Eesha Khare, 18, of Saratoga, Calif., who created a high-speed charger for portable electronic devices, won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award of $50,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, held in Phoenix, Ariz., on May 17. Intel ISEF is a program of the non-profit Society for Science & the Public, which also recognized Henry Lin, 17, of Shreveport, La., with the same $50,000 prize for simulating thousands of clusters of galaxies and providing scientists with valuable new data. The top $75,000 Gordon E. Moore Award went to Ionut Budisteanu of Romania, for using artificial intelligence to create a viable model for a low-cost, self-driving car. Khare’s invention recognizes the crucial need for energy-efficient storage devices as portable electronics become ubiquitous in daily life, the release said. Her tiny device that fits inside cellphone batteries, allows them to fully charge within 20-30 seconds.

Growing up in the Philippines, my mother was my main source of inspiration for cooking. I came from a family of eleven kids, and as a child, I would constantly volunteer to help her in the kitchen. My mother would prepare such amazing authentic Filipino food, and cooking for her was almost second nature. She didn’t think about it, she just knew what ingredients to use, how much of each to use, and how to combine their flavors in ways that would satisfy everyone in the family. So Filipino food for me is much more than just adobo, longganisa, or tocino and fried rice – it represents a huge part of my culture, and most importantly, it is what connects me with my family. And that’s why it’s so important to me that we think about Filipino food not just in terms of what’s delicious, but in terms of what’s healthy and nourishing for our families.

– CHICAGO Sufi singer Rahat Fateh Ali Khan entertained Chicago area music lovers with a packed-to-capacity concert at the Sears Centre Arena here May 17. More than 5,000 people flocked to the venue to listen to the legendary singer, who presented his popular Bollywood songs, according to a press release from the organizers. Accompanied by a group of over 20 musicians, the 39-year-old singer performed popular numbers like “Dagabaaz Re” and “Tere Mast Mast Do Nain” from “Dabbangg 2,” “Dil To Bachha Hai Ji” from “Ishqiya” and “Teri Ore” from “Singh is Kinng.” Co-hosted by Saahil Exclusive and L.A. Tan , the concert - Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s 50th – began with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Allah Hu,” setting the tone for the evening.  Just before the end, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan introduced his entire team to the audience, and also invited his manager and the local promoters Bhavesh Patel and Babu Patel of Sahil and Mayur Patel and Nick Patel of L.A. Tan on stage.

– LEMONT, Ill. Legendary musician M. Balamurali Krishna was recently felicitated with a lifetime achievement award by the Sri Annamacharya Project of North America (SAPNA) for his contribution to Carnatic music. Mukta Dutta Tomar, the consul general of India in Chicago,   presented the award April 28 at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago here, organizers said in a press release.  Tomar and Balamurli Krishna also presented community service awards to videographer Nagabhushan Rao, Sharma Konkapaka and TV Asia’s Midwest bureau chief Vandana Jhingan, the release said. The 82-year-old Balamurali Krishna also performed at the fifth annual Veena Festival, held April 26 to 28 at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago   and the Balaji Temple in Aurora, Ill. Accompanied by R. Satish Kumar on violin and K. Parthasarathy on mridangam, Balamurli Krishna entertained the audience WHEN? with his popular songs.

Bollywood producer Pooja Bhatt is auctioning off a role in one of her next Hindi-language films to help raise money to reduce rising cases of violence against women in India, the charity Oxfam has said. The opportunity, organised by Oxfam's partner Scottish Circle, is available to people in Scotland, where the highest bidder will win the chance to star in a film that will be screened to millions. "I would be delighted to offer a role to the highest bidder in either the film ‘Bad', which would be a speaking part… Or they could win a part in my film ‘Cabaret', where they will get to participate in an elaborate song sequence complete with colour, dancers and the works," Bhatt said in a statement issued by Oxfam. In December 2012, the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi received widespread international coverage as thousands of urban middle class Indians took to the streets to protest crime against women and girls in the country.

The government and the United Nations on Tuesday unveiled new guidelines on how to deal with the reproductive and sexual healthcare needs of girls and women when a disaster strikes. The guidelines spelled out in a 223-page manual are designed to help humanitarian workers reduce sexual violence, HIV transmission and maternal and newborn morbidity and mortality. "When a disaster strikes, although the first concern is survival, other essential needs do not disappear. Women have unique health concerns, from hygiene to life-threatening complications related to pregnancy and childbirth," said Frederika Meijer, country director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA). "The integration of sexual and reproductive health in disaster preparedness and response is a priority at all levels," she said at the launch of the Minimum Initial Service Package (MISP). India is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world with large chunks of its 1.

