligations.
This is why some observers have been saying that the term “bailout” shouldn’t be used in reference to the current government intervention — because it’s bank money plus interest that’s being used to insure depositors, and it’s only being administered by the federal government.
But standing behind the DIF is the “the full faith and credit of the United States government,” according to the FDIC, meaning that if the DIF runs out of money or encounters a problem, the Treasury could call on taxpayers as a next resort.
This is not an impossibility. The DIF had a $125 billion balance as of the last quarter of 2022 and SVB reported $212 billion in assets in the same quarter. Treasury officials sounded confident on Sunday night the money in the DIF would be more than enough to cover SVB’s deposits.
The Fed steps in for backup
To settle fears of a potential shortfall, the Federal Reserve announced an additional line of credit known as a Bank Term Funding Program, offering loans of up to one year to banks, credit unions, and other types of depository institutions. For collateral, the Fed will take U.S. bonds and mortgage-backed securities, and the line of credit will be backed up by $25 billion from the Treasury’s $38 billion Exchange Stabilization Fund.
“Both of these steps are likely to increase confidence among depositors, though they stop short of an FDIC guarantee of uninsured accounts as was implemented in 2008,” analysts for Goldman Sachs wrote in a Sunday note to investors.
“The Dodd-Frank Act limits the FDIC’s authority to provide guarantees by requiring congressional passage of a joint resolution of approval, which is only marginally easier than passing a new legislation. Given the actions announced today, we do not expect near-term actions in Congress to provide guarantees,” they wrote.
Even as the US government scrambles to find a buyer for the bank, SVB’s UK arm was sold to HSBC for £1, the Bank of England and the British government announced Monday morning. Sheila Bair, former chairperson of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – which took over the bank after it was shut down –told the US press that finding a buyer for SVB was “the best outcome.”
India impact
While the British arm of SVB has managed to find a buyer in the UK, that is unlikely to calm Indian startups since they primarily have deposited their money with the US-based SVB, which is headquartered in New York.
The fallout of SVB’s collapse could be far-reaching. Startups may be unable to pay employees in the coming days and venture capital firms may be unable to raise funds. The tech industry is the biggest customer of SVB with a large number of Indian startups, especially in the SaaS (software as a service) sector that services US clients, having accounts at the bank.
Additional loans
Instead of a total government bailout that would have required taxpayer money, the United States’ Federal Reserve announced that it would make available additional loans to eligible depository institutions to help assure that banks have the ability to meet the needs of all their depositors.
A new entity called the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) will be created and it will offer loans of up to one year in length to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions. Those taking advantage of the facility will be asked to pledge high-quality collateral such as Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities.
While relatively unknown outside Silicon Valley, SVB was among the top 20 American commercial banks, with $209 billion in total assets at the end of last year, according to the FDIC. It’s the largest lender to fail since Washington Mutual collapsed in 2008.
The announcement was surprising yet expected. The two regional powerhouses have been in talks to re-establish diplomatic relations for nearly two years. At times, negotiators seemed to drag their feet, the deep distrust between the two countries appearing immovable.
Iran’s talks with Saudi Arabia were unfolding at the same time as negotiations between Iran and the United States to revive the 2016 nuclear deal were faltering. The outcomes of both sets of Iran talks seemed interlinked – Riyadh and Washington have long walked in lockstep on foreign policy.
Picture : NBC
But a shift in regional alliances is afoot. Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the US has become strained in recent years, while China’s standing has risen. Unlike Washington, Beijing has shown an ability to transcend the many rivalries that crisscross the Middle East. China has forged good diplomatic relations with countries across the region, driven by strengthening economic ties, without the Western lectures on human rights.
Xi gave no details of the ruling Communist Party’s plans in a speech to China’s ceremonial legislature. But Beijing has been increasingly assertive since he took power in 2012 and called for changes in the International Monetary Fund and other entities it says fail to reflect the desires of developing countries.
China should “actively participate in the reform and construction of the global governance system” and promote “global security initiatives,” said Xi, the country’s most powerful leader in decades. That will add “positive energy to world peace and development,” Xi said.
Last week, Xi was named to another term in the ceremonial presidency after breaking with tradition in October and awarding himself a third-five year term as general secretary of the ruling party, putting himself on track to become leader for life.
The National People’s Congress on March 12th cemented Xi’s dominance by endorsing the appointment of his loyalists as premier and other government leaders in a once-a-decade change. Xi has sidelined potential rivals and loaded the top ranks of the ruling party with his supporters.
The new premier, Li Qiang, tried Monday to reassure entrepreneurs but gave no details of possible plans to improve conditions after Xi’s government spent the past decade building up state companies that control banking, energy, steel, telecoms and other industries.
Li’s comments echoed promises by other Chinese leaders over the past six months to support entrepreneurs who generate jobs and wealth. They have vowed to simplify regulations and taxes but have given no indication they plan to rein in state companies that entrepreneurs complain drain away their profits.
The ruling party will “treat enterprises of all types of ownership equally” and “support the development and growth of private enterprises,” Li said. “Our leading cadres at all levels must sincerely care about and serve private enterprises,” he said.
Chinese officials earlier indicated anti-monopoly and data security crackdowns that knocked tens of billions of dollars off the stock market value of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and other tech companies were ending. But entrepreneurs were rattled anew in February when a star banker who played a leading role in tech deals disappeared. Bao Fan’s company said he was “cooperating in an investigation” but gave no details.
Li said Beijing will make a priority of job creation as it tries to revive economic growth that sank to 3% last year, the second-lowest level in decades. This year’s official growth target is “around 5%.”
The premier expressed confidence China can cope as its workforce shrinks. The number of potential workers age 15 to 59 has fallen by more than 5% from its 2011 peak, an unusually abrupt decline for a middle-income country.
Li said that while China is losing its “demographic dividend” of young workers, better education means it is gaining a “talent dividend.” He said some 15 million people still enter the workforce every year. “Abundant human resources is still China’s outstanding advantage,” he said.
Abroad, Beijing also has built on China’s growing heft as the second-largest economy to promote trade and construction initiatives that Washington, Tokyo, Moscow and New Delhi worry will expand its strategic influence at their expanse.
