Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Two Pakistani businessmen in Connecticut pleaded guilty March 5, to money laundering related to exports to Pakistan. A third defendant had earlier pleaded guilty to violating American export laws.
Muhammad Ismail, 67, of Meriden, and his son Kamran Khan, 38, of Hamden, pleaded guilty today in Bridgeport federal court to money laundering in connection with funds they received for the unlawful export of goods to Pakistan. A third defendant, Ismail’s other son, Imran Khan, 43, of North Haven, previously pleaded guilty to violating U.S. export laws, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut.
According to court documents and statements made in court, from at least 2012 to December 2016, Ismail, and his two sons, carried out a scheme to purchase goods that were controlled under the Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”) and to export those goods without a license to Pakistan, in violation of the EAR.
Through companies conducting business as Brush Locker Tools, Kauser Enterprises-USA and Kauser Enterprises-Pakistan, the three defendants received orders from a Pakistani company that procured materials and equipment for the Pakistani military, requesting them to procure specific products that were subject to the EAR. When U.S. manufacturers asked about the end-user for a product, the Ismail and the Khans told them either that the product would remain in the U.S. or completed an end-user certification indicating that the product would not be exported.
After the products were purchased, they were shipped by the manufacturer to the defendants in Connecticut. The products were then shipped to Pakistan on behalf of either the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (“PAEC”), the Pakistan Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (“SUPARCO”), or the National Institute of Lasers & Optronics (“NILOP”), all of which were listed on the U.S. Department of Commerce Entity List.
The three defendants never obtained a license to export any item to the Pakistani entities even though they knew that a license was required prior to export, authorities said. They received through wire transactions from Value Additions’ Pakistan-based bank account to a U.S. bank account that the defendants controlled.
Ismail and Kamran Khan each pleaded guilty to one count of international money laundering, for causing funds to be transferred from Pakistan to the U.S. in connection with the export control violations. In pleading guilty, Ismail and Kamran Khan specifically admitted that, between January and July 2013, they procured, received and exported to SUPARCO, without a license to do so, certain bagging film that is used for advanced composite fabrication and other high temperature applications where dimensional stability, adherence to sealant tapes and uniform film gage are essential. The proceeds for the sale of the bagging film was wired from Pakistan to the defendants in the U.S.
When they are sentenced, Ismail and Kamran Khan face a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years. Since the time of their arrests in December 2016, Ismail has been released on a $50,000 bond, and Kamran Khan has been released on a $100,000 bond.
Ismail and Kamran Khan are both citizens of Pakistan and lawful permanent residents of the U.S.
On June 1, 2017, Imran Khan, whose citizenship is not mentioned in the press release, pleaded guilty to one count of violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Imran Khan specifically admitted that, between August 2012 and January 2013, he procured, received and exported to PAEC an Alpha Duo Spectrometer without a license to do so. He is released on a $100,000 bond pending sentencing.
This matter is being investigated by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Export Enforcement.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.University at Buffalo’s Indian Students Association members posing with the Indian flag at the International Fiesta 2018 where they won the dance competition against five other teams March 3. (Photo provided by ISA)
It took weeks of aches and pains and tubes of Bengay for the Indian Students Association to win the tough dance competition at the March 3 International Fiesta 2018, held in the University at Buffalo, New York.
The event which is organized by the International Council, invites International clubs on campus to participate in a competition showing their culture, talent, and story through music and dance. The theme of this year’s competition was “Pride!” and the ISA decided to portray India’s culture by moving through the various regions in that country, Anmol Patel, vice president of the organization told Desi Talk.
The story behind the ISA’s portrayal went something like this, Patel, an Indian-American biomedical science major, explains — “Many Indian American kids are ashamed of their country but soon come to realize India’s rich history, heritage, and traditions while experiencing India’s diverse festivals through the year.
“We took the audience on a journey across the nation highlighting the north, south, east, and west of India,” Patel said responding to queries via email.
The group enjoyed the fun and the pain of putting their performance on stage. “Not only do we enjoy our fun, diverse festivities but we also take great pride in our culture and identity and value its importance,” Patel said.
The diversity was impressive – Classical dance was featured as Ganesh Chaturthi; Pongal represented South Indian dance forms; Garba and Raas represented Navaratri, Bollywood represented Diwali, Fusion represented Holi, “And overall, our great nation,” Patel enthused.
“When the whole team puts in their full commitment for the past month with body aches, foot wraps, going through countless tubes of Bengay, early morning weekend and late night weekday practices, and struggling with assignments and exams,” Patel said. It appears from her account that all that pressure and stress became just a memory when, “you hear your nation’s name at FIRST PLACE! It made everything worth it. I could not be more proud,” Patel added.
The ISA had been planning their story and performance for at least 3 months before it came to fruition on stage, Patel said.
“When Bobby Lundy showed off his intense acrobatics by flipping on stage Saturday night, the crowd went wild,” reported The Spectrum newspaper. “The dancers matched intense and intricate choreography with story-telling, rising above their competition,” the paper added.
The ISA competed against five other clubs on campus, including Malaysian, Latin American, which secured 2nd and 3rd place, and Bangladesh, Filipino American, Arab, and Balkan student associations.
“During a night of diverse performances, ISA told a story of cultural acceptance,” The Spectrum said. Patel told The Spectrum, she had a “personal connection to the performance and was proud to represent her heritage.”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Photographs of various Hindu deities and spiritual leaders are on display for sale at a roadside shop in New Delhi, India, February 28, 2018. Picture taken February 28, 2018. REUTERS/Saumya Khandelwal
NEW DELHI – During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.
The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are reported here for the first time.
Minutes of the meeting, reviewed by Reuters, and interviews with committee members set out its aims: to use evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA to prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth.
Interviews with members of the 14-person committee and ministers in Modi’s government suggest the ambitions of Hindu nationalists extend beyond holding political power in this nation of 1.3 billion people – a kaleidoscope of religions. They want ultimately to shape the national identity to match their religious views, that India is a nation of and for Hindus.
In doing so, they are challenging a more multicultural narrative that has dominated since the time of British rule, that modern-day India is a tapestry born of migrations, invasions and conversions. That view is rooted in demographic fact. While the majority of Indians are Hindus, Muslims and people of other faiths account for some 240 million, or a fifth, of the populace.
The committee’s chairman, K.N. Dikshit, told Reuters, “I have been asked to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history.” The committee’s creator, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma, confirmed in an interview that the group’s work was part of larger plans to revise India’s history.
For India’s Muslims, who have pointed to incidents of religious violence and discrimination since Modi took office in 2014, the development is ominous. The head of Muslim party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said his people had “never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India.”
“The government,” he said, “wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”
Modi did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.A man prays inside a Hindu temple in New Delhi, India January 18, 2018. Picture taken January 18, 2018. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
INTO THE CLASSROOM
Helping to drive the debate over Indian history is an ideological, nationalist Hindu group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It helped sweep Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to power in 2014 and now counts among its members the ministers in charge of agriculture, highways and internal security.
The RSS asserts that ancestors of all people of Indian origin – including 172 million Muslims – were Hindu and that they must accept their common ancestry as part of Bharat Mata, or Mother India. Modi has been a member of the RSS since childhood. An official biography of Culture Minister Sharma says he too has been a “dedicated follower” of the RSS for many years.
Referring to the emblematic colour of the Hindu nationalist movement, RSS spokesman Manmohan Vaidya told Reuters that “the true colour of Indian history is saffron and to bring about cultural changes we have to rewrite history.”
Balmukund Pandey, the head of the historical research wing of the RSS, said he meets regularly with Culture Minister Sharma. “The time is now,” Pandey said, to restore India’s past glory by establishing that ancient Hindu texts are fact not myth.
Sharma told Reuters he expects the conclusions of the committee to find their way into school textbooks and academic research. The panel is referred to in government documents as the committee for “holistic study of origin and evolution of Indian culture since 12,000 years before present and its interface with other cultures of the world.”
