Tag: DonaldTrump

Indian American fashion designer Anand Jon Alexander, who is currently in prison serving a 59-year sentence for rape, is writing a book in which he talks about how what he did was “absolutely immoral, but not illegal.” He will also write about Ivanka Trump, whom he met when she was 14 years old.

Jon, who is in prison for the last seven years, is serving the 59-year sentence for rape and a dozen other criminal counts, including committing a lewd act on a child. “What I did was absolutely immoral, but not illegal,” he recently told a former acquaintance of a writer at pagesix.com. “I had a lot of sex, but it was not illegal. Everyone was over 17, except one girl who lied about her age.”

Jon, 40, preyed on aspiring models who hoped he would help their careers. But he said he was a victim of police racism. “This was about lifestyle,” Jon told my source. “The police saw a brown-skinned man having sex with white girls.”

Jon will talk in the book about dressing Janet Jackson and Mary J. Blige, and how he met Ivanka Trump when she was 14 and became the first designer to put her on the runway. “Ivanka did five shows for me. She’d take the subway to fittings,” Jon said, according to the pagesix.com story.

According to Inquisitr, in 2007, Jon pleaded guilty to forcing women to have oral sex with him in exchange for launching their modeling careers. “We were all searching for companionship. We were all searching for success,” he told The Associated Press. “The expectations were different. We got so caught up in the whole hype,” he added.

Inquisitr said that Alexander used to go online and lure young women to his apartment where he would make them strip and either sexually assaulted them or touched them without consent thereafter.  He also said that “everyone was over 17, except one girl who lie about her age.”

Jon is hoping that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit would write off or reduce his sentence. “I have 100 percent faith and confidence that I will be freed,” he told the New York Daily News.

India no longer needs international cooperation to decarbonise itself and needs to pressure countries to remain ambitious, including wealthier countries that need to act domestically and support developing countries in the transition to a green economy.

Similarly, China today is the world’s largest issuer of green bonds, a new way to fund “green” projects. So says Simon Zadek, co-Director with the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System.

The Inquiry is an international platform for advancing national and international efforts to shift the trillions of dollars required for delivering an inclusive, green economy through the transformation of the global financial system.

With solar procurement bids in India now below the cost of coal, action in this and other areas no longer needs international cooperation to decarbonise, Zadek told IANS in an email interview.

Similarly, within a few years, there will be massive deployment of battery technology and electric vehicles. India must be concerned, however, that climate change is addressed for its own secure development and needs to pressure all countries to remain ambitious, including wealthier countries that need to act domestically and support developing countries in the transition, he said.

Zadek was replying to a question: With President Trump mulling a possible pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, do you think this will impede or demotivate developing countries like India and China to continue on its path to decarbonise?

Speaking at a UN energy forum in Vienna on May 11, Power Minister Piyush Goyal said: “The road from Paris to India today has been somewhat bumpy. We will have to sort that out. But I’d like to reassure each one of you here today that India stands committed to its commitments made at Paris irrespective of what happens in the rest of the world.”

According to Zadek, China has adopted literally hundreds of policy steps in encouraging the transition to a low-carbon and sustainable economy, many of which are reflected at a high-level in its 13th Five Year Plan.

“Of notable importance is massive policy and fiscal support for sustainable infrastructure (especially in the mobility and energy spaces but also water, sanitation, land use, etc.), the State Council adopted recommendations to green China’s financial system, and the countrywide carbon market.”

The UNEP expert, who has advised companies worldwide on sustainability issues, and until recently lived in China, believes there will be no successful “brown” economies in the 21st century.

“So the transition is an imperative, and an early transition offers so many first mover advantages to China that catalysing it with fiscal and other policy support makes sense.” Zadek said funds from international frameworks like the Green Climate Fund (GCF) would not help transition in countries like India and China.

The GCF and other international public funds are far too small to play any significant role for India or China, except in catalytic and experimental roles such as encouraging the use of blockchain and other digital technologies to ease and lower the cost of international capital.

The GCF is a unique global initiative by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to respond to climate change by investing into low-emission and climate-resilient development.

On China’s investments in its green programmes, he said the People’s Bank of China estimates that $600 billion a year is needed to green the country’s economy.

