Latest news with #SouthAsian
Al Etihad
41 minutes ago
- Climate
- Al Etihad
Pakistan flash floods and heavy rains kill 24
28 June 2025 15:19 PESHAWAR (AFP)Heavy rains and flash flooding across Pakistan have killed 24 people including 12 children since the start of the monsoon season this week, disaster management officials least 13 people have been killed in the eastern province of Punjab since Wednesday, the area's disaster management authority said of the fatalities were children, who died when walls and roofs collapsed during heavy latest toll came after officials in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa said 11 people were killed in flash floods and landslides over 24 victims included "four children and three women -- while six others have been injured", the province's disaster management agency said late agency said 10 of those killed were in the northwestern Swat Valley where, according to local media, a flash flood swept away families on a in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has also damaged 56 houses, six of which were destroyed, the disaster agency national meteorological service warned that the risk of heavy rain and possible flash floods will remain high until at least month, at least 32 people were killed in severe storms in the South Asian nation, which experienced several extreme weather events in the spring, including strong hailstorms. Pakistan is one of the world's most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change, and its 240 million inhabitants are facing extreme weather events with increasing frequency.
NDTV
2 hours ago
- Politics
- NDTV
JD Vance's Wife Got To Know Of His Veep Nomination 5 Minutes Before Public
Usha Vance, wife of JD Vance and Second Lady of the United States, has revealed she learned of her husband's vice-presidential nomination just 'five minutes' before it became public. 'It really was like a bolt of lightning. You don't have an opportunity to think about it, or even to plan what it is that you'd like to do,' Usha, who is of Indian-origin, said in a podcast with US author Meghan McCain. Usha Vance also faced questions about her role as the US Second Lady and the pressure of being the first woman of South Asian descent to be in that position. 'Maybe we've just sort of moved beyond trying to count firsts of everything. I'm not sure, except when older Indian people kind of give me that look,' Usha said. She also touched upon how her life changed since JD Vance became the Vice President. Usha said, 'People call you ma'am. No one's ever called me ma'am before this.' It was such a privilege to be able to sit down with our incredible @SLOTUS Usha Vance for her first long form on camera interview. She is already iconic and I loved getting to know her more personal side. If you haven't already watched, here it is! — Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) June 26, 2025 In July 2024, months ahead of the November presidential elections, Donald Trump announced 39-year-old JD Vance as his running mate. The announcement came on the first day of the Republican Party convention in Milwaukee. A former venture capitalist and an author from Ohio, JD Vance was once a strong critic of Trump, and was known for calling him 'America's Hitler' and an 'idiot' after the 2016 election. Much has changed since then. JD Vance turned into one of the most loyal supporters of Trump. He had even appeared in court to back Trump during his hush money trial. Vance is a graduate of Yale Law School and a US Marine veteran. Since Trump won the November 5 election, Vance's family has also been in the spotlight. Much of the attention has focused on Usha's Indian origins. Born in San Diego County, California, Usha is the daughter of Telugu immigrant parents. Usha's father is a mechanical engineer, and her mother is a molecular biologist from Andhra Pradesh. She has a BA degree in history from Yale University and an MPhil in early modern history at Cambridge. In 2010, while at Yale Law School, she met JD Vance and the couple wed in Kentucky in 2014. They have three children: two sons, Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel.