Those include the multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to construct ports, railways and other trade-related infrastructure across an arc of countries from the South Pacific through Asia to Africa and Europe. China also is promoting trade and security initiatives.
A “Global Security Initiative” issued in February said China is “ready to conduct bilateral and multilateral security cooperation with all countries.” It offered to help African countries resolve disputes and to set up a “new security framework in the Middle East.”
Also last month, Beijing called for a cease-fire in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed Chinese involvement but said success would require action in addition to words. Beijing has refused to criticize President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and has accused Western governments of provoking the invasion.
The agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia could herald the end of a blood-drenched era in the Middle East. Riyadh and Tehran have been at ideological and military loggerheads since Iran’s Islamic Revolution installed an anti-Western, Shia theocracy in 1979.
Those tensions began to escalate into a region-wide proxy war after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq spiraled into civil conflict, with both Iran and Saudi Arabia vying for influence in the petrol-rich Arab country. Armed conflict that pitted Saudi-backed militants against Iran-backed armed groups washed over much of the region in the decade and a half that followed.
In Yemen, a Saudi-led coalition military campaign to quash Iranian-backed rebels triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. In Syria, Iran supported President Bashar al-Assad as he brutalized his own people, only to find his forces facing off with rebels backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. In Lebanon too, Iran and Saudi Arabia have backed different factions, contributing to a two-decade-long political crisis that has exacted a huge economic and security toll on the tiny eastern Mediterranean country.
Diplomatic relations were officially severed in 2016 when Saudi Arabia executed prominent Shia Saudi cleric Nimr al-Nimr, leading rioters in Tehran to torch the Saudi embassy.
But a slew of economic problems triggered by the pandemic and costly wars may have eroded the appetite for conflict, and Saudi and Iranian officials say they are eager to turn the page on that dark chapter.
The détente appears to go far beyond the resumption of diplomatic relations. Saudi and Iranian officials say they will also work to reimplement a decades-old security cooperation pact and revive an even older agreement on technology, and trade.
It’s a rare piece of good news for a region still reeling from their rivalry. How that plays out – and whether it can undo the havoc wreaked by the rivalry – remains to be seen.
But analysts say that China’s growing leverage in the region helped hedge both countries’ bets, changing a now-outdated political calculus that once made Western capitals the most likely venue for watershed regional accords.
“China is now the godfather of this agreement and given China’s strategic importance to Iran, that holds tremendous weight,” said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst familiar with the Saudi leadership’s thinking.
In 1938, Harvard researchers embarked on a study that continues to this day to find out: What makes us happy in life?
The researchers gathered health records from 724 people from all over the world, asking detailed questions about their lives at two-year intervals.
As participants entered mid- and late-life, the Harvard Study often asked about retirement. Based on their responses, the No. 1 challenge people faced in retirement was not being able to replace the social connections that had sustained them for so long at work.
But people who fare the best in retirement find ways to cultivate connections. And yet, almost no one talks about the importance of developing new sources of meaning and purpose.
One participant, when asked what he missed about being a doctor for nearly 50 years, answered: “Absolutely nothing about the work itself. I miss the people and the friendships.”
Leo DeMarco, another participant, had a similar feeling: After he retired as a high school teacher, he found it hard to stay in touch with his colleagues.
“I get spiritual sustenance from talking shop. It’s wonderful to help someone acquire skills,” he said. “Teaching young people was what started my whole process of exploring.”
Taking on hobbies might not be enough
For many of us, work is where we feel that we matter most — to our workmates, customers, communities, and even to our families — because we are providing for them.
Henry Keane was abruptly forced into retirement by changes at his factory. Suddenly he had an abundance of time and energy.
He started volunteering at the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. He put time into his hobbies — refinishing furniture and cross-country skiing. But something was still missing.
“I need to work!” Keane told the researchers at age 65. “Nothing too substantial, but I’m learning that I just love being around people.”
To retire happy, invest in your relationships now
Keane’s realization teaches us an important lesson not only about retirement, but about work itself: We are often shrouded in financial concerns and the pressure of deadlines, so we don’t notice how significant our work relationships are until they’re gone.
To create more meaningful connections, ask yourself:
Who are the people I most enjoy working with, and what makes them valuable to me? Am I appreciating them?
What kinds of connections am I missing that I want more of? How can I make them happen?
Is there someone I’d like to know better? How can I reach out to them?
If I’m having conflict with a coworker, what can I do to alleviate it?
Who is different from me in some way (thinks differently, comes from a different background, has a different expertise)? What can I learn from them?
At the end of the day, notice how your experiences might affect your sense of meaning and purpose. It could be that this influence is, on balance, a good one. But if not, are there any small changes you can make?
“When I look back,” Ellen Freund, a former university administrator, told the study in 2006, “I wish I paid more attention to the people and less to the problems. I loved my job. But I think I was a difficult and impatient boss. I guess, now that you mention it, I wish I got to know everyone a little better.”
Every workday is an important part of our personal experience, and the more we enrich it with relationships, the more we benefit. Work, too, is life.
Virat Kohli finally put an end to his run-drought in Test cricket by hitting his first half-century in red-ball cricket in 16 innings – the longest for him without a Test fifty. Kohli did that on Day 3 of the India vs Australia fourth and final Test in Ahmedabad. In the process, Kohli also became the fifth Indian to reach 4000 Test runs at home, joining an illustrious list headed by Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sunil Gavaskar and Virender Sehwag.
Virat Kohli now has more than 4000 Test runs in India at an average of 58.82. This is the best among batters who have scored more than 4000 Test runs in India.
Picture : HindustanTimes
Kohli is the third fastest to reach 4000 Test runs in India. Kohli did it in his 77th innings in India. He went past current India head coach Rahul Dravid (88) and the legendary Sunil Gavaskar (87). Kohli needed 42 runs to reach the milestone and he got there in the final session on Saturday with a boundary off Nathan Lyon.
A few minutes later, Kohli also reached his fifty. This was his first Test fifty in close to 14 months. The last time he had reached half a ton was back in January, 2022 against South Africa.
