NEW YORK – An Indian American athlete advisor, Munish Sood, is among 10 individuals arrested in connection with two related fraud and corruption schemes, involving the sport of basketball.
The arrested include four Division I NCAA men’s basketball coaches and a senior executive at a major athletic apparel company (“Company-1”).
In the first scheme, college basketball coaches took cash bribes from athlete advisors, including business managers and financial advisors, in exchange for using their influence over college players under their control to pressure and direct those players and their families to retain the services of the advisors paying the bribes, according to the Justice Department.
In the second scheme, a senior executive, working for Company-1, in connection with corrupt advisors, funneled bribe payments to high school-aged players and their families to secure those players’ commitments to attend universities sponsored by Company-1, rather than universities sponsored by rival athletic apparel companies.
The announcement was made by Joon H. Kim, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and William F. Sweeney Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The three complaints charge four coaches, Chuck Connors Person, Lamont Evans, Emanuel Richardson, a/k/a “Book,” and Anthony Bland a/k/a “Tony”; three athlete advisors, Christian Dawkins, Munish Sood, and Rashan Michel, a senior executive at Company-1, James Gatto, a/k/a “Jim,” along with two individuals affiliated with Company-1, Merl Code and Jonathan Brad Augustine, with wire fraud, bribery, travel act, and conspiracy offenses. The defendants were all arrested earlier this week in various parts of the country.
Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said: “The picture of college basketball painted by the charges is not a pretty one – coaches at some of the nation’s top programs taking cash bribes, managers and advisors circling blue-chip prospects like coyotes, and employees of a global sportswear company funneling cash to families of high school recruits. For the ten charged men, the madness of college basketball went well beyond the Big Dance in March. Month after month, the defendants allegedly exploited the hoop dreams of student-athletes around the country, treating them as little more than opportunities to enrich themselves through bribery and fraud schemes. The defendants’ alleged criminal conduct not only sullied the spirit of amateur athletics, but showed contempt for the thousands of players and coaches who follow the rules, and play the game the right way.”
The charges in the complaints result from a scheme involving bribery, corruption, and fraud in intercollegiate athletics. Since 2015, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI have been investigating the criminal influence of money on coaches and student-athletes who participate in intercollegiate basketball governed by the NCAA.
Participants in both schemes allegedly took steps to conceal the illegal payments, including (i) funneling them to athletes and/or their families indirectly through surrogates and entities controlled by the scheme participants; and (ii) making or intending to make misrepresentations to the relevant universities regarding the involvement of student-athletes and coaches in the schemes, in violation of NCAA rules.
As described in the complaints, these schemes operated as a fraud on the universities involved, all of which provide scholarships to players and salaries to coaches with the understanding and expectation that the players and coaches are in full compliance with all relevant NCAA rules and regulations. Moreover, these schemes subject the universities to substantial potential penalties by the NCAA, including, but not limited to, financial fines and penalties as well as the potential loss of eligibility to compete in various NCAA events.
Jim Allison and Padmanee Sharma are longtime research collaborators who married in 2014. At the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the two are trying to push the frontier of immunotherapy. Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman/for The Washington Post.
Cancer researcher Jim Allison stands at the edge of a small stage, fiddling with his harmonica, his unruly gray hair hanging almost to his shoulders. Soon, surrounded by eight other cancer experts who also happen to be musicians, he’ll be growling out the classic “Big Boss Man” before a boisterous crowd at the House of Blues.
It’s a fitting number, says Patrick Hwu, who plays keyboards for the band and is Allison’s colleague at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “When it comes to immunotherapy, he is the big boss man.”
Few would disagree. In recent years, Allison’s work has ignited a revolution in oncology treatment that frees the immune system to attack malignant tumors. Patients near death have returned to live full lives. The drug class he pioneered, called checkpoint inhibitors, now includes a half-dozen therapies that have spawned a billion-dollar market. So stuffed is his office with scientific awards that some sit in boxes on the floor. He frequently shows up on the shortlist of contenders for the Nobel Prize in medicine, which is being announced Monday.
But amid the successes, these are challenging times for Allison and the oncologist who is his key partner – and who typically is front and center in the audience when his band plays at fundraisers like this. Padmanee Sharma is a formidable researcher and immunologist in her own right at MD Anderson, a specialist in renal, bladder and prostate cancers. She is also Allison’s wife.
In their particular corner of the universe, they are the ultimate power couple. Yet they, like other immunotherapy enthusiasts, find themselves grappling with the downsides of the new treatments. The therapies can cause serious side effects and, while effective for some patients, are far from foolproof. And they have largely been a bust for cancers of the prostate and pancreas.
Allison and Sharma feel the frustration acutely, saying that many more people must be helped. “We need to get the numbers much, much higher,” he says.
Even as they pursue the next breakthrough, their lives are a frenetic mix of science and celebrity. Allison’s role in developing immunotherapy has won him the adulation of both patients and philanthropists. The couple has flown on philanthropist and former financier Michael Milken’s private jet, been escorted on backstage tours by U2’s the Edge and attended high-wattage Vatican stem-cell conferences. At the Smith & Wollensky’s where they frequently dine in Houston – where Allison proposed to Sharma – there are wall plaques inscribed with their names near their usual table.
Still, they reserve most of their energy for their science. They say immunotherapy’s problem is that its use in patients has outpaced a fundamental understanding of how it works.
To remedy that, they are running an ambitious program that links animal research, novel human trials and intense monitoring of tumors via repeated biopsies. By analyzing the malignancies before, during and after treatment, they hope to better understand the interaction among the cancer, the treatment and the immune system. They know that using combinations of therapies for cancer will probably be the key to better outcomes for patients, but they need to figure out exactly which drugs to use, and how.
Allison doesn’t hesitate to tell Sharma what works best for laboratory research. She pushes back on any suggestions that might not help patients, reminding Allison he isn’t a physician.
And if they can’t compromise, who wins?
“Pam,” says the gravelly voiced Allison. “She’s louder.”
“I just want things to move things faster,” she counters.
On the sprawling MD Anderson campus, Sharma speed-walks, doling out medical advice, pep talks and the latest test results.
She warmly greets Michael Lee Lanning, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2003. Within three years, the disease had spread throughout his body, and doctors sent him home with painkillers and phone numbers for hospice. He was 59.
Looking for a reprieve, he went to MD Anderson and met Sharma. “She looked me in the eye and said, ‘Everyone will die, and some will die sooner,’ ” he recalled. A “cold b—-,” he told his wife.
But as he ran through treatment after treatment, Lanning came to appreciate Sharma’s refusal to give up. Two years ago, she had him enroll in a trial testing a combination of radiation and Yervoy, a medication developed by Allison that was the first checkpoint inhibitor approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The treatment kept Lanning’s cancer under control until this past December, when the tumors once more began growing and he repeated the one-two punch of radiation and Yervoy. More recently, to keep the tumors in check, he began taking a different immunotherapy drug.
“I didn’t think I’d make it to 60,” said Lanning, who is again stable. Now he’s 71 years old. His beloved granddaughter, who was 8 when he was diagnosed, is now in college.
Sharma has pushed for close monitoring of tumors in various stages of treatment for years, believing that it provides critical clues about why only some patients respond to immunotherapy and about how to design subsequent trials and experiments. Allison, a fan of the strategy, made its broad expansion a condition of his move from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York to MD Anderson in 2012. Today, about 100 of the center’s trials involve such intense surveillance.
While other cancer hospitals do similar analysis, the scale of the effort at MD Anderson sets it apart. “I’m jealous,” said Charles Drake, co-director of the cancer immunotherapy programs at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. “They can apply state-of-the-art analytical tools to tumor specimens before, during and after treatments and see the results in real time.”
Now Sharma and Allison are bringing their approach to advanced prostate cancer, which is notoriously resistant to immunotherapy. Previous research has shown that combining two immunotherapy drugs might be better than using just one. In a trial overseen by Sharma, one drug is used to drive T cells, the foot soldiers of the immune system, to the tumor, and a second to block proteins that keep those soldiers from attacking the malignancy.
“We have to try,” she says. “At least these treatments give our patients a chance.”
By outward appearance, Allison and Sharma are opposites. She’s 47, striking and model-thin; he’s 69, rumpled and pudgy.
Just as pronounced are their similarities. They bonded years ago over their shared obsession with T cells, and these days, Sharma says, “we talk about data all the time, at dinner, while brushing our teeth.”
Allison grew up in a small town in South Texas where his country-doctor father made house calls. His mother died of lymphoma when he was 11 – just the first of many family losses to cancer. Two uncles and a brother later died of the disease. Allison has battled early-stage melanoma, bladder and prostate cancers.
He went into cancer research not because of family history but because he always wanted to be the first person to figure something out. Early on in classes at the University of Texas at Austin, he realized that medical school wasn’t for him. “If you are a doctor, you have to do the right thing; otherwise, you could hurt somebody,” he says. “I like being on the edge and being wrong a lot.”
