The first-ever Indian-American mayor of Hoboken, N.J., delivered his first State of the City address Jan. 29, at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Mayor Ravinder Bhalla has distinguished himself with his very active grassroots social media approach to 21st Century governance.

Calling his city the best place to live in the country, he dwelt on his achievements even as he presented a long-term vision that aims at dealing with daily lifestyle issues. He also recognized an Indian-American child with an award.

“I’m biased, but Hoboken is the best place in America to call home,” Mayor Ravinder Bhalla asserted as he began his speech.  His address focused on his three major priorities: a Vision Zero pedestrian safety campaign that would eliminate all traffic-related deaths by 2030;  water main upgrades that include $1.5 million dollars each year in proactive water main replacements, with $33 million in water main upgrades over a 15 year span; and Hoboken’s Climate Action Plan to mitigate the effects of climate change, a plan that calls for municipal operations to become net zero by 2025 and carbon neutral by 2035.

The Mayor recognized two residents for their contributions to the community, one an Indian-American, Satya Singh, a 5 year old cancer survivor who has helped raise $500,000 with her mother and father for cancer research. She was honored as “Hoboken Girls’ 2018 Girl of the Year” for turning tragedy into triumph, the Mayor said.
“We’re joined tonight by one of my favorite young people in Hoboken, Satya Singh,” the Mayor said, recounting the experiences of the five-year old, who was diagnosed four years ago.  “Satya, with the strength of her mother, Raakhee and father, Agan, had to endure long hospital stays, hundreds of doctor visits, sleepless nights, and a six hour surgery to remove a tumor. She didn’t just beat back cancer, though. With the grace of God, Satya is now cancer free,” Mayor Bhalla noted. “Today, at the age of 5, she’s inspiring countless children across the country,” he said.

Jack Silbert who runs a program called “Don’t dis – disabilities” was also honored at the event.
The address also featured performances by the Hoboken High School Choir, and the Hoboken School’s Thespians Club.

When he was sworn in a year ago, Bhalla said, “I envisioned a progressive, forward thinking, 21^st century model of what urban living could look like. And I am proud to say we’ve made incredible progress towards achieving that vision.”

Bhalla experienced hate speech during his campaign and after his victory, and one of his first acts on coming into office was to sign an Executive Order declaring Hoboken a fair and welcoming city.

“In a time of divisiveness, when the values embodied by the Statue of Liberty are under duress, when we fight over whether to build walls or not, I chose to signal to the world that Hoboken is open, that in our streets and neighborhoods, the American Dream is alive and well.  We don’t need Washington to define who we are, WE can do that,” the Mayor said.
Among his achievements is extending municipal services to residents and improving delivery,  setting up a homelessness taskforce, a food pantry, job training and placement programs, housing vouchers for permanent housing, increasing the budget for a tenant advocate, and establishing paid parental leave for all city employees, “because those first few months with a child should not leave someone with an empty wallet.”

The full video of the State of the City can be viewed here: https://www.facebook.com/Hoboken/videos/545899202577534/

NEW DELHI – India‘s main opposition Congress party is promising to introduce a minimum income guarantee for the poor if it wins power in an election due by May, alarming some big and small business leaders who are asking: Where will the money come from?

The programme – which would be one of the world’s biggest schemes for poor households, supporting around 300 million people – has yet to be finalised.

But already some business organisations say they fear the tens of billions of dollars it would be expected to cost will mean higher taxes and reduced spending on badly needed infrastructure such as roads and railways.

“We are against such freebies,” said Pronab Sarkar, head of a tour company in Delhi and the president of the Indian Association of Tour Operators. “These could be funded only through higher taxes on industry and the middle class.”

Congress says much of the cost of the guaranteed income scheme could come from savings made by cracking down on tax evasion and ensuring existing subsidies on staples such as food and fuel went only to those who qualified.

A senior Congress official, however, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the party might also consider raising tax rates for the rich to pay for its plan.

“Eventually, it boils to transferring the resources to some extent from the rich to the poor people,” the official said.

Until a few months ago, the grip of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pro-business Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on power seemed unassailable.

But a series of defeats for the BJP in state elections at the end of last year, and some opinion polls suggesting its support has waned, have raised prospects that Congress could take power in alliance with regional parties and those based on specific groups, such as the lower caste Dalits.

That has meant the minimum income plan outlined by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi this week – which would be in addition to current welfare programmes – is being taken seriously by business groups.

MODI DISAPPOINTS

As the BJP’s fortunes have waned, disillusionment with Modi’s government had been growing among some industrialists, who were stung by a sudden ban on high-denomination banknotes in 2016 and the chaotic 2017 launch of a national sales tax.

As the party seeks to win back voters concerned about low farm incomes and the pace of job creation, Modi’s promise three years ago to cut the corporate tax rate to 25 percent, from 30 percent, has been shelved for now.

The government is expected to announce a series of spending measures and tax changes in an interim budget on Friday costing at least 1 trillion rupees ($14 billion). As a result, the budget deficit targets the government had set for the current and the next fiscal years may not be met.

Concerns that Modi is backsliding on fiscal prudence pale, though, compared with worries about the Congress plan, according to several business people who spoke to Reuters.

S.C. Ralhan, former head of the Federation of Indian Exporters Organisations (FIE), and a leading engineering goods exporter through his company Sri Tools, said India could not afford the minimum income guarantee as it would have to be paid for by businesses and individual taxpayers.

“Congress party’s electoral promise could tilt traders’ and urban middle class voters towards Modi, since they would have to bear the economic pressure,” said Praveen Khandelwal, secretary general of the Confederation of All India Traders.

The view from the business world was not uniform, though.

D.S. Rawat, head of the Confederation of Organic industries of India, said that “rich businesses should sacrifice” to prevent millions of households from being left behind in India‘s development. He represents the niche food processing industry with a membership of more than 250 companies.

Government economic advisers said it would be difficult to dismantle current welfare programmes, such as food subsidies and a rural job guarantee programme, to make up for the guaranteed income proposal.

Private economists and the rating agencies, though, warned that Congress’s proposed income support scheme, if carried out without replacing current welfare programmes, could widen the deficit further.

Under Modi, higher spending, along with a shortfall in tax collections, will already push the fiscal deficit up to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product for the year ending in March, overshooting a previous 3.3 percent target, according to a source with direct knowledge of budget discussions.

Devindra Pant, chief economist of India Ratings, an arm of Fitch, estimated that income support of about 5,000 rupees per month for about 260 million people, about one fifth of India‘s population, could cost about 4 trillion rupees ($56.24 billion) a year, or about 2 percent of the GDP.

“Whichever party comes to power, government finances are likely to remain under pressure for next few years,” he said.

Two Indian-origin students are in a team from University of Pennsylvania that won the 2019 YPrize for their plan to make catheters immune to deadly infections.

This Jan. 28, students Tanvi Kapur from Germany, a senior at the Wharton School, and junior Ishir Seth (of North Carolina), who is in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Science Management, beat out three other finalists at the Jan. 28, competition to win the $10,000 Y-Prize, which is awarded to four Penn undergraduates. Their team includes senior WenTao Zhang, also from the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program, as well as  Beatriz Go, a senior at UWharton and the School of Engineering and Applies Science.