Kohli now has more than 4000 Test runs in India at an average of 58.82. This is the best among batters who have scored more than 4000 Test runs in India.
Sehwag is the fastest to reach 4000 Tests in India in just 71 innings. At No.2 is Tendulkar in 78 innings. The little master, however, sits on top among the highest run-scorers in Tests in India with 7216 runs in 153 innings. He is followed by Dravid (5598), Gavaskar (5067) and Sehwag (4656).
Kohli came to the crease after India lost Cheteshwar Pujara just at the stroke of Tea on Day 2. India were in a good position but they were still a long way behind Australia’s first innings total of 480. India needed Kohli to stand up and put another noteworthy stand with Shubman Gill, who had just reached his century.
The former captain had a few nervous moments before the Tea break against Nathan Lyon. He got beaten once and got an outside edge that thankfully did not carry to Steve Smith at first slip. But Ahmedabad saw a different Kohli in the last session. He was confident and assured.
He made good use of the best pitch of the series and slowly started to make the scoreboard ticking. He put up a 58-run stand with Gill before the latter was dismissed for a well made 128.
Ravindra Jadeja then joined hands with Kohli and the two made sure there was no further damage. Kohli was unbeaten on 59 and Jadeja was batting on 16 when stumps was called on Day 2 with India at 289/3, trailing Australia by 191 runs.
Indian American Presidential nominee Arun Subramanian,43, was confirmed March 7, 2023, by the U.S. Senate, as a District Judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, considered one of the most active court on white-collar crimes in the country. Subramanian becomes the first Indian American and South Asian Judge to serve in the District Court of SDNY. He was confirmed with a 57-39 vote.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to parents who immigrated to America from India in the early 1970s, Subramanian graduated summa cum laude from Case Western Reserve University in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and English. Three years later, he earned his law degree from Columbia Law School as a James Kent & Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He also served as executive articles editor for the Columbia Law Review.
A consumer protection expert, Subramanian currently serves as a partner with Susman Godfrey where he has dealt with cases on behalf of consumers and individuals injured by unfair and illegal practices, including public entities and whistleblowers. He’s also defended victims of trafficking in child pornography.
The Susman Godfrey website recounts his victories in court during his career. “Arun has tried and arbitrated high-stakes cases on both sides of the “v,” and has successfully recovered over a billion dollars for public and private entities who were the victims of fraud and other illegal conduct,” susmangodfrey.com says.
“Arun’s expertise isn’t limited to any practice area. He has taken up the cause of public entities and whistleblowers in False Claims Act cases, victims of trafficking in child pornography, consumers and individuals injured by unfair and illegal practices, and has for over a decade focused on complex commercial litigation, including antitrust, patent infringement, and breach of contract cases,” the site says.
Some of his major victories listed on susmangodfrey.com include securing over $400 million for state and federal governmental entities in United States ex rel. Kester v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.; Recovering $590 million in settlements in the ongoing LIBOR price-fixing class action;Achieving a complete jury victory in Tyler, Texas as co-lead counsel on behalf of defendant Globus Medical in a spinal insert patent infringement suit brought by Flexuspine, a local Tyler company; and securing what his law firm says is “a trailblazing judgment victory” of more than $100 million for client Assured Guaranty against Flagstar Bank in one of the first trials concerning repurchases of faulty RMBS—”a significant milestone in forcing banks to honor contractual commitments made which they sought to avoid after the financial crisis.”
He has served as a law clerk to Judge Dennis Jacobs on the Second Circuit Court, Judge Gerard Lynch in the Southern District of New York, and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of Brooklyn, New York. He was also appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts to serve on the court’s AdvisoCommittee for the Federal Rules of Evidence.
Subramanian has engaged in considerable pro bono work for years, serving on the pro bono panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He serves as Chairperson of Susman Godfrey’s 2022 Pro Bono Committee, his law firm said. He is also a longtime Director of the Columbia Law Review. He was recently named a member of the Development Committee for The Appellate Project, an organization that provides minority lawyers and law students opportunities in the field of appellate law.
Upon his confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Sen. Charles Schumer who championed Subramanian’s nomination with the Biden-Harris Administration, described the Indian American as a “first-rate legal mind” who has defending consumers through his career.
“Arun Subramanian is the epitome of the American Dream and a history maker: the child of hard-working immigrants from India, he will become the first South Asian on the Southern District bench, in an area with a deep and diverse South Asian community,” Schumer said, adding, “I was proud to recommend Mr. Subramanian to President Biden and I’ve worked to confirm him as soon as possible. I am confident he will bring remarkable legal talent and experience, integrity and professionalism to the federal court. He will follow the law where it takes him, in the pursuit of fair and impartial justice.
Hundreds of Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA) Members and leaders from across the United States flew into Washington D.C. for AAHOA’s Spring National Advocacy Conference (SNAC) earlier this week to discuss critical issues impacting America’s hotel owners.
As the premier voice of hotel owners, AAHOA seeks to partner with elected officials in Washington, D.C. to identify viable solutions to the biggest challenges facing the industry. The 2023 AAHOA SNAC provided the opportunity for America’s hoteliers to meet with and cultivate relationships with more than 200 elected officials in Washington, D.C.
AAHOA Members focused on obtaining greater access to capital and addressing the severe labor shortages plaguing the industry. AAHOA leaders helped expand lawmakers’ knowledge around the importance of hotels to their communities and the economy at large. When AAHOA Members receive assistance, their local business communities see an uptick in employment rates, profitability, state and local tax contributions, and business sustainability.
“It was an honor to attend my final advocacy conference as Chairman of AAHOA. We brought nearly 200 AAHOA leaders to Washington, D.C., to advocate on behalf of our industry and on behalf of AAHOA’s 20,000 members,” said AAHOA Chairman Nishant (Neal) Patel. “Creating relationships with our elected officials is a top priority for AAHOA, and we will continue to work on your behalf, strengthening relationships so we can continue to represent the entire hospitality industry with your best interests at heart.”
Political affiliations aside, those in attendance were representing the interests and issues that are important to America’s hoteliers and the broader travel and hospitality industry.