Allison did not attend medical school, but he did earn a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. In the mid-1990s, while doing research at the University of California at Berkeley, he became intrigued by a molecule called CTLA-4, which exists on the surface of T cells. It was widely thought to spur the immune system into action. Allison and immunologist Jeffrey Bluestone at the University of California at San Francisco independently proved just the opposite: The protein slammed on the immune system’s brakes.
Allison wondered about the implications for cancer. If this brake – called a checkpoint – were disabled, would T cells hunt down and destroy tumors?
To find out, his lab developed an antibody that blocked CTLA-4 and injected it into mice with cancer. The tumors melted away. That work led to a 1996 landmark paper describing a radical new anti-cancer approach targeting the immune system, not the malignant cell. It was called “checkpoint blockade.”
“Jim Allison’s conceptual insight opened up the whole field,” said Antoni Ribas, a leading oncologist and immunologist at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Allison was determined to get the compound into human testing. “I wasn’t going to let anyone get in my way,” he says.
After years of badgering skeptical pharmaceutical companies, he finally persuaded a company later bought by Bristol-Myers Squibb to test the drug for advanced melanoma, which at the time was almost always lethal.
Sharon Vener, 65, was in one of the first trials. In the mid-1980s, the mother of two had a small mole that turned out to be melanoma. Sixteen years later, the disease returned with a vengeance – as an inoperable, baseball-size tumor attached to her heart, lungs and chest wall; she also had several tumors in her liver.
Her doctors, including Ribas, tried a few treatments. All failed. As a final effort, he enrolled her in a first-in-human trial of Allison’s immunotherapy drug. Her tumors began to shrink after a single dose.
“Every birthday, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’m still here,’ ” Vener says. A decade ago, Ribas introduced her to Allison as the man who had saved her life. The two hugged and then cried.
Sharma’s father, an engineer in Guyana, ended up as a handyman after he and his family fled political turmoil for the United States in 1980. They settled in a tiny basement apartment in “Little Guyana” in Queens, and her mother cleaned houses. Sharma was 10.
A standout student, she would go on to graduate from Boston University and earn a medical degree and PhD in immunology from Pennsylvania State University. After further training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, she was hired by MD Anderson in 2004.
She and Allison met at a scientific meeting the following year and began collaborating. For a long time, she was leery about getting personally involved with him. “I didn’t want to worry that everyone would think my ideas were actually his ideas,” she says.
By now she has her own significant achievements, including being the first to show that a T cell protein called ICOS boosts the effectiveness of some immunotherapy. In Houston, both she and Allison have impressive portfolios.
He is chair of MD Anderson’s immunotherapy department and executive director of what the cancer center calls its immunotherapy platform, a large effort to understand cancer and the immune system. She is the platform’s scientific director, and between the two of them they preside over three labs and dozens of people. Every week, they and their team review four or five trials to try to discern patterns, decide which animal tests to conduct and how to design new human studies.
In their personal lives, the constant talk of T cells sometimes perplexes Sharma’s three daughters from a previous marriage. But they are familiar with their mother’s focus. She says she has never felt guilty about the demands of her job; her patients desperately needed her, and her daughters were lucky enough “to grow up healthy in a world with indoor plumbing and Cheerios.”
Plus some perks: These days, Sharma drives a Porsche with a vanity license plate that says CTLA-4, a reference to her husband’s work. And he drives a Tesla with a plate that says ICOS, a nod to hers.
But back to Chicago and the House of Blues restaurant, where the “The Checkpoints” are well into their set. The show, held annually during the biggest cancer conference of the year, raises money for grants awarded by the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer.
Allison’s fame and his facility with the harmonica have provided unique opportunities, such as accompanying Willie Nelson and his band at the Redneck Country Club near Houston. Tonight, however, clad in a black Hawaiian shirt, he’s performing for a different crowd.
The big boss man is the picture of cool as he steps up and plays “Take Out Some Insurance on Me, Baby.” Dancing right in front, as always, is Sharma.
American flags seen at the Washington Monument. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
NEW YORK – NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s statement that he expects players to stand for the American anthem when preseason and regular-season games begin, is commendable.
That bold statement needs to be reiterated across all sporting disciplines. If players don’t respect that simple rule, they need to be disciplined; fired, if they violate it often.
It’s deplorable that the form of protest initiated by Colin Kaepernick has spread like wildfire, vitiated the sporting arena in the United States. It’s made a mockery of fans who pay to watch sports, dented a valuable family outing. Fans feel violated, humiliated when players show disrespect for the American anthem and the flag.
Why should fans with a deep sense of pride in their national anthem and flag, revere it, respect a player who appallingly tramples on the same sentiments, tarnishes a time-bound tradition ingrained into the very soul of sports?
The sports field is where children at an early age learn the value of teamwork, discipline and teamwork. Learn to win, take loss in stride, become stronger mentally and physically in life. A strong sense of patriotism and pride is instilled in children when they sing the national anthem in tandem, stand up for the flag. It’s a ritual followed in countries around the world, by civilized people.
Why should adult fans taken their innocent, naïve children to games where players show disrespect to the anthem and the flag? What if children emulate the same in their school yard, to show solidarity for a trivial issue, without understanding the consequences of their action?
It’s ridiculous! Shame to all players who have shown disrespect for the national anthem and the national flag!
At the Olympics as well as World Cups, it’s a time-bound tradition for the national anthem to be played at medal ceremony. Imagine a player who has won gold, and the national anthem is being played to honor that win, as the national flag goes up, to kneel at that moment.
Does that idiot think that viewers from around the world will clap for him or her, immediately decide that yes, the athlete is right, try to resolve the issue of racial injustice? Or would viewers jeer, condemn the incident, feel ashamed of that athlete? I vote for the latter.
If players want to highlight injustice and police brutality against Blacks, then they should do it the right way, like all other forms of protest: hold rallies, converge on Capitol Hill or their town hall, give talks in schools and universities, do a Million Players March, even refuse to play. Do what it takes to take that issue of racial injustice forward. But for goodness sake, leave the sports arena alone with this absurd tactic of kneeling down for the flag, when the national anthem is being played!
This is what Silver said in his statement: “It’s always been an opportunity in our arenas for both teams to come together and have a moment of reflection. Clearly for the non-American players, it’s not necessarily a moment of patriotism for the United States, but it’s about respect. It’s about respect for the country they play in. It’s about respect for the principles that underlie this country. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone agrees at any given point with what’s happening in their country.”
President Trump may have been profane and coarse when he said “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired. He’s fired!” But one can totally agree with what he had to say about the kneelers: “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage. That’s a total disrespect for everything we stand for.”
The effect of Kaepernick’s puerile act – which cost him his career – has already invaded the children’s sporting arena and psyche: a group of 8-year-old football players, from a team called Junior Comanches, in Cahokia, Illinois, knelt during the national anthem while turning their backs on the flag, earlier this month, to protest the verdict in the St. Louis trial of former police officer Jason Stockley.
The question is: are 8-year-old children capable of making their own judgment on issues like police brutality, injustice against Black people, and hatred against minorities? And did they all talk about it and then decide to kneel, or were they told to do so by conniving adults to prove a point, gain national publicity?
At an age when an 8-year-old should be learning to respect, laugh and play with classmates, not look at the color of the skin before deciding whom to be friends with, the act of showing callous disrespect on the field will translate quickly to lack of trust and disrespect off the field for myriad issues.
What next will these children do: spit in a white police officer’s face?
It won’t be just the flag and the anthem after such an inglorious stance; it would mean impertinence, scant respect and disobedience to a whole lot of other issues, sow fear and hatred early for all white skin people.
The vicious cycle of racial intolerance just started very early for those 8-year-old Junior Comanches players. It will dictate a lot of their decisions in life going forward; color judgment, even before they understand an issue in its entirety. It’s a pity. They are not minnow players anymore. They are ‘warriors’ too now, for a cause they have little understanding of. Perhaps, they will be ostracized for their act of defiance done at direction of adults, for no fault of theirs.
Fans are doing the right thing by showing disgust and contempt for NFL players who kneel: use those jerseys as doormats and bonfire fodder. Throw it in the fireplace.
(Sujeet Rajan is Executive Editor, Parikh Worldwide Media. Email him: sujeet@newsindiatimes.com Follow him on Twitter @SujeetRajan1)
Bergen County Women’s Working Committee, New Jersey, held an annual walk-a-thon Sept. 24, to raise funds in support of Manavi, an organization to help Indian and South Asian women in the tri-state area and beyond. (Photo: Manavi newsletter)
The Bergen County Women’s Working Committee gathered for an annual walk-a-thon to support the work of Manavi in its work towards ending violence against women.
The New Jersey-based Manavi, is among the oldest women’s organization for Indian-American and South Asian women in distress.
“On this beautiful sunny day, Sunday, September 24, 2017 there was a great turnout of some very dedicated people at the Saddle Brook County Park in Ridgewood, NJ.,” Manavi said in its monthly newsletter.
The walk was opened by the Mayor of Ridgewood Susan Knudsen, the Bergen County Prosecutor Gurbir S. Grewal, and activist Monica Singh.