The Wire
6 hours ago
- Politics
- The Wire
Remembering Jim Masselos, a Historian With a Unique Sensibility
History An urban sociologist reminisces on her 40-year friendship with the Australian who contributed to understanding the urban cultures that organised early and mid-20th century Bombay/Mumbai. Jim Masselos (1940-2025) passed away in a Sydney hospital on Tuesday, June 24, 2025. I knew that the end was near; I had talked to him twice in April and realised that his energy was fading and he was taking longer to converse and yet it is difficult to believe that he is no more. In April, we talked about the terror attack in Pahalgam, the changing geopolitics in the world and US president Donald Trump's attack on academia. He was also sad about what was happening to South Asian scholarship in Australia and yet hopeful that the tide would soon turn as young people realise how important it is to do academic work and research on South Asia. I first met Jim in the early 1980s but knew of him before through a childhood friend Navaz Patuck : the Patuck family home in Pali Hill being an open house to so many passing foreigners who came to Bombay. I distinctly remember our first encounter at Samovar, the iconic restaurant at Jehangir Art Gallery. I was doing a doctorate on Ahmedabad's early history and its textile industry and wanted to discuss the parallel trends between the two cities of Bombay and Ahmedabad, both being framed by this industry. Our conversations soon drifted elsewhere because M.F. Hussain was sitting somewhere nearby (for long Samovar was Hussain's haunt). It allowed Jim to start talking about Bombay's culture and the contribution of the progressive movement in art to its history. Did this happen in Ahmedabad and if not, why not, he asked? Since then, we met almost every time he came to India and our paths criss-crossed either in Mumbai or Delhi and sometimes in Kolkata and Hyderabad. Our meetings increased because by then we had a mutual friend in Alice Thorner, another constant visitor and a lover of the city of Mumbai. Our conversations (sometimes with Alice) always drifted towards comprehending the history of the city, Bombay's cultural scene, its immersion in its version of modernity and its cosmopolitan ambience, together with vigilante politics and unplanned urban growth. What did these trends have to do with post-colonial nationalism, we wondered. High tide at Girgaon Chowpatty in Mumbai, Friday, June 27, 2025. Photo: PTI. Jim arrived in India as part of the Colombo Plan which gave scholarships to those who wanted to study in the newly independent countries of Asia – he was one of the first Australians who took this opportunity, travelled to Bombay and completed a doctorate at Bombay University on nationalist ideas in Bombay. He stayed at the Bombay University's hostel at B. Road, Churchgate and met up with many who were studying at that time in Bombay university. Most of these students became his friends and he kept in touch with them over the next four decades as they traversed their own careers as Bombay's and India's politicians, lawyers and intellectuals – part of the newly mobile group educating themselves under the Nehruvian project of the making of modern India. Over time, I met some of them because Jim had a great gift for keeping relationships and learning the current history of India through their eyes. During his early years in Bombay, Jim would walk around the city and discover its nooks and corners and the various neighbourhood settlements of distinct communities living in the city. As we know, this cultivated gaze impacted his historical work (which he later analysed as the intersections between space, identity and community) and allowed him to give us, the readers an insight into urban neighbourhood cultures. Also read: Remembering Jim Masselos, the Australian Scholar of Bombay's Social History In a recent assessment, Prashant Kidambi (2019) has suggested that Jim's distinctive contribution to Bombay's historiography can be understood at four levels. Not only did he document ways in which urban communities were historically reconstituted in the modern city but emphasised how they used their own tools of modernity to do so. Second, Jim highlighted significance of urban space in understanding the city and third, focused on how diverse forms of power have structured social relations in the city. And finally, he has also been concerned with how one form of power – nationalism – sought to acquire and exercise hegemony in the city, sometimes to its detriment. But Jim, through these travels across the city, also became a collector of old books and that of old and new art as it was being in fashioned in Bombay. He learnt not only to become an archivist but also an art historian and a curator of art exhibitions. In the course of his walks across south Mumbai, he started collecting old books sold on the pavements of Flora Fountain and over time accumulated publications not only of late 19th and early 20th century British and Indian authors but also official government reports on the history of the city and on India. When I visited him in Sydney for the first time in the mid-90s, I realised that he had collected colonial documents which included almost all the Royal Commission Reports published by the British. His home had become a make-shift archive and in case anyone wanted to navigate around the rooms in his house, one had to skip and jump over these piles of books lying on the floor and find a comfortable sofa/chair that was empty of such publications. That being difficult, we would end up sitting in his kitchen or conversing at a southeast Asian restaurant at the corner of the street. (Jim was trying to donate this collection of books to a library in Sydney. However, this seemed to be the wrong time – not only was South Asian history/studies not popular in Australia but with a lack of physical space and ongoing digitalisation, no library-administrator was interested in accepting these late 19th century and early 20th century primary sources on India). But most significantly, what was important was the art he collected as he visited the galleries sponsoring the progressive painters in the city and which he collated as he travelled around the country. He had Catholic tastes and his collection included Kutchi embroidery, pichwai, miniature paintings, a dancing Nataraj and the artwork of the Bombay progressive artist Tyeb Mehta, for example. This artwork was depicted prominently across all the available wall space in his home. Thus, in addition to being an archive, his home had become an art gallery! (Later he also collected some Australian Indigenous paintings and hung them up with the Indian paintings). 