The team’s company, Nosoco Technologies, is also vying for the Penn Startup Challenge later this year if it meets that competition’s guidelines. Currently it is in the semi-finals for that Challenge.

Kapur told PennToday that the Nosoco team had a personal reason for choosing to deal with the problem of catheters — Zhang’s great-grandfather died from complications of a catheter-related infection.

“This is a huge problem in hospitals,” Kapur is quoted saying in the article.

The Y-Prize, a collaboration between Penn Engineering, Wharton’s William and Phyllis Mack Institute for Innovation Management, the Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship, and the Penn Center for Innovation.  Teams like that of Kapur and Seth had to submit a video pitch explaining their idea and how they would make it a reality.

Following on the ” roll-to-roll surface wrinkle printing ” technology developed by some Penn professors,  the Nosoco team came up with the idea to incorporate the wrinkles (micro-sized crevices) into the catheter wall, to prevent or disrupt the formation of biofilms, a super-thin slime of bacteria which clings to a surface. “That pesky little bit of scum around your dishwasher drain is a biofilm; so is the plaque on your teeth. Many biofilms are harmless, but when “bad” bacteria band together, it can cause infection,” the PennToday article explains.

Kapur told PennToday there are 1 million catheter-associated infections each year, and 13,000 people die from conditions such as sepsis and nephritis. for hospitals and insurers it costs an estimated $3.5 billion a year in U.S. alone. The anti-microbial  properties of the wrinkled material is what led the Nosoco team to decide on using it.

The team has already been working on their catheter project over the last few months, and the YPrize money will help testing its viability, a process that could take till the end of 2019, before it can go into clinical trials, the PennToday news report said.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – An official survey that has been withheld by the government shows India’s unemployment rate rose to a 45-year high during 2017-2018, the Business Standard newspaper reported on Thursday, delivering a blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi just months before what is expected to be a closely fought general election.

A political controversy over the survey erupted after the acting chairman and another member of the body that reviewed the jobs data resigned, saying there had been a delay in its scheduled December release and alleging interference by other state agencies.

The assessment by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) conducted between July 2017-June 2018 showed the unemployment rate stood at 6.1 percent, the highest since 1972-73, the newspaper reported.

That year, when India was just coming out of a war with Pakistan and hit by global oil shocks like other oil-importing countries, the unemployment rate was 5.18 percent.

Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the main opposition Congress party who the polls show is closing in on Modi’s lead in the election due by May, said the job report showed “a national disaster”.

India’s economy has been expanding by 7 percent plus annually – the fastest pace among major economies – bit uneven growth has meant that there are not enough new jobs to keep pace. And critics say the government’s claims of economic success have sounded increasingly hollow.

Modi’s ambitious Make-in-India project to lift the share of domestic manufacturing from 17 percent of GDP to about 25 percent and create jobs for an estimated 1.2 million youth entering the marker failed to take off.

The report showed frighteningly high levels of unemployment among the young, with 18.7 percent of urban males aged between 15-29 without work, and a jobless rate of 27.2 percent for urban females in the same age group.

Worse, the labor force participation rate – the proportion of population working or seeking jobs – declined to 36.9 percent in 2017/18 from 39.5 percent in 2011/12, the report said. The comparable rate for the United States was 63.1 percent in December.

CRISIS EVERYWHERE

Himanshu, an associate professor at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University who specializes on development economics, said that the jobs crisis was everywhere to see.

“News and data like thousands of PhDs applying for waiter jobs in Mumbai or millions applying for just a thousand jobs in Gujarat or 10 million applying for a small number of jobs in railways,” he said.

“I mean, these kind of examples are everywhere,” he said, pointing to street protests by caste and other interest groups seeking quotas for government jobs.

The data provides the first comprehensive assessment of India’s employment since Modi’s decision in November 2016 to withdraw most of the country’s banknotes from circulation overnight.

After the chaotic launch of a national sales tax in July 2017, hundreds of thousands have lost jobs in small businesses.

The government declined to confirm or deny the findings contained in the report.

“We have not released the report. I do not want to comment on it,” Pravin Srivastava, India’s chief statistician, told Reuters.

But he said the report was not final and would be released after a review.

The gloomy jobs data could be awkward for Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to explain with a general election looming and opinion polls already showing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party unlikely to keep its parliamentary majority.

“It’s a very, very serious issue, and that is the reason why the government didn’t want this data to come out in the public domain,” said former finance minister Yashwant Sinha.

A report released by the All India Manufacturers’ Organisation said last month 3.5 million jobs had been lost since 2016, mainly due to demonetization and rising working costs after the launch of the national tax.

Some sociologists say that there are instances of a correlation between high unemployment and an increase in criminal behavior.

“The anti-social activities, they have risen in many places. Whether roadside violence, theft, robbery, black-marketing, prostitution, all kinds of things,” said Abhijit Dasgupta, professor of sociology at the University of Delhi.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India summoned Pakistan’s envoy in protest against a telephone call made by Pakistan’s foreign minister to a separatist leader in Indian Kashmir and said there would be consequences if there was more such contact.

The row is the latest to erupt between the nuclear-armed rivals over the disputed territory of Kashmir at the heart of seven decades of hostility. India has refused any talks with its neighbour saying it must first stop supporting militants fighting its rule in Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale called Pakistan’s ambassador, Sohail Mahmood, on Wednesday to denounce Pakistan for trying to subvert the country’s integrity, the Indian foreign ministry said in a statement.

It said the call by Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi to Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a leader of the separatist umbrella All Parties Hurriyat Conference, based in Srinagar, the capital of Indian Kashmir, was deplorable.

“The Pakistan Foreign Minister’s actions are tantamount to direct interference in the internal affairs of its neighbour,” the foreign ministry said.

Pakistan denies giving any material help the militants but says it is committed to giving the Kashmiri people moral and diplomatic support in their struggle for self-determination.

It rejected the Indian objections and said that the leadership in Pakistan had always been in touch with Kashmiri leaders and there was nothing new in the phone call.

“We would like to reiterate that Kashmir is an outstanding dispute between India and Pakistan, and acknowledged as such through U.N. Security Council resolutions as well as numerous Pakistan-India documents…” the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

It said it was a “travesty” to portray the struggle of the Kashmiri people as terrorism.

India and Pakistan have twice gone to war over Kashmir. India controls 45 percent, in the south and east, Pakistan about a third in the north and west, and China the rest.

The Indian Foreign Ministry said that Gokhale asked the Pakistani envoy to ensure there was no more such contact.

“He was cautioned that persistence of such behaviour by Pakistan will have implications.”

On its website, the University of Farmington advertised an innovative STEM curriculum that would prepare students to compete in the global economy, and flexible class schedules that would allow them to enroll without disrupting their careers. The Michigan-based school touted the number of languages spoken by its president (four) and the number of classes taught by teaching assistants (zero.) Photos of the campus showed students lounging around with books on a grassy quad, or engaged in rapt conversation in its brightly-lit modern library. Tuition was relatively reasonable – $8,500 a year for undergraduates and $11,000 a year for graduate students.