The funds raised, the amount of which was not revealed in the newsletter, will be used towards Manavi’s Economic Empowerment program for survivors and to meet the periodic needs of Manavi’s transitional home or safe-house, Ashiana.
During September, Manavi advocates also represented the organization at an interactive session organized by the Consulate General of India on Sept. 8, at the consulate ballroom. The session was chaired by the India’s Consul General in New York Sandeep Chakravorty and involved discussions on activities and future events among community service providers.
In addition, Manavi’s sexual assault advocates participated in a Clothesline Project in Hackensack, N.J., across from the Bergen County Courthouse on Sept. 13. The Clothesline project which intended to raise community awareness on sexual assault and domestic violence featured thousands of t?shirts created by survivors. Manavi advocates had a table there and distributed posters and brochures from Manavi’s sexual assault support services program
Manavi also announced it is looking for volunteers who can help with translating the Know Your Rights booklet into Bengali. Contact: prashanti@manavi.org or call us at (732) 435-1414 if you can help.
New York City, my birthplace, is ringed by Italian neighborhoods. Go to Staten Island, the Bronx, Long Island or New Jersey — it doesn’t really matter where you go, as long as you are within 50 miles of the Empire State Building. Within that fortunate circle, you will find that you are always reasonably close to a neighborhood, or at least a street, full of little stores and restaurants of unprepossessing appearance and fantastic culinary achievement.
Tragically, such neighborhoods are a blessing of erratic and patently unfair geographic distribution.
In the rest of the country, the quality of the prosciutto seems to be directly proportional to the number of hand-crafted teak display cases, and also to the elevation of your heart rate when you view the prices posted inside those cases. In Italian neighborhoods, by contrast, the older and more scuffed the linoleum, the barer the badly plastered walls, the more tattered the appearance of the single 1956 Mass card taped into the cash register by way of decoration, the more likely you are to discover the single best piece of charcuterie you have ever eaten.
Unlike some enclaves that develop great restaurants and markets as they gentrify, Italians do not need to seek out good food as a way of expressing that they have arrived, financially and socially. Italians are already there. And being a cheerful and kind people, they are willing to invite the rest of us in.
I appreciated this anew while on vacation in Italy. Having spent years in a food desert of Washington, D.C., I was practically weeping over the ease with which one could secure decent pizza. I am not the only American to have noticed that everything tastes better in Italy, and no, that’s not just because you’re on vacation and surrounded by charming ancient buildings. (You may notice that few accounts of vacations in Reykjavik or Dublin begin with “The food was amazing.”) The quality of produce in Italy is, in fact, much better, because Italians demand that it be better. And having gotten their hands on better ingredients, they prepare them with the care their treasures deserve.
It’s not quite clear why Italians have such an amazing array of exquisite regional dishes, nor why they have held out so fanatically against the blandifying forces of modern commercial food processing. We can guess that the Roman Empire probably had something to do with it. Empires facilitate trade in exotic foodstuffs, and rich imperial barons employ chefs who dedicate considerable ingenuity to finding the best possible uses of those ingredients. Arguably the oldest cookbook in the world dates to the Roman Empire, and it is reasonable to suppose that even after that empire collapsed, its culinary influence lingered among the citizenry. (Though it’s worth noting that Italian cuisine as we know it today evolved with the arrival of New World foods like tomatoes.)
A long growing season also helps. Without vegetables or abundant herbs, there are only so many possible variations on “hunk of meat,” “piece of fish,” “egg” or “things you can make from milk.” (It’s not an accident that the northern reaches of Europe are little famed for culinary excellence, or that the most interesting and appealing local specialties tend to be either cheeses or some kind of alcohol.)
Ironically, the tenacity and abundance of Italian food culture may also be attributable in part to the intense regional strife that followed the Roman Empire, and the poverty of Italy’s long decline from its Renaissance peak. As Tyler Cowen noted in his marvelous book, “An Economist Gets Lunch,” in places that industrialized early, mass commercial canning, and television, preceded the technological and logistical innovations that made it easy for us to get decent produce year-round. In those places, hungry and relatively poor people developed a taste, or at least a tolerance, for bland processed food made palatable by lashings of sugar and fat. Then came television, which favored meals that can be eaten one-handed in front of a screen. And women moving into the workforce, which favored anything that can be prepared quickly.
Thanks to its relative poverty, Italy came to these things late, and at a time when global food supply chains were improving. So Italians held onto a food culture that prized care and taste over efficiency and ability to withstand a harsh shipping process.
All these things are probably part of the explanation, but they cannot be all of it because why, almost a century after the great wave of Italian immigration ended, are Italian Americans still noticeably better-fed than, say, their Irish-American counterparts?
As the anthropologists are fond of telling us, culture is a mystery, difficult to describe, hard to destroy, impossible to create. It’s the emergent sum of millions of individual decisions. So we cannot replicate Italian food culture; we can only try to figure out how to let as many people as possible free-ride on their cultural labor.
New York has more than its fair share of Italian cuisine. Perhaps some denizens of a town or neighborhood of a certifiably Italian-American character will take pity on more barren culinary climes. Of course, without a critical mass, the food culture will dissipate into a sea of Oreos and tater-tot casseroles, so we need at least a few thousand to move en masse. (Which reminds me: If only we could spread French cuisine the same way! But since America has pitifully few recent French immigrants, this may require some sort of special visa program.)
Towns could even entice Italian food-related businesses with tax abatements and special grants enabling them to relocate their linoleum, their Mass cards, and their battered steel display cases to new homes within the Great American Food Desert.
This may seem a little extreme to you. Must thousands of our fellow citizens uproot themselves, simply to improve the food culture elsewhere?
To even ask such a question demonstrates how dire the problem is. If you cared about food properly — which is to say, as much as Italians do — you’d already be recruiting in and around New York.
– McArdle is a Bloomberg View columnist. She wrote for the Daily Beast, Newsweek, the Atlantic and the Economist and founded the blog Asymmetrical Information. She is the author of “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.”
New York City, my birthplace, is ringed by Italian neighborhoods. Go to Staten Island, the Bronx, Long Island or New Jersey — it doesn’t really matter where you go, as long as you are within 50 miles of the Empire State Building. Within that fortunate circle, you will find that you are always reasonably close to a neighborhood, or at least a street, full of little stores and restaurants of unprepossessing appearance and fantastic culinary achievement.
Tragically, such neighborhoods are a blessing of erratic and patently unfair geographic distribution.
In the rest of the country, the quality of the prosciutto seems to be directly proportional to the number of hand-crafted teak display cases, and also to the elevation of your heart rate when you view the prices posted inside those cases. In Italian neighborhoods, by contrast, the older and more scuffed the linoleum, the barer the badly plastered walls, the more tattered the appearance of the single 1956 Mass card taped into the cash register by way of decoration, the more likely you are to discover the single best piece of charcuterie you have ever eaten.
Unlike some enclaves that develop great restaurants and markets as they gentrify, Italians do not need to seek out good food as a way of expressing that they have arrived, financially and socially. Italians are already there. And being a cheerful and kind people, they are willing to invite the rest of us in.
I appreciated this anew while on vacation in Italy. Having spent years in a food desert of Washington, D.C., I was practically weeping over the ease with which one could secure decent pizza. I am not the only American to have noticed that everything tastes better in Italy, and no, that’s not just because you’re on vacation and surrounded by charming ancient buildings. (You may notice that few accounts of vacations in Reykjavik or Dublin begin with “The food was amazing.”) The quality of produce in Italy is, in fact, much better, because Italians demand that it be better. And having gotten their hands on better ingredients, they prepare them with the care their treasures deserve.
It’s not quite clear why Italians have such an amazing array of exquisite regional dishes, nor why they have held out so fanatically against the blandifying forces of modern commercial food processing. We can guess that the Roman Empire probably had something to do with it. Empires facilitate trade in exotic foodstuffs, and rich imperial barons employ chefs who dedicate considerable ingenuity to finding the best possible uses of those ingredients. Arguably the oldest cookbook in the world dates to the Roman Empire, and it is reasonable to suppose that even after that empire collapsed, its culinary influence lingered among the citizenry. (Though it’s worth noting that Italian cuisine as we know it today evolved with the arrival of New World foods like tomatoes.)
A long growing season also helps. Without vegetables or abundant herbs, there are only so many possible variations on “hunk of meat,” “piece of fish,” “egg” or “things you can make from milk.” (It’s not an accident that the northern reaches of Europe are little famed for culinary excellence, or that the most interesting and appealing local specialties tend to be either cheeses or some kind of alcohol.)
Ironically, the tenacity and abundance of Italian food culture may also be attributable in part to the intense regional strife that followed the Roman Empire, and the poverty of Italy’s long decline from its Renaissance peak. As Tyler Cowen noted in his marvelous book, “An Economist Gets Lunch,” in places that industrialized early, mass commercial canning, and television, preceded the technological and logistical innovations that made it easy for us to get decent produce year-round. In those places, hungry and relatively poor people developed a taste, or at least a tolerance, for bland processed food made palatable by lashings of sugar and fat. Then came television, which favored meals that can be eaten one-handed in front of a screen. And women moving into the workforce, which favored anything that can be prepared quickly.