“Today the numbers are far from that but progress is being made with China’s levels of green credit having hit almost 10 per cent of total banking sector portfolios and China today being the world’s largest issuer of green bonds.”

On steps India could take to accelerate decarbonisation of its economy, he said: “Much more of what you are already doing, ramping up clean energy, including distributed solar for isolated, unconnected communities, shutting down your coal build pipeline for simple economic reasons and preparing India’s innovative entrepreneurs to move heavily into clean mobility.”

He favoured transforming India’s domestic financial system to make it fit for the purpose and so enabling the country reduce dependency on expensive international capital. India’s draft “Ten Year Electricity Plan” calls for a staggering 275 GW of renewable energy by 2027, in addition to 72 GW of hydro and 15 GW of nuclear energy.

After struggling to find her footing while immigrating to the United States from Nepal in 2006, Sanjita Pradhan began to appreciate how much more difficult it is for refugees with little support or understanding of American culture. Starting with an entry-level position at a call center, she ultimately found a career as a resettlement director for Catholic Charities, where she helped refugees who’d made it to Iowa. Later, she served as executive officer at the Office of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs in the Iowa Department of Human Rights.

In 2015, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. But this past March, she and nine other members of the commission issued a high-profile public resignation via an open letter repudiating President Donald Trump’s stance on immigrants.

In an interview with Asia Blog as part of our Asian Pacific American Heritage Month interview series, Pradhan described her work with refugees, the challenges they face in rural America, and what prompted her to resign from the commission.

Can you describe your immigration experience?

Nepal had been undergoing this huge internal political turmoil — we had Maoist issues and a civil war for more than 10 years with a very unstable government. We were going through strikes and closures every other day. My husband’s brother lived in the U.S. and they have a child whose age is pretty similar to ours. I always felt like their child was going to a better school and getting better opportunities than ours was. So we made the big decision to move — to invest in our kids’ future no matter how scary it was.

I got the opportunity to come to the U.S. thorough the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery system. Part of me was excited to explore the new world, but part of me was very scared of leaving a fairly secure job and what I already knew. I figured I would have to start from scratch in terms of finding jobs — that nobody would really know my credentials and skills and that I’d really have to start at the bottom. In many ways that fear did come true.

Through the Diversity Immigrant Visa, we didn’t have any government support, unlike refugees and asylum seekers. So we were completely on our own. We were lucky to be able to stay with my brother-in-law’s family for four months while we got on our feet. I initially worked in an entry-level call center position hoping my skills would be recognized and I could move up the ladder.

How did you get into work with refugees?

I was very intrigued by the work that organizations were doing in refugee resettlement, so I started volunteering. I was thinking to myself, “Wow, I came here with a Master’s degree, English language skills, knowledge about the culture, and had family to help me, and I still struggled. How are these refugees without any of that going to make it?”

I bought groceries for refugee families, cleaned dirty apartments so they could come in and have a home, I drove people around in a 16-passenger van, and really got my hands dirty. I eventually got hired at Lutheran Services of Iowa and kept moving up in different roles, and after two-and-a-half years, I was the director of the resettlement program at Catholic Charities.

I worked with refugees from Eritrea, Sudan, Iraq, Nepal, Bhutan, Somalia, and Afghanistan, among other backgrounds. Those I had the most expertise with were ethnically Nepali refugees from Bhutan who went through refugee camps after the ethnic cleansing in the 1990s. Around 2008, many began to be resettled in the United States, but some were in the camps for as long as 17 years before that. The process of relocation takes anywhere from two to three years because they have to go through a rigorous process of medical screening, background checks, and things like that.

Sanjita Pradhan works with a group of Asian Americans on how to register to vote and participate in the political process. (Sanjita Pradhan)

What challenges do refugees in Iowa and the Midwest face compared to bigger cities?

There are 99 counties in Iowa and only a handful are urban and diverse, so I think people are still getting used to seeing different kinds of people who speak different languages. One of the big issues I see is that there aren’t enough social services, non-profit organizations, or advocacy organizations compared to bigger cities, where there are many resources for immigrants to go for help. So it takes people longer to become established and get the help they need, to get into the right jobs, to learn the language, and go from refugee status to green card to citizenship.