“Located in the heart of the automotive and advanced manufacturing center of Southeast Michigan, the University of Farmington provides students from throughout the world a unique educational experience,” the site informed prospective applicants.

But there were no classes taking place at the university, which employed no instructors or professors. In court filings that were unsealed Wednesday, federal prosecutors revealed that the school’s employees were actually undercover agents working for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The fake university had been set up in 2015 as part of an elaborate sting operation aimed at ensnaring foreign nationals who had initially come to the United States on student visas. Its “campus” consisted of a small office in a corporate park in the northwestern Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, Michigan, with no quad or library in sight.

The phony university was “being used by foreign citizens as a ‘pay to play’ scheme,” prosecutors allege. After forking over thousands of dollars, students would provide immigration authorities with evidence that they were enrolled in a full-time educational program. They could then continue to live and work in the United States under a student visa. But since the University of Farmington didn’t actually exist, they didn’t have the hassle of writing papers, taking tests or showing up to class.

Students knew that the scheme was illegal, “and that discretion should be used when discussing the program with others,” prosecutors wrote in their indictment, which was filed Jan. 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.

According to the Detroit News, which first reported on the undercover operation, dozens of University of Farmington students were arrested on immigration violations on Wednesday as part of a massive nationwide sweep, and are now potentially facing deportation. In addition, eight people who allegedly worked as “recruiters” for the school and collectively helped at least 600 students to remain in the country under false pretenses now face federal conspiracy charges.

ICE could not be reached for comment late Wednesday night. It’s unclear how many past or present students could be facing deportation as a result of the sting.

The Department of Homeland Security’s list of certified schools where international students can enroll includes the University of Farmington. And the school made some pretense of being a legitimate institution. Before Wednesday night, when the school’s Facebook and Twitter accounts were abruptly deleted, posts on social media notified students about school cancellations due to an ice storm, and advertised an upcoming admissions fair. It had a Latin motto – “Scientia et Labor,” meaning “Knowledge and Work” – and a handful of positive online reviews from people claiming to be satisfied alumni.

But no one enrolled at the university was making progress toward a degree, the indictment said. The “unique educational experience” promoted on the school’s website apparently consisted of not going to school at all.

There were some clues that not everything was aboveboard. The school’s website never said how many enrolled students it had, though it claimed that they came from all 50 states and 47 countries. It didn’t name the university’s president or the year when the school was founded. As the Detroit News’s Robert Snell noted on Twitter, a photo showing a diverse group of students deep in concentration came from Shutterstock. The university claimed to be accredited by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, but did not appear in an online directory of accredited institutions on the organization’s website.

According to prosecutors, students were well aware that the school was a fraud. They allegedly chose to enroll anyway because doing so would allow them to remain in the country on F-1 nonimmigrant visas, which allow foreign citizens to temporarily reside in the United States while studying accredited academic institutions.

Khaalid Walls, a spokesman for ICE in Detroit, told local news station WXYZ that the students had entered the United States legally on F-1 visas after being accepted to legitimate schools, and had later transferred to the University of Farmington.

The federal indictments name eight people in eight states who allegedly worked as recruiters for the school. All have been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit visa fraud and harboring aliens for profit. They face a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

The eight recruiters allegedly helped create fraudulent records, including transcripts, that students could give to immigration authorities. Authorities contend that they collectively accepted more than $250,000 in kickbacks for their work, not realizing that the payments were actually coming from undercover agents who worked for Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE.

“We are all aware that international students can be a valuable asset to our country, but as this case shows, the well-intended international student visa program can also be exploited and abused,” Matthew Schneider, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said in a statement emailed to media outlets on Wednesday.

This isn’t the first time that the feds have set up a fake university with the goal of rooting out visa fraud. Calling “pay to stay” a national security threat, officials announced in April 2016 that they had charged 21 people with recruiting international students who paid to enroll at the made-up University of Northern New Jersey so that they could get student visas. More than a dozen students who partook in the scheme later told the New York Times that they felt they had been deceived by the government.

Many of the students who enrolled at the University of Farmington appear to be Indian nationals who belong to the Telugu ethnic group. The American Telugu Association said in a Wednesday s tatement that “scores of Telugu students nationwide” had been arrested in early-morning raids, and that the organization was attempting to provide them with legal guidance.

As the News noted, the undercover investigation seems to have ramped up one month after President Trump took office. While the fake university was set up in 2015, it wasn’t until February 2017 that HSI agents began posing as university officials, the indictment said. The undercover operation, nicknamed “Paper Chase,” continued until earlier this month.

Over the years, the university’s ghostly presence in the basement of suburban Detroit office park aroused at least one neighbor’s suspicions.

“I was like ‘what is this?'” Matt Friedman, who runs a strategic communications firm based in the same complex, told the News. “I’d never heard of it before and never saw anybody there. The whole thing was just odd.”

NEW DELHI – Late one night in the fall, about 200 female students in Bhopal, a city in central India, held a rare demonstration on their college’s basketball court. Their very presence there was an act of protest: Women were not allowed to be outside their dormitories after dark, just one of many restrictions on their movement.

They spent the night outdoors – the first time many of them had seen the moon since they began college, one student recalled.

For years, college campuses in India have regulated the movement of their female students in the name of safety. But in protests over the past several months, women on college campuses nationwide have voiced their demands: freedom from oppressive rules and equality with the male students. And slowly, colleges are responding.

Women’s access to education in India has improved vastly in the past three decades, but social change has been slower. Reported crime against women has doubled in the past 10 years, which experts say is a result of deeply embedded patriarchal attitudes that are also evidenced by the persistent preference for male children and the decline in the number of working women.

The recent protests were inspired by a Delhi-based women’s collective, Pinjra Tod, or “Break the Cage,” which campaigns against arbitrary curfews and rules imposed on female residents at colleges and universities – part of a broader battle by women’s rights activists to take back public spaces and challenge the threat of sexual violence.

They’re fighting not just the curfew but also “the idea of policing women and how they are kept in gendered spaces,” said Joan Sony Cherian, a member of the collective.

Women in India this month have entered a temple that once banned female visitors of menstruating age and prompted the dismissal of a professor for comparing virgins to “a sealed bottle.” Last year, dozens of women shared stories of sexual harassment at workplaces as part of a burgeoning #MeToo movement.

At Bhopal’s Regional Institute of Education, which trains students to become teachers, the campus residences had strict rules for women. Female students had to be back in their dorm rooms by 5:30 p.m. in the winter, by 6:45 p.m. at other times. Leaving campus was allowed only between 1 to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Food delivery was allowed only until 5:30 p.m.

If a woman wanted to leave campus for a longer period, her parents were required to fax the request, after which two sets of administrative signatures were required. Female students did not have access to the rooftop terrace. For the men on campus, most of these rules did not apply.

The women began their campaign with a sit-in, borrowing tactics and strategies developed by Break the Cage. Without their support, “our protest would not have been at this scale,” said Rai, a participating student, who spoke on the condition of partial anonymity to avoid possible retaliation by the college.