Thanks to its relative poverty, Italy came to these things late, and at a time when global food supply chains were improving. So Italians held onto a food culture that prized care and taste over efficiency and ability to withstand a harsh shipping process.
All these things are probably part of the explanation, but they cannot be all of it because why, almost a century after the great wave of Italian immigration ended, are Italian Americans still noticeably better-fed than, say, their Irish-American counterparts?
As the anthropologists are fond of telling us, culture is a mystery, difficult to describe, hard to destroy, impossible to create. It’s the emergent sum of millions of individual decisions. So we cannot replicate Italian food culture; we can only try to figure out how to let as many people as possible free-ride on their cultural labor.
New York has more than its fair share of Italian cuisine. Perhaps some denizens of a town or neighborhood of a certifiably Italian-American character will take pity on more barren culinary climes. Of course, without a critical mass, the food culture will dissipate into a sea of Oreos and tater-tot casseroles, so we need at least a few thousand to move en masse. (Which reminds me: If only we could spread French cuisine the same way! But since America has pitifully few recent French immigrants, this may require some sort of special visa program.)
Towns could even entice Italian food-related businesses with tax abatements and special grants enabling them to relocate their linoleum, their Mass cards, and their battered steel display cases to new homes within the Great American Food Desert.
This may seem a little extreme to you. Must thousands of our fellow citizens uproot themselves, simply to improve the food culture elsewhere?
To even ask such a question demonstrates how dire the problem is. If you cared about food properly — which is to say, as much as Italians do — you’d already be recruiting in and around New York.
– McArdle is a Bloomberg View columnist. She wrote for the Daily Beast, Newsweek, the Atlantic and the Economist and founded the blog Asymmetrical Information. She is the author of “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.”
The acronym IoT has a new meaning – “Internet of Toys”- and just like the old abbreviation, for Internet of Things, this one comes with urgent cybersecurity warnings. The FBI is cautioning that Internet-connected toys, also known as “smart toys,” can be compromised by hackers. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center goes into extraordinary detail in its release, saying strangers can pinpoint your address, snag children’s names and birth dates, download your son or daughter’s photo, and even listen in on your conversations and record your child’s voice.
This is not just a heads up about potential child identity theft. The FBI has more serious concerns: “The potential misuse of sensitive data such as GPS location information, visual identifiers from pictures or videos, and known interests to garner trust from a child could present exploitation risks,” the release states. “The FBI encourages consumers to consider cyber security prior to introducing smart, interactive, internet-connected toys into their homes . . .”
So what types of toys should parents scrutinize? Here are several risk factors provided by the FBI and SecurityIntelligence.com. Be cautious if the toy:
– connects directly to the Internet via WiFi.
– connects via Bluetooth to a device which is, in turn, connected to the Internet .
– contains speakers.
– contains microphones.
– contains a recording device.
– contains cameras.
– contains wireless transmitters and receivers.
– has speech recognition capability.
– has GPS capability.
– connects to a mobile app.
– requests name, address, date of birth or other personal information when you register.
– stores your data internally.
– sends your data to the manufacturer and/or partners.
– has cloud connection capability.
– remains connected to the cloud even when it’s off.
– does not come with an End User License Agreement or EULA.
– The cloud storage provider is not identified in the EULA.
The concern is more than theoretical. Several specific toys have already come under fire.
In February, Germany banned an Internet-connected doll called “My Friend Cayla” and advised parents who already own one to destroy it. Cayla, made by Genesis toys, contains an internal microphone that criminals could use to listen in on children – but that’s not all. The Norwegian Consumer Council says strangers could also speak to children through Cayla and demonstrated how it could be done in a well-produced YouTube video.
Another controversy, also in February, involved “Cloud Pets,” which are Internet-connected stuffed animals that allow parents and children to leave voice messages for each other. A security researcher discovered a couple million of those voice recordings in a poorly secured Internet database. And because manufacturer Spiral Toys did not require complex passwords, it was feasible for hackers to access the recordings. Spiral Toys chief executive Mark Meyers told NetworkWorld, “We looked at it and thought it was a very minimal issue.”
Earlier, V-Tech acknowledged that close to 5 million of its customers’ “Learning Lodge,” “Kid Connect” and other accounts were hacked. Those accounts allowed children to download games or communicate with their parents on V-Tech devices. A hacker was able to access children’s photos, names, dates of birth, addresses and chat histories. The Motherboard website shared portions of hacked family photos and a child’s recording to demonstrate that the threat was real.
How available are Internet-connected toys? A quick Internet search revealed smart toy technology housed in dolls, stuffed animals, dinosaurs, unicorns, teddy bears, stationary bicycles, wrist bands, children’s tablets – and more. That’s why, in June, the Federal Trade Commission updated its guidance about COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, to include Internet-connected toys. Under COPPA, among other things, companies are supposed to ask parental permission before collecting personal information about children under age 13. Staffers in the office of Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., say he is planning to reintroduce a bill that would expand COPPA.
Meanwhile, the FBI suggests parents take several steps to protect their children from the potential dangers of Internet-connected toys:
1. Look for Internet-connected toys that are certified by an FTC-approved group that has verified they protect children’s privacy.
2. Before buying a smart toy, do an online search to see if there have been negative reports or reviews.
3. Read the company’s user agreement and privacy practices and make sure you are okay with them.
4. Pay particular attention to where your data is stored or sent, including third party services – and research their reputation.
5. Connect toys only to a secure WiFi access point.
6. If the toy uses Bluetooth, make sure it requires PINs or passwords when pairing with Internet-connected devices.
7. Make sure the toy uses encryption when transmitting data to the WiFi access point, the server or the cloud.
8. See if the toy can receive software updates and security patches and, if so, keep it updated to the most recent version.
9. Find out if the company will notify you if it suffers a data breach, discovers vulnerabilities in its toy or changes its disclosures.
10. Provide as little personal information as possible when setting up user accounts for the toy.
11. Choose strong, unique passwords when creating your account.
12. Pay attention to what your children are doing with the toy, either by monitoring them in person or using the parent portal, if there is one.
13. Turn the toy off when your children are not using it, especially if it contains cameras and/or microphones.
14. If you believe your child’s toy has been compromised, file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
Or, if all this vigilance sounds overwhelming, you could always send your kids outside to play.
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Leamy hosts the podcast “Easy Money” and is a 25-year consumer advocate for programs such as “Good Morning America” and “The Dr. Oz Show.” Connect with her at leamy.com and @ElisabethLeamy.
Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, introduces the iPhone X during a launch event in Cupertino, California, U.S. September 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
Apple released more details about the iPhone X’s Face ID feature when it published a new privacy site Wednesday, addressing some of the concerns that people have had since the face-scanning feature was announced.
When Apple unveiled the feature, which can unlock phones and be used for payments, it spurred not only a thousand alarming think pieces, but also a letter from Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., asking how the company will protect the data. There have also been worries about how much to trust Face ID. The company’s first public demo of Face ID didn’t go that smoothly, after all – at one point, the demonstrator had to skip the face scan and enter his password instead.
The most telling answers on Face ID come from a white paper the company’s posted on its security.
The information collected by Face ID won’t leave your device, the company reiterates on the site. Apple also lays out exactly what it’s storing: infrared images of your face captured when you first start Face ID, the mathematical representations of your face it calculates during that enrollment and whatever other images the phone deems necessary to account for changes to your face (a beard growing over time, for example). Images are also cropped close to your face to avoid grabbing any background information.
There are also several instances when Face ID won’t work. These include when:
– The device has just been turned on or restarted.
– The device hasn’t been unlocked for more than 48 hours.
– The passcode hasn’t been used to unlock the device in the past 156 hours (6 ½ days) and Face ID has not unlocked the device in the past four hours.
– The device has received a remote lock command.
– There have been five unsuccessful attempts to match a face. (Note: This is what happened onstage to Apple’s head of software, Craig Federighi, when he demonstrated the feature for the first time in public after others handled the demo phone.)
– You power off or initiate the Emergency SOS by pressing and holding either volume button and the side button simultaneously for two seconds.
This last tip, at least in part, addresses concerns that people will not be able to stop others from using Face ID to open an individual’s phone without consent. And by activating the Emergency SOS, you’ll also be dialing an emergency number and disabling the Touch ID and Face ID features.
That should help users worried about being asked to open their phones under duress, such as while being mugged. That is, if they have the time to activate it when needed.Apple’s new privacy site also breaks down its practices on everything from Apple Pay to encryption to health data on the site, offering short descriptions of how it uses data, how it protects data and often adds links to give those interested in more information on its policies.
It’s a comprehensive website and more reader-friendly than any other tech giant’s privacy center. Still, it’s a lot of reading and a reminder of all the information we’re entrusting to Apple and its philosophies on data protection.