The Sacramento Kings were sold to a group led by software billionaire Vivek Ranadive, who will become the first Indian-born owner in National Basketball Association history. A Sacramento-based group led by Ranadive signed an agreement to purchase the team from the Maloof family, Mayor Kevin Johnson said May 17 in a news conference. The group paid $347 million for a 65 percent stake in the team, according to the Sacramento Bee. The deal, which includes a plan for a new downtown arena, values the Kings at $535 million, the most expensive in league history, and ends a five- month battle over the team's future. Johnson, a former NBA All-Star, took the podium at the news conference as Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours," played over the speakers. He opened by asking those in attendance to repeat after him: "We did it." "This is something that will define Sacramento," he said. "It is transformative.

What is curry? Today, the word describes a bewildering number of spicy vegetable and meat stews from places as far-flung as the Indian subcontinent, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean Islands. There is little agreement about what actually constitutes a curry. And, until recently, how and when curry first appeared was a culinary mystery as well. The term likely derives from kari, the word for sauce in Tamil, a South-Indian language. Perplexed by that region’s wide variety of savory dishes, 17th-century British traders lumped them all under the term curry.   A curry, as the Brits defined it, might be a mélange of onion, ginger, turmeric, garlic, pepper, chilies, coriander, cumin, and other spices cooked with shellfish, meat, or vegetables. Those curries, like the curries we know today, were the byproduct of more than a millennium of trade between the Indian subcontinent and other parts of Asia, which provided new ingredients to spice up traditional Indian stews.

– AURORA, Ill. Renowned dancer-choreographer Leela Samson led a troupe of eight in a Bharata Natyam performance at the Metea Valley High School here May 4. “Spanda” was hosted by Natya Dance Theatre. According to a press release from the organizers, "Spanda" refers not only to external movement but also to the inner vibration (naada) that animates all the rhythms of our universe.  Various devices were explored in the performances, among them three dancers in single undulating file, rising and falling in alternation while pulsating through expanding and contracting hand gestures and a human chain stretched through tension in opposing directions, recalling the polarization of positive and negative forces at the churning of the primordial ocean. The first padam, in Raaga Punnagavarali, of a heroine pining for her lover, was enacted almost entirely seated on a chair to minimize the distraction of rhythmic movement, the release said.

A Sterling man has been arrested by the FBI and charged with the federal felony of abusive sexual contact for allegedly fondling a fellow passenger on a flight last month into Reagan National Airport. Now, this was not a passing touch, as alleged in a federal affidavit by FBI Special Agent David Wiegand, and unwanted sexual contact is a serious matter. And in this age of federal air marshals, Saurabh Agarwal of Sterling was arrested before his flight from Miami even landed at National. He is now facing up to two years in federal prison. Agarwal, 40, reportedly sat next to a woman he did not know on an American Airlines flight on April 10. The woman told investigators that she fell asleep shortly after takeoff. When she awoke, she allegedly found the man’s hand beneath her blouse and inside her bra, fondling her breast, Wiegand’s affidavit states. The woman pretended to be asleep, and she reported that her seatmate kept squeezing her body and her hand tightly, with his other hand.

Former world number one Vijay Singh sued the PGA Tour for “reckless administration and implementation” of its anti-doping program on May 8, a week after golf’s premier tour dropped a doping case against the Fijian. Three-times major winner Singh was initially found by the PGA Tour to have breached the sport’s doping rules after using a spray, which contains a banned substance, to treat an injury but he was later cleared of any wrongdoing after winning an appeal. He filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of the State of New York on May 8, and issued a statement saying the PGA Tour had damaged his reputation. “I am proud of my achievement, my work ethic and the way I live my life,” Singh said in the statement. “The PGA Tour not only treated me unfairly, but displayed a lack of professionalism that should concern every professional golfer and fan of the game.

Simply put, Indian cuisine presents some of the most satisfying meatless dishes of any in the world, which is why in my relatively short time as a vegetarian I've become something of a regular at Rasika West End in Washington.  But I want to be just as comfortable making Indian dishes at home as I am ordering them out, so I've been studying up. As intimidating as Indian cooking can seem, given its beautiful layering of spices and sometimes hard-to-find ingredients, diving in doesn't need to be difficult. I started the way I usually do, with a seasonal vegetable — in this case, spring peas — and the desire to do something different with them.  One of my favorite Indian dishes is the classic matar paneer, made with that creamy-chewy cheese (paneer) and green peas (matar) plus a pungent sauce of tomatoes, ginger and a raft of spices.

– JOHANNESBURG South Africa suspended its Chief of State Protocol Ambassador Bruce Koloane after a civilian Airbus carrying guests from India to the wedding of the Gupta family landed at an army airbase. “Preliminary investigations have revealed the need to probe the circumstances under which the clearances for the aircraft to land was secured,” the Department of International Relations and Cooperation said in an emailed statement Thursday. “The department takes this matter in a very serious light.” The ruling African National Congress and its labor union ally, Cosatu, criticized the decision to allow guests of the wedding of Vega Gupta and Aakash Jahajgarhia to land on April 30 at the Waterkloof Air force base, near Pretoria, the capital. The Guptas, an Indian family that has been doing business in South Africa since 1993, own Sahara Computers and The New Age newspaper.