Sharma said this “Hindu first” version of Indian history will be added to a school curriculum which has long taught that people from central Asia arrived in India much more recently, some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, and transformed the population.
Hindu nationalists and senior figures in Modi’s party reject the idea that India was forged from a mass migration. They believe that today’s Hindu population is directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants. Historian Romila Thapar said the question of who first stood on the soil was important to nationalists because “if the Hindus are to have primacy as citizens in a Hindu Rashtra (kingdom), their foundational religion cannot be an imported one.” To assert that primacy, nationalists need to claim descent from ancestors and a religion that were indigenous, said Thapar, 86, who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for decades and has authored books on ancient Indian history.
The theory of an influx of people from central Asia 3,000 to 4,000 years ago was embraced during British rule.
India’s first post-independence leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who promoted a secular state and tolerance of India’s Muslims, said it was “entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture.” That outlook informed the way India was governed by Nehru and then by his Congress party for more than half a century. The rights of minorities – including the prohibition of discrimination based on religion – are enshrined in India’s constitution, of which Nehru was a signatory in 1950.
Shashi Tharoor, a prominent member of the Congress party, said right wing Hindus are “leading a political campaign over Indian history that seeks to reinvent the idea of India itself.” “For seven decades after independence, Indianness rested on faith in the country’s pluralism,” Tharoor said, but the rise of Hindu nationalism had brought with it a “sense of cultural superiority.”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.FILE PHOTO: A visitor stands next to a portrait of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inside the Nehru memorial museum and library in New Delhi, India, September 24, 2015. REUTERS/Anindito Mukherjee/File Photo
A HISTORY FOUNDED ON HINDU TEXTS
The history committee met in the offices of the director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, a federal body that oversees archaeological research. Among the committee’s 14 members are bureaucrats and academics. The chairman, Dikshit, is a former senior official with the Archaeological Survey.
Culture Minister Sharma told Reuters he will present the committee’s final report to parliament and lobby the nation’s Ministry of Human Resource Development to write the findings into school textbooks. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, which is responsible for education and literacy programmes, is also headed by an adherent of the RSS, Prakash Javadekar.
“We will take every recommendation made by the Culture Ministry seriously,” Javadekar said. “Our government is the first government to have the courage to even question the existing version of history that is being taught in schools and colleges.”
According to the minutes of the history committee’s first meeting, Dikshit, the chairman, said it was “essential to establish a correlation” between ancient Hindu scriptures and evidence that Indian civilization stretches back many thousands of years. Doing so would help bolster both conclusions the committee wants to reach: that events described in Hindu texts are real, and today’s Hindus are descendants of those times.
The minutes and interviews with committee members lay out a comprehensive campaign to achieve this, including the dating of archaeological sites and DNA testing of human remains.
Culture Minister Sharma told Reuters he wants to establish that Hindu scriptures are factual accounts. Speaking of the Ramayana, the epic that follows the journey of a Hindu deity in human form, Sharma said: “I worship Ramayana and I think it is a historical document. People who think it is fiction are absolutely wrong.” The epic tells how the god Rama rescues his wife from a demon king. It still informs many Indians’ sense of gender roles and duty.
Sharma said it was a priority to prove through archaeological research the existence of a mystical river, the Saraswati, that is mentioned in another ancient scripture, the Vedas. Other projects include examining artifacts from locations in scriptures, mapping the dates of astrological events mentioned in these texts and excavating the sites of battles in another epic, the Mahabharata, according to Sharma and minutes of the committee’s meeting.
In much the same way that some Christians point to evidence of an ancient flood substantiating the Biblical tale of Noah and his ark, if the settings and features of the ancient scriptures in India can be verified, the thinking goes, then the stories are true. “If the Koran and Bible are considered as part of history, then what is the problem in accepting our Hindu religious texts as the history of India?” said Sharma.
Modi did not order the committee’s creation – it was instigated by Sharma, government documents show – but its mission is in keeping with his outlook. During the 2014 inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, Modi pointed to the scientific achievements documented by ancient religious texts and spoke of Ganesha, a Hindu deity with an elephant’s head: “We worship Lord Ganesha, and maybe there was a plastic surgeon at that time who kept the head of an elephant on the torso of a human. There are many areas where our ancestors made large contributions.” Modi did not respond to a request from Reuters that he expand on this remark.
Nine of 12 history committee members interviewed by Reuters said they have been tasked with matching archaeological and other evidence with ancient Indian scriptures, or establishing that Indian civilization is much older than is widely known. The others confirmed their membership but declined to discuss the group’s activities. The committee includes a geologist, archaeologists, scholars of the ancient Sanskrit language and two bureaucrats.
One of the Sanskrit scholars, Santosh Kumar Shukla, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told Reuters he believes India’s Hindu culture is millions of years old. Another committee member, Ramesh Chand Sharma, former head of the linguistics department at the University of Delhi, said he would take a strictly scientific approach. “I don’t subscribe to any ideology,” he said.
With an annual budget of about $400 million – an important source of federal funding for historical research, archaeology and the arts – the Culture Ministry is an influential place to start a campaign of historical revision.
After he was named culture minister in 2014 following Modi’s victory, Sharma, a doctor and chairman of a chain of hospitals, said he received guidance from the RSS. Sharma, a genial man with a wide smile, has a portrait of Bharat Mata, or Mother India, hanging above the doorway of a meeting room in his bungalow in central Delhi. Below it are portraits of past RSS leaders.
During the last three years, Sharma said, his ministry has organised hundreds of workshops and seminars across the country “to prove the supremacy of our glorious past.” The aim, he said, is to build a fresh narrative to balance the liberal and secular philosophy espoused by India’s first prime minister, Nehru, and furthered by successive governments for most of the nation’s post-independence history.
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, now controlled by Sharma’s ministry, these days mixes in sessions about right wing Hindu leaders and causes. At one such event in 2016, the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Amit Shah, took the opportunity to lambast Nehru as a man influenced by the western world. “We have always believed that our policies should have the smell of Indian soil,” Shah said. It was time for a history of India that concentrates on “facts about our great past.”