Overall, what really may be most useful for people looking at this site is the articulation from Apple about how it views privacy as they push further into personal wearable devices and home hubs. The fact that it’s made this knowledge center at all shows that it will continue to try to provide more personalized services with a privacy bent.
SEATTLE – Amazon really wants us all to be talking to its smart assistant, Alexa. The company announced a half-dozen new products that make clear that the tech giant wants you to be talking to its assistant at every point in your day, in every room of your house, no matter who you are.
The company introduced four completely new products to its smart-speaker category: the high-end Echo Plus that doubles as a smarter home hub; the Echo Spot which is a smart alarm clock with a video screen; a set of button accessories aimed at making the Echo more of an entertainment device; and the Echo Connect – a $35 speakerphone box that plugs into the traditional landline connection and uses your home phone number.
Amazon also revealed updates to the Echo, which hasn’t seen an upgrade since its 2014 launch, and decreased the size of the Fire TV so that it’s no longer its own set-top box. Though it still offers 4K streaming, it now plugs entirely into the back of a TV.BMW also announced it will put Alexa-friendly microphones and the voice assistant in select BMW and Mini models in 2018.
The aggressive push to make Alexa as ubiquitous as possible may substantially raise expectations for others in the space, such as Google and Apple – which has yet to even launch its dedicated smart home speaker, the HomePod.
(Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)
Amazon’s senior vice president of devices Dave Limp said that the company dedicates 5,000 people to Alexa and Echo alone to help with this efforts – a huge effort, given that reports place its competitors’ teams at dozens or hundreds of employees. Limp said, however, that Amazon saw demand for development with Alexa from all stripes – products, services and hardware. That focus may explain how Amazon has been able to tackle one of the biggest obstacles facing the smart home: how difficult it is to set up.
The complexity of setting up a smart home – downloading apps, figuring out which devices work with which services, even naming each individual bulb – has proven a major hurdle to smart appliance adoption even as companies aggressively pursue the space.
But Limp showed off how Alexa – using the $149 Echo Plus – can now make smart home set-up as easy as, well, screwing in a light bulb. Shortly after twisting the bulb into the socket, the Echo Plus picked it up in a scan for smart devices in the room, named it and was able to control it within 15 seconds.
Every version of the higher-end Echo will also ship with its own Philips Hue lightbulb, as a very transparent push to get more people to try out the smart home for themselves.
Adding the Echo Plus puts Amazon’s speakers, price-wise, on either side of Google’s $130 Home.
Amazon showed off the Echo Spot which could work for those more comfortable with the idea of smart home technology. About the size of a compact clock radio, the Spot features a video screen that can play video, display a watch face and be used for video calls. The $130 Spot is essentially a more compact riff on the Echo Show, the video-enabled Echo that debuted earlier this year.
Amazon’s also making a new push to style the Echo as a more active entertainment device. Echo Buttons, which would look at home on any game show set, connect to an Echo device via Bluetooth; the firm showed off a trivia game demo, where players buzzed in when they knew the answer. Toy giant Hasbro will make a version of Trivial Pursuit that uses the buttons, Limp said.
The traditional Echo saw a price drop, to $99, and a redesign that makes it more compact, a little shorter and a little squatter. A new “routines” features allows Echo to trigger multiple actions – turning on lights, opening the blinds, starting the coffee maker – from a single phrase such as “Alexa, good morning.” Both the Echo and Echo Plus will get free outbound calls to any number in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, pulling contacts from your smartphone.
The forceful push on hardware – at relatively low prices – dovetails exactly with Amazon’s hardware strategy in the past, analysts said.
“For Amazon, hardware is a means to drive more consumption be it media or washing powder,” said Geoff Blaber of CCS Insight in a note following the event. “Amazon has the momentum in the smart speaker and voice assistant space. It’s clearly determined to maximize that advantage and use it to spearhead its move deeper into the home.”
In 2005, two years after Sameer Sahay arrived in the United States from India to pursue an MBA, he was thrilled when an Oregon health care company hired him and agreed to sponsor his green card. His life as an American, he thought, had begun.
Twelve years later, Sahay, now 50, is still a data architect, still working for the same firm, and still waiting for that green card. It’s not clear when he’ll clear the government backlog. He does know that his provisional status stalled his career – changing jobs would have required the company to file a new petition. “Personally, I have sacrificed my career to help my family to have a better life,” Sahay says. “That has taken its toll. Had I gotten a green card, I could have moved on, moved up, done a lot more things. This held me where I was 10 years ago.”
Tangled and contradictory immigration policies of this sort have frustrated Indian immigrants for years, but the United States was seen as a prize worth pursuing. Now, though, many Indians – long a vital pillar of U.S. hospitals, tech firms, and engineering efforts – are reconsidering their options. Despite a chummy Rose Garden meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June, the permanent legal status of many Indians in America has become far more uncertain since Trump’s election.
In the president’s short time in office, his promises and policies – from the “Muslim ban” to a directive that may alter who gets a work visa – have convinced many foreign nationals that they are not welcome. For many of the 2.4 million Indian nationals living in the United States, including roughly 1 million who are scientists and engineers, the fears are existential; although roughly 45 percent are naturalized citizens, hundreds of thousands still depend on impermanent visas that must be periodically renewed. Changes in the U.S. skilled visa scheme could trigger large economic and intellectual losses, especially in states with many South Asian residents such as California and New Jersey. Some foreign nationals there wonder if Trump’s policies will trigger an Indian brain drain.
Since Trump’s election, the number of Indian-born residents in the United States searching for jobs back in India has climbed more than tenfold, consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu found. Six hundred people were searching in December, and the number spiked in March to 7,000. Four out of 10 U.S. colleges say they’ve seen a sharp drop in international applicants for the fall term, especially among applicants from India and China, the top sources for international students. Nearly 167,000 Indians studied at American colleges in the 2015-2016 school year.
Some graduates from Indian colleges have considered setting out for Canada, which is wooing tech workers, or heading to Europe. Personal safety fears are driving decisions, as well. After a white U.S. Navy veteran shot two Indian engineers in Kansas in February, killing one, Indian newspapers ran news coverage of the story and editorials for days. The vet had angrily questioned the pair about their visa status.
Shops and business along the boardwalk in Ocean City, Md., are among those that depend on workers hired through the J-1 visa program. (Photo: Washington Post /Michael S. Williamson)
This year, the number of people applying for a high-skilled worker visa, the H-1B, dropped for the first time in four years – from 236,000 last year to 199,000, the government reported. Attorneys sensed that Trump’s travel ban and vows to tighten vetting procedures have unnerved petitioners. The new wave of H-1B applicants began processing on Sep. 18 – with the numbers severely tightened. More applications are being challenged than ever before.
“The platform he got elected on, that hatred, denigrating other religions, it wasn’t making America great again and uplift the world. It’s ‘We’re going to make America great’ at the cost to the rest of the world. We’re doing long-term damage here,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. At the same time, the opportunities in India are growing exponentially. “They don’t have to leave.”
Nearly 127,000 Indians were given H-1B visas to work in the United States in the 2016 fiscal year, far more than any other nationality. (The Chinese claimed 21,600 visas.) Most of the 85,000 documents awarded annually by lottery go to outsourcing companies. Such firms recruit foreigners with college diplomas, most of whom are Indian, to work in technical jobs. For years, big tech companies such as Microsoft and Google have pressed the government to raise the number of visas allotted, saying they can’t find enough Americans with the necessary skills. H-1B critics say there are enough Americans with technology degrees to fill all the country’s technical jobs.
In April, Trump rolled out another “America First” policy and announced changes to the program. He signed an executive order that may alter who gets the annual visas, saying he wants to ensure that only the highest-skilled, best-paid immigrant workers gain entry. Lower-skilled workers would be prevented from taking jobs from Americans, he said. Outsourcing firms, such as Infosys, expect a sharp drop in the number of visas they would receive, which would hurt Indians who possess only undergraduate degrees.
The policies and outcomes have discouraged both undergraduate and graduate students from India who would like to study science and engineering in the United States, says Tahmina Watson, an immigration attorney in Seattle. “Why would students come here if the path to a long-term career does not exist?” she says.
So many workers have been frustrated that attorney Brent Renison sought class-action status for a lawsuit filed last year in U.S. District Court in Portland. He argued, in part, that the H-1B lottery was arbitrary and capricious. The suit asked the court to order the government to process visa petitions in the order they are filed and compel the government to establish a waitlist like the one used for green card petitions. The government prevailed.
“Some people are moving out of the country, taking valuable skills with them,” Renison says. “Some people are choosing not to come. If this persists, were going to lose a lot of the foreign students we educate.”
(Photo: Reuters)
The system was barely functioning as it was. Applications for work visas already were so clogged in the federal bureaucracy that in recent years even Ivy League graduates couldn’t be certain of receiving one. Getting a work visa hasn’t guaranteed stability, as Sahay, the data architect, knows. Employers can sponsor immigrants’ green cards, or permanent visas, but the approvals process is backlogged. The federal government places caps for green cards on each country each year. Indians seeking permanent residency say it’s routine for them to linger in line for a decade or more. Up to 2 million Indian workers here and abroad may be waiting in a green card backlog that could take a decade or more to clear if there are no changes to the system, says David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute think tank.