“AAHOA provides a platform to voice our concerns by continuing to strengthen its position and influence in the hospitality industry, as well as in key political circles at the federal, state, and local levels,” said AAHOA President & CEO Laura Lee Blake. “We are making a true difference for the benefit of our members, and it is fantastic to see the impact we are having. I know policymakers will remember us the next time they make decisions affecting the hospitality industry.”
To ensure the sustainability of hotels and the broader American travel industry, AAHOA Members urged Congress to support the following four issues:
Promote access to capital by increasing SBA loan caps/limits
SBA 7(a) and 504 Loan Limits to $10 Million: Obtaining access to capital is a critical factor for small businesses to operate and thrive in a challenging economy. Currently, Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) and 504 loans are capped at $5 million, which was last set in 2010. For hoteliers, the costs of constructing and purchasing properties have skyrocketed over the past decade.
Permanently Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
Business owners across the country face critical labor shortages. Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) improvements affecting workers without children that expired at the end of 2021 should be made permanent.
Address the industry’s labor shortage by significantly increasing the number of H-2B visas and creating a new H-2C visa.
Address the Hospitality Labor Shortage with H-2B visas: The unemployment rate in the leisure and hospitality sector is 5.2%, which is 36% higher than the 3.6% overall unemployment rate for the country, according to the latest February 2023 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Picture : Hotel Business
The Biden Administration announced its expansion of an additional 64,000 temporary nonagricultural worker H-2B visas for FY 2023. This is in addition to the 66,000 H-2B visas that are normally available each year. However, the total number of available visas does not come close to the estimated 1.5 million open jobs in the industry.
AAHOA seeks for Congress to: Eliminate caps on the H-2B visa program altogether so there are no constraints on addressing employers’ needs for additional seasonal workers. Also, if an already-approved worker is brought back, they should not be counted against the cap of a new visa.
Allow these visas to be valid for multiple years, so businesses do not have to undergo the onerous filing process every year.
Cosponsor the Essential Workers for Economic Advancement Act
The Essential Workers for Economic Advancement Act (EWEA) would help business owners address the critical labor shortage by filling a need currently unaddressed in the U.S. immigration system.
The EWEA creates an H-2C visa program for nonimmigrant, nonagricultural service workers. It is intended for small businesses in industries with lower educational thresholds and comparatively low sales per employee.
AAHOA further offers numerous opportunities for elected officials to utilize and learn about the needs of AAHOA Members and to speak directly with key constituents back home. These include attending regional conference meetings and speaking at AAHOA town halls as well as participating in interviews with Today’s Hotelier, AAHOA’s monthly magazine distributed to 20,000 Hoteliers.
AAHOA rounded out the event with a HerOwnership Panel with Sonali Desai, Executive Director of the House Democratic Caucus, along with Women Hotelier Directors Lina Patel and Tejal Patel. This panel was held in celebration of International Women’s Day, and focused on championing women in entrepreneurship in D.C. and giving women hoteliers the tools to take charge of their hospitality careers.
AAHOA is the largest hotel owners association in the nation, with Member-owned properties representing a significant part of the U.S. economy. AAHOA’s 20,000 members own 60% of the hotels in the United States and are responsible for 1.7% of the nation’s GDP. More than one million employees work at AAHOA member-owned hotels, earning $47 billion annually, and member-owned hotels support 4.2 million U.S. jobs across all sectors of the hospitality industry. AAHOA’s mission is to advance and protect the business interests of hotel owners through advocacy, industry leadership, professional development, member benefits, and community engagement.
Indian-origin Lakshmi Balachandra, an associate professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College’s Wellesley Business School, Massachusetts filed a gender discrimination lawsuit in the US District Court in Boston against the institution.
According to a Boston Globe report the lawsuit alleges that Balachandra was subjected to gender and racial discrimination at the institution. “Babson favours white and male faculty and predominantly reserves awards and privileges for them,” the complaint filed in the court reads.
Lakshmi Balachandra alleged she lost career opportunities and faced economic losses, emotional distress, and harm to her reputation because of mistreatment and administrators’ failure to investigate her concerns, The Boston Globe newspaper reported on February 27.
Lakshmi Balachandra joined Babson’s faculty in 2012 and earned tenure in 2019. In her lawsuit, she called out Andrew Corbett, a professor and former chair of the college’s entrepreneurship division, as the “primary direct perpetrators of the discriminatory work environment.”
According to the complaint filed in US District Court in Boston dated February 27, Lakshmi Balachandra alleged that Corbett, who oversaw teaching assignments, class scheduling, and annual reviews, only allowed her to teach required courses in entrepreneurship despite her requests to teach electives – even though she had taught such classes previously at MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School.
“Babson favours white and male faculty and predominantly reserves awards and privileges for them,” Lakshmi Balachandra’s complaint alleged. According to the complaint, despite her research record, expressed interest, and service to the college, she was denied numerous leadership positions and opportunities for more time to conduct research and write.
“Such privileges are routinely given to white male faculty in the entrepreneurship division,” the complaint read. Lakshmi Balachandra’s attorney, Monica Shah, said that the professor has also filed a charge of discrimination with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination.
Meanwhile, Babson College has responded that it takes concerns or complaints seriously and has well-established protocols and resources in place to thoroughly investigate and address them.
“The college is home to a diverse global community where equity and inclusion are valued and incorporated across every facet of campus, and where discrimination of any kind is not tolerated,” a spokesperson of Babson College was quoted as saying. Lakshmi Balachandra, who is currently on leave for a fellowship at the National Science Foundation, is seeking unspecified damages, the report added.
India shone bright at the 95th Academy awards. As an ecstatic MM Keeravani sang out his thanks in tune with that Carpenter’s immortal sappy ditty, the auditorium exploded in hoots, whistles and loud cheers. His ‘namaste’, a delightful little tailpiece to his acceptance speech, echoed the sentiments of a billion Indians on the top of the world after ‘Naatu Naatu’ won the Best Original Song at the Academy awards.