Receive a free second night at the Asbury Hotel, a beachy-rocker property in Asbury Park, N.J. Two-night stays start at $126 weekdays and $225 weekends, including taxes. Use promo code 2FOR1. The 110-room hotel features live music in the lobby, an exhibit by celebrity photographer Danny Clinch (he interned with Annie Leibovitz) and a rooftop venue with sunrise yoga and outdoor movies. Info: 732-774-7100, theasburyhotel.com
Hotel Vermont, in Burlington, has a breadmaking-class special with a dinner credit. The package starts at $478 per couple and includes one night’s accommodations; a Sunday-morning lesson at the Brot Bakehouse School and Kitchen in nearby Fairfax; a $100 credit for dinner at Juniper, the hotel’s restaurant; and taxes. The class typically costs $98 per person. Valid on select weekends throughout the year, such as the Baking with Wild Starter Cultures class on March 18. Info: 855-650-0080, hotelvt.com/home
Hotel 50 Bowery, a boutique hotel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is offering 25 percent discounts on weekends and 20 percent off on weekdays. Book the Reawaken to Spring Savings deal by April 30; stay through June 30. Request promo code JVSPRING18. Info: 855-464-6201, jdvhotels.com/hotels/new-york/nyc/hotel-50-bowery-nyc/specials/spring-campaign
Sea
Windstar Cruises is offering free air and a pre-cruise hotel stay on its luxury yacht cruises in Tahiti. The deal applies to itineraries of seven, 10 and 11 days. For example, the seven-day Dreams of Tahiti that sails round trip from Papeete on Nov. 1 starts at $4,699 per person double and includes round-trip air from Los Angeles to Papeete, one pre-cruise night and one post-cruise day room at Le Méridien Tahiti, transfers and taxes. The brochure price is $9,599 and round-trip air is typically more than $1,400. Info: 877-203-5729, windstarcruises.com
Receive a $500 discount on Central Holiday’s seven-night cruise along the Croatian coast. The Cruising the Adriatic trip from Dubrovnik to Split starts at $998 per person double for the April 28 departure and $1,149 for the May 12 sailing. Add $95 port charges. The voyage on the 41-passenger M/S Prestige includes 14 meals, shore excursions and airport transfers. Book by March 31. Info: 800-935-5000, centralholidays.com/Special-Offers
Air
Southwest has a sale on nonstop flights booked by March 8. For example, round-trip air from Washington Dulles to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., starts at $154, with taxes; fare on other airlines starts at $203. Travel restrictions vary by destination. For domestic routes, travel March 13-June 13 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Holiday blackout dates apply; 21-day advance purchase required. Info: southwest.com
Package
Book a 2018 escorted tour with Globus or an independent trip with Monograms to Italy, Britain or Ireland and receive a $150 airfare credit. Travelers can also combine the air discount with 5 percent off the land portion. For example, Globus’s seven-night Best of Southern England trip, which departs in late September, starts at $2,315 per person double after the airfare credit and $89 land discount. Trip includes round-trip airfare from Washington Dulles to London; seven nights’ lodging in London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bath and Brighton; nine meals; motorcoach transport; guided tours; and taxes. Book the airfare credit deal by March 27 and the land discount by April 24. You must book the flights through Globus or Monograms and fly on United, Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian Airlines or Brussels Airlines. Info: 866-755-8581, globusjourneys.com/special-offers/europe-vacations/airfare
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Harmeet Dhillon speaks during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 19, 2016. (Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris)
On a recent night in San Francisco, the woman representing the Google engineer famously fired for arguing women aren’t genetically suited to work in tech doesn’t have it in her to attend a dinner of her peers. Those peers – other San Francisco judges and attorneys-run the spectrum, in her view, from liberal to far lefty. The sort of people she’s surrounded by and specializes in riling up. But it can be exhausting.
“If I go today, I’ll be devoured by judges and attorneys asking me how I could represent James,” Harmeet Dhillon says of the annual bar association dinner. This was in January, months after her new client, James Damore, became an inescapable flashpoint in the workplace-gender war. Dhillon had just finished an interview on Fox News, where she makes regular appearances. She ditched the dinner and sat down for another interview instead.
Dhillon is a Republican in the People’s Republic of Northern California. She’s an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump, and one of three elected leaders of the state’s Republican National Committee.
She’s a free-speech lawyer who argues the University of California at Berkeley stifled the First Amendment when it bumped a speech by conservative Ann Coulter. She doesn’t believe in fake-news conspiracies and, in an appearance on Fox News, has denounced Robert Mueller’s investigation as “absolutely” corrupt. “I didn’t say Mueller was corrupt. But the investigation itself, it appears to be corrupt on many levels.”
“She’s a person of some dichotomy. On the one hand, she was on the board of the ACLU and fights for many individual rights,” says Neel Chatterjee, a San Francisco lawyer who’s known Dhillon since the 1980s. “On the other hand, she’s a staunch Republican Trump supporter.” And as Chatterjee notes: “She likes fighting political fights.”
“When Harmeet decided to lend her voice to the Trump campaign, there were, especially in the South Asian community, a lot of people who really questioned her integrity and her good faith,” says Paul Grewal, a childhood friend and Facebook Inc.’s general counsel. “She made very clear in the toughest moments of that campaign that what she was standing up for were her own conservative ideals.”
Dhillon, 49, is in America’s progressive hub summoning her own life experience to craft a novel legal argument that posits Damore in her own mold: a conservative in a liberal bubble demanding and using free-speech rights.
Dhillon won’t say whether she agrees with her client’s 3,000-word manifesto, the one Damore used to blast Google’s diversity policies before he was fired. In it he asserts, among other things, that biological variances are a likely explanation for Silicon Valley’s lopsided gender gap. But Dhillon does agree that Google’s work culture crushes conservative ideology while promoting a liberal echo chamber. That ethos, she argues, is ultimately what fueled her client’s termination.
Central to her case are a pair of 81-year-old sections of California’s Labor Code that prohibit employers from controlling employees’ political expression at work or firing them because of it. Where the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment ends, says Dhillon, California’s statute begins.
Dhillon argues that Google’s work culture changed in November 2016, after Trump’s electoral victory. Within days the reality of his victory set in, and many Google employees were in a panic, “having expected a different outcome fully in line with their political views,” Dhillon wrote in the 161-page complaint. The document mentions Trump nine times and uses the word “conservative” 101 times.
The lawsuit appears designed to maximally embarrass one of the world’s biggest companies. One section of her complaint-under the heading “Google Failed to Protect Employees from Workplace Harassment Due to Their Support for President Trump”-decries unnamed managers for sabotaging the careers of conservative employees while promoting like-minded progressives, and in another instance, Google employees allegedly encouraged “unambiguous social pecking” of conservative white men. Later, she accuses Google of welcoming a diverse realm of alternative lifestyles on its internal message boards, including mailing lists for employees identifying sexually as “yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin.” But, she notes, the tech giant neglected to create or encourage such a venue for “traditional monogamy.”
Dhillon says she’s the advocate for a true underdog here. While Google welcomes the “furries and transgender,” she says, conservative men are blacklisted. Among the loudest voices demanding social equality for conservative white males is, of course, President Trump.
Her approach to equality in Silicon Valley is an obvious deviation from the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements that have dominated social media in tandem with growing calls for gender equality for women in tech, Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, while Dhillon sues Google for plotting to hire and promote women instead of men, the U.S. Department of Labor has filed suit against the company for quite the opposite: not hiring enough women.
Dhillon describes them as two different problems. Finding more women in the industry is a pipeline challenge. So long as American universities are churning out four male tech candidates for every one woman, she says, the supply issue can’t be solved. To achieve balance in Silicon Valley, employers cannot stop hiring men: “That’s not legal.”
Her ideals were born out of her tiny hometown in rural North Carolina, at her dinner table where her devout parents taught her about tort reform, taxation and what it meant to be an immigrant in Jimmy Carter’s America. Coming from India’s socialized democracy in the 1970s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was on the cusp of temporarily suspending the nation’s constitution, the idea of intense government intervention and regulation didn’t resonate with the tax-averse, gun-holding Dhillon family. They fled India for the United Kingdom, then to America’s promise of free-market capitalism, only to be miffed by the Carter administration’s tax rates on capital gains. Discussions often centered on the U.S. gas shortage, flaws in socialism, foreign policy and family values.
Senator Jesse Helms, a leading North Carolina conservative at the time, was central to the family’s political identity. As he spoke out against the Indian government’s persecution of Sikhs, he won favor with the Punjabi diaspora in his own backyard. In the 1980s the Dhillon household became a political hub for Helms, who found wealthy donors among the state’s hundreds of Sikh families.
While mulling her career path, Dhillon considered following her father into medicine. He never discouraged her, but he did describe surgery as physically taxing while asking her to contemplate her own physical strength and endurance. “Women have a lot of choices, and they frequently choose not to go into certain fields, which is totally legitimate,” she says.
“My father was a turban-wearing man of faith when he decided to be a Republican in a Democratically controlled, Klan-heavy state in the South.”
Instead, Dhillon studied classics at Dartmouth before going to law school at the University of Virginia. Her politics began to take shape as she served as editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review, a biweekly conservative newspaper, where in 1988 she published a satirical column likening the school’s president to Adolf Hitler. She told the New York Times then that the column sought to shine light on “liberal fascism,” while demonstrating how the school had mistreated conservative students.
Now, as a Republican Party official in California, she applies her professional stature as a free-speech lawyer to advocate for conservatives. For example: She’s representing the UC Berkeley students who are suing the school for snubbing Coulter.
Damore’s class-action case fits that mold, arguing that he and other conservatives have been ostracized because their ideology was “un-Googley” at a place where there’s an incentive for discriminating against whites, males and conservatives.