Those concerns may add to the shortage of highly skilled technology workers in the United States, just as Canada or Singapore vie for those same people. Every other startup company, says Vish Mishra, an investor with Clearstone Venture Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, has operations based overseas or recruits workers in India, Eastern Europe, Canada or Israel. “You’re not going to have, all of a sudden, 200,000 [American] people filling the gap that exists. What are businesses going to do? Businesses have to import talent,” he says.
Canada has become more attractive just since the U.S. presidential election. The country granted temporary work visas to 1,960 Indian nationals in all of 2015, and 2,120 total in the fourth quarter of 2016 and first quarter of this year.
In November, Canada announced that as of June, the country would speed the processing of standard visas and work permits to two weeks for highly skilled talent working for companies doing business in Canada. The move, the government says, will help companies grow and fuel job growth for Canadians.
Meanwhile, in the United States, tech workers and engineers are bound to established companies that filed paperwork for them years back. Almost everyone in the Indian tech community knows a weekend entrepreneur who desperately wants to start his or her own company but can’t quit work because they would be visa-less. Meanwhile, friends and family in India beg them to come home and bring their ideas to India’s own booming silicon valleys.
Rishi Bhilawadikar, a user-experience designer in the Bay area, says that tenuous life lived by so many educated Indian workers – in America, but not really of America – spurred him to shoot a feature film. In For Here or To Go, made over the course of more than seven years, the characters weigh whether America has lost its promise for young, mobile Indians. The idea bubbled up, Bhilawadikar says, after he read research that showed how certain laws keep some immigrants from fulfilling their potential, driving many back home or to countries with more welcoming policies, such as Canada and Chile.
“I go visit my parents [in India] and they say, ‘You’ve been waiting all that time. Does it make sense?'” Bhilawadikar says. “You’re constantly made to think, ‘Do I belong here or should I go back?'” Educated at the Indiana University Bloomington, Bhilawadikar says he has stayed in America because of his professional network and a job that he likes at The Gap. “If you worked hard to develop roots here, it becomes difficult after 15, 20 years to pack up your bags,” he says. Still, he has been reluctant to marry, not knowing if he can count on staying.
Sahay, in Oregon, knows that purgatory too well. When he arrived, he knew Indians who were getting visas in three to four years, he says. Trump’s election has not given him hope that he can expect things to change, “I don’t know if can be called unfair or not,” he says. “The rules happen; people have to abide by it. That’s what we’ve been doing. That’s what thousands of Indians have been doing: waiting.”
Back in India, his niece and nephew, once eager to move to the states, have ditched those plans. The election of Trump has soured their views on America. “Their first reaction is, ‘No,'” Sahay says. “‘I’ll go to any other country but the U.S.'”
The American Hindu Coalition (AHC) Women’s Business Wing held a conference on September 23, in the Greater Washington, DC Area.
The conference started with an introduction by the conference emcee Padmini Nidumolu followed by rendition of the American national anthem by Ananya Penugonda. The AHC President Harsh Sethi introduced the team, including Women’s Business Wing Director Manikya Lakshmi Linga. It was followed by a presentation on political advocacy by John Jaggers, AHC Political Director.
AHC Women’s Business Wing leader Srilekha Reddy Palle presented the mission of the group, which is to create a sustainable structure that supports the continued global advancement of women through individual development, community creation, and cultural change.
The conference concluded with a cultural show case led by Shilpi C and team. It was revealed that American Hindu Coalition Women’s Business Wing has officially became an outreach partner of Global Entrepreneurship Summit, be held in Hyderabad, India. The US delegation is chaired by Ivanka Trump.
Plymouth Miami Beach, in the Art Deco District, is offering more than half off stays in October. Rooms start at $149 a night Sunday through Wednesday and $199 Thursday through Saturday. Add 13 percent tax. Rates typically start at $349. The deal coincides with the Miami Spice dining special: Nearly 200 restaurants are offering multi-course lunch or brunch for $23 and dinner for $39. Book at theplymouth.com with promo code PLY.
Wyndham Extra Holidays is offering savings of up to 20 percent at 16 ski resorts. The promotion applies to Wyndham vacation ownership resorts in 10 U.S. states, including Utah, Colorado and Vermont, and three Canadian provinces. For example, a one-bedroom suite at Utah’s Wyndham Park City in mid-December is $159 a night (plus $16 taxes), a savings of $40. Stay Nov. 22-April 10; holiday blackouts apply. Book by Nov. 20 at extraholidays.com/promotion/wyndham-vacation-ski-resort-deals with promo code SKI.
Intrepid Travel is taking 40 percent off October departures of its Gorillas & Game Parks adventure in Africa. The 16-day trip in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda starts at $1,965 per person, down from $3,275, and includes 10 nights of camping, three nights in a dorm and two nights in a hotel; 44 meals; several game drives; a mountain-gorilla trek and permit in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park; and taxes. Depart Oct. 21 or Oct. 28. Info: 800-970-7299, intrepidtravel.com/us/uganda/gorillas-game-parks-104068.
Save 10 percent on a six-day package at Hacienda Puerta del Cielo Ecolodge & Spa, which sits on the rim of an ancient caldera in Nicaragua. The Green Season Special costs $2,125 for two people and includes five nights in a private casita; three daily meals; round-trip airport transfers; welcome cocktail and daily appetizer; two excursions, including a Colonial Granada and Isletas boat tour and a Masaya Volcano and artisan tour; two 50-minute massages; dinner with a bottle of wine; and taxes. Valid through Nov. 30. Info: 772-708-2865, haciendapuertadelcielo.com
Sea
Victoria Cruises is offering two-for-one rates on the already discounted February departures of its Yangtze River cruises in China. The promo applies to the Three Gorges Highlights cruise, which spends four nights sailing from Yichang to Chongqing and three nights on the reverse itinerary. To receive the discount, you must purchase the shore excursion package, which is also two-for-one. Sale is valid on superior cabins only. The cruise starts at $470 per couple, including port charges, plus $90 for the excursion package. A luxury amenity package with enhanced dining privileges, WiFi and other perks is also two-for-one and costs $200 for two travelers. Instead of tips, each passenger pays a $25 service charge. Book by Nov. 30. Info: 800-348-8084, victoriacruises.com/about/specials.
Air
With Scandinavian Air, kids ages 2 to 11 can fly to Scandinavia and Finland for the price of taxes and fees. For example, round-trip air from Washington Dulles to Copenhagen costs $756 for one adult ($701) and one child ($55). An adult must accompany each child. Travel Nov. 1-May 31. Book by Thursday at flysas.com
Package
Book a round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to Auckland on Air Tahiti Nui by Monday and receive a stopover in Tahiti with three free hotel nights at Le Meridien Tahiti, a value of at least $690. Stay Nov. 18-May 31; blackout dates apply. Round-trip air starts at $1,058. The promo also allows an Australia stopover for an additional $350. Priced separately, air from Washington to Los Angeles starts at about $240 round trip. Book by phone at 855-837-9669. Promo details: airtahitinui.com/us-en/tahiti-and-new-zealand
Apoorva Lakhia’s “Haseena Parkar” is a film that is more concerned with making money than it is about telling the true story of that rare woman who made it to the top in the underworld. Why else would you see Haseena as a young bride in 1976, watching a movie and sipping on a brand of bottled water that definitely did not exist during the period? There is a time and place for brand promotions, but this is not it.
Authenticity is not the only thing that suffers in the film. Lakhia is more concerned with sanitising events so as to make his heroine as blameless as possible. Bollywood has made many gangster films, many of them based on Dawood Ibrahim’s life, but all of them have shied away from depicting the gangster as a person with varying shades of grey. Lakhia is no different. Parkar intervenes in disputes only because she wants to be a good Samaritan. She bullies builders and landowners, but only because they harass the poor. Every bad deed is cloaked as a good one, doing both the film and its subject a huge disservice.
In real life, Parkar was an authority in her own right – a powerful woman who is said to have controlled and expanded her brother’s business in India. But Lakhia’s film remains ambiguous about Haseena’s businesses and instead portrays her as the victim of police excesses and her brother’s crimes.
Dawood Ibrahim is never named, but everything else about him is spelled out loud – from his policeman father and rivalry with the Karim Lala gang and the Arun Gawli gang to his role in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.
The entire film is told in flashback, as public prosecutor Roshni Satam (obviously modelled on advocate Rohini Salian) recounts Haseena’s troubled past while trying to pin her down in an extortion case. Haseena stares down at the lawyer disdainfully, her mouth full of tobacco, and drawls out cryptic answers like, “You have read about my brother, but I have read my brother”.
