NRIs Corner

Lawyers in Bahrain will train Indian social workers to familiarise them with the laws of the country.

According to Mohan Kumar, India’s ambassador to Bahrain, social workers should be aware of the laws of Bahrain to help members of the Indian community in need, the Gulf Daily News reported Saturday.

“We will invite all social workers to the embassy where they will be briefed by embassy lawyers, including Bahrainis. This will help them give proper advice to those in trouble,” Kumar was quoted as saying.

A 19-year-old Indian student was killed and six others were injured when a car they were travelling crashed into a compound wall of a school in Bahrain.

Pratik Baldev Raj was killed on the spot Tuesday night when he was thrown out of the vehicle travelling at high speed, the Gulf Daily News reported Thursday.

A student of Ernst & Young Training Institute, Pratik was an employee of Al Jazira Cold Store Company.

The transient accused of brutally attacking an 81-year-old Sikh man outside a gurdwara in the US May 5 has pleaded not guilty of attempted murder and elderly abuse.

Gilbert Garcia, 29, was arrested for brutally attacking Piara Singh with a steel rod outside the Nanaksar Sikh gurdwara on South Cherry Avenue, southwest Fresno, in central California around 7 a.m. May 5.

The accused appeared before the Fresno County Superior Court Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the charges, which the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office described as a hate crime, the Fresno Bee reported.

The US has honoured three Indian-Americans with the prestigious Champions of Change awards for their achievements as immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs.

The three — Shradha Agarwal from Chicago, Riddhiman Das from Kansas and Amar Sawhney from Massachusetts — were
presented with the award at the White House.

They were among 11 people honoured yesterday.

The Indian-Americans and others were felicitated at the “Champions of Change” event at the White House that

(IANS) Three Indians accused of raping a woman in Hamilton two years ago have been found not guilty by a jury in New Zealand Thursday and will be deported to India.

A jury of seven women and five men in the high court of Hamilton found Harvinder Singh, 22, Kamaljeet Singh, 27, and Sumit Vermani, 26 not guilty in the rape case that allegedly took place in a house on a road leading to Lake Rotorua on the intervening night of April 16-17, 2011, media reports said.

An Indian-origin doctor in Malaysia is facing charges of assaulting his wife in 2009 in which a lower court had earlier acquitted him. P Mahendran, 47, was ordered by Shah Alam High Court yesterday to answer to the charge of assaulting his estranged wife, B Bhavani Devi, 41, after allowing the prosecution’s appeal against the lower court’s decision acquitting him without calling for his defence last December, the New Straits Times reported today.

Highlighting the achievements of immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs, the White House today presented three Indian-Americans with prestigious Champions of Change awards.

The three Indian Americans among the 11 recipients are Shradha Agarwal from Chicago, Riddhiman Das from Kansas, and Amar Sawhney from Massachusetts.

A court in Malaysia has ordered that an Indian-origin doctor be charged with assaulting his wife in a case dating back to nearly four years, after a lower court had acquitted him.

The high court at Shah Alam, capital of the Malaysian state of Selangor, ordered P. Mahendran, 47, to enter his defence on the charge after a lower court had acquitted him, media reports said Wednesday.

An 18-year-old Indian student in Saudi Arabia has allegedly committed suicide after failing in his class 12 CBSE exams, results of which were declared on Monday.

Mir Ameer Ansari from Dammam in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province was an intelligent student but took his life after failing in Mathematics, the Arab News reported on Wednesday.

“He just couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he could only score 17 out of 100 in mathematics,” the report quoted a community elder as saying.

They came from distant India to verdant Gudaeloupe, a group of French islands in the French West Indies, with dreams in their eyes, only to end up being exploited for endless years.

Between 1854 and 1889, an estimated 42,873 Indians came largely from five French ruled territories in India to work on contract on sugar plantations not knowing that colonial settlers had turned to them to find cheap labour after the abolition of slavery in 1848.

On their arrival, the cultural shock was brutal, as Michel Narayninsamy, president of Guadeloupe Global people of Indian Origin (GOPIO) notes.

A 28-year-old Indian man has been sentenced to death by a court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for murdering a housewife last year.

The court of first instance in Dubai found the accused, an accountant by profession, guilty of killing the woman by slitting her throat in her house at Bur Dubai here and then decamping with jewellery, the Khaleej Times reported Tuesday.

A crocodile-skin Birkin handbag made by luxury goods firm Hermes has sold for a record 63,800 euros (USD 82,600) at an auction in Paris, auction house Artcurial said today.

The bag, manufactured in 2006 and marked by its unusual combination of orange, red and pink colours, was sold at above its estimate of 40,000-50,000 euros at the auction on May 21, Artcurial said.

It did not disclose details about the purchaser.

The previous record sale price for a Birkin bag was 61,000 euros, during a 2011 auction in Paris.

An 11-year-old Indian girl in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has a rare cancer and her family is racing against time to collect funds for her treatment.

Martina Thomas, who will turn 12 June 4, started taking chemotharapy in Abu Dhabi a year ago after she was diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukemia, a form of childhood cancer symptomised by an abnormally high white blood-cell count, The National reported Monday.