Dhillon was one of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s candidates to help run the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, and she was reportedly considered for other political appointments in California and D.C. Had she gotten the civil rights job, Dhillon says, she would have prioritized First Amendment violations against conservatives, chased down human traffickers and fought for free speech at abortion clinics.
“I’m a supporter of the administration and the president, and that’s my position. As a member of the RNC, if I couldn’t support them on important issues, then I would resign my position,” she says.
At a June 2016 Trump rally in San Jose, Dhillon witnessed city police ushering his supporters into the teeth of what would quickly boil over into a bloody confrontation with anti-Trump demonstrators. Stones and fists flew; red hats burned. The lawsuit, on behalf of 20 pro-Trump protesters, was Dhillon’s reintroduction to national politics. The headlines opened doors for Dhillon, making her a fixture on Fox News as its only South Asian contributor. (Dhillon defeated San Jose’s bid to dismiss the case, which is under appeal in federal court.)
Weeks after her Trump protest suit was filed, she offered a Sikh prayer to open the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, covering her head during the Punjabi invocation that sought holy protection and guidance for America to uphold the values of humility, truth and justice. Trump accepted the party’s nomination the next day. In response, she says, she received death threats from fellow Sikhs and Indians.
Dhillon is soft-spoken about the ways in which she differs from her party and, particularly, the president. She does say America needs immigrants-legal immigrants. She’d prefer to leave the government out of marriage and abortion rights. She hates talking about that time she wrote now-Democratic Senator Kamala Harris a $250 check for a city campaign. “It was a nonpartisan race,” she says, sounding like she has made this case before.
In 2012 she ran her only political campaign to date, vying for a seat in the California State Senate. She was trounced in San Francisco’s famed Castro neighborhood, but the 54,887 votes she won were the most ever for a Republican in the state’s 11th District. She credits that small victory and her subsequent success to bending her California environment to her family, her party and her own ideals.
“My father was a turban-wearing man of faith when he decided to be a Republican in a Democratically controlled, Klan-heavy state in the South,” she says. “I’m not Nikki Haley, and I’m not Bobby Jindal. I’ve never been looking to assume that assimilation mentality.”
NEW YORK – Mindy Kaling’s new series ‘Champions’ is set to premiere on Thursday, March 8 on NBC and it is already impressing audiences, according to the Huston Chronicle.
Kaling is not a main character in the series but guest stars as Priya Patel, the high school girlfriend of Vince (Anders Holm), who owns a Brooklyn gym with his brother, Matthew (Andy Favreau) and are planning to sell the gym they inherited from their father and relocate to Florida.
But one day, Priya shows up at the gym with Michael (J.J. Totah), she and Vince’s 15-year-old gay son, as he needs a place to live in New York so can attend a high school for performers.
According to a Community Voices report, Michael initially worries that his new caretakers will be uncomfortable with the fact that he is gay, but they’re actually not and Vince even tells him “we dream of becoming a gay gym because women and straight guys are pigs.”
From then on, Totah steals the show with his witty retorts as the writers have given him dialogue that the Huston Chronicle said “Bruce Vilanch could have written for Bette Midler and Totah tosses it off with hilarious and lovable ease.”
The “oh, snap!” dialogue also comes up every now and then for Michael who even tells his dad that he “looks like an abusive boyfriend in a Lifetime movie.”
On the other hand, Michael is nervous about his new life and worried about how his audition to get into Manhattan Academy will go.
So even if he seems like a witty kid, he’s basically just a normal one who has to explain his moods and other situations by referencing scenes from “Les Miz.”
Kaling has co-created ‘Champions’ with Charlie Grandy who told Metro News: “I’ve been working with Mindy for a long time, on 5 projects, and she said to me, ‘I have this rough idea about a half Indian gay teenager moving from Cleveland to New York to pursue his Broadway dreams. Does that sound interesting to you?’ And immediately I said, ‘Yeah.’ I have to admit I would have said yes whatever, because it was Mindy. But that idea specifically felt very timely and interesting.”
NEW YORK – Indian American Manish Engineer has become the first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the Seattle Art Museum, according to Artdaily.org.
According to the Seattle Art Museum, this newly created position oversees technology and digital efforts across the institution to amplify the museum’s mission and improve business operations.
“As our first CTO, Manish will lead the museum to greater levels of engagement with exciting new technologies in support of SAM’s mission to connect art to life. His expertise, experience, and genuine love of art will help us deploy technology to serve broad audiences more effectively than ever,” Kimerly Rorschach, the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO, said, in a statement.
Prior to working at the Seattle Art Museum, Engineer worked as a Project Director in the membership and development departments at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
He also worked as MoMA’s IT Associate Director of Applications, where he oversaw their financial systems, internal mobile point of sale app and e-commerce platform, along with several other museum applications and databases, according to Artdaily.org.
Engineer also worked at Penguin Random House on several high profile projects developing apps and complex e-books for former First Lady Michelle Obama, Giada De Laurentiis and Max Brooks’ World War Z novel.
He also spent eight years at Oracle Corporation as a Principal Consultant where he worked on a variety of customer vertical markets and as a Senior Product Manager where he managed and designed analytics for CRM applications.
According to Artdaily.org, Engineer holds a Master of Arts degree in contemporary art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, as well as an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
He also has an undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering from Ohio State University and loved to performed stand-up comedy throughout New York while he held volunteer positions at the Guggenheim and MoMA.
NEW YORK – Indian American hotelier Nik Patel of Orlando, Florida, has been allegedly accused of engaging in a new multimillion-dollar loan fraud while he was on bonded release last year, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, federal prosecutors filed new documents on Saturday, March 3, while Patel sentencing hearing was scheduled for Tuesday morning in Chicago before U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras.
“While on bond and awaiting sentence in this case, defendant devised a scheme to obtain fraudulent loans totaling approximately $19 million by impersonating an employee of Banco do Brazil and taking the identity of a legitimate financial institution,” states the government’s position paper on sentencing, which also calls for a prison term of 30 years for Patel.
Patel was originally arrested in September 2014 and had pleaded guilty in December 2016.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, Patel used the money made from the fraud to shop at high-end stores, make multiple visits to brothels in Panama, stay at expensive hotels, take a $19,000 charter flight to Chicago for the court hearing in his criminal case and buy a $30,000 tab for his daughter’s birthday party which was held at the Four Seasons hotel in Orlando in 2017.
Patel was arrested at the Gateway Kissimmee Airport on Jan. 6 when he was caught by the FBI, while trying to flee to Ecuador where he was seeking political asylum and planned to purchase one of the world’s rarest diamonds using $35 million with his “dirty money.”
Federal authorities alleged that Patel was at the Kissimmee airport with Orlando businessman Kevin Timirchand, who has since been charged in Orlando federal court with wire fraud, and that both men were planning to move to Ecuador and set up a business there, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Andrew DeVooght, Patel’s attorney, has filed a response to the government’s recommendations saying “the government’s request for a 30-year sentence is not appropriate in this case” because “such a sentence ignores many important facts” such as Patel’s guilty plea and the fact that his business partner was also involved in the fraud.
NEW YORK – The telephone lines at the Embassy of India in Washington D.C. have been spoofed by fraudsters to cheat people for money, according to a PTI report.
The Embassy of India has informed the U.S. government about the incident and has launched an internal investigation itself while advises Indian Americans to not fall into such traps.
It also issued a rare public advisory on such fraud calls as they have not only cheated people with money but also has brought the Embassy of India into a bad light.
“These fraudsters either seek personal information like credit card details etc. or try to extort money from Indian nationals by inter alia claiming that there are errors in their passports, visa forms, immigration forms etc. which could be rectified by paying money, and at the same time warning that the so called errors, if not rectified, could result in deportation of the individual to India or their imprisonment in USA,” the Indian Embassy said in its advisory.
The incident was reported by Indian nationals living in the U.S. and visa applicants, who were receiving these calls and showed up on their phone as embassy telephone numbers or even as someone from the embassy, reported PTI.