The quality of acting doesn’t help either. As Haseena, Shraddha Kapoor is obviously out of her depth. She tries to act the part, donning a fake suit and dark skin tone to depict an aging Haseena, but none of it can make up for her lack of acting talent. As Dawood, Siddhanth Kapoor is even more caricaturish, widening his eyes and scowling every time he is expected to emote.
“Haseena Parkar” is yet another film in the long line of hagiographies that Bollywood tends to pass off as gangster films. That a person can be evil and still lead an interesting life worth recounting seems to be beyond the imagination of our film-makers.
29-inch tall, cross-legged sandstone Lord Ganesha statue from the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh
The Denver Art Museum in Colorado is collaborating with the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, for their October exhibition of the Hindu deity Lord Ganesha.
For the exhibition “Ganesha: The Playful Protector” which will run from Oct. 1 to 28 at the Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of Cambodia will loan their 29-inch tall, cross-legged sandstone Lord Ganesha statue from between the years 600 and 700, to the museum for the centerpiece of the exhibition
The National Museum of Cambodia will also provide the Denver Art Museum with other representations of Lord Ganesha through sculptures, paintings and textiles including a stone Lord Ganesha with three mother goddesses from the years 800 to 900 from India and a six-armed dancing Lord Ganesha from the years 1000 to 1100 also from India and much more.
“This significant pre-Angkor artwork will be on view along with sculptures, paintings, and textiles from the DAM’s own collection of ancient to modern representations of the Hindu deity,” the museum stated in an announcement adding that Lord Ganesha inspired “numerous representations throughout the Asian subcontinent over time—all of which will be surveyed in the exhibition.”
The Denver Art Museum was praised by Hindus for showcasing the deity Lord Ganesha in its own exhibition this month.
Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, President of Universal Society of Hinduism, said in a statement that “art had a long and rich tradition in Hinduism and ancient Sanskrit literature talked about religious paintings of deities on wood or cloth.”
Zed urged all major art museums of the world, to frequently organize exhibitions focused on Hindu art in order to share the rich Hindu art heritage with the rest of the world.
Hinduism is the oldest and third largest religion of the world, with about 1.1 billion believers, with about three million in the U.S., all trying to reach the ultimate goal of ‘moksh’ or liberation.
Lord Ganesha has been widely worshiped since the year 400 and is known as the God of wisdom and the remover of obstacles and is called upon before the beginning of any major activity.
NEW YORK – The Association of Indians in America, NY Chapter (AIA-NY) hosted its 30th annual Deepavali Festival at the South Street Seaport, on October 1, culminating with a spectacular display of fireworks.
The weather was beautiful and according to police estimate, approximate 100,000 people visited the event and enjoyed the festivities.
British celebrity singer/songwriter Jay Sean Photo Credit: Peter Farreira
Deepavali, meaning ‘a row of lamps’ is also popularly known as Diwali, or ‘Festival of Lights’. It signifies the triumph of ‘Good over Evil’. The AIA-NY attempts to bridge the gap in the community with events such as Deepavali and bring the community together.
The festival was a full-day celebration with numerous corporate booths, food and clothing vendors, performances and activities for the entire family.
Dancers from SHIAMAK USA Photo Credit: Peter Farreira
This was a special year, as it was the 30th anniversary of the Deepavali Festival and 50th anniversary of AIA. Although the festival caters to all ages, the emphasis recently has shifted more towards youth, as their involvement is considered essential for the longevity of the association. With that objective in mind, Gobind Munjal, the current President of AIA-NY launched a youth wing earlier this year called “Desi Next” geared towards younger generation.
Towards that goal, British celebrity singer/songwriter Jay Sean was invited to perform and rocked the stage. Also, a Canadian-born singer/songwriter “The PropheC” was an added attraction this year. This was in addition to the Inter Collegiate Dance Competition “Naach Inferno”, which has been an attraction for the past couple of years.
Canadian-born singer/songwriter “The PropheC” Photo Credit: Peter Farreira
The dancers of SHIAMAK USA involved everyone in a participatory dance at the end of the festival.
“AIA’s goal to incorporate more young adults into the mainstream activities of the community was accomplished,” said Munjal.
Dr. Sudhir Parikh reads out raffle winners on the stage ate the AIA-NY Deepavali Festival at South Street Seaport Photo Credit: Peter Farreira
Authentic Indian cuisine, a holistic health fair, in addition to a showcase of culture, arts, crafts, jewelry, traditional clothes, were some of the highlights this year. Corporate sponsors such as Cheapoair, Qatar Airways, Toyota, PepsiCo, New York Life, Kotak Mahindra Bank and many more were present.
The AIA is the oldest not-for-profit organization of Asian Indians in America founded on August 20, 1967.
EDISON, NJ – The 19th Dusshera festival was celebrated at Papaianni Park in Edison, New Jersey, by the Indo American Festivals.
The festival featured dance performances and a Ramleela enacted by members of Navrang Dance Academy which is run by Varsha Naik.
The festival also saw many vendors selling colorful clothing, stunning jewelry, decorative artifacts and scrumptious Italian and Indian food like pasta, bhel, Italian ice and popcorn, not to mention the traditional Dussehra favorite: fafda and jalebi.
The night ended with the burning of Ravana’s effigy to commemorate the festival. Dusshera, also known as Vijayadashami, is the celebration of good over evil.
The Festival was inaugurated by the chief guest, South Indian actress Aditi Agarwal, along with Esha Vyas, Mayor Lankey, Senator Thompson, EBC Radio’s Alka and Arvind Agarwal, Upendra Chivakula, accompanied by Chairperson Chanchal Gupta, Raj Mittal, President and Vice President Atul Sharma of Indo American Festivals.
For the first time in 19 years the actual Dusshera festival happened to be on the same day as the event.
The Dushahra festival was originally started in 1999 by the Founder and Chairman, Mangal Gupta in New Jersey and has since grown exponentially to become the Annual Grand Dusshera Festival, but not without the overwhelming support of the committee members and volunteers who have been working continuously for several months to make this event possible.
Traditionally, the 10-day long festival starts the day after the 9-day long festival of Navratri, which worships the Goddess Durga and ends on the 10th day or Dashami which is observed on a full moon day.
While each state in India has its own type of celebration, the significance of the festival remains the same.
According to the Ramayana, Lord Rama fought against the nine-headed demon Ravana for 10 days because he had kidnapped his wife Sita and defeated him to rescue her.
To enact this great victory, every year during the festival, a Ramleela is played in every town in India and now elsewhere in the world where Indians have settled.
NEW YORK – A student from Jackson heights, New York, is among six high-achieving Indian-American students awarded Upakar Scholarships. Another Indian American student from New Jersey is among three awarded Upakar Textbook Scholarships
This year’s six Upakar Scholars are:
Arpita Abrol, Jackson Heights NY (Virginia for Education scholar)
Oeishi Banerjee of Cupertino CA,
Karthik Bijoy of Chicago IL,
Bhakti Javiya of Detroit MI,
Mithali Patel of Cumming GA; and
Naazneen Vhora of Harvey IL.
This year’s three Upakar Textbook Scholars are:
Sanket Patel of Egg Harbor Township NJ;
Vidhi Raju Patel of Springfield MN; and
Meena Pyatt of Missouri City TX.
This year’s Scholars join 19 other Upakar Scholars who will be renewed for the 2017-2018 academic year.
“Another year, another great set of Upakar scholars,” Executive Vice President Nirupma Rohatgi said. “Upakar Foundation is proud to support these future leaders to commemorate its nineteenth anniversary of scholarship awards. The key to advancement in the globalized economy is education, and Upakar plays a significant role in facilitating that in our community.”
Upakar Foundation was founded in 1997 in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to combat the stereotype that every Indian-American child can afford a four-year college education without being overwhelmed with student debt. According to 2012 government data, one in twelve Indian-Americans lives below the poverty line, which is an annual income of just $23,000 for a family of four.
“Excellence in our community should be rewarded,” Treasurer Nithya Nagarajan said. “After all, financial resources should not be the sole determinant of a child’s level of success. But the need outstrips the current ability to meet it, and cost of higher education continue to rise.”
Over the last 19 years Upakar has awarded 152 scholarships totaling over $600,000 to students who meet the scholarship criteria. It is a merit and financial based scholarship and requires the scholar to have been born in India or having at least one Indian-born parent and be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Financial need is determined by the family’s adjusted gross income. Scholars must have attained a raw high school GPA above 3.6. Finally, as long as a scholar’s GPA exceeds 3.3 in college, Upakar will renew the scholarship for up to four years.
Mallika Sarabhai, choreographer and dancer, performed with her dance company Darpana, at the Share and Care Foundation Gala held in New Jersey Sept. 30. It raised $1.3 million for projects in India. (Photo: Share and Care)
Close to 1,300 people attended the 35th annual fundraiser and gala of the non-profit organization Share & Care Foundation, Sept. 30, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, N.J.
They enjoyed a riveting Bharatnatyam-cum-contemporary dance performance by renowned choreographer and dancer Mallika Sarabhai and her company Darpana, and generously opened their wallets to help implement projects in India relating to education and immunization of children, women’s empowerment, and spreading awareness about cleanliness. The theme of this year’s gala was “Nurturing Potential, Harvesting Dreams.”