Though she started taking the chemotherapy course immediately after she was diagnosed with the disease last year, it was not enough, and now she needs a bone marrow transplant.

External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid has called for increased cooperation with Saudi Arabia in the defence sector, steps that need to be taken to combat militancy and pitched in for investment in the country during his meeting with the Indian community in Jeddah

During his meeting with the Indian community in Saudi Arabia, Khurshid expressed the Indian government’s concern over the plight of expatriates employed in Saudi Arabia, consequent to the introduction of a proposed work force nationalisation law by the Middle East nation.

[Syed Mujeeb QSM] Prime Minister John Key is expected to institute the first ever Indian Weekender’s Kiwi Indian Hall of Fame at a glittering gala ceremony in Auckland on May 21.

The Kiwi-Indian Hall of Fame recognises and celebrates Kiwis of Indian origin in New Zealand for their significant and outstanding contribution not just to the Kiwi-Indian Community, but also to the larger NZ society.
At the forthcoming ceremony, the criterion for nomination is to honour a Kiwi-Indian who has brought pride to the community through excellence in his or her chosen field.

The credit crunch seems to be taking its toll on one of the world’s richest Indians Lakshmi N Mittal, who has put up one of his mansions in central London up for sale.

The steel tycoon had bought the property on Palace Green in Kensington for 117 million pounds in 2008, when it was declared the most expensive home in Britain.

However, according to the ‘Sunday Times’, he may end up making a loss on the neo-Georgian building after it went on the market earlier this month for 110 million pounds.

Two prominent Middle East-based businessmen who hail from Kerala appear to be caught in the factional feud of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) in Kerala.

The Ernakulam unit of the CPI-M has accused M.A. Yusuf Ali, owner of the Emke Group, of encroaching upon the government land for his Rs.1600-crore Lulu Shopping Mall project here that opened in March this year.

External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid arrived in Jeddah on Saturday for talks with the Saudi Arabian leadership on a wide range of issues, including the controversial ‘Nitaqat law’ and on counter terrorism cooperation.

Khurshid, who is on an official two-day visit to Saudi Arabia, was given a warm welcome by Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abdul Aziz Bin Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz soon after his arrival.

History-making Indian-American legal luminary Srikanth ‘Sri’ Srinivasan’s unanimous Senate confirmation as the first South Asian judge on the powerful appeals court for the American capital has been widely hailed.

Senate Judiciary Committee’s Democratic Chairman Patrick Leahy, welcomed Srinivasan’s confirmation, but criticised “Republican efforts to delay a floor vote of the highly qualified nominee, who waited months for a confirmation hearing and who was first nominated nearly one year ago.”

Describing him as a “trailblazer” who personifies the best of America, the US President Barack Obama has said that Indian-American Srikanth Srinivasan will serve as a judge of America’s second highest court “with distinction”.

Chandigarh-born Srinivasan’s nomination to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was unanimously approved by the Senate yesterday, with 97 voting in favor.

46-year-old Srinivasan has become the first South Asian to be appointed to the top American court.

Twelve-year-old Indian-origin boy Sathwik Karnik won the 2013 National Geographic Bee by correctly naming Chimborazo, a peak in Ecuador, as the farthest point on earth from the Equator.

A seventh grader from King Philip Regional Middle School in Norfolk, Massachusetts, in the US, he won the 25th edition of the bee in a heated final against 13-year-old Conrad Oberhaus of Lincolnshire, Illinois.

By winning the title, Karnik bagged for himself a $25,000 college scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos Islands for him and a parent and a lifetime membership to the National Geographic Society.

Well-known Kannada author U R Ananthamurthy, the only Indian to be shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2013, today lost the prestigious award to American writer Lydia Davis.

The New York based writer-translator Davis bagged the 60,000 pound prize for her “innovative and influential” writing, which includes works such as ‘The End of the Story’ and ‘Varieties of Disturbance’.

The British government has approved applications for 15 new faith schools, including two Sikh and six Muslim schools.

UK education secretary Michael Gove cleared the applications as part of 102 new “free schools” which are to be opened from 2014 and beyond.

Free schools are state-funded schools, independent of local authority control and as part of the rules, faith schools under the category are able to select a maximum of 50 per cent of pupils on the basis of religion.

A court in Malaysia has sentenced two Indian-origin men to separate jail terms for brutally assaulting a Nigerian that led to his death.

Judge Noor Azian Shaari of the high court in Shah Alam, the capital of the Malaysian state of Selangor, sentenced V. Ganesan, 29, to one year in jail and T. Kumar, 29, to seven years in jail for causing grievous injuries to Nwabudike Emmanuel Chukwuma that led to his death in April last year, the New Straits Times reported Wednesday.

The “killer provision” of ban on client site placement for H1B workers, which may prove to be detrimental to the interests of major Indian IT companies, remains in place despite a last minute deal reached between key Senators on certain provisions of the immigration bill.

Continued presence of such a problematic provision in the bill, which was passed by a key Senate panel yesterday, industry sources said would not only badly hit Indian IT companies, but also disrupt operational capabilities of a large number of key American companies as well.