On the third day of the protest, the administration relented. Now women don’t have to return to campus until 8 p.m. and can remain outside their dorm rooms while on campus until 9 p.m. Later that week, a group of female students danced in a religious procession on campus in celebration. It was a new taste of freedom: Under the previous rules, they were locked in during festivals or could celebrate only in an enclosed space demarcated for them.

The protests weren’t limited to Bhopal. They spread. In some instances, they were inspired by previous protests; others happened spontaneously.

Female students at a branch of the Regional Institute of Education in Ajmer, a town in Rajasthan state, broke their curfew barely a week after the Bhopal protests. In October, students from Panjab University protested for 48 days. Protests led by Break the Cage at prestigious Delhi colleges such as Miranda House and Lady Shri Ram College soon followed.

Administrators at the government-run Regional Institute of Education declined to comment on the protests. Lady Shri Ram College, a branch of Delhi University, said that the college had introduced changes such as ending the requirement for female students to have local guardians. The new rules were announced just before the planned protest.

Pratibha Jolly, Miranda House principal, acknowledged that the old rules were “archaic and major reform was overdue.” After last year’s protest, the college made the curfew later and increased the number of nights a resident could stay out of the dorm.

“Our biggest challenge is to provide a safe, secure environment while nurturing liberal and progressive education for an extremely diverse student population,” Jolly said. “This requires nuanced responses.”

But members of Break the Cage reject the safety argument. Devika Shekhawat, a member of the group, said women are aware of the risks. “We want to change the spaces” rather than force women to change their behavior, she said.

Break the Cage has been advocating for women on campuses since 2015. While curfews have been central to its demands, it has also drawn attention to issues such as higher fees charged by dormitories for women, the lack of sexual harassment committees mandated by law, and moral policing of female students.

The solidarity offered by Break the Cage has made a difference, said Kanupriya, 23, the student union president of Panjab University, who goes by one name. She led a successful campaign to scrap the dorm curfew.

These successes alone will not bring about gender equality, Kanupriya said, but they are a way to move the needle: “This is about changing what is considered normal.”

A child’s finger is pricked at a doctor’s office, and the child cries out. “Ow! Ah! Oh!”

How much pain adult Americans think the young patient is suffering will depend on whether they believe the child to be a girl or a boy, according to a study published this month in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology. Those who know the distressed patient as “Samuel” will infer that he is in more pain than those who know the patient as “Samantha,” even though Samuel and Samantha are in fact the same 5-year-old, whose shoulder-length blond hair, red T-shirt and gym shorts don’t immediately suggest male or female characteristics.

The child’s finger-prick test was captured in a short video played for 264 adults, men and women between the ages of 18 and 75. On average, participants told that they were watching a boy’s reaction to his prekindergarten doctor’s visit rated his pain, on a scale from 0 (no pain) to 100 (severe pain), as 50.42, while those instructed that the patient was a girl rated her pain as 45.90. When researchers controlled for explicit gender stereotypes – the belief that boys are more stoic – the difference vanished, suggesting that biases about the willingness of male versus female children to display pain were behind the belief that this particular boy was truly in dire straits because he was moved to cry out.

The results, in what lead author Brian D. Earp described as a “new research area,” contribute to growing understanding of sex differences in pain, a topic that has mainly been studied in the context of adults. They add further dimensions to the exploration of pain assessments biased by race, based on dubious notions about biological differences between blacks and whites. And they suggest a possible need for a course correction in pediatric care, where health care providers may exhibit the same biases that influence the general public.

“Adults have a lot of authority and agency in saying, ‘This is how I feel.’ We express ourselves in nuanced ways,” Earp, the associate director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But young children, and how they’re attended to, depends on the judgments of adults in the room. Understanding the structure of those judgments is important for equitable health care.”

In a finding that surprised the paper’s authors, the downgrading of female pain was driven by female participants, who were more likely than men to say that the pain of the subject was less severe when told she was a girl.

“This is a big mystery,” Earp said. “We’re spitballing to come up with a reason.”

A similar dynamic seemed to appear in a 2014 study that the new paper takes as its model, in which a sample of disproportionately female nursing and psychology students viewed the same video as in the recent study and rated Samuel as experiencing more pain than Samantha, despite the identical behavior. That those training to be medical providers were among the participants suggests crossover to the health-care profession. Their responses bolster the idea that gender bias about how children express pain influences even those “who are in a position to be making healthcare decisions,” Earp said.

“It’s a preliminary result, but we’re pretty sure there’s a there there,” he said.

The lead author of the earlier study, Lindsey Cohen, a professor of psychology at Georgia State University, said in an interview that he had long wondered if their results, published in the journal Children’s Health Care, would hold up among men.

It appears that they don’t. In the new study, the gender of the young patient had no effect on assessments offered by 156 male participants, among several hundred who viewed the video.

The discovery is in “some tension,” the paper notes, with the conclusions of related experiments, though not on the central finding that the pain of boys is taken more seriously. For instance, a 2008 study found that fathers rated the pain of their sons higher than that of their daughters in a cold pressor test, in which a subject immerses a hand in a container of ice water. Mothers showed no difference.

Meanwhile, research has shown that young children don’t experience pain differently on account of gender in the way that the adult population does, both in terms of sensitivity and clinical risk. The sex hormones thought to account for the difference are not present before puberty. Studies of how adults nevertheless come to different conclusions about the pain of children have mainly been limited to the attitudes of their parents, who enjoy a unique vantage point.

The new study accesses a wider audience. And the apparent biases of the women it surveyed came as no surprise to Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University and the author of “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.” She said it was the logical conclusion of women rating their own pain as less severe.

“Since there’s more pressure on women to be appropriately sympathetic to pain, and since we’re biased in the direction of taking male pain more seriously, it makes sense that women are at least as bad if not worse,” Manne said.

The results, while not surprising, were “really sad,” she observed. “We should be troubled by the fact that seemingly all else equal, perceived gender plus a few gender stereotypes are enough to have a little girl’s pain responded to with less concern.”

If boys do tend to understate their own pain, Earp said, there might be good reason to see the same behavior as reflecting more intense pain in a male subject, one who has been led to believe, “Boys don’t cry.”

But Manne pointed to research casting doubt on the idea that young boys have already learned to bottle up their emotions. Some analysis has found, by contrast, that boys are more likely than girls to express negative emotions in childhood, a pattern that reverses only in adolescence.

“It’s still possible that we socialize boys to be stoic, but that pernicious norm doesn’t appear to be very potent,” she said. “Then the results start to look really disturbing, because there’s no basis for thinking the boy was actually in any more pain.”

Earp said he would like his next study to introduce the factor of race, which has been explored – revealing a “view in the back of people’s heads that black people have literally thicker skin,” he said – but rarely in combination with gender bias, especially among children.