There's a double meaning to the title of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," filmmaker Mira Nair's gripping and complex drama based on the 2007 novel by Mohsin Hamid about the roots of extremism. On a superficial level, "fundamentalist" refers to religious identity, one unfortunately most often associated with Islamic terrorism these days. And the story — about an ambitious, Pakistani-born Wall Street financial analyst who becomes disenchanted with the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — certainly suggests that most obvious reading. In that interpretation, the reluctant fundamentalist is an assimilated Muslim forced into anti-American radicalism by America itself. But the hero Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), whom we meet at the outset as an older and wiser professor of revolutionary studies at Lahore University, isn't quite what he appears.

Channa masala is a no-brainer when you’re ordering Indian takeout, especially if you’re a vegetarian. The Punjabi chickpea curry is a tantalizing balance of spicy, tangy and sweet, and it happens to be nutritionally unimpeachable. It also seems like one of those dishes that’s so uniquely flavored and intricately composed that it’s totally worth it to pay an expert to make it for you instead of endeavoring to make it yourself. But this is a false impression that stems from most Americans’ ignorance of South Asian cooking conventions.   Technique-wise, channa masala is as simple as any other stew it requires chopping, simmering and stirring. What makes homemade channa masala challenging is getting that balance of spice, acidity, and sweetness right.  I have seen many recipes that purport to be simple yet authentic, containing only seasonings easily obtainable in American supermarkets: garlic, ginger, jalapeño, turmeric, cumin, coriander and lemon juice.

In Reef flip flops, blue jeans and a Calvin Klein polo shirt, Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, strode down the driveway of his Federalist-style home last week in Montgomery Village, Md., an upper middle-class Washington, D.C. suburb, past a ground cover of purple wisteria blooming in his front yard and pink tulips across the street. In the next few minutes, the uncle to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, accomplished something that 11 years of post-9/11 press releases, news conferences and soundbites by too many American Muslim leaders has failed to do on the issue of radicalization and terrorism: with raw, unfettered emotion, he owned up to the problem within. Instead of being silenced by what they did, he openly said that his nephews had brought “shame” on the family with their actions.

One night in February, Rajib Haider was set upon near his Dhaka home by five knife-wielding youths. His face was so lacerated that a relative who found the body wasn't sure it was him until he called Haider's cellphone and heard it ring inside a pocket. Haider was a blogger, one of hundreds in Bangladesh demanding the death penalty for Islamist leaders accused of wartime atrocities, whose grisly murder swelled the crowds at student-led rallies many hailed as a "Bangladesh Spring". But now, a radical pro-Islam movement has emerged to counter the students it sneers at as "atheist bloggers". Known as Hefajat-e-Islam, it has given the government until May 5 to introduce a new blasphemy law, reinstate pledges to Allah in the constitution, ban women from mixing freely with men and make Islamic education mandatory - an agenda critics say would amount to the 'Talibanisation' of Bangladesh.

Louisville, Kentucky – Friday morning, four Pakistani-American doctors dressed in business suits and medical scrubs sat in one of this city’s most popular breakfast spots and fretted. At an adjacent table, a middle-aged woman grew visibly nervous when their native land was mentioned. One of the doctors, a 47-year-old cardiologist, was despondent. “We were all praying this wouldn’t happen,” he told me. “No matter what you do in your community, that’s the label that is attached.” Another doctor worried that years of outreach efforts by the city’s 10,000-strong Muslim community, a mix of Bosnians, Somalis and Iraqis, would be lost. Thursday, he sent a letter to the local newspaper condemning the Boston attack “no matter who committed it.” When news broke Friday that the two suspects were Chechen Muslims, his family grew nervous. “Five minutes ago my mom called from Copenhagen to see if I was ok,” the 41-year-old geriatrician said. “It rattles all of us.