The Embassy of India has already started collecting information from the public, including details of the Western Union account number or bank account details where the money was transferred.
According to its website, the Embassy of India has advised “members of the public not to entertain any suspicious telephone calls made in the name of Embassy of India. They are also advised not to reveal any personal information or transfer any money in response to such calls. They may bring such matters to the notice of the Embassy at the email ID.”
This is the first time the Embassy of India has been targeted for such a crime. The U.S. government has received reports from the embassies of other nations in the past.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.During a speech at AIPAC’s annual conference on March 5, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said that “Jerusalem was, is, and will always be the capital of Israel.” (Photo: Videograb from The Washington Post video on speech)
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference crowd hadn’t had something or someone unabashedly to cheer for – until Monday evening. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was greeted as a rock star and repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet as she recounted her record at the U.N. “When I come to AIPAC, I am with friends,” she started off. “In the United Nations, we sometimes don’t have many friends.” The crowd treated her more like a valued member of the family rather than a mere friend.
Unlike the previous administration, which declined to veto a vehemently anti-Israel resolution as it headed for the exits, Haley proudly recalled that she had promised Israel that this sort of thing would never happen again – and it hasn’t.
She railed at the U.N., UNESCO in particular, for its obsessive and unfair bullying of the Jewish state. She recalled, “Some of you might have seen that the top Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, recently had some advice for me. He told me to shut up. Mr. Erekat, I will always be respectful, but I will never shut up.” The crowd roared in approval.
She embraced the notion the accusation that the United States shows favoritism toward Israel. “There’s nothing wrong with showing favoritism towards an ally; that’s what being an ally is all about,” she said. However, she explained that “in all that we’re doing, our approach on Israel is tied to one major idea – the simple concept that Israel must be treated like any other normal country.” That, too, drew robust applause, since a major focus of AIPAC has been to halt the international effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. She said that U.N. votes should never be the only factor in foreign aid, but noted that the administration was “determined to start making that connection.”
She also vigorously defended the decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. “It cannot be the case that only one country in the world doesn’t get to choose its capital city,” she said. She promised to be there when the new embassy opens in May.
With good humor and anecdotes from her time growing up in and serving as governor of South Carolina, we got a reminder that she was a skilled politician before heading to the U.N. Aside from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, she is arguably the only member of the administration who has improved her record in office.
Her “we’re taking names” attitude at the U.N. gives friends of Israel on both sides of the aisle some sweet satisfaction after years of complacency in the face of an anti-Israel onslaught. Granted, at the U.N., Haley gets to show off flashy rhetoric without the responsibility for choosing the least of bad options with regard to Syria or Iran policy. Nevertheless, from the safety of New York she has made the most of her time. She has generally avoided the ongoing White House soap opera and has been spared the indignity of defending President Donald Trump’s indefensible actions. She might be one of the few figures who would not alienate either pro-Trump or anti-Trump Republicans should she decide to run for the presidency in the future. (For one thing, she has never had to serve in Congress, where partisan sniping and gridlock can hinder political ambition.) The trick for Haley may be getting out of the administration with an unblemished record – before the roof falls in.
Haley is uniquely able to maintain a high profile without incurring much criticism. She does not run, or claim to run, U.S. foreign policy. With this president, that’s a plus for her. Having backed Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., for president, she claims no role in Trump’s stunning victory (as Stephen K. Bannon did). Haley, therefore, likely won’t trigger his resentment and antagonism, as others who claim too big a role in Trump’s rise have done.
Her spectacular speech and effusive reception shouldn’t raise Trump’s ire – as long as she doesn’t make this a routine, at least not while working in his administration.
The sun never comes out in Prosit Roy’s “Pari” (Fairy). In keeping with the film’s theme, every frame is dark, the rain is always pouring in sheets and the houses are dingy and dilapidated – the hallmark of any respectable horror film.
Set in Kolkata whose art-deco buildings with peeling walls and general squalidness make it the perfect place for ghosts to appear, “Pari” revolves around Arnab (Parambrata Chatterjee), a journalist whose car runs down a woman, setting in motion a chain of events he has no control over. The woman’s grown-up daughter Rukhsana (Anushka Sharma) is found chained in her own home.
Struck by her lack of social skills and her scared demeanour, Arnab brings her home, but Rukhsana is not what she seems. A bearded man (Rajat Kapoor) is looking for her, and she is haunted by flashbacks of satanic rituals and women who drink blood.
The first hour of “Pari” has enough jump-in-your-seat moments, and director Roy ensures that the atmospherics contribute to the scares. Curtains sway eerily as Rukhsana stares glassily into nothing, seeing bloody, crazy versions of herself all over the house. There aren’t too many special effects, and Roy relies on make-up and Sharma’s ability to transform her face from childlike to terrifying in a matter of moments.
But as the story moves forward, he also feels the need to establish a connection and some sort of a love story between Arnab and Rukhsana. So the ghostly activities take a break while songs play in the background and the two characters enjoy cups of tea and watch cartoons on TV.
In the second hour of the film, things get less mysterious – we find out Rukhsana’s story, and the scary moments get repetitive. Roy gives us an almost Harry Potteresque explanation for the conclusion, with the theme of love winning over evil, but it is hardly satisfying for all the build-up we have seen in the first half.
Both Chatterjee and Sharma are in top form, playing off each other very well. Rajat Kapoor as the doctor who talks to ghosts is appropriately eerie.
But once Roy strips away the mystery from his characters,“ Pari” loses its way, and it feels like a laboured finish to the end. Even those easily scared (like this reviewer) will find no need to avert their eyes. The foreboding one feels in every horror film barely lasts till the end, and leaves entirely once you exit the theatre, which is not really an endorsement for a good horror film.
A Kansas man pleaded guilty Tuesday to opening fire in a bar last year, killing one Indian man and injuring two other people in a crime that sparked international outrage and federal hate crime charges.
Adam W. Purinton, 52, pleaded guilty to one count of premeditated first-degree murder and two counts of attempted premeditated first-degree murder in connection with the shooting at Austin’s Bar and Grill in Olathe, Kansas, in February of last year, according to Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe. He will be sentenced in May, and is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison under a plea agreement.
Purinton was “distraught” and “drinking pretty fast” before he was kicked out of the bar the night of the shooting, witnesses told The Washington Post on the night of the crime. He barged back in, hurling racial slurs and shouting, “Get out of my country!” at two Indian men before firing shots, witnesses recalled. Purinton, it turned out, thought the men were Iranian.
One of the Indian men shot – Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32 – died in the hospital, police said. Alok Madasani, 32, was released from the hospital a day later. Both of the men worked for Garmin, the Olathe-based technology firm. A third man, Ian Grillot, was wounded when he tried to intervene. He was later hailed as a hero for his efforts.
A federal grand jury in June also indicted Purinton on two hate crime charges for killing Kuchibhotla and attempting to kill Madasani. The indictment states that Purinton “intentionally and specifically engaged in an act of violence, knowing that the act created a grave risk of death to a person.”
Purinton pleaded not guilty in November to the federal hate crime charges, which are separate from Tuesday’s plea agreement. The hate crime charges carry a possible death sentence because one involves a killing, but the Justice Department has not said whether it will seek the death sentence.
The shooting, which took place just over a month after President Trump’s inauguration, sent waves of fear rippling through immigrant communities, particularly those from India. Family members of the Indian men shot said they worried the United States was no longer a safe place for Indians. The father of one of the injured men even urged parents in India not to send their children to the United States. “The situation seems to be pretty bad after Trump took over as the U.S. president,” he said at the time.
Trump initially faced criticism for not speaking out against the shooting. He later addressed it in a speech to Congress.
Purinton grew up in Kansas suburbia, and was described by the Kansas City Star as a Navy veteran and former air traffic controller. In recent years, he moved from one low-level job to another, and neighbors recalled that he was frequently drunk. He appeared deeply bothered by the death of his father in 2015, the Kansas City Star reported.