With “Naatu Naatu”, the hit dance track from “RRR”, documentary feature “All That Breathes” and short documentary “The Elephant Whisperers” up for an Oscar, the 95th Academy Awards could well be India’s moment to shine at perhaps the most glittering of all showbiz stages today. It is the first time that India-made productions have earned so many Oscar nominations.
India’s win at Oscars 2023 brings up one of our major strengths, which is being unafraid of sentiment, of bringing something real and emotional to a world that has been taken over by pallid superheroes and their even more pallid tales.
Picture : India Glitz
It’s not just the song which had had the globe dancing to its tune from S S Rajamouli’s blockbuster ‘RRR’ that made history at this edition of the Oscars. It was also the Best Documentary Short award for the ‘The Elephant Whisperers’, a heartwarming film on the deep bond between a pair of elephants and their humans, directed by Kartiki Gonsalves, and produced by Guneet Monga. If you haven’t seen the 40 minute film on Netflix, featuring the charming Raghu and Ammu, and Bomman and Bellie, get right to it: it truly is a testament to, as Gonsalves said, the ‘sacred bond between us and the natural world and respect for indigenous
Naatu Naatu was the first Indian win in the Best original song category, and Gonsalves the first Indian to win in the short docu category. India’s cup would have brimmeth over if Shaunak Sen had won the Best Documentary Feature for ‘All That Breathes’, a haunting film about a pair of Delhi-based brothers who care for injured kites falling from the skies. That loss will be a lasting regret.
Shaunak Sen didn’t win the Best Documentary Feature for ‘All That Breathes’. But even as Sen’s film kept winning hearts on the festival circuit, from Sundance to Cannes, and we kept our fingers and toes tightly crossed, it was ‘Navalny’, about the imprisoned Russian dissident and hardcore Putin critic Alexei Navalny which had been gathering momentum in the build-up to the Oscars. This was always going to be the year that anti-war sentiment was everywhere, with ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ the front-runner in the race, which lost out, quite rightly, to Everything Everywhere All At Once.
The German war epic, directed by Edward Berger, had to be content with the Best International Feature, original score, production design and cinematography, and it lost out, quite rightly to the totally bonkers genre-bending multiverse sci-fi-action-adventure ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
Still, two out of three is not a bad strike. History doesn’t always have to be grand sweeps. It can be made out of these small incremental steps, because of what they mean once the hurly burly of the awards night and the zillion pre-Oscars and post-Oscars after parties are done and dusted.
An award on a stage where the world is watching opens up doors not just for the film and its makers, but also the country they represent. Those who’ve been dismissing the ‘song-and-dance’ spectacles of Indian mainstream movies, are now dancing to the infectious rhythms of ‘Naatu Naatu’, even as SS Rajamouli’s RRR will always come with a caveat of whether or not it was truthful to the lives of the revolutionaries it was based on.
Picture : NDTV
But this is a time to celebrate, not nit-pick. As first-time Oscar presenter Deepika Padukone, the lights on stage making her even more luminous, asked the audience quite rhetorically: do you know ‘Naatu Naatu’, and it played out on stage, it was a moment.
That live performance may not have matched the mad energy of the song that you see in the film, but the win, which had looked like a shoo-in from the time it was nominated, brings to the fore the joyousness of music, and the stories that can be told via song when words fail. It brings up one of the major strengths of Indian cinema, which is being unafraid of sentiment, of bringing something real and emotional to a world which has been taken over by pallid superheroes and their even more pallid tales which all look and feel similar.
Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) conducted its election last month and the new team was sworn-in on March 4th at a virtual Zoom ceremony with veteran community leader from New York Mr. Lal Motwani as its president. Motwani has been a Founder Life member from GOPIO inception in 1989 and was serving as the International Coordinator-at-Large and later as Executive Trustee of GOPIO Foundation in his last term.
Others sworn in at the ceremony are media and community leader Mr. Umesh Chandra from Brisbane, Australia as Executive Vice President; Los Angeles area community leader Kewal Kanda as Vice President, New Jersey businessman Prakash Shah as Global Ambassador and former IBM official and community activist Ms. Jasbir ‘Nami’ Kaur as International Coordinator-at-Large.
Five additiona Regional International Coordinators were sworn-in as follows: Businessman Roger Latchman from Johannesburg, South Africa as Africa Coordinator; Engineering Entrepreneur Deo Gosine (Trinidad and New York) as Caribbean Coordinator; Real Estate Investor Ashok Madan of Southern California as North America Coordinator; former engineer Harmohan Singh Walia of Sydney, Australia as Oceania Coordinator and New Delhi businessman Dhiraj Ahuja as South Asia Coordinator.
The election was conducted according to the GOPIO bylaws by a team of the Interim Committee which was appointed by the GOPIO General Body Meeting held on January 14th consisting of Mr. Ram Gadhavi (Wayne, New Jersey, USA), Mr. Mahavir Arya (Sydney, Australia) and Mr. Mridul Pathak (New York). In a spirit of unity, nominees with multiple nominations withdrew from their multiple nominations except one, making it a unanimous choice for all positions.
The ceremony started with a universal prayer song by Ms. Devika Gadhavi, who is a young professional working for the New York Times. Dr. Thomas Abraham, Chairman of GOPIO welcomed the participants from all continents and provided a brief introduction to the birth of GOPIO and many of its achievements in the last 34 years. Dr. Abraham also highlighted the great services provided by GOPIO Chapters during the pandemic such as providing food to the frontline workers at the beginning of the lockdown, getting N95 masks to the hospitals, replenishing food pantries and sending oxygen concentrators to India when the pandemic was at its highest level.
“GOPIO chapters around the world have been doing a lot of organizational ground work in many countries to promote leadership in public service and the thrust have been to promote and involve the Indian Diaspora in the larger society and local communities wherever they live,” said Dr. Abraham.
Congratulating the new team, former GOPIO President Niraj Baxi said that the ceremony on March 4th signifies marching forward for GOPIO. The program ended with a melodious Bollywood celebration song by GOPIO-Edison President Pallavi Belwariar.
Lal Motwani has been termed a strong community leader who has been involved in several community groups and served as President of the National Federation of Indian American Associations (NFIA), Society of Indian American Engineers and Architects (SIAEA) and Alliance of Global Sindhi Associations. He was the Executive Trustee of GOPIO Foundation from Sept. 2021 to Jan. 2023.
