The real endgame for President Donald Trump’s lawyers is to throw the 2020 election into the U.S. House of Representatives, where Trump would prevail, says former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. “I think the strategy of the Trump team is not to get him to 270, but to keep [Joe] Biden from getting to 270,” Dershowitz told Zenger News in a video interview, referring to the minimum number of Electoral College votes required to capture the White House. At this point, Biden would have 306 electoral votes if all 50 state governments were to certify their unofficial vote totals.…
Author: zenger.news
Mumbai, Maharashtra — Several states in India plan to introduce a measure that would outlaw religious conversion only for the sake of marriage. “Jihad in the name of love will not be tolerated,” Shivraj Singh Chouhan, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh said in a statement. The central Indian state was the first to announce plans for such a law, followed by Haryana and Uttar Pradesh in north India. All three states are governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Known as the Love Jihad Bill, the name of the proposed law refers to a conspiracy…
On a winter evening earlier this month, on a Zoom session, we watch as two musicians sing a Rajasthani lullaby, — a version of the original rendition by Hindustani Classical maestro Ustad Sultan Khan. Ustad Zakir Hussain, we are informed, had accompanied the artiste. “So jaa re, tane lori sunaaun” (Sleep, while I sing to you, a lullaby); the words echo. The screen switches between the text, in Hindi and English, and the two musicians sing each line in an easily comprehensible manner. There are over 150 participants from all age groups, children to great grandmothers, some seated and some…
Natural indigo has been coveted all over the world for centuries and has been in use for more than 4000 years. However, its connection with India is particularly strong—the term indigo comes from the Latin Indicum that means “Indian.” Indigo plantations in India date back to 1777 when Louis Bonnard, a Frenchman, introduced it to Bengal in eastern India. He started cultivation at Taldanga in Bankura district and Goalpara in Hooghly district. In the early 19th century, the British developed many indigo plantations, as it was a highly profitable crop — there was a lot of demand for the blue…
It was a virtual ceremony of a different kind in Puducherry in the southern part of India, on October 26 this year. Puducherry Chief Minister V Narayanasamy and the Chinese Ambassador to India, Sun Weidong, jointly inaugurated the XuFancheng Culture Study Center in the Union Territory town, formerly known as Pondicherry, in South India. While Narayanasamy was present at the center for the opening ceremony, Weidong joined in virtually from Delhi. Xu Fancheng was a Sanskrit scholar, who left China for India in the 1940s and lived in the erstwhile French settlement for 27 years. Fancheng, who painted and mastered…
Tejasvi Dogra can control irrigation, soil temperature, and pesticide sprays at his apple orchard in Madavag village of Himachal Pradesh in India, just by using his phone, all the way from his office in Shimla 62 miles away. Dogra, a 26-year-old lawyer at the Himachal Pradesh High Court in Shimla, has created a program that runs mobile applications paired with sensors and dispensers installed at his orchard. So as soon as Dogra gets an alert on his phone about lowered moisture levels on the farm, all he has to do is run the app that starts irrigating his plants. Cameras…
In September, the police in Golaghat district of Assam in Northeast India got a tip-off about a broken piece of rhinoceros horn that was being traded by some locals. The information set the alarm bells ringing. The investigations revealed an alarming trend. The officials found that some employees of the Kaziranga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, were allegedly involved in smuggling of rhino horns. The park is home to over 2400 greater one-horned rhinoceroses, classified as vulnerable on The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which is a critical indicator of the…
The calotropis is a common weed found in plenty in the Indian countryside. A hardy plant with large, waxy leaves and purple and white flowers, it flourishes in dry and harsh conditions, and barely gets any attention, even from cattle, because of its highly toxic sap. However, for Tamil Nadu entrepreneur, Gowri Shankar, it is gold. The plant, also called milkweed because of the latex it produces, is the source of a plant fiber, similar to hemp and linen, that has been developed as a vegan alternative to wool by Shankar, a former fashion merchandiser. “The fiber from calotropis has traditionally…
Earlier this year, farmers in Anantapur, a city in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, were left with huge volumes of unsold sweet lime. While there was no local demand, the farmers were unable to transport the produce elsewhere due to a lockdown. The farmers were bracing for huge losses, when KisanSaathi, an agriculture marketing firm, offered to sell the crop to Mother Dairy, a food processing company. Many farmers in the city today supply sweet lime to Mother Dairy. “I have been selling my mosambi (sweet lime) for four years now, but I have never seen kind of sorting…
GIZA PLATEAU, Egypt— Thrill seekers push the limits — including skydiving over one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The annual skydiving festival, Jump Like a Pharaoh was held earlier in November and attracted 90 skydivers from 19 different countries. The first-ever night jump was over Egypt’s Giza pyramids, where three Egyptian pharaohs are buried. Historians believe the pyramids distinct shape was meant to guarantee immortality and help the kings ascend to Ra, the sun god. “Adrenaline-seekers made six jumps over the pyramids, three on each festival day. The night jump consisted of 33 participants, due to strict health requirements.”…