Kuchibhotla, the man Purinton fatally shot, grew up in the south Indian city of Hyderabad and came to the United States to study engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso. He got married, bought a house, and planned to start a family in Kansas, his wife said in a news conference days after the shooting.
His family warned him about the dangers of staying in the United States, and his wife said she encouraged him to consider going back to India. But Kuchibhotla, his wife said, refused to abandon “the country he loved.”
“The life Srinu and I had together, the plans we made, the family we hoped to build here, all vanished in a moment of senseless anti-immigrant rage,” his wife, Sunayana Dumala, wrote in a January commentary in the Kansas City Star.
Dumala was not sure she would be able to return to the United States, in part because her immigration status depended on her husband’s. “And I didn’t know if I’d want to,” she said.
But with the help of immigration lawyers, she returned.
“I returned for all the love that flowed around me after this terrible tragedy. For all the people, near and far, who went out of their way to show me America cannot and must not be judged by the actions of one man,” Dumala wrote. “I returned because America is my home now.”
Dumala was not in court Tuesday, but released a statement saying the plea “will not bring back my Srinu, but it will send a strong message that hate is never acceptable.
She planned to attend a memorial walk in Kuchibhotla’s honor on Friday, which would have been his 34th birthday.
“We must understand and love one another,” Dumala wrote in her statement. “Let us continue to work for peace, understanding and love – the things Srinu stood for and will be his legacy.”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Students from South Plantation High School carrying placards and shouting slogans walk on the street during a protest in support of the gun control, following a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Plantation, Florida, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
WASHINGTON – A majority of Republican lawmakers in the tightest congressional races are changing their message on guns, expressing new support for restrictions after last month’s high school shooting in Florida, according to a Reuters review of the candidates’ public statements.
Eleven Republican incumbents face elections in 2018 widely seen as toss-ups or leaning against the current office holder. So far, six of them have publicly embraced new gun control measures in the wake of the Feb. 14 shooting in Parkland, Reuters found. (Graphic: http://tmsnrt.rs/2I8qevA)
In advocating for some restrictions, they are breaking ranks with a party that has often balked at taking significant steps that could restrict Americans’ constitutional right to own guns and has typically limited its responses to mass shootings to expressions of sympathy.
However limited the shift, it shows that lawmakers who will depend on the votes of moderates and independents to win tough swing-district races are deviating from decades of party orthodoxy on gun ownership.
They are doing it amid a public outcry over repeated mass shootings that has been driven in part by student activists who have confronted lawmakers over legislative inaction on the issue.
In less competitive races, most Republican candidates are still holding to the party position on guns. Most Republican lawmakers were largely silent last week when President Donald Trump surprised his party with his call for new limits on gun ownership, including a directive to ban so-called bump stocks that make semi-automatic rifles fire more quickly.
Don Bacon, a first-term congressman for Omaha, Nebraska, is one of those lawmakers facing what is shaping up to be a hard-fought race in November’s congressional elections. After a former student shot dead 17 people at the Florida high school, he expressed support for tighter restrictions on Americans’ ability to buy and own guns.
In social media posts and interviews, he departed from the message of the National Rifle Association, which is a major donor to the Republican Party and has given Bacon one of its highest ratings.
Bacon said he was working on legislation to raise penalties for illegal gun buyers. He also wanted to improve background checks and allow law enforcement officers to temporarily seize firearms from people believed to be dangerous, after those people are allowed to contest the claims against them.
After a gunman shot dead 58 people at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas in October, Bacon was more cautious: He joined 78 lawmakers from both parties in signing a letter urging the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to reevaluate bump stocks. The NRA also supported the move.
“It’s not about winning re-election. It’s about doing what’s right,” the congressman told Reuters of his post-Parkland support for new measures. At the same time, he emphasized that he views himself as a defender of the gun rights enshrined in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
AMERICANS FAVOR RESTRICTIONS
Three out of four Americans say they favor banning military-style assault weapons, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found. The poll of 1,488 people between Feb. 25 and March 1 also found that nearly 9 in 10 people supported expanding background checks for gun buyers.
Republican incumbents in competitive districts need to respond to voters who are often more open to gun restrictions than those in districts that are easy wins, said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist at FP1 Strategies.
“In swing districts, voters have different opinions and they want to see a more comprehensive approach,” Williams said.
Because concern in the United States over mass shootings is high, adopting more restrictive views on gun policy could help candidates in tight races, said Doug Heye, another Republican strategist. But Republican lawmakers also want to avoid alienating gun rights supporters, said Williams.
Underscoring that, in another 13 races, where Republican incumbents face competitive but not toss-up races, only three of the Republicans have moved toward gun control, according to the Reuters review.
NOTICEABLE SHIFTS
Dana Rohrabacher is another congressman and gun rights stalwart facing a tough fight to keep his seat. The Southern California Republican has also noticeably shifted his positions. He now says it should be illegal to sell weapons to felons and people taking psychiatric prescription drugs.
By contrast, after the Las Vegas shooting, Rohrabacher’s spokesman Ken Grubbs said it was “demagoguery” to discuss specific legislative changes, according to a report in a local Californian newspaper. Grubbs did not return a request for comment from Reuters.
Congressman John Faso of upstate New York said in interviews after the Florida shootings that he favors expanding background checks and not allowing people to buy semi-automatic guns until they turn 21.
Faso, who took office in 2017, confined his response to the Las Vegas shootings to a Twitter post in which he described them as “heart breaking.”
Bacon, Rohrabacher and Faso and eight other Republican incumbents face the toughest re-election fights, according to three political analysis groups – Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Inside Elections.
Republican lawmakers in seven “safe” districts adjoining those districts have largely stuck to the same positions they had before the shooting: mostly opposed to new forms of gun control.
Some defended their decision to not endorse new restrictions when contacted for comment by Reuters. Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado said he has seen no evidence to justify new laws restricting the purchase or ownership of guns. None of the other lawmakers contacted by Reuters besides Bacon and Buck offered an explanation for their shift or steadfastness on gun policy following Parkland.
Reuters examined the public statements of 31 lawmakers in the competitive and safe districts, including speeches and social media postings, and asked them about any other pronouncements they have made on the issue.
NRA DECISIONS TO COME
The stark difference in responses can be seen in Florida. Republican congressman Carlos Curbelo is in a tight race in his South Florida district. He said he now favors raising the age of purchase for long guns and even advocates banning civilian purchases of military-style weapons and regulating high-capacity magazines.
Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, who is in an adjacent safe Republican district, issued a press release praising Trump’s NRA-endorsed call to ban bump stocks as “a welcome announcement.” He advocated no other specific measures to reduce gun violence.
The 18 Republican lawmakers in both competitive and safe seats whose statements Reuters analyzed have received more than $1.5 million from the NRA in donations or expenditures on their behalf throughout their political careers. The 11 lawmakers who did not shift their stance on gun control after the Florida shootings received 85 percent of that, Reuters found.
Asked whether the NRA was considering limiting support for any of the lawmakers who have expressed support for new gun control measures, NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said the association had yet to complete its evaluations of candidates. This would be done after election registration deadlines, which have not yet passed in most states.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Architect and educator Balkrishna Doshi, 90, who has been awarded the Pritzer Prize for Architecture 2018, often referred to as the Nobel prize for architecture. (Photo: Pritzkerprize.com)
Balkrishna Doshi, an Indian architect and educator, has been awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture 2018, which honors a living architect or architects whose work shows talent, vision, and commitment, and who has consistently made significant contributions to humanity. The international prize was established by the Pritzker family of Chicago through their Hyatt Foundation in 1979, and is often referred to as “architecture’s Nobel” and “the profession’s highest honor.”
The award consists of $100,000 (US) and a bronze medallion. The award is conferred on the laureate/s at a ceremony held at an architecturally significant site throughout the world, the Pritzker website says.