An architect by profession, Motwani retired as the Assistant Director of New York City’s Housing Authority, Office of Facility Planning and Administration. Motwani has been able to leave his “mark” on a number of New York City landmarks, be it John F Kennedy (JFK) airport, LaGuardia Airport, World Trade Center, American Express, Port Authority of NY/NJ, City Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank and New York City Housing Authority, the world’s largest public housing facility housing 1/8 of the NYC population.
In his acceptance speech, President Motwani said, “We will soon activate those regions which are not active now and we will get all the councils to become active again. We need many volunteers to get involved in the Councils such as Human Rights, Cultural, Academic, Women, Science and Technology, Youth and Young Professionals, Media, Health and Wellness and on Seniors. We will officially launch GOPIO Chamber of Commerce (GICC) in different parts of the world.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi might embark on a state visit to the United States in the third week of June. To decide on the visit’s dates, both parties have been involved in diplomatic negotiations. Modi’s visit to the United States is in the works and amongst things on the menu is a mega event on International Yoga Day on June 21, according to media reports.
Sources say that the Big Apple will be the likely venue and the UN building is being looked at where PM Modi may perform Yoga with the UN Secretary-General and other dignitaries and send the message of Yoga as the unifier in the world. This is expected to be a big message to the American people also as Yoga has been embraced as a key fitness regime in America.
“June 21 to 25 is a possible window both sides are looking at. There will be an announcement at the appropriate time,” said a source. US President Joe Biden’s team had reportedly extended an invitation to Modi for a bilateral summit later this year.
Reports say that the official state visit will begin in Washington DC with President Joe Biden rolling out a red carpet for the Indian Premier. Besides, delegation-level talks and a one-on-one meeting are also being planned.
Picture : Reuters
From security cooperation to trade, education, cyber security, defense and climate change, the menu is quite large. The indication that a special welcome awaits Prime Minister Narendra Modi was given by the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken when he was in Delhi for the G-20 Foreign Ministers meeting earlier this month.
In Washington DC, the Prime Minister’s full agenda is still being worked out but from the captains of the business to lawmakers and the Indian diaspora there will be a packed schedule for PM Modi. On June 22 or June 23, a state dinner is being planned in the White House.
Post that Prime Minister Modi is expected to be in Chicago on June 24, where a big diaspora event is being planned along the lines of the Madison Square Garden event and Howdy Modi in Houston.
In Washington, there is complete unanimity that India is the chosen partner for the US and behind closed doors, they will continue to press each other to do more on issues of democracy and human rights, but on a broader canvas this is the best time for the relationship, and they must now let the momentum slip away.
Modi met Biden last on the margins of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Bali, Indonesia, where both the leaders discussed global and regional developments. At the time, Biden said that he looks forward to continuing to support the G20’s work under India’s Presidency. The visit will be crucial against the backdrop of Ukraine war. India’s recent G20 meetings have been overshadowed by the West with no consensus over the ongoing conflict in Europe.
US and India have a strategic alliance. The leaders in their last in-person meeting in Indonesia took into account areas like crucial and emerging technologies and artificial intelligence. “They reviewed the continuing deepening of the India-US strategic partnership including cooperation in future oriented sectors like critical and emerging technologies, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, etc,” the MEA had said in a statement.
In the wake of the Ukraine conflict the leaders also discussed “topical global and regional developments” in the meeting held on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Bali. Modi and Biden underlined the close collaboration between the US and India in groupings like Quad and I2U2. India, Israel, the US, and the United Arab Emirates are the members of the I2U2, whilst the Quad is made up of India, the US, Australia, and Japan.
Demonstrators across the nation blocked streets and major highways throughout Israel on March 16, 2023 continuing nationwide protests over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s plan to overhaul the country’s judicial system. Despite the widespread unrest, the conservative administration appeared determined to move forward with legislation that would upend Israel’s legal system by handing Netanyahu’s government full control over the country’s judiciary, with the sovereignty of the Supreme Court also at stake.
Netanyahu and his allies say the country’s unelected judges have too much power and need to be reined in. His opponents say that Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, has a deep conflict of interest. They say his planned overhaul will destroy the country’s democratic checks and balances and is a poorly disguised plot to make his criminal case go away.
Picture : CNN
Last week, half a million Israelis took to the streets in the tenth consecutive week of protests against plans by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to overhaul the country’s judicial system, organizers claimed. Israel has a population of just over 9 million, so if organizers’ estimates are correct, about 5% of Israelis came out to voice their opposition to the proposed reforms.
Nearly half of the protesters – about 240,000 – gathered in Tel Aviv, the organizers said. In Jerusalem, several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of President Isaac Herzog’s house. They carried Israeli flags and chanted slogans including “Israel will not be a dictatorship.”
On Thursday, Herzog – whose role is largely ceremonial – urged the Netanyahu government to take the judicial overhaul legislation off the table. Protesters and critics of Netanyahu’s plan say it would weaken the country’s courts and erode the judiciary’s ability to check the power of the country’s other branches of government.
The package of legislation would give Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the power to overrule Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority. It would also give the government the power to nominate judges, which currently rests with a committee composed of judges, legal experts and politicians.
It would remove power and independence from government ministries’ legal advisers, and take away the power of the courts to invalidate “unreasonable” government appointments, as the High Court did in January, forcing Netanyahu to fire Interior and Health Minister Aryeh Deri.
Critics accuse Netanyahu of pushing the legislation in order to get out of corruption trials he is currently facing. Netanyahu denies that, saying the trials are collapsing on their own, and that the changes are necessary after judicial overreach by unelected judges.
Israel does not have a written constitution, but a set of what are called Basic Laws. “We are done being polite,” said Shikma Bressler, an Israeli protest leader. “If the laws being suggested will pass, Israel will no longer be a democracy.”
About two out of three (66%) Israelis believe the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down laws incompatible with Israel’s Basic Laws, and about the same proportion (63%) say they support the current system of nominating judges, according to a poll last month for the Israel Democracy Institute.
