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5 Indian Americans among Junior 8 Summit participants
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Five Indian American students are among eight students from the elite Harker Academy, a private school in San Jose, California, representing the US in the Junior 8 Summit in Germany. They would be joining President George W. Bush and other world leaders to discuss pressing global issues like poverty, the environment, AIDS, economic development and intellectual property.
They beat 65 school teams nationwide to represent the US at the Group of Eight (G8) Summit, an international forum of the world’s leading industrial nations.
The youth representatives from the G8 countries meet during a parallel meeting, the Junior 8 or J-8 Summit in Wismar, Germany, and convene with world leaders, including a private meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Sixteen-year-old Kavitha Narra, will stand next to Bush when the youth groups present their communiqué —a distillation of their perspectives and solutions to global problems to the world leaders.
“We just want to convey a message from the youth of the world,” Kavitha said. “We’re ready to get involved in our future, in our government, in our world. We just want to have them listen to us as young people.”
Kavitha learned about the J-8 competition early this year while chatting on a UNICEF website with an online student friend from Africa. She then enlisted Rachel Peterson, 17, also junior and other friends to join the competition.
With help from advisor Carol Zink and a Harker librarian, they submitted online a well-researched and articulate proposal about solving four global issues: global climate change and energy efficiency, economic development in Africa, HIV and AIDS, and new challenges for the global economy. The students divided into two-member teams to tackle each of the four global problems. In their winning entry, they quoted the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
All the students share the view that “global is local,” and vice-versa, and that young people have an important role to play in finding solutions to the world’s problems.
Rohit Nalamasu, 17, who is pursuing independent research on carbon nano tubes, teamed up with Kavitha to research HIV and AIDS. They suggested a clean-needle exchange for drug users in Russia to prevent the spread of HIV and proposed enlisting the help of celebrities and business kind of social icons to promote awareness in India and China.
“Society thinks that we are too young and we can’t think about things like these,” Rohit said. “But in the future, we’ll be the ones making decisions. I hope they listen to us now.
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Indian prof is MIT dean of engineering
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Subra Suresh, an IIT Chennai alumnus, has been appointed dean of the prestigious engineering school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Currently, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Suresh will succeed Institute Professor Thomas Magnanti as the next dean of the School of Engineering July 23.
An MIT announcement Thursday noted that its School of Engineering has “long held a unique national and international position of pre-eminence in both education and research”.
“I am certain that in his new role as dean, Professor Suresh will continue the tradition of outstanding school leadership embodied by Institute Professor Thomas L Magnanti, dean since 1999, and his distinguished predecessors,” said Provost L. Rafael
Reif.
Suresh, who served as head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) from 2000 to 2006, “is not only an accomplished academic leader, but also a scholar and teacher of the highest distinction,” Reif said.
Suresh holds faculty appointments in DMSE, mechanical engineering, biological engineering and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
“I am grateful for the privilege to serve as the dean of this premier school of engineering, and very much look forward to working with the highly talented MIT faculty, staff and students to take the school to new heights,” Suresh said.
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UK award for Indian-origin scribe |
A book by Indian-origin journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran, setting out new details of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority’s government of Iraq, has won the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize worth £30,000.
The book, titled Imperial Life in the Emerald City, states that £800 million of Iraq’s oil revenue was paid to US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s old firm Halliburton and that the Baghdad stock exchange was put in the hands of a 24-year-old who had never worked in finance. It also states that the Iraqi capital’s new traffic regulations were based on the laws of the state of Maryland, downloaded from the Internet.
Judges of the prize hailed the book as “up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years”. Chandrasekaran is a former Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post.
The chairperson of the judges, Lady Helena Kennedy, said the book was “as fine as Hershey on Hiroshima and Capote’s In Cold Blood. The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed”.
“Chandrasekaran stands back, detached and collected, from his subject but his reader is left gobsmacked, right in the middle.”
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Tough going for docs |
Doctors who are not graduates of recognised foreign medical schools, including those from India, will no longer be allowed to practice in Singapore starting next year, said the country’s health ministry.
These physicians who come from countries like the Philippines, India and Myanmar have been serving as junior doctors. The Singapore Medical Council has allowed institutions to hire them since 2000 to work on a short-term basis to ease the shortage of physicians.
The change will not affect those who are already in the city-state. As of last January, Singapore had 7,611 registered doctors including 2,286 trained in foreign institutions.
About 400 are either from unrecognised medical schools or on training stints.
“The intention is to bring in doctors from top-ranked schools to serve” in Singapore, The Straits Times quoted a ministry spokesman as saying.
Singapore is expanding the number of doctors trained in the city-state and increasing the list of recognised foreign medical schools from 20 in 2003 to 140 currently.
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Indian Americans push for ‘improved’ bill |
As US President George W. Bush vowed to revive his derailed immigration bill, an Indian American advocacy group said it would push for a fairer law that would let the best and brightest to stay permanently.
The US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) said it opposed the Bush bill in its current form because it did not provide for more compassionate family-based visas, more and faster H1-B visas and green cards and an easier way for employers to retain high-skilled workers.
Expressing disappointment that the Senate failed to pass a law that he hoped would have included such provisions, USINPAC chairman Sanjay Puri said, “The bill should have done a lot more to ensure that some of the best and brightest could stay in the US permanently.”
Instead, the Senate voted down or failed to bring up amendments that would have given them and their families a chance to stay here and ensure that the US is the destination of choice for these talented individuals thus enabling us to stay on top of the competitive marketplace for skills,” he said. Bush meanwhile, will lobby with his own conservative Republicans who decry the legislation that would offer an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, including some 300,000 Indians. |
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