One of the central questions surrounding the Boston Marathon bombings is whether they portend a larger wave of terror attacks by homegrown Islamic radicals. The culprits, two brothers of Chechen origin, one of whom was a naturalized U.S. citizen, had both lived in the country for more than a decade. While the older brother is reported to have been sullen, resentful and ill at ease in his adopted country, the younger brother was by all accounts a well-mannered kid, whose main vice was marijuana. Many fear that if these two men could turn viciously against the country that gave them refuge, the same might be true of at least some small number of their co-religionists. I grew up in a Muslim household in New York City’s polyglot outer boroughs, and the Tsarnaev brothers strike me, in broad outline, as recognizable figures. The younger brother’s Twitter feed, which has attracted wide attention, reads like dispatches from the collective id of at least a quarter of my high school classmate

Bollywood actress Parmita Kurada and her 2-year-old son were reportedly harassed in Times Square this month by a man dressed as Cookie Monster from the beloved children's series "Sesame Street."  The former Miss India Asia Pacific who now lives in Stamford, Conn., and her son, Samay, on April 7 clicked a photograph with a man dressed as Cookie Monster, local news reports said. After not receiving a tip immediately, the man reportedly pushed her son and bad-mouthed the mother. Kurada told the New York Post that she was walking with Samay and her 8-month-old son, Swhaas, on Broadway near West 45th Street when they were swarmed by impersonators. “I just thought they were being friendly,” she said. “It’s strange. We weren’t even talking to them. These guys walk up to you and say, ‘Take a picture! Take a picture!’ " She said another person dressed as Elmo picked Samay up from his stroller without her permission and urged her to take a photo.

– MORRISTOWN, N.J. Top Indian restaurants in the region displayed their signature dishes at the Hyatt here April 14 to teach the younger generation to eat right and develop a love for desi cuisine. Hosted by the Varli group, The Varli Food Festival for Kids featured live cooking demos, booths, games and activities to introduce children to various aspects of Indian food. Proceeds from the event will be used by the Diya Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing food, education, and medical aid to children across the world, Varli Singh, the main organizer and brainchild of the festival told Desi Talk. More than 700 children and adults packed the Headquarters Plaza where an array of food to please every palette was presented. From a chicken wrap from Tulsi to the coconut-crusted shrimp from Devi to Raj Kachori from Mithaas, to Alokozay Indian teas, countless Indian desserts, chaats, kababs and so much more.

In a bylane next to Mumbai's biggest mall, in a suburb teeming with people even at midnight, is a building that at first glance looks like an abandoned warehouse. The decrepit exterior hides the set of what may be one of India's most ambitious TV shows yet - the domestic version of the U.S. television hit action series "24", which its makers hope will revolutionize Indian TV. The Indian "24" is a novel concept in an industry where daily soaps reign. It will be the first seasonal fiction show on TV, one of the most expensive TV shows ever produced and the first to have a Bollywood star in the lead. Anil Kapoor, 53 and best known for his turn as the talk show host in Danny Boyle's Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire", will be the Indian counterpart of Jack Bauer, the suave police officer who is part of an elite anti-terrorism unit. Kiefer Sutherland starred in the original.

Bollywood actresses Sonam Kapoor, Lara Dutta, Chitrangada Singh, Yami Gautam, Juhi Chawla, Zeenat Aman and Jacqueline Fernandez added sparkle to the India International Jewellery Week in Delhi, April 12 and 13.  Dutta showcased diamonds by Birdhichand Ghanshyamdas Jewelers, while Singh wore designs by Hazoorilal Jewelers Chawla wore a bridal maroon lehenga and polki necklaces by Kay Jewels, Aman walked the ramp for RK Jewels in a carved gold and uncut diamond piece over a black and red ensemble, news reports said.  The fourth edition of the fashion event was inaugurated April 12 with a lamp-lighting ceremony by Kapoor, who also walked the ramp to mark the opening of the two-day jewelry exhibition. According to the IIJW website, the show was dedicated to women's empowerment and motherhood and began with a dance performance showing the four elements of nature -- Water, Air, Fire and Earth. After each dance performance, the models showcased the jewels on the ramp.

(Reuters) - Pope Francis, in his first major decision, on Saturday set up an advisory board of cardinals from around the world to help him govern the Catholic Church and reform its troubled central administration. The eight cardinals will help him put into place changes in an administration which has been held responsible for some of the mishaps and scandals that plagued the eight-year reign of Pope Benedict before he resigned in February. A Vatican statement said the group would "advise him in the governing of the universal Church" as well as in making administrative changes, a sign that Francis wants to consult more widely than Benedict did before making decisions. The eight prelates come from Italy, Chile, India, Germany, Democratic Republic of Congo, the United States, Australia, and Honduras, indicating that Francis intends to take seriously calls by bishops from around the world to have more say in Vatican decisions that affect their areas.

Anthony Weiner’s political comeback is in the hands of one person: His wife, Huma Abedin. If that sounds familiar — well, Abedin seems to be following the playbook of her longtime boss and mentor, Hillary Clinton. “It took a long time to be able to sit on a couch next to Anthony and say, ‘O.K., I understand and I forgive,’.” Abedin says in a much-discussed New York Times profile of the former power couple. “It was the right choice for me. I didn’t make it lightly.” Compare to when Clinton sat on a couch in 1992, in front of cameras for “60 Minutes,” after her husband’s campaign was rocked by reports of an extramarital affair. “You know, I’m not sitting here – some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she told Steve Kroft. “I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.