What kind of work do these refugees usually end up doing?

Those who come in with no English ability — which is a lot of them — usually get employed in the meat plants we have around Iowa. So you see a concentration of refugees in towns with meat plants. Sometimes they get stuck with that job for life.

If they have a little more English then they’re sometimes employed in janitorial jobs, restaurants, or housekeeping. If they have a little more, some work in retail stores, but only a small fraction end up doing professional career-oriented jobs. Most of the immigrants who come with higher education end up going to bigger cities. Some communities are doing a better job than others at accommodating these refugees in terms of service, education, and healthcare.

Is discrimination a big issue with the refugees you’ve worked with?

In my job at the Office of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs at the Iowa Department of Human Rights, a lot of people would report to me different kinds of discrimination they were facing. A lot of workers in meat plants complained that they had supervisors who discriminated against the new refugee workers. Some of the African refugees are given the hardest jobs, like on the kill floor. There were some working in janitorial services who mentioned that all those who get hired through refugee services are only given $9 an hour, but hires from other sources are given $10.

Refugee resettlement work is really one of the most rewarding jobs I’ve ever done, but also one of the most challenging. At first, I was happy even when I could find folks jobs at the meat plants. I’ve seen the other side of the world and seen how they lived, so even being able to work at a meat plant seemed like a better option. But as time went on I saw all the issues within these industries like discrimination and other things, so I started to doubt my philosophy of “having a job at the meat plant is better than not having a job at all.”

Do you see any impact on the refugees you work with stemming from the current political atmosphere?

We know that there is a lot of fear in our community right now. Refugees are afraid to travel, and they don’t travel even if they have a very urgent situation, like someone getting sick back home. There were a lot of refugees seeking citizenship right after the election, so there’s heightening demand for citizenship paperwork now. There are many things happening in high schools, like students chanting “build a wall” or “go home.”

How did joining the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders come about?

I started having lots of questions about federal refugee resettlement programs, which didn’t seem to be reforming. Until 2013, the per capita grant that the government gave to resettlement agencies was only $425 per person. So with that $425, a resettlement agency would have to provide housing, food, and all kinds of support to a refugee for at least a month or so until they found a job. That’s just unsustainable.

In 2013 that was bumped up to $1,125, so agencies had a little more money to work with. But while working on the ground I was thinking, how do people who make all these rules at the highest level know what’s happening at the ground level? How do they get feedback to make appropriate changes? Because nearly everyone who hears that resettlement agencies can only provide a refugee with support for 30 to 90 days thinks that’s ridiculous, but it’s been like that for a long time.

During my work at the Office of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs, as I researched other communities doing similar work and resources in the field, I was happy to stumble on the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and was ecstatic to find there was such a thing. I followed their work, subscribed to newsletters, participated in webinars, etc. until one day I was able to host a roundtable with them here in Iowa. This was the very first time something like that had happened in Iowa and it was pretty exciting. As I continued my work with them, I learned about the commission, thought it would be a great opportunity to represent Iowa on the national scale and bring national resources to Iowa, so I applied and surprisingly got accepted after a few rounds of interviews.

What kind of work were you able to do with the commission?

It was a great learning process for me to be connected to a national group doing great work on topics like DACA and DAPA, the Affordable Care Act, making sure Asian Americans’ needs are met and that language needs and language services are available.

We also did a lot to advocate data disaggregation at the highest level because so there’s so much disparity in the Asian population — especially regarding English ability and economic status. Chinese immigrants, for example, are very different from Burmese. If you come on an H1-B [skilled worker visa] or a different kind of green card as opposed to coming as a refugee, your needs are going to be very different. Identifying just as “Asian American” would never allow service providers to cater to different communities appropriately.

One of the biggest contributions I feel like I was able to make, since I was the first and only Nepalese American on the commission, was to bridge the gap between this community and the federal government. Nepalese-Americans are a newer group in the U.S., so they’re still isolated and we don’t see a lot of them in mainstream anything — business, entrepreneurship, politics, etc.

