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NEW DELHI: Invites sent by Indian President Droupadi Murmu calling herself "President of Bharat" for a dinner on the sidelines of the G20 summit have stirred speculation that the government may be about to change the country's name. WHAT IS THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT INDIA'S NAME? By convention, invitations issued by Indian constitutional bodies have always mentioned the name India when the text is in English, and the name Bharat when the text is in Hindi. However, the invites - in English - for the G20 dinner called Murmu the President of Bharat. An official at the president's office said they...

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump delivers a line in the Indian language Hindi in a campaign commercial airing on Indian-American cable stations. The ad features some of Trump's comments at a recent speech to the Republican Hindu Coalition. Several top Bollywood stars were in attendance as Trump talked of his love for the Indian people and his desire to end terrorist violence, like the attacks on Mumbai. He also delivers the line "ab ki baar Trump sarkar," which translates to "this time, a Trump government." A recent analysis of minorities in the 2016 election by UPI and CVoter found Trump...

A court in southern Bangladesh sentenced two Hindu schoolteachers to six months in jail for making "abusive" remarks about Islam that led a mob to attack their school, a magistrate said Tuesday.

Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at each other. First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another. Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total. It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue. Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia....

Since Lord Macaulay set out to turn India’s native elite into “a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” in 1835, English has been the country’s language of government. But according to a leaked memo, Indian officials must now use Hindi in all official posts on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Ministers have also ordered officials, many of whom do not speak fluent Hindi, to use the language in presentations. The disclosure provoked an angry response from state leaders across the country yesterday, who resent the...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A Louisville man accused of opening fire at a homeowners association meeting, killing one and critically wounding another, was ordered held on $1 million bail Saturday at an initial court hearing where a prosecutor called him "the epitome of danger to the community." A not guilty plea was entered on behalf of 55-year-old Mahmoud Yousef Hindi to charges of murder, assault and wanton endangerment in the Thursday evening shooting at a church.

Indiana University's programme for India studies, aimed at training high school students in Hindi and Urdu, has received about $120 million from the Obama administration. The money has been granted to the University under the 'STARTALK Program' of the US government, which was started by the previous administration of George W Bush, to increase the foreign language proficiency of Americans in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, Turkish, Swahili and Urdu. "Our goals are for the participating students to acquire the linguistic and cultural competence to communicate successfully in the language and obtain various learning strategies and skills," said Sungok Hong, a...

August 7, 2004THE OVERVIEWBin Laden Sent Suspect to U.S., Officials Say By DOUGLAS JEHL and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM ASHINGTON, Aug. 6 - American intelligence officials now believe that Issa al-Hindi, the alleged Qaeda operative now in British custody, was dispatched to the United States in early 2001 by the mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot at the direction of Osama bin Laden to case potential targets in New York City, senior government officials said Friday. The officials said that Mr. Hindi was the same person as the figure identified in the Sept. 11 commission report as Issa al-Britani. The...

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — A senior al-Qaida operative lived in New Jersey and posed as a student while conducting surveillance of financial institutions as possible targets for a terror attack, according to a published report. The operative, identified by U.S. officials in Washington as Dhiren Barot, 32, entered the United States on a student visa, The Record of Bergen County reported in Thursday's editions.

There has been a mass exodus of Hindi-speaking migrants (All pics by Subhamoy Bhattacharjee) Hindi-speaking migrants have started fleeing India's north-eastern state of Assam again after a week of massacres and bomb attacks left nine dead and more than 20 injured. Separatists of the United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa) were blamed for the nearly 10 explosions in the third week of May, when attacks on migrants resumed in the northern districts of Dibrugarh and Sibsagar after a lull of three months. Then followed a spate of bombings stretching from the far northern district of Tinsukia to the western...

Cambridge has finally closed the door on Sanskrit as a hallowed subject of undergraduate study, nearly one-and-a-half centuries after it first established a chair in the 3,000-year-old language. The Times of India sought -- and received -- confirmation of the university's decision within hours of Cambridge honouring Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with a doctor of law degree, in what some scholars believe to be the most cynical form of "tactless academic marketing"... Dr John Smith, reader in Sanskrit at Cambridge, told TOI that it is "not a trivial decision...this is a decision about letting the subject wither on the vine....