Doshi, 90, was born in Pune into an extended family that had been involved in the furniture industry for two generations. His artistic inclinations were recognized by a teacher who exposed him to the discipline of architecture. He began his architecture studies in 1947, the year India gained independence, at the Sir J.J . School of Architecture Bombay (Mumbai), the oldest and one of the foremost institutions for architecture in India.
Doshi’s studied at the Royal Institute of British Architects, and also famous French architect Le Corbusier, returning to India in 1954, to oversee Le Corbusier’s projects in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. Those buildings include the Mill Owner’s Association Building (Ahmedabad, 1954) and Shodhan House (Ahmedabad, 1956), among others. Beginning in 1962, Doshi also worked with Louis Kahn as an associate to build the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and they continued to collaborate for over a decade.
In 1956, Doshi hired two architects and founded his own practice, Vastushilpa, which has since been renamed Vastushilpa Consultants and grown to employ five partners and sixty employees, and has completed more than 100 projects since its inception.
Doshi is known for infusing Western idea with Eastern culture and a deep reverence for life and the forces of nature, “laced with sights, sounds, and memories from his past” Pritzker says on its website.
“Alongside a deep respect for Indian history and culture, elements of his youth—memories of shrines, temples and bustling streets; scents of lacquer and wood from his grandfather’s furniture workshop—all find a way into his architecture,” Pritzker notes.
His built works include institutions, mixed-use complexes, housing projects, public spaces, galleries, and private residences. Doshi recalls one of his most personal endeavors, Sangath (Ahmedabad, 1980), his architecture studio. “Sangath fuses images and associations of Indian lifestyles. The campus integrates, and memories of places visited collide, evoking and connecting forgotten episodes,” Doshi is quoted saying. “Sangath is an ongoing school where one learns, unlearns and relearns. It has become a sanctuary of culture, art and sustainability where research, institutional facilities and maximum sustainability are emphasized,” Doshi adds.
A retrospective of his works, “Celebrating Habitat: The Real, the Virtual and the Imaginary,” opened at the National Gallery of Modern Arts, Delhi, India (2014), before traveling to the Power Station of Art Shanghai, China, (2017). He recently delivered the 27th Annual Architecture lecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, U.K. (2017).
Published texts include Paths Uncharted (Vastushilpa Foundation, 2011); “Community Building in Indore, India” in Where are the Utopian Visionaries?: Architecture of Social Exchange by Hansy Better Barraza (Periscope Publishing, 2012); and numerous works in relevant international journals such as A+U (Japan), Architectural Review (United Kingdom), and Abitare (Italy), among many others.
Doshi was a member of the International Committee for preparing the International Charter on the Education of Architects, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, and McGill University, Canada. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in the U.S. including Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign; Rice University, Houston; Washington University in St. Louis.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Mumbai: Director Saila Kariat during the promotion of film “The Valley” in Mumbai on Oct 10, 2017.(Photo: IANS)
NEW DELHI – Indian-American Saila Kariat, who has made her directing debut with “The Valley”, says the US — where a debate on immigrants has been raging — is going “backwards” under the leadership of President Donald Trump.
“Starting as a child, I immigrated from US-India-Canada-US, so I have seen the evolution of attitudes towards immigrants. When I came back to the US in 1984, I felt it was so progressive compared to other countries,” Kariat told IANS in an email interview.
“However, I find recent developments in the US alarming. The present government is taking the country backwards. To me, it is a clear demonstration of how leadership is so important,” she added.
After living in the US for over 20 years, Kariat picked up a story about an immigrant family to tell through “The Valley”. But she steered away from making it a piece harping about their experiences in a foreign country. Instead, the award-winning film, which released in India on March 2, throws light on an important aspect: Depression.
It follows a distraught father as he searches for answers after his college-age daughter’s suicide.
On the idea behind making the film, Kariat said: “I have lived in Silicon Valley for over 20 years. I witnessed the pressure young people face to be successful, and the cluster suicides in some Bay Area schools. The problems experienced there can be found in most modern societies all over the world — they are just more intense in our high tech capital.
“Anxiety and depression are on the rise amongst young adults, and the reasons are complex. I explore this in the movie. I have also seen mental health problems go unaccepted or ignored in the Indian community. There is a lot of stigma, particularly amongst Asians.”
Produced by Wavefront Productions, “The Valley” stars Alyy Khan and Suchitra Pillai. The film has won awards at many film extravaganzas like the Berlin International Filmmaker Festival of World Cinema, Madrid International Film Festival, Out of the Can Film Festival and DC South Asian Film Festival.
Making the movie was not at all easy.
“I had the story idea about eight years ago, and started writing the script about four years ago. Independent filmmaking is a process full of obstacles, and mine was no different. I had to raise the money, find the crew and cast. Raising the funding was a challenge, as this was my first feature.
“Then I worked extremely hard on casting with Lauren Herrel. I could not find the right actors in the US, so I reached out to India and Pakistan. That’s how I found Alyy Khan, Suchitra Pillai and Samina Peerzada.”
Kariat, who hails from Andhra Pradesh, was born in Berkeley and worked as an engineer for many years. Her father was a professor and moved jobs.
After getting married and embracing motherhood with two children, she started her own residential construction company. It was after that she gradually realised her passion for filmmaking, and embarked on her journey to make it come true by getting a degree in film at San Jose State University.
“I love filmmaking — the creative process. I am struggling with filmmaking — the business. Due to various reasons, I have had to drive the business end of the movie, and that has been challenging. However, it is truly a passion. Anyone who has made a feature can tell you the sacrifices involved. You can’t do it unless you truly love it,” said Kariat, who has produced some projects as well.
In “The Valley”, she has tackled the sensitive subject of depression and suicide. She says her vision is to touch hearts with her stories.
“I want to tell stories that have some meaning and relevance in today’s world. I do not like gratuitous violence and sex. In some cases, the story calls for it, but I feel many movies try to introduce these elements simply to make themselves commercial.
“I want to tell stories that touch people’s souls, not make them cringe.”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.An Air India aircraft takes off from the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad, India, July 7, 2017. REUTERS/Amit Dave
NEW DELHI – Saudi Arabia has given Air India permission to fly between New Delhi and Tel Aviv over Saudi airspace, the airline’s spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday, ending a 70-year ban and marking a diplomatic shift.
Saudi Arabia does not recognise Israel and lifting the airspace ban would reflect what appears to be thawing ties between Israel and the kingdom. Both are U.S. allies with a shared concern over Iranian influence in the region.
India and Israel have built close ties over the years away from the public eye, largely centred on arms purchases.
But under Narendra Modi economic ties have flourished and last year he made a first-ever visit to Israel by an Indian prime minister. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited India last month, the first such trip in 15 years.
Air India plans to operate flights three days a week, and the flight would save two hours of travel time as a result of flying over the Saudi airspace, an Air India spokesman said.
Netanyahu said on Monday that Saudi Arabia had granted Air India permission to fly over its territory on its new routes to and from Tel Aviv, but there was no confirmation from either Saudi Arabia or Air India.
Saudi’s General Authority of Civil Aviation was not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.
Air India’s website showed options to book flights to Tel Aviv from New Delhi starting March 22, with fares starting at 24,124 Indian rupees ($371.94).
The national carrier, which has also received approval from the country’s aviation regulator to fly to Israel over Saudi Arabia, would operate a 7 hour 5 minute flight between the two cities, its spokesman said.
El Al Israel Airlines, the country’s flag carrier, flies four weekly flights to Mumbai but these take seven hours rather than five as they take a route south towards Ethiopia and then east to India, avoiding Saudi airspace.
El Al has asked an airline industry lobby group to help it access Saudi Arabian airspace, so it can compete with Air India’s planned route between India and Israel, Reuters reported on Thursday.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.People are silhouetted as they pose with laptops in front of a screen projected with a Facebook logo, in this picture illustration taken in Zenica October 29, 2014. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Files
SAN FRANCISCO – To mark International Women’s Day, Facebook on Wednesday announced that it will launch a new tool that will give female entrepreneurs the power to connect with each other and share questions, advice, resources and support to help them grow their businesses.