Stark examples exist of the consequences, for both adults and children, of racially biased assessments of pain. Some of them have been documented by the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics. African Americans and Hispanics have been shown to receive lower doses of pain medication than whites. They wait longer in emergency rooms for pain medication. Their pain needs have been taken less seriously in hospice care. Though studies have shown that African Americans report greater back pain, clinicians record the opposite. Minority and low-income children encounter more difficulty getting oral pain evaluated and treated.

To Earp, this pattern suggests that the way adults interpret the pain of children could have consequences for their health, prompting the question, “What are the real-life treatment implications of this cognitive bias?”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted its “final rule” amending regulations dealing with H-1B petitions that are subject to caps, including those that may be eligible for the advanced degree exemption. It will come into effect April 1, and could lead to advantages for Indian applicants with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. Indian applicants for H-1B visas form the overwhelming majority of petitions filed for this category.

The final rule, which was flagged last December, and has come into operation faster than previous such changes, reverses the order by which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) selects H-1B petitions under the H-1B regular cap and the advanced degree exemption. It also introduces an electronic registration requirement for petitioners seeking to file H-1B cap-subject petitions.

Authorities say this new formulation makes the system “more effective and efficient,” and one expert from the Obama administration, says it is good news for Indian graduates of U.S. universities who have earned advanced degrees.

“This change is moderately good news for Indian graduates of U.S. universities with advanced degrees, since USCIS estimates that about 5,000 more of them will get H-1B visas each year—at the expense of all other applicants,” said immigration attorney Doug Rand, in an email response to News India Times. Rand was the assistant director for entrepreneurship in the Obama White House and worked on immigration regulations, including the H-4 Employment Authorization for spouses of H-1B visa holders.

“But make no mistake: The H-1B program is already under duress due to other recent policy changes, and more trouble is on the near horizon,” Rand warned, adding, “Today’s rule is the first full immigration regulation that the Trump administration has pushed all the way through the regulatory process, from start to finish, and they did it at warp speed.”

Rand also said, “It’s possible that other changes—such as excluding lower-salary workers from the H-1B program and eliminating work permits for H-4 spouses—may be coming soon.” Rand is the co-founder of Boundless Immigration, a technology company that says it helps families navigate the immigration process.

The USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna called the changes, “simple and smart” with a positive benefit for employers, the foreign workers they seek to employ, and the agency’s adjudicators. Once implemented, Cissna said, the new registration system will lower overall costs for employers and increase government efficiency.

“We are also furthering President Trump’s goal of improving our immigration system by making a simple adjustment to the H-1B cap selection process. As a result, U.S. employers seeking to employ foreign workers with a U.S. master’s or higher degree will have a greater chance of selection in the H-1B lottery in years of excess demand for new H-1B visas,” Cissna said.

In its press release, the DHS said that effective April 1, the USCIS will first select H-1B petitions submitted on behalf of all beneficiaries, including those that may be eligible for the advanced degree exemption. It will then select from the remaining eligible petitions, a number projected to reach the advanced degree exemption.

“Changing the order in which USCIS counts these allocations will likely increase the number of petitions for beneficiaries with a master’s or higher degree from a U.S. institution of higher education to be selected under the H-1B numerical allocations,” the USCIS maintains. “Specifically, the change will result in an estimated increase of up to 16% (or 5,340 workers) in the number of selected petitions for H-1B beneficiaries with a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. institution of higher education,” it contends. More details are spelt out at uscis.gov.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced 46 judicial appointments for the New Year, including one new appointment and two reappointments of three Indian-Americans. All three are women judges.

Judge Archana Rao was appointed by the Mayor to Civil Court and has been assigned to Criminal Court. She has spent her entire career so far with the New York County District Attorney’s Office working in several bureaus during her 17 year tenure there, is a new appointee, according to a press release from the Mayor’s office Jan. 31. She last served as Bureau Chief of the Financial Frauds Bureau. She joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in 2001. She was assigned to the trial division, where, in addition to prosecuting street crime cases, she served in the Domestic Violence Unit and the Welfare Fraud Unit, according to a bio on the Asian Women in Business which had her on its list of “Asian Women Prosecutors and the Pursuit of Justice: in 2013.  In 2004, she was assigned to the Special Prosecutions Bureau where she handled a variety of investigations and prosecutions, including frauds involving mortgages, housing and securities as well as computer crimes. She eventually rose to become Bureau Chief. Judge Rao is a graduate of Vassar College and Fordham University School of Law.

de Blasio reappointed Judge Raja Rajeswari who was the first Indian-American woman to be appointed as a Criminal Court Judge in April 2015.  She was a career prosecutor for 16 years with the Richmond County District Attorney’s Office.  Her work primarily involved women and children, according to the website talksonlaw.com. Chennai-born Rajeswari immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager and is an accomplished Bharathanatyam and Kucchipudi dancer. She speaks Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, and Sinhalease. Judge Rajeswari is a graduate of CUNY College of Staten Island and received her law degree from Brooklyn Law School.

Judge Deepa Ambekar was reappointed to Civil Court. She was first appointed as an Interim Civil Court Judge in May 2018 and has been serving in Criminal Court.  Prior to her appointment, Judge Ambekar served with the New York City Council as a Senior Legislative Attorney and Counsel to the Committee on Public Safety. In that position, Ambekar handled numerous responsibilities including analyzing federal, state, and local laws to provide legal and policy counsel to the Speaker on issues related to bail, summons reform, pre-trial incarceration, Rikers reform, and criminal justice issues, her LinkedIn profile details.

Prior to that, she served as a Staff Attorney with the Legal Aid Society, Criminal Defense Division, where she represented more than 1,000 defendants facing felony and misdemeanor charges. Judge Ambekar is a graduate of the University of Michigan and received her J.D. from Rutgers Law School.

The 46 judges include four appointments and two reappointments to Family Court; nine appointments and nineteen reappointments to Criminal Court; and nine appointments and three reappointments to Civil Court, the Jan. 31 press release from the Mayor’s office said. Judges appointed or reappointed to Civil Court sit in either Criminal or Family Court. The appointments were effective January 1, 25, and 28. In addition, Mayor de Blasio has designated three appointees for vacancies anticipated in March.

“An impartial justice system is essential to building a fairer city for all. The thirteen judges I am appointing, and the thirty-three I am welcoming back, will represent the people of our city with fair and effective judicial oversight of our courts,” de Blasio is quoted saying in the press release.

Family, Criminal and Civil Court are part of the New York State Unified Court System. Family Court judges hear cases related to adoption, foster care and guardianship, custody and visitation, domestic violence, abused or neglected children, and juvenile delinquency. The City’s Criminal Court handles misdemeanor cases and lesser offenses, and conducts arraignments.

WASHINGTON – The United States will pull out of a nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, the Trump administration announced Friday, ending a cornerstone Cold War agreement on grounds that Russian violations render it moot.

The demise of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty raises fears of a new nuclear arms race, although U.S. officials discount the risk.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States is suspending participation in the agreement, starting a six-month countdown to a final U.S. withdrawal. That leaves a slim chance that Russia could end missile programs widely seen as a violation, salvaging the treaty. The United States accuses Moscow of violating the agreement since 2014.