Why did you and nine other members of the commission decide to resign through the open letter to President Trump?

None of us had expected the result of the election. We were planning for the next administration and how to continue the really great work we started when President Obama was in office. We knew if Hillary Clinton was in office she would champion and continue this work. So the election came as a big shock to us. Six of the commissioners resigned immediately. They did not want to be associated with the Trump Administration in any way, shape, or form.

For a lot of us, the question was, “who are we serving?” We’re not really serving the president; we’re serving our communities. So we had to try to save all of this great work that’s been done and not be defeated right away. We wrote a letter to President Trump. We knew his administration wouldn’t have an appetite for all of the work we did during the Obama Administration. So we strategically planned to only discuss a few topics, trade being one of them. We wanted to give that opportunity — to at least have a dialogue.

We never got a response. It was a chaotic transition, so there were probably many reasons we did not hear back. But once the first Muslim travel ban [wherein Trump issued an executive order barring nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.] was put into place, all of us knew right then and there that that was the time for us to move on and that we had to make a statement. The Muslim ban and many other policies of this administration are diametrically opposite to our goals, principles, and values.

We know that in every transition, commissions like these don’t get attention until five or six months in, but we didn’t see any positive things on the horizon that were going to happen. There was just one thing after another and after another that was detrimental to our communities and against the values and principles that we stand for.

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri is being sheltered by Pakistan’s ISI, possibly in Karachi, and the Islamic terrorist’s “desperate last wish” is a last, big, blowout attack on the US “before folding his eyes”, multiple sources told Newsweek.  As for Hamza bin Laden, al-Zawahiri’s dead protege’s son, he, too, is in Pakistan, also being sheltered by the ISI, a former top Pakistani official said to Newsweek.

The Pakistani intelligence agency been protecting al-Zawahiri since US forces evicted Al-Qaida from Afghanistan in late 2001, according to several sources that Newsweek terms “authoritative”. And the US was likely in the know about his whereabouts, because last year in January, the Barack Obama administration went after him with a drone and almost got him.

“The drone hit next to the room where Dr. Zawahiri was staying,” a “senior” militant from region told Newsweek. “The shared wall collapsed, and debris from the explosion showered on him and broke his glasses, but luckily he was safe,” the militant added.

In fact, al-Zawahiri, has survived “several” drone attacks since 2001, an Afghan Taliban leader told Newsweek. He added that the Al-Qaida leader was “no longer welcome” in areas controlled by his group because it’s engaged in peace negotiations with the Afghan government and doesn’t want to be seen as “a threat to world peace.”

That’s why the ISI – which the Afghan Taliban refers to as “the black leg” – moved al-Zawahiri to Karachi. The Pakistani port city “makes sense” as a sanctuary, the former Pakistani official told Newsweek. That’s because the city has widespread sympathies for militant Islam, has congested 19th-century streets and a large Pakistani military presence.

In fact, it’s the same official who said he is a “100 percent” sure that bin Laden’s 26-year-old son, Hamza, a rising “star”, is also in the country under ISI protection.  Several experts say that till today, Al-Qaida remains a potent force with the ability to attack the US again and that the Donald Trump administration recognizes that.

In fact, Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran, points to a 2014 plot by Al-Qaeda to place sympathizers on a Pakistani frigate, hijack it and use it to “attack American naval ships in the Indian Ocean, or maybe Indian ships, or maybe both.” As Riedel told Newsweek: Imagine if a Pakistani frigate packed with explosives—or a nuclear device—”sank an American aircraft carrier”.

A Sikh couple in Richland, Washington, found a note on their doorstep with vague threats in it, including phrases like “You are under attack” and “Watch yourself”. The note, however, was not in an envelope, but strangely, inside a diaper.

The couple have a new-born baby, so it’s possible that the perpetrator was trying to insinuate a threat to their child, or even be mocking them, as Sikhs have been ridiculed by racists for wearing a turban, a tenet of their religion.

The couple, who were not identified by Tri-City Herald newspaper which first reported the incident, are long-time residents of the ti-cities area. The husband works as an engineer and emigrated from India several years ago.

The couple told the publication that they have become frightened. They are more careful of their safety and skip taking walks in the neighborhood. They have also put up security cameras around the house.