The “Community Finder” tool is being launched under the #SheMeansBusiness programme that was established by Facebook in 2016 to support women-owned businesses.
The social media giant will also launch the “Credit Her” campaign that would help people give credit to women for their incredible contributions.
Starting on International Women’s Day on Thursday, people can also show their support to women through cards, photo frames or themed backgrounds for text posts on the platform.
Facebook also released data from 2017 on the contributions that women around the world made to their communities and said International Women’s Day was the most talked about moment last year.
“Unique to 2017, International Women’s Day was the most talked about moment of the year. It was a moment that rallied the world around empowering women, and that was just the beginning of mounting energy for women’s movements that shows no signs of slowing down in 2018,” Maxine Williams, Global Chief Diversity Officer, Facebook, said in a statement.
Facebook said that over a fourth of the total conversations about International Women’s Day on the platform were led by 18 to 24-year-old females.
“Forty per cent of active groups on Facebook were created by women, females created 70 per cent of all fundraisers on the platform and 43 per cent of Pages are women-owned,” the social media giant revealed.
Williams also shared examples where women used Groups, Pages for small business and fundraisers to make a positive impact in their communities.
“Maria leads ‘Supergirls’, a group of nearly 90,000 women in Israel in which they share deep secrets, ask personal questions or have a shoulder to cry on,” she said.
Another was Angel, who worked for the Alameda County Fair in the US. She started a Facebook Page that helped her grow following and increase ticket sales, Williams added.
NEW DELHI — Ahead of International Women’s Day March 8, Forbes India released a its “W-Power Trailblazers” issue, featuring 25 women who are rising stars in business.
The 25 women stars include Chiki Sarkar, publisher, Juggernaut Books; Adhuna Bhabani, founder-director, Bblunt; Anupriya Acharya, CEO (India), Publicis Media; Kavitha Sairam, co-founder, FIB-SOL Life Technologies; and Dina Wadia and Shivpriya Nanda, joint managing partners, J. Sagar Associates, among others.
“We need to specify that this is not a ranking but a qualitative selection – a grouping of ground breakers, game-changers and innovators working across diverse sectors such as technology, law, banking, insurance, media, biotech and the startup sector,” Forbes India said in a statement.
“Mandated quotas smack of tokenism, and we have as many women who favor reservations as those who would like merit to be the decider,” said Brian Carvalho, editor of Forbes India, referring to the lack of women on company boards.
“With the overwhelming response that we received for the first edition of W-Power last year, a second edition was imminent. This issue is unique because of the methodology used in selection of the leaders. We believe that this list cannot be ranked hence we adopt a qualitative approach,” said Joy Chakraborthy, CEO-Forbes India and president, revenue, Network18.
Forbes released their recent list of The World’s Billionaires on March 6, which features 10 Indian Americans.
The richest one on the list is Rakesh Gangwal, the co-founder of the airline Indigo and is worth $3.3 billion, after he made an extra $1.2 billion in the past year.
The second richest is Romesh T. Wadhwani, an IT entrepreneur and philanthropist with a net worth of $3.1 billion, who ended up topping the list last year.
Forbes recent list has a record of 2,208 members including two new Indian Americans, Niraj Shah who is worth $1.6 billion and Jayshree Ullal who is worth $1.3 billion.
Shah is the CEO and co-founder of Wayfair while Ullal is the CEO of Arista Networks.
Other Indian American billionaires who are on the list include Vinod Khosla ($2.3 billion), Google investor Kavitark Ram Shriram ($2.1 billion), Vista Equity Partners cofounder Brian Sheth ($2 billion), pharmaceutical executive John Kapoor ($1.8 billion), software executive and investor Aneel Bhusri ($1.6 billion) and Syntel co-founder Bharat Desai ($1.1 billion).
Sheth is the youngest Indian American billionaire on the list whose wealth went up by $900 million, while Khosla’s net worth increased by $700 million.
The combined net worth of Indian American billionaires is $20.2 billion and the richest Indian American of all is Shahid Khan, the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, with net worth of $7.2 billion.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Investigators say that Chad Horsley told them he blamed Muslims for killing U.S. military members overseas. (Photo: Livingston Parish Sheriff via The Washington Post)
For decades, Sikhs in the United States have been sending two messages to the world whenever they’ve been the targets of Islamophobia:
1) Hate crimes against Muslims or any other group are deplorable and antithetical to both the peaceful teachings of Sikhism and the values on which the United States was founded.
2) We’re an entirely different religion, by the way.
Some people apparently are not getting either message.
Take what happened at the Best Stop convenience store in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, just east of Baton Rouge. The store, owned by an Indian immigrant who is Sikh, has a piece of plywood covering what used to be a plate-glass window and a rattled cashier behind the counter.
About 20 minutes after Harjot Singh, the nephew of the store’s owner, closed the store Saturday night, a man plowed his pickup truck through the window.
Police say the man behind the wheel was Chad Horsley, a former reserve sheriff’s deputy from Denham Springs, Louisiana. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
“According to Horsley, he was under the impression the owners were Muslim,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release posted on Facebook. “He blamed Muslims for killing his fellow service members overseas.”
But he had other gripes, the sheriff’s office said.
“He was also upset that Muslims, in his mind, were having an easier time prospering than he was despite his time in the service.”
Horsley joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve in 2014, the Baton Rouge Advocate reported. And he had served as a deputy in nearby East Baton Rouge Parish, both full time and as a reserve, for six years, starting in 2010.
After the incident at the Best Stop, Horsley was charged with a hate crime, criminal damage to property, criminal mischief and two counts of impersonating a peace officer. He was released on $56,000 bail.
Investigators called the case “a bizarre one.” They said Horsley had been in the store the week before and he claimed that “he worked for a Sheriff’s Office and suspected the cashier of dealing drugs from the store.” Police said Horsley told the clerk he would be back around midnight to search the store and that the clerk should “make sure no one was around.”
Instead, the clerk called the sheriff’s office, which warned the public to be on the lookout for the 5-foot-9 man who was making threats and probably impersonating a police officer.
But the man wasn’t seen again until Saturday, authorities say, when his pickup came barreling through the store’s window.
Authorities said he at first claimed to be a witness to the crime but later told them that he was involved – and railed about Muslims.
“Even if it was Muslims, he shouldn’t have done that thing,” Singh, the clerk on duty at the time, told the Advocate. Singh emigrated from India two years ago. “We’re just trying to make a living out of here; that’s all we’re doing.”
The Council for American-Islamic Relations condemned the act.
“We thank local law enforcement officials for their prompt and professional response to this disturbing incident, which is apparently another example of the growing Islamophobia targeting American Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim,” said CAIR’s national communications director, Ibrahim Hooper.
Still, Hooper said, “an individual charged with such serious crimes should not have been released on bail before trial.”
Sikhs in the United States have been fighting the battle for decades – being persecuted for someone else’s religion.
As The Washington Post’s Peter Holley has reported:
“Followers of the monotheistic faith, which originated in South Asia in the 15th century, have been on the receiving end of xenophobic intolerance since they began arriving in the Pacific Northwest to fill logging jobs in the early 20th century, according to Simran Jeet Singh, a senior religion fellow at the Sikh Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.
” ‘Pretty immediately after our arrival in this country, we became targets of xenophobia,” Singh said in a recent interview. “Hate violence has ebbed and flowed throughout our history in America, but being targets of racism is nothing new. It’s part of our history here.’
“That intimidation intensified in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when a wave of anti-Islamic sentiment washed over the country, leading some to confuse the long beards and turbans worn by many Sikh men as a representation of Islam. Others viewed it simply as an opportunity to attack individuals they perceived as being ‘un-American.’ ”
Two Pakistani businessmen in Connecticut pleaded guilty March 5, to money laundering related to exports to Pakistan. A third defendant had earlier pleaded guilty to violating American export laws.