“For years Russia has violated the terms of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty without remorse,” Pompeo said, adding that the United States has continued to meet its obligations while seeking to get Moscow to come into compliance.

“When an agreement is so brazenly disregarded and our security is so threatened, we must respond,” he added.

In a statement, President Donald Trump said the onus is on Russia.

“The United States has fully adhered to the INF Treaty for more than 30 years, but we will not remain constrained by its terms while Russia misrepresents its actions,” Trump said. “We cannot be the only country in the world unilaterally bound by this treaty, or any other. We will move forward with developing our own military response options and will work with NATO and our other allies and partners to deny Russia any military advantage from its unlawful conduct.”

Earlier Friday, the Kremlin said it expected official notification of the U.S. withdrawal within days.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday that Russia greets the news “with much regret.”

The Associated Press quoted Peskov as saying that Washington has been “unwilling to hold any substantial talks” with Moscow to save the treaty.

The Trump administration has signaled for months that it wants to end the agreement covering ground-based nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

Arms control specialists said that without the treaty, the United States may move to position missile systems in Europe, while Russia could use the opportunity to base missile systems elsewhere.

The India Association of Long Island (IALI) celebrated India’s 70^th Republic Day on Saturday, January 26, at the India Center Building in Hicksville, New York.

The celebration was attended by IALI members only and included the singing of the Indian National Anthem as the Indian National Flag was hoisted.

IALI members also sang patriotic songs within groups while IALI First Lady Saroj Aery gave a solo performance.

President Lalit Aery went over the first month of his presidency including the IALI Oath Ceremony, which took place on January 11.

He also spoke for his hope, on the forums that are directed by IALI on the topics of meditation, women, kids, Sangeet and seniors citizens, and urged everyone to attend these forums.

IALI will be celebrating the festival of Holi on Sunday, March 17 at the Cottilion at 12 noon.

A federal grand jury returned an indictment against seven people who conspired to harbor an illegal immigrant who is accused of killing an Indian American police officer in Newman, California.

According to a Department of Justice press release, Erik Razo‑Quiroz, 29, of Merced; Adrian Virgen-Mendoza, 25, of Fairfield; Conrado Virgen‑Mendoza, 34, of Chowchilla; Erasmo Villegas-Suarez, 36, of Buttonwillow; Ana Leydi Cervantes-Sanchez, 31, of Newman; Bernabe Madrigal-Castaneda, 59, of Lamont; and Maria Luisa Moreno, 57, of Lamont, were charged with conspiring to harbor and conceal Gustavo Perez Arriaga, who shot and killed Officer Ronil Singh on December 26, 2018 in Newman, California.

In addition, Razo‑Quiroz is charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, as well as an illegal immigrant in possession of a firearm.

“Law enforcement agencies that are sworn to protect the public can accomplish their mission only when they have the active cooperation and support of the community they serve. Officers who serve our community put their lives on the line every day to protect us, and they deserve that cooperation and support,” U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott stated. “When individuals act to thwart law enforcement’s efforts, they undermine the safety of those officers and the public as a whole. Today’s indictment is a significant step toward holding accountable those who chose to harbor and conceal the man accused of killing a police officer in Newman, California, Corporal Ronil Singh.”

According to court documents, between December 26 and 28, the defendants conspired to harbor and conceal Arriaga, while he was on the run for the alleged murder of Singh.

According to an earlier News India Times report, Singh had pulled over Arriaga at a traffic stop on the morning of December 26, 2018, where he shot Singh, who later died at the hospital.

Since then, the seven defendants have helped conceal and harbor Arriaga, despite knowing that he had killed a police officer.

The defendants transported, hosted and provisioned Arriaga with clothes, money and a new cell phone; concealed the truck that Arriaga was driving when he allegedly killed Corporal Singh and made plans and wired money to smuggle Arriaga out of California and back to Mexico, according to a Department of Justice press release.

Additionally, Razo-Quiroz, who is also a convicted felon, disposed of the gun that Arriaga allegedly used to murder Corporal Singh.

If convicted of the firearms offenses, Razo-Quiroz faces a maximum statutory penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine while the conspiracy charge carries a maximum statutory penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA), an affiliate of the American Library Association, announced the winners of the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature (APAAL). The winner in the Adult Non-Fiction category is an Indian-American.

Sharmila Sen won in the category for her book  Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America, published by Penguin Books. It is a “deeply personal memoir and a primer on race” according to APALA which describes it as “a richly literary examination of the various systems of class, race, religion, and culture that defined who she is, drawing on her familial and educational backgrounds in Hindu mythology, Indian politics, British and American literature, Bollywood, American television, and more.”

In it Sen challenges this yearning for whiteness and searches instead for a messy but fuller embrace of all races in America, the Jan. 28 press release notes.

According to her profile on the Penguin Random House website, Sen grew up in Calcutta, and immigrated to the U.S. when she was 12. She grew up in Cambridge, Mass., graduated from Harvard and earned her Ph.D. from Yale in English literature. She taught courses on literatures from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for seven years as a professor at Harvard. She is executive editor-at-large at Harvard University Press. Sen has lived and worked in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, lectured around the world on postcolonial literature and culture and published essays on racism and immigration. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., with her architect husband and their three children.

Publisher’s Weekly called Sen’s book a “captivating memoir” where Sen examines her immensely privileged background in 1970s Calcutta, as well as paints “vivid and often disturbing picture of poverty in India,” and explores her transition to becoming a minority in the U.S.

“Readers interested in first-generation immigrant stories will enjoy this heartfelt account of how newcomers carve a space for themselves in the melting pot of America,” Publishers Weekly said.

The APALA awards promote Asian/Pacific American culture and heritage and are awarded to titles published from October 2017 to September 2018 based on their literary and artistic merit.

There are five categories for the Awards. Each committee selected a winning title for the category.

Each award will be named and given the award seal and plaques during the annual APALA Literature Award Ceremony taking place during the ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition in Washington, D.C. June 20-25.

Many Indian Americans came together at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Plaza in Irving, Texas to pay a floral tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on his 71^st death anniversary.

Those who were present include Secretary of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Plaza, Rao Kalvala; Treasurer of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Plaza, Abhijit Railkar; board members John Hammond and Taiyab Kundawala; advisory board member MVL Prasad, and several community leaders including Sudhanshu, Dr. Puligandla, T.P. Matthew and Shabnam Modgil.

“At the age of 78 years, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948 during a morning prayer meeting at Birla Bhavan, New Delhi. Godse fired four bullets at Gandhi on point-blank range. The place where Gandhiji was cremated called Rajghat which is about 5 acres land. It is important to remember the principles of Mahtama Gandhi today especially peace and non-violence,” Dr. Prasad Thotakura, the Chairman of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Plaza, stated. “Gandhi’s persuasive methods of civil disobedience influenced leaders of civil rights movement around the world, mainly Martin Luther King Jr. in the USA. Gandhiji sacrificed 32 years of his precious life in the struggle to free India from British. Gandhiji’s principles are everlasting and ever applicable. Though he physically departed us 71 years ago, he is still alive amongst us with his valuable principles.”