Muslim extremist admits he was spy who revealed Canada bomb plot By Toby Harnden (Filed: 16/07/2006) Muslim leaders in Canada have reacted with fury after a radical advocate of Sharia law revealed that he had been a government spy who helped to uncover an alleged al-Qaeda plot, writes Toby Harnden. Mubin Shaikh, 29, came forward to confirm that he was recruited by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country's equivalent of MI5, and directed a 10-day winter training course in guerrilla tactics. During the course, which Mr Shaikh set up in a field in the remote village of Washago,...

Part 2 of National Post's series: "The path to terror in Canada" Terror suspect's bride: 'I'm shocked' Stewart Bell National Post Tuesday, September 05, 2006 Three months after the RCMP began arresting 18 suspects accused of plotting terror attacks in Canada, an investigation by the National Post has uncovered a web of links to Pakistan. Today, in the second of four parts, an exclusive interview with the Pakistani bride of Toronto terror suspect Jahmaal James. LAHORE, Pakistan - There are plastic flowers on the walls, a small computer on the table beneath the window and a curtain for a door....

American children will now learn Hindi -- and for a good reason. The Bush administration thinks that learning Hindi and a few other foreign languages is a "critical need" for the US's national security and prosperity. President George W. Bush on Thursday unveiled a $ 114 million plan, called the "National Security Language Initiative". Apart from Hindi, the languages being courted are Chinese, Russian, Arabic and Farsi. "This programme is a part of a strategic goal, and that is to protect this country," Bush told a conference of more than 120 US university presidents. A request is to be sent...

HADITHA DAM, Iraq (July 27, 2005) -- As the Marines with 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment continue their fight in the Global War on Terrorism, most of them think of it as business and not personal. However, for some Marines who are of the Islamic faith, the war in Iraq hits a personal note. Cpl. Mohammed N. Rahman, who is a Sunni Muslim, fights not only to free the people of Iraq from the insurgents grip and to protect his country (America), but also to redeem his beloved religion. “This is a personal offense, not only to me but others...

A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi (India's official language, along with English) accent has so much in common with Welsh. Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common. It has long been known that the two languages stem from Indo-European, the "mother of all languages" - but the peculiar similarities between the two accents when spoken...

The Internet is home to a wealth of multilingual content, but are its doors still locked by an English key? At the end of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's hourlong address at the company's recent Government Leaders Summit, a representative from the Internet Society of China made the following remark in the ensuing Q&A session. "Mr. Ballmer, now we still have to type in 'weather.com.cn' to check the weather. Most Chinese people can't do that. They just want to type in 'tian qi' (Chinese for weather)," he said. Short of a more concrete answer, Ballmer acknowledged that Microsoft needs to work...

    For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces.     Looking forward to tomorrow's freedom? Support The United States Armed Forces Today!     ANCIENT WARFARE Part IX: War in Ancient India   Aerial WarfareNo question can be more interesting in the present circumstances of the world than India’s contribution to the science of aeronautics. There are numerous illustration in our vast Puranic and epic literature to show how well and wonderfully the ancient Indians conquered the air. To glibly characterize everything found in this literature as imaginary...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 - A new portrait of Al Qaeda's inner workings is emerging from the cache of information seized last month in Pakistan, as investigators begin to identify a new generation of operatives who appear to be filling the vacuum created when leaders were killed or captured, senior intelligence officials said Monday. Using computer records, e-mail addresses and documents seized after the arrest of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan last month in Pakistan, intelligence analysts say they are finding that Al Qaeda's upper ranks are being filled by lower-ranking members and more recent recruits. "They're a little bit of both,''...

August 7, 2004THE OVERVIEWBin Laden Sent Suspect to U.S., Officials SayBy DOUGLAS JEHL and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM ASHINGTON, Aug. 6 - American intelligence officials now believe that Issa al-Hindi, the alleged Qaeda operative now in British custody, was dispatched to the United States in early 2001 by the mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot at the direction of Osama bin Laden to case potential targets in New York City, senior government officials said Friday.The officials said that Mr. Hindi was the same person as the figure identified in the Sept. 11 commission report as Issa al-Britani. The account of Mr....