“The only thing this government cares about is crushing Israeli democracy,” opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said. The proposal has touched off deep political discord in Israel in recent weeks, with public turmoil reaching a fever pitch one day after Netanyahu and members of his right-wing coalition snubbed a proposal by President Isaac Herzog that was widely supported as a viable alternative to the controversial shakeup.
Herzog and protest leaders have continued to warn that political chaos gripping the nation had potential to ignite a civil war unless a compromise could be reached soon.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti won confirmation on March 15th from a divided Senate as the nation’s next ambassador to India, more than a year and a half after he was nominated by President Joe Biden.
The 52-42 vote gave the administration a long-sought victory with several Republicans breaking party discipline for the vote that they said was critical to fill one of the country’s highest-profile diplomatic posts. “It’s a national security imperative to immediately have an ambassador in place in India. We can’t afford to wait any longer,” said Indiana Sen. Todd Young, one of the Republican crossover votes.
The day began with uncertain prospects for Garcetti, a two-term, progressive Democrat first nominated to the diplomatic post by Biden in July 2021. With several Democrats defecting, Garcetti’s fate rested with Republican senators in a chamber often divided along partisan lines. He secured seven GOP votes, more than enough to make up for the Democratic breakaways.
Kansas Republican Roger Marshall said having an ambassador in place in India was vital in advancing relations among members of the “quad” — the U.S. India, Australia and Japan, which he said puts pressure on China. “We don’t agree on all the different policies he did as mayor, but I think he’s a good person at heart and he would be a good ambassador,” Marshall said. He said on the allegations: “He answered my questions adequately.”
At the White House, spokesperson Olivia Dalton said Biden “believes that we have a crucial and consequential partnership with India and that Mayor Garcetti will make a strong and effective ambassador.” The vacancy in the ambassadorship had left a significant diplomatic gap for the administration at a time of rising global tensions, including China’s increasingly assertive presence in the Pacific region and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
India, the world’s most populous democracy, is continuing to buy oil from Russia, while Western governments move to limit fossil fuel earnings that support Moscow’s budget, its military and its invasion of Ukraine. Russia also provides the majority of India’s military hardware.
The nomination had been freighted with questions about what the former mayor knew, and when, about sexual harassment allegations against his friend and once-close adviser, Rick Jacobs. A lawsuit alleges that Jacobs frequently harassed one of the then-mayor’s police bodyguards while Garcetti ignored the abuse or laughed it off.
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Garcetti, the son of former Los Angeles district attorney Gil Garcetti, has repeatedly denied the claims. Jacobs has called the allegations against him “pure fiction.” The case is scheduled to go to trial later this year. At a Senate committee hearing in December 2021, Garcetti said, “I never witnessed, nor was it brought to my attention, the behavior that’s been alleged. … If it had been, I would have immediately taken action to stop that.”
Wednesday’s vote tested Democratic loyalty to Biden, and also measured assessments of Garcetti’s judgment and trustworthiness, stemming from the City Hall allegations that shadowed him in the #MeToo era. “I think we can find somebody that will do the job better,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, one of the Democrats who opposed Garcetti. Garcetti also failed to win over Democrat Mark Kelly of Arizona, who said he had “serious concerns.”
Rachel Rizzo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said she sensed frustration about the lack of an ambassador during a recent trip to India. She said it gave “an impression that the relationship isn’t important.” “It really points to the internal dysfunction in the U.S. Congress at the moment, and it makes it very hard for us to send the messages that we’re trying to send when it looks to our diplomatic partners that we don’t have our house in order,” she said.
Last May, a top Senate Republican released an investigation t hat concluded Garcetti “likely knew or should have known” that Jacobs was alleged to be sexually harassing city employees, a finding that appeared to contradict the mayor’s assertion that he was unaware of any inappropriate behavior. The 23-page report released by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa found it was “extremely unlikely” that the mayor would not have been aware. The White House called that report a partisan smear.
The nomination, first announced in July 2021, cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2022 but was not considered by the full Senate. Biden renominated Garcetti early this year, and the White House has defended him as a well-qualified candidate.
On a politically divided vote, the committee again advanced the nomination to the full Senate early this month, though Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the panel, said that “new evidence” had raised questions about Garcetti’s judgment and prompted him to oppose the nomination.
Garcetti’s confirmation follows a contentious tenure at Los Angeles City Hall framed by rising homelessness, the pandemic and high crime rates as well as sexual harassment and corruption scandals. The Los Angeles area, once known for boundless growth, has seen its population decline.
Garcetti took office in 2013 with a “back to basics” agenda that centered on fixing L.A.’s notoriously cratered streets and sidewalks. But those early ambitions faded as out-of-control homeless encampments transformed the city and then the government shuttered businesses, restaurants and schoolrooms — and shed hundreds of thousands of jobs — in the depths of the pandemic.
Still, the former mayor has been credited with continuing a transit buildup in a city choked with traffic and establishing tougher earthquake safety standards for thousands of buildings. An Ivy Leaguer and Rhodes Scholar, he spent two decades in city government either as mayor or a city councilman and took a circuitous path toward the diplomatic corps. Ambassadorships are frequently a reward for political supporters.
Garcetti considered a 2020 White House run but later became part of Biden’s inner circle, emerging as a widely discussed possibility to join the Cabinet. He took himself out of the running after many of the plum jobs had been filled, saying the coronavirus crisis at the time made it impossible for him to step away from City Hall.
Vish Mishra, Venture Director, Clearstone Venture Partners, a former president and trustee of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Silicon Valley, said: “You never leave the ambassador’s spot vacant in any country with which you are candid and friendly,” he said. “We don’t have an ambassador spot vacant in Germany, France, England, or any other friendly country. But India is the exception. It’s been two years, and something needs to be done. I wish to ask the administration, why can’t you appoint an ambassador to India?”
Senator Mark Warner, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, minced no words on the issue: “It is an embarrassment that we say this is one of the most valuable relationships in the world, and yet we’ve not appointed an ambassador.”
Warner was part of a Congressional delegation to India recently. He also said that Indians also raised the issue of the absence of an ambassador at this important time. Warner is co-chair of the Senate India Caucus, the largest and only country-specific caucus in the Senate.