“Those things bothered us,” and the diaper and note were strange and upsetting, the husband said. “I’ve never had any bad interaction with any of my neighbors. I was very surprised. Why would anybody do this?”

The couple have reason enough to be worried. A spate of crimes targeting the Indian community has been reported nationwide. Recently, a Sikh woman was sexually assaulted inside a gurudwara in Oregon and a Sikh man, Deep Rai, was shot on his property in the Seattle area of Washington. He survived.

It’s not just Sikhs though, but people of all faiths from India who have become targets of racially-motivated attacks. A Hindu Indian engineer from Andhra Pradesh, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, was shot dead in Olathe, Kansas.

Muslims have generally felt terrified of new policies by the Trump administration which they feel are biased against them. Several mosques around the country have been vandalized.

The Sikh couple are not the only ones in their area to be targeted. The husband told Tri-City Herald that he’s also heard of other local incidents — a harassing note left on a car, harassing comments. Another Indian immigrant said he was yelled at while out for coffee a few months ago.

Nikki Haley, the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, has claimed that her mother was not allowed to be a judge in India because she was a woman, while in fact women have been judges in the country since at least 1937.

Answering a question about the role of women at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, she said, “When you didn’t have a lot of education in India, my mother actually was able to go to law school. And she was actually put up to be one of the first female judges in India, but because of the situation with women she wasn’t allowed to sit on the bench.”

“But how amazing for her to watch her daughter become Governor of South Carolina and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.,” she added. It’s been noted that women have been allowed to serves as judges in India since at least 1937.

Haley’s parents, Ajit Singh and Raj Kaur Randhawa, reportedly emigrated from India in the 1960s. But more than two decades earlier a woman, Anna Chandy, became a judge in Travancore in pre-Independence India.

Haley said that she is “proud” to be the daughter of Indian immigrants who believe the family is “blessed” to be American. Prefacing her answer to a question about President Donald Trump’s attempts to temporarily restrict people from six Muslim-majority countries and refugees coming to the U.S., she said, “I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants, who reminded my brothers, my sister and me every day how blessed we were to be in this country.”

“I do believe that the fabric of America is legal immigration. That is what makes the U.S. so fantastic,” she said. Haley denied that Trump’s attempts to restrict people from the six countries was based on religion and pointed out that several Muslim-majority countries were not covered by it. “I don’t think that’s what this is,” she said.  “If that were the case, there are another dozen, you know, Muslim countries that could have been on the list.”

She said that nothing should be banned based on religion. “We will never close our doors in the U.S. We won’t. But what we did do was take a pause.”

Because of the difficulty of properly vetting people from those six countries as well as refugees, Trump pushed for the temporary ban.  “This is not about not wanting people in,” she said, adding that it was about keeping terrorists out.

Mohammed Hazra Khan, an Indian American man who tried to go to Syria with his teenaged brother and sister to join the Islamic State terror organization has been sentenced in Chicago to 40 months in prison, media reports stated.

With his conviction on November 19th, Mohammed Hazra Khan, 21, became the first person of Indian origin to be convicted and sentenced in the U.S. for Islamic State connections. The sentencing hits the news just after the victory of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who had called for intensive investigation of Muslim immigrants and, controversially, suggesting that if necessary their immigration should be stopped temporarily till a mechanism for heightened scrutiny was in place.

Federal Judge John J. Tharp sentenced Khan, who had admitted in court last year to the charges of providing support to the Islamic State and trying to go abroad to join it, Mary B. McCord, the Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, said in a statement.

Khan was arrested by anti-terrorism officers two years ago while trying to leave the U.S. from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, she said. He was 19 years old at the time of his arrest. Khan’s brother, who was 16 years old in 2014, and sister, who was 17, were also stopped at the airport but did not face any charges and were let go after officials questioned them.

Khan is an American citizen born in New York. But his family had immigrated from India and lived in the Chicago area. Last year, his mother had publicly asked ISIS leaders to “leave our children alone” and asserted: “The venom spewed by these groups and the violence committed by them find no support in the Quran and are completely at odds with our Islamic faith.”