Through a Facebook Live from Chicago, the Chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress (IOC), Sam Pitroda, addressed a large audience of Indian Americans, who were gathered to celebrate India’s 70th Republic Day on Saturday, January 26 at the Christos Church Auditorium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The celebration was hosted by IOC Kerala Pennsylvania chapter, where the IOC PA chapter President Santhosh Abraham chaired the event and among those present were IOC USA National President Shudh Prakash Singh, General Secretary Rajender Dichpally, Vice President Kalathil Varughese, Treasurer Vinit Nagpal, Secretary Shalu Punnoose and Kerala Chapter National President Joby George, who has been organizing this celebration for many years now.

In his message, Dr. Pitroda congratulated the Kerala Chapter National President Joby George and Chairman Kalathil Varghese for the mega event.

Pitroda also highlighted the progress that India has made in the last 70 years and urged audience members to join IOC.

This year’s chief guest was State Senator John Sabatina, while State Representative Martina White and City Councilman Derek Green were both guest speakers.

In his speech, Sen. Sabatina said that the Republic Day celebration is the most appropriate as India is a great democratic country and he appreciates the fact that the IOC Kerala chapter took the initiative to celebrate it.

Rep. White said that “Indians in the region are well respected and a law abiding community, I am happy to join your celebrations,” while Councilman Green added that “it is good to note the Indian community is getting involved in the mainstream politics.”

A cultural program organized by Geemon George included dances, live music and other varieties of entertainment.

More than 50 children and adults performed on stage making it an evening to remember.

The celebration ended with a Kerala style dinner with over 250 people in attendance including leaders of various organizations.

Sunil Chatrani, the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of Elegant Hotels Group, has been named the Caribbean’s 2019 Hotelier of the Year.

The Guyanese-born, Barbados-based hotelier received the top honor at the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association’s (CHTA) 37th annual Caribbean Travel Marketplace, according to a press release.

Chatrani has worked in hotel operations for more than 20 years and currently presides over Elegant’s operations of seven hotels and resorts in Barbados, including Crystal Cove Hotel, Turtle Beach Resort, Waves Hotel and Spa, The House, Colony Club Hotel, Tamarind and Treasure Beach Hotel, which he joined in 2010.

The group also includes the acclaimed Daphne’s Restaurant on Barbados’ west coast, sister eatery to Daphne’s Restaurant in London.

“It is very overwhelming. The truth is all of us in the industry work very hard on a daily basis and so many other hoteliers are deserving of this,” Chatrani said, thanking the team at Elegant Hotels and his family for their support.

According to a press release, Chatrani’s winning developmental strategy that promotes continuous investment and improvement, and builds the profitability of each property with a focused three-step program; refurbish, re-position and re-price.

In addition to a day-to-day maintenance and regular refurbishment, Chatrani also manages a central fund for financing larger projects each year.

He believes that this, as well as the group’s outstanding training and service programs, generates tangible improvements in the guest experience at the Elegant Hotels Group properties, the press release adds.

“Sunil is a true Caribbean success story. His professional accomplishments have been outstanding, and his commitment to staff and community development is nothing short of exemplary,” Frank Comito, CHTA’s CEO and Director General, said.

Chatrani was Chairman of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association from 2014 to 2016 and is currently Chairman of the Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc. (BTMI) and the Barbados Tourism Product Authority (BTPA).

NEW YORK – The horrific racist and homophobic assault on Jussie Smollett, a black, gay actor, in Chicago, has been widely condemned, including by President Trump. But the incident, where two masked men rained blows, poured a chemical substance, probably bleach, and wrapped a rope around Smollett’s neck, yelling profanities, and “MAGA country”, during the attack, is part of a trend of growing hate crimes across the United States.

There was a 17 percent increase in hate crimes in 2017 – the third consecutive year such crimes increased, according to the FBI, reported The Washington Post. Of the 7,175 hate crimes reported by United States law enforcement agencies, 2,013 incidents targeted black Americans. A total of 1,130 hate crimes involved people who were targeted based on their sexual orientation.

Now, a new report, released on Thursday, by the Communities Against Hate initiative (CAH), analyzes that more than two-thirds of Americans say that hate incidents have intensified during the past two years.

The report, ‘Hate Magnified: Communities in Crisis’, documents where hate incidents occur, which communities are most likely to experience hate incidents, and what form those incidents most often take.

Hate Magnified authors analyzed results from a Hate Incidence Poll conducted by Washington-based firm Brilliant Corners, in addition to nearly 4,000 incident reports submitted to the CAH online reporting database. It surveyed 800 adults, with samples of 200 African Americans, 200 Hispanic Americans, and 200 Arab American/Middle Eastern Americans.

The report noted that 73 percent of Americans of Middle East or Arab descent experienced hate incidents, with 59 percent of Hispanic Americans and 47 percent of African Americans reporting the same experience. Notably, nearly 40 percent of those perpetrating hate incidents invoked the name of an alt-right hate group, President Trump, or Trump-related rhetoric, according to database submissions.

“The data are clear: hate is pervasive in America,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference Education Fund, on the CAH findings. “While we have made tremendous progress as a nation toward celebrating our diverse communities, the collected data are alarming and underscore there is more to do.”

The findings include: 21.5 percent of hate incidents occurred on the street; 14.55 percent occurring at a business location; and 13 percent in private residences; 84 percent of respondents felt hate incidents were prevalent in the country; 66 percent felt that incidents or expressions of hate are getting worse; and 18 percent of respondents experienced episodes of depression following hate incidents, highlighting the mental wellness implications of a hate-filled climate.

In October 2018, a white supremacist murdered two African Americans at a Kentucky Kroger supermarket after he unsuccessfully attempted to enter an African-American church. Soon thereafter, the tragic shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue represented the deadliest attack against the Jewish community in American history. The killer’s vicious attack left 11 dead, seven injured, and sent Pittsburgh and the nation reeling, the report noted.

VOA reported there were a total of 905 bias incidents in nine of the 10 largest US cities last year, up 12 percent from 2017, according to data compiled by the Center for Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino.

Hate crime data for Phoenix, the fifth-largest US city, were unavailable, but police departments in nearly 20 other cities reported an overall increase in bias incidents, the report noted.

Among the nation’s largest cities, bias incidents rose 6 percent in New York City, 13 percent in Los Angles, 26 percent in Chicago and a startling 173 percent in Houston, according to the data. Blacks, Jews and gays were the top three targets of hate crimes in Chicago, the data show.

In New York City, home of the largest American Jewish population, more than half of the 361 hate crimes recorded in 2018 targeted Jews, according to city police data. And of the 189 anti-Semitic incidents, 150 involved the displaying of swastikas.

“We’re seeing an unmistakable trend of increases,” Brian Levin, director of the Center for Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino, said. Last year’s increase in hate crimes “shows that we’re in a new era that started four or five years ago.”

Despite the overall increase in hate crimes, there was a silver lining in the data. Attacks targeting Muslims in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles fell, VOA reported. According to the FBI, anti-Muslim hate crimes dropped by 13 percent in 2017 after rising sharply over the previous two years.