“People donated a lot. We raised $1.3 million,” Dr. Manoj Desai, chairman of the annual gala and fundraising and member of the board of trustees of Share and Care, told Desi Talk. Those individuals or couples who donated more than $15,000 were introduced on stage during the event, including Dr. Sudhir Parikh, publisher of Desi Talk and recipient of India’s Padma Shri award, and his wife Dr. Sudha Parikh, H.R. Shah, founder and CEO of TV Asia, Amit and Kalpana Doshi, and Kamlesh (no last name given). An anonymous donor gave $80,000, Desai said. Seventy five couples donated $1,000 each. A painting donated by Shreya Mehta, was unveiled.
Several donors who gave more than $15,000 were honored on stage at the Sept. 30 annual fundraising gala of the Share and Care Foundation, which was held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. (Photo: Share and Care)
Sharad Shah, president of Share and Care, in his speech, emphasized the team work required to undertake work of disaster relief not just in North Gujarat, but also in Texas and Florida, noting how patrons, volunteers of and partner- NGOs of Share and Care are working in the field, he told Desi Talk.
The national anthems of India and the U.S. were sung by Sweta Sukhadia.
In Prudential Hall at NJPAC, Sarabhai, who was introduced by Payal Doshi, brought two full-length works. The first, Love Songs to Shiva, was an emotional and joyous piece for eight dancers, performed in Tamil; and Finding My Voice, which blended the classical and contemporary dance forms and dealt with issues ranging from global warming to growing intolerance in the world, performed in Tamil, Urdu, Hindustani and English. Sarabhai’s son, Revanta, also performed in the troupe.
“What the audience liked the most was that she provided subtitles in English that translated what was being said in the performances,” Desai said. “It helped everyone understand the story.”
Those gathered for the event were given a rundown about where the dollars they gave to Share and Care were used in India through a video as well as an account given by Dr. Sharad Shah, chairman of Share and Care.
Since it was founded in 1982, the Share & Care Foundation has raised $71 million to bring education, gender equality, healthcare, and sanitation and hygiene to deserving women and children of rural India, according to the Facebook site of the non-profit which runs almost entirely on volunteer efforts.
Share and Care works with on-the-ground non-governmental organizations in India which it says are “highly vetted” and include people with close grassroots connections implementing the objectives of the projects. It has been involved in more than 800 programs around India. Some of the sustainable and continuing programs include loan-scholarships to talented students to complete college in areas of science, technology, engineering and math; supporting middle-school dropouts to help them complete their educations; helping vulnerable women with education and self-defense skills, and to gain financial independence; helping improve access to quality healthcare, and provide preventative health education including sanitation through building indoor toilets, and raising awareness about hygiene.
This July, the Paramus, N.J.-based foundation was given a good rating by Charity Navigator, a premier U.S. organization that evaluates the performance of non-profits. It gave Share and Care an overall score and rating of 87.55 out of 100, and an accountability and transparency rating of 100 out of hundred. It also showed that 81 percent of the charity’s total expenses were spent on the programs and services it delivers.
Rep. Ami Bera’s father, Babulal Bera, 84, was released before the end of his sentence because he earned credit for good behavior although he will have to check in with a probation officer for three years.
Babulal Bera was convicted for running a money laundering scheme to help finance his son’s campaigns and had been sentenced last year to one year and one day.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, he was incarcerated in a federal prison on Terminal Island until July 29 and was then transferred to a halfway house.
Babulal Bera requested more than 130 improper donations from about 90 family and friends for congressional campaigns in 2010 and 2012 and then reimbursed them for the money, with more than $225,000 in 2010 and more than $43,000 in 2012.
Investigators found more than 130 improper campaign contributions involving about 90 contributors
His son Ami Bera, is a Democrat from Elk Grove, California, who barley won reelection after his father’s conviction and has denied any knowledge of the laundering operation.
“It’s been a very tough year for me and my entire family and we are happy to have him home. Janine and I are grateful to the hundreds of people who kept my parents in their thoughts and prayers,” he said in a statement.
He will be running for reelection yet again next year in Sacramento’s 7th Congressional District and is already facing challengers from both sides of the aisle.
NEW YORK – A Sikh student from Marple-Newtown High School in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, was banned by a soccer referee to play a game against Conestoga High because of his turban.
Witnesses say the referee would not even allow the unidentified freshman player onto the field citing the National Federation of High School Soccer rules stating that; “Illegal equipment shall not be worn by any player. Types of equipment which are illegal include, but are not limited to helmets, hats, caps or visors.’
After school district officials were notified of the incident, they opened up an investigation to determine if the Sikh soccer player’s religious rights were violated by the referee’s decision and found out that the NFHS had tweeted that “there was no ban on religious headwear in soccer.”
According to the Tredyfrin Patch, the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA), districts can apply for exemptions from such rules by requesting certain players be allowed to wear religious items.
School District Attorney Mark Sereni sent ABC Action News a statement reading:
“Our District was surprised to learn yesterday that, according to a PIAA soccer referee’s decision, the PIAA apparently does not have a rule that reasonably accommodates the wearing of religious headwear by our student athletes who play soccer. Our district is investigating this ruling and has advocated and will continue to advocate for the rights of our student athletes to appropriately wear religious headgear.”
“Annually, all schools are informed of this information at the pre-season rules meetings held in their area. The oversight by the school should not cause this overreaction,” Robert A. Lombardi, executive director of PIAA, told NBC News adding that he had wrote an email to the school telling them that they had not properly requested a modification to a National Federation of State High School Associations rule to allow headgear for religious purposes and that it was a miscommunication between the school and PIAA, not a rules issue.
Simran Jeet Singh, an assistant professor at Trinity University, even tweeted his experience with this situation: “I grew up playing soccer in Texas and faced discrimination from referees more than once for my Sikh turban. Some accused me of hiding bombs.”
But sports associations in the United States have gradually been letting go of these regulations that once prohibited religious headgear from being worn during competitions.
The International Basketball Federation, (FIBA), approved this rule in May that was expected to take into affect on Oct. 1.
The International Football Association Board, or FIFA, too approved changes several years back and USA Boxing, the sport’s national governing body, was to lift its ban in June after it granted a waiver to a 16-year-old Muslim-American student who was wearing a hijab during a competition.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate for a second term Oct. 2, seen here with U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, R-Florida, discussing ways to boost Internet access, close the #digitaldivide in Florida and across U.S.. (Photo: Federal Communications Commission)
In a vote split along party lines, the U.S. Senate confirmed Indian-American Ajit Varadrajan Pai, originally from Kansas, as head of the Federal Communications Commission Oct. 2. It makes Pai the highest office holder from the community. The FCC is a powerful body that regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. An independent U.S. government agency overseen by Congress, the Commission is the federal agency responsible for implementing and enforcing America’s communications law and regulations.
Pai was confirmed in a 52-41 vote in the 100-member Senate. Seven members did not vote, according to the U.S. Senate website. However, four Democrats did support Pai’s reconfirmation. Pai was first appointed FCC commissioner by President Barack Obama in 2012 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate.
Pai’s five year term is with retrospective effect from July 1, 2016 which means his term ends June 30, 2021.
“I am deeply grateful to the U.S. Senate for confirming my nomination to serve a second term at the FCC and to President Trump for submitting that nomination to the Senate,” Pai said in a statement released Oct. 2. “Since January, the Commission has focused on bridging the digital divide, promoting innovation, protecting consumers and public safety, and making the FCC more open and transparent. With today’s vote, I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues to advance these critical priorities in the time to come,” Pai added.
Several high profile IT leaders, entrepreneurs and activists have opposed Pai, critical of his opposition to Pai’s stand on deregulating broadband providers and eliminating net neutrality rules. An online petition by net neutrality advocacy groups on pressuring lawmakers not to confirm Pai failed.
While opponents in the Senate railed against Pai, his colleagues on FCC congratulated him on his confirmation.
“I extend my congratulations and best wishes to Chairman Ajit Pai on his reconfirmation by the United States Senate. Even when our views differ, my admiration of the Chairman’s commitment to public service remains,” said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. “I look forward to continuing to work with him to advance our shared goals.”
Two other Indian-Americans are in the running for another high office, that of Secretary of Health and Human Service, according to news reports – Trump nominee Seema Verma, who was confirmed as administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services; and former Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal.
Pai’s stated philosophy in his biography on the FCC website says he believes consumers benefit most from competition, not preemptive regulation, and that free markets have delivered more value to American consumers than highly regulated ones.
Pai grew up in Parsons, Kansas and now lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Janine; son, Alexander; and daughter, Annabelle. He graduated with honors from Harvard University in 1994 and from the University of Chicago Law School in 1997, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and won the Thomas R. Mulroy Prize. In 2010, Pai was one of 55 individuals nationwide chosen for the 2011 Marshall Memorial Fellowship, a leadership development initiative of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