(AP) — Former President Donald Trump can be sued by injured Capitol Police officers and Democratic lawmakers over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Justice Department said Thursday in a federal court case testing Trump’s legal vulnerability for his speech before the riot.
The Justice Department told a Washington federal appeals court in a legal filing that it should allow the lawsuits to move forward, rejecting Trump’s argument that he is immune from the claims.
The department said it takes no position on the lawsuits’ claims that the former president’s words incited the attack on the Capitol. Nevertheless, Justice lawyers told the court that a president would not be protected by “absolute immunity” if his words were found to have been an “incitement of imminent private violence.”
“As the Nation’s leader and head of state, the President has ‘an extraordinary power to speak to his fellow citizens and on their behalf,’ they wrote. “But that traditional function is one of public communication and persuasion, not incitement of imminent private violence.”
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The brief was filed by lawyers of the Justice Department’s Civil Division and has no bearing on a separate criminal investigation by a department special counsel into whether Trump can be criminally charged over efforts to undo President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election ahead of the Capitol riot. In fact, the lawyers note that they are not taking a position with respect to potential criminal liability for Trump or anyone else.
Trump’s lawyers have argued he was acting within the bounds of his official duties and had no intention to spark violence when he called on thousands of supporters to “march to the Capitol” and “fight like hell” before the riot erupted.
“The actions of rioters do not strip President Trump of immunity,” his lawyers wrote in court papers. “In the run-up to January 6th and on the day itself, President Trump was acting well within the scope of ordinary presidential action when he engaged in open discussion and debate about the integrity of the 2020 election.”
A Trump spokesperson said Thursday that the president “repeatedly called for peace, patriotism, and respect for our men and women of law enforcement” on Jan. 6 and that the courts “should rule in favor of President Trump in short order and dismiss these frivolous lawsuits.”
In the separate investigation into Trump and his allies’ efforts to keep the Republican president in power, special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he will fight the subpoena.
Trump is appealing a decision by a federal judge in Washington, who last year rejected efforts by the former president to toss out the conspiracy civil lawsuits filed by the lawmakers and police officers. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Trump’s words during a rally before the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol were likely “words of incitement not protected by the First Amendment.”
“Only in the most extraordinary circumstances could a court not recognize that the First Amendment protects a President’s speech,” Mehta wrote in his February 2022 ruling. “But the court believes this is that case.”
One of the lawsuits, filed by Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., alleges that “Trump directly incited the violence at the Capitol that followed and then watched approvingly as the building was overrun.” Two other lawsuits were also filed, one by other House Democrats and another by officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby.
The House Democrats’ lawsuit cites a federal civil rights law that was enacted to counter the Ku Klux Klan’s intimidation of officials. The cases describe in detail how Trump and others spread baseless claims of election fraud, both before and after the 2020 presidential election was declared, and charge that they helped to rile up the thousands of rioters before they stormed the Capitol.
The lawsuits seek damages for the physical and emotional injuries the plaintiffs sustained during the insurrection. Even if the appeals court agrees that Trump can be sued, those who brought the lawsuit still face an uphill battle. They would need to show there was more than fiery rhetoric, but a direct and intentional call for imminent violence, said Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor.
“We are really far away from knowing that even if the court allows the lawsuit to go forward whether they would be successful,” she said. “Even if the court says hypothetically you can bring an action against a president, I think they’re likely to draw a line that is very generous to the president’s protected conduct.”
In its filing, the Justice Department cautioned that the “court must take care not to adopt rules that would unduly chill legitimate presidential communication” or saddle a president with burdensome and intrusive lawsuits.
“In exercising their traditional communicative functions, Presidents routinely address controversial issues that are the subject of passionate feelings,” the department wrote. “Presidents may at times use strong rhetoric. And some who hear that rhetoric may overreact, or even respond with violence.”
The Andhra Pradesh Global Investment Summit (GIS) 2023 turned out to be a huge success, as 352 Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs), amounting to about US$ 159 billion were finalized, which will create approximately 6,03,223 jobs in the state. The summit was attended by domestic and international business leaders, who made massive investments especially in the green hydrogen energy sector.
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Inaugurated by Union Transport Minister, Nitin Gadkari and Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, the event had the presence of India’s top business leaders including Reliance Industries chairman and MD, Mukesh Ambani, Jindal Steel & Power Ltd, chairman Naveen Jindal, Adani Ports and SEZ Ltd CEO, Karan Adani, Dalmia Group managing director, Puneet Dalmia and others.
In his address at the GIS 2023, the CM said, “It is a proud moment to announce that the state has received 340 investment proposals with an investment of about Rs 13 lakh crore (US $159 billion) providing employment to almost six lakh people across 20 sectors.”
At the inauguration, Mukesh Ambani commended the state’s industrial development and its advantages and expressed confidence that the state would play a significant role in India’s growth story. “Reliance will create 50,000 new job opportunities in Andhra Pradesh and will promote sale of products made in the state through retail business,” he announced.
Naveen Jindal revealed that the firm will be setting up a 3 million tonne per annum steel plant in the state that will create jobs for over 10,000 people directly or indirectly.
According to Reddy, the state’s Energy Department received significant investment proposals especially in green hydrogen. The IT and ITES department managed to get 56 proposals, whereas the Tourism department got 117 proposals.
The two-day Global Investors Summit 2023 organized at the Andhra University Engineering College, Visakhapatnam concluded on March 4 with cultural performances by various dance groups.
“We are excited to announce the opening of Xavier University School of Veterinary Medicine in September 2023,” said Ravishankar Bhooplapur, President of Xavier University School of Medicine. “The mission of Xavier University School of Veterinary Medicine is to prepare veterinary physicians to practice veterinary medicine of the highest standard, and the opening of our new veterinary school will provide students with a quality veterinary education at an affordable price.”
According to the company, the single origin spices are sourced from Indian regions and states, packaged at state-of-the-art facility in India and shipped directly to consumers. The brand has expanded its partnership with farmers and cooperatives to bring high quality and authentic Indian spices to the consumers.