'Dancing to the Flute - Music and Dance in Indian Art'. Jim had an exhibition of the art in his collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the mid-90s. The catalogue was called Dancing to the Flute: Music and Dance in the Art of India. (In the last decade, he has donated some of these paintings to the NSW gallery, but these lie in the basement!) During this exhibition, he also organised a seminar on four decades of social science scholarship on India, giving us a lens on how he combined art and social sciences in one persona. It is then that I came to realise that Jim was also an enthusiastic art curator and his understanding of Indian art led him to collaborate with the journal Marg and the noted art historian B. N. Goswamy. In the late 2000s he brought groups of Australians to introduce them to India's art heritage and his understanding of it. For the conference in the mid-1990s, he pushed me to write an essay on M.N. Srinivas's contribution to Indian sociology. This was what started me on my project to study the disciplinary history of sociology in India, which still continues. During this Sydney visit, I also discovered that Jim was a brilliant photographer. I had noticed him taking photographs earlier, but when I saw the photographs on his computer, I realised that he had brought his unique historical sensibility to his photographs. Since then, Jim has brought out two volumes on photographs combining company photographs with his own current ones in a then and now text: Bombay Then and Now and Beato's Delhi (text written with Delhi historian Narayani Gupta). In the early 1990s, Alice brought to me a project to put together a conference on Bombay. The idea, she said, came from Jim who during a breakfast conversation at Delhi's India International Centre, asked how an urban historian should write about contemporary Bombay. This led to the organisation of a conference on Bombay in December 1992 and the publication of two volumes – Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture and Bombay: Metaphor of Modern India. Jim wrote a paper for the second volume. But even as we were preparing the two books for publication, we (Alice, Jim and I) knew that Bombay had changed fundamentally after the 1992-93 riots and that we needed to capture the recent changes. With Alice passing away, Jim and I put together a third volume titled Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition. Recently, when the published fourth volume reached him, Jim stated that he had not realised that his innocent question of what it means to write on contemporary Bombay as an urban historian would lead to four volumes on the city. Jim's contribution to scholarship was quiet but significant. Never to brag about himself, he was a soft and gentle scholar/person full of generosity for others. After Rachel Dwyer, Prashant Kidambi and Manjiri Kamat put together a Festschrift, a volume on his honour ('Bombay before Mumbai' in 2019) and Robert Aldrich organised a conference around his scholarship in Sydney in February 2020, I saw a satisfied expression on his face and in his body language, a sense of pride and fulfilment that his colleagues had honoured him and acknowledged his contributions. Characteristically, he gave a sheepish smile and silently accepted the accolades that they bestowed upon him. That was Jim. Urban sociologist Sujata Patel retired as Professor of Sociology from the University of Hyderabad in 2018. Patel and Masselos collaborated to edit a volume on Bombay, one of four volumes that Patel has co-edited on the city. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Time of India
7 hours ago
- Climate
- Time of India
Pakistan flash floods kill 11: local officials
Flash flooding in Pakistan's mountainous northwest has killed 11 people, including several children, at the start of the monsoon season, disaster management officials said. "In the past 24 hours, flash floods and landslides have claimed the lives of 11 people -- including four children and three women -- while six others have been injured," according to a report issued late Friday by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial disaster management agency. The report said 10 of those killed were in the Swat Valley, where, according to local media, a flash flood swept away families on a riverbank. Flooding in the province has also damaged 56 houses, six of which were destroyed, the disaster agency report said. The national meteorological service warned that the risk of heavy rain and possible flash floods will remain high until at least Tuesday. Live Events Last month, at least 24 people were killed in severe storms in the South Asian nation, which experienced several extreme weather events in the spring, including strong hailstorms. Pakistan is one of the world's most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change, and its 240 million inhabitants are facing extreme weather events with increasing frequency.
The Star
10 hours ago
- Business
- The Star
Solar push in govt institutions to tackle energy woes
THE caretaker leader has ordered all government institutions including ministry buildings and schools to install solar panels to ease chronic power problems in a country regularly hit by deadly heatwaves. The South Asian nation of 170 million people has set itself a target of generating 20% of its power from renewable energy by 2030 – a four-fold increase – and rising to 30% by 2040, the government said in a statement. 'Bangladesh is lagging far behind its neighbouring countries,' the statement issued by the office of interim leader Muhammad Yunus read. 'Only 5.6% of our total requirement is currently met from renewable sources,' it added, noting that in neighbouring India, it is 24% and in Sri Lanka, nearly 40%. The government's rooftop solar programme will see all government offices, schools, colleges and hospitals installed with panels immediately, the statement issued late Thursday said. The micro-finance pioneer said the panels would be installed and operated by private sector companies, unlike the largely failed push by since-ousted former prime minister Sheikh Hasina to install panels by using government power agencies. 'The private sector will handle overall maintenance and keep the systems operational for their own business interests,' the statement said. 'The government will only provide them with rooftop access'. The government has also initiated tender processes for 55 solar power plants with a total 5,238 megawatts capacity. Bangladesh relies heavily on importing cross-border power from neighbouring India, as well from Nepal, especially when demand soars during the blistering heat when consumers rely on energy-hungry air conditioners to keep cool. Dhaka also began construction of the Russia-backed nuclear plant at Rooppur in 2017. The much-delayed 2,400-megawatt project will be Bangladesh's largest power station by generating capacity once fully operational. — AFP