The vicious attack on Smollett, which California Sen. Kamala Harris described as an “attempted modern-day lynching”, pales in comparison, however, to the case of a landscaper who killed numerous gay men, across the border, in Canada.

Bruce McArthur, who was arrested a year ago and initially charged with sexually abusing and killing six gay men, dismembering them and hiding the pieces in planters on the property of a client who allowed him to store tools there, is now found to have killed some more individuals. Six of his victims were of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent, reported The New York Times.

(Sujeet Rajan is Executive Editor, Parikh Worldwide Media. Email him: sujeet@newsindiatimes.com Follow him on Twitter @SujeetRajan1)

Hindus are appalled after learning that the Shree Swaminarayan Temple in Louisville, Kentucky was vandalized yesterday and are now urging Kentucky Gov. Matt G. Bevin to visit the temple.

According to a press release, Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, has urged Governor Bevin to visit the vandalized Shree Swaminarayan Temple Kentucky and meet the dismayed Hindu community in Louisville area.

“It was shocking and heartbreaking for the US Hindus to observe the hard-working, harmonious and peaceful Kentucky Hindu community receiving such signals of hatred and intimidation. Kentucky Hindus had made lot of contributions to the state, nation and society and continued to do so,” Zed is quoted saying in a press release.

Besides bolstering the morale of Hindu community of Kentucky, Governor Bevin’s visit would also fulfill his own Vision for Kentucky, which is “Protecting and Strengthening Our Communities,” the press release added.

According to a Louisville Courier Journal report, sometime between Sunday evening and Tuesday morning, vandals broke the windows of the temple and wrote hateful words on its walls with black spray paint such as “Jesus Is All Mighty,” “Jesus Is Lord” and “God.”

As an interfaith gesture, Zed has also urged Roman Catholic Archbishop of Louisville Joseph E. Kurtz, Episcopal Bishop of Kentucky Terry Allen White and area leaders of other religions to also visit the vandalized temple to show their solidarity with the shocked Hindus.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has delivered an interim budget likely to boost the government’s popularity ahead of polls that are now just months away.

The budget includes big announcements such as a major income support scheme for farmers and a new pension program for workers. It also includes a number of smaller measures that could prove popular, including tax relief for India’s lower middle class.

Delivered by Finance Minister Piyush Goyal because Arun Jaitley is in the U.S. for medical treatment, the budget speech was heavy on praise for the government’s programs over the last four-and-a-half years — sometimes prompting boos from the opposition.

Farmers, as well as companies with exposure to rural India and middle class taxpayers, seem to be the clear winners here at the expense of the country’s fiscal deficit.

WINNERS

Farmers

As expected, Modi’s administration has come out with a massive spending plan for the country’s farmers: A $10.5 billion (750 billion-rupee) farm income support program. Farmers with less than two hectares of land will receive $84 (6,000 rupees) each year. That’s likely to assist about 120 million small and marginal farmers, the government said. Agriculture-focused companies such as Shakti Pumps India Ltd., Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd., KSB Ltd., Kirloskar Brothers Ltd., Avanti Feeds Ltd., Waterbase Ltd., JK Agri Genetics Ltd., PI Industries Ltd. could benefit.

Taxpayers

Income tax payers earning up to 500,000 rupees will get a full tax rebate, while those earning up to 650,000 rupees will not need to pay tax if they invest in the country’s provident funds and prescribed equities. Goyal said this could benefit as many as 30 million middle class taxpayers. Anyone earning more will be taxed at the prevailing rates.

Rural India

Increased spending on the animal husbandry and fisheries sectors and an interest subvention plan for small-and-medium-sized businesses could benefit companies with exposure to rural India. That includes motorcycle companies and others with interests in the country’s heartland including Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. and Larsen & Toubro Ltd.

Workers

A second big announcement in the budget was for a “mega” pension program for India’s informal sector workers with income below 15,000 rupees. The vast majority of the country’s workers are employed in small enterprises, often with little job security and no social security benefits.

Real Estate

The Bombay Stock Exchange’s real estate index climbed as the government reiterated its push for affordable housing and announced new measures that could boost home-buying. Goyal promised a home for every person in India, a country of 1.3 billion people, and proposed to allow investments of as much as 20 million rupees from capital gains for buying two residential houses, compared with only one at present. He also proposed waiving tax on the notional rent payable on a second self-occupied house. Companies that could benefit include Oberoi Realty Ltd., Prestige Estates Projects Ltd. and DLF Ltd.

Automakers

The S&P BSE Auto Index jumped as much as 5.3 percent, its biggest intraday advance since May 2014, as Goyal delivered his speech. Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., Hero MotoCorp Ltd. and Bajaj Auto Ltd. gave the biggest boost to the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex.

Modi

In his government’s budget, two major initiatives — a farmer income support plan and a pension plan — bear the name of the prime minister’s office. Although the farmers’ plan was expected, the pension announcement was not. And both could go some way to boosting Modi’s popularity ahead of elections.

LOSERS

Bond holders

Modi’s government will breach its fiscal deficit target for a second year, with the budget gap estimated at 3.4 percent. Bond holders could get hit if Moody’s or S&P downgrade the country’s credit rating. Moody’s has already said the government’s budget includes no new policies to increase revenues.

“Ongoing slippage from the government’s budgeted fiscal deficit targets over the past two years, and our expectation that the government will face challenges meeting its target again this coming fiscal year (ending March 2020) does not bode well for medium term fiscal consolidation,” said Gene Fang, an associate managing director at Moody’s Investors Service’s sovereign risk group.

Sovereign bonds slid after the government detailed higher-than-expected borrowing numbers for fiscal 2019-20. The yield on the most traded 2028 bond was up 14 basis points to 7.63 percent as of 2:43 p.m. in Mumbai.

Opposition parties

Modi’s administration has unleashed an interim budget full of populist goodies for farmers, the middle class and small-and-medium-sized businesses. Regardless of whether the government implements any of this with the election due by May, the announcements could still hurt opposition parties as they head out on the campaign trail with only manifesto promises to offer voters.

Farm laborers

Rural laborers who toil on farms but don’t actually own any land will not benefit from the government’s big spending plan for farmers. These workers are often already desperately poor, while most state-initiated plans to boost prosperity in the countryside tend to focus on land-owning farmers.

“It tends to ignore the landless farmers who will not be entitled to the annual support of 6,000 rupees,” said Jaijit Bhattacharya, president of the Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research in New Delhi.

Defense

In dollar terms, India’s defense spending is less than it was last year because of depreciation. This year’s budget allocates about 3.05 trillion rupees ($43 billion) for defense spending, most of which is eaten up by recurring costs that squeezes the money available for new arms purchases.

Last year, the government allocated about 2.85 trillion rupees ($40 billion). But the rupee has depreciated over the past year and on Feb. 1, 2018, 2.85 trillion rupees amounted to roughly $44.5 billion. That stagnation matters, because India is one of the world’s largest weapons importers. Effectively, the Indian government is compensating for depreciation and inflation, and will likely still sell this as an increase in defense spending.