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Indianapolis' tight knit Sikh community mourned Saturday as members learned that four Sikhs were among the eight people killed in the mass shooting at a FedEx warehouse. The Marion County Coroner’s office identified the dead late Friday as Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jaswinder Kaur, 64; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74.
The U.S. has reported 30% of adults are fully vaccinated and nearly 50% of the U.S. adult population has received at least one vaccine dose.
The heavy, wet snow made travel hazardous in some areas and threatened power outages from downed trees and power lines.
Members of the Sikh community in Indianapolis gather after a mass shooting in which eight people, including four Sikhs, died, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jon Cherry/Getty ImagesOn April 16, 2021, a gunman opened fire at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis killing eight people and injuring several others before taking his own life. Four members of the Sikh community were among those gunned down. The site was reported as having a significant number of Sikh employees, and the massacre has left the community shaken and in grief. “I have sat with families from our community and so many others at the Holiday Inn Express as they wait to hear the fates of their loved ones,” said Maninder Singh Walia, a member of the Indianapolis Sikh community. “These kinds of violent attacks are a threat to all of us. Our community has a long road of healing – physically, mentally, and spiritually – to recover from this tragedy.” The shooter’s motive is not yet known. In a statement following the incident, the Sikh Coalition, an advocacy group, called on authorities to conduct a full investigation “including the possibility of bias as a factor.” Sikhs have in the past been targeted in racist attacks. As a scholar of the tradition and a practicing Sikh myself, I have studied the prejudices and barriers that many Sikhs in America face. I have also experienced racial slurs from a young age. The bottom line is there is little understanding in the U.S. of who exactly the Sikhs are and what they believe. So here’s a primer. Founder of Sikhism To start at the beginning, the founder of the Sikh tradition, Guru Nanak, was born in 1469 in the Punjab region of South Asia, which is currently split between Pakistan and the northwestern area of India. A majority of the global Sikh population still resides in Punjab on the Indian side of the border. From a young age, Guru Nanak was disillusioned by the social inequities and religious hypocrisies he observed around him. He believed that a single divine force created the entire world and resided within it. In his belief, God was not separate from the world and watching from a distance, but fully present in every aspect of creation. He therefore asserted that all people are equally divine and deserve to be treated as such. To promote this vision of divine oneness and social equality, Guru Nanak created institutions and religious practices. He established community centers and places of worship, wrote his own scriptural compositions and institutionalized a system of leadership (gurus) that would carry forward his vision. The Sikh view thus rejects all social distinctions that produce inequities, including gender, race, religion and caste, the predominant structure for social hierarchy in South Asia. A community kitchen run by the Sikhs to provide free meals irrespective of caste, faith or religion, in the Golden Temple, in Punjab, India. shankar s., CC BY Serving the world is a natural expression of Sikh prayer and worship. Sikhs call this prayerful service “seva,” and it is a core part of their practice. The Sikh identity In the Sikh tradition, a truly religious person is one who cultivates the spiritual self while also serving the communities around them – or a saint-soldier. The saint-soldier ideal applies to women and men alike. In this spirit, Sikh women and men maintain five articles of faith, popularly known as the five Ks. These are: kes (long, uncut hair), kara (steel bracelet), kanga (wooden comb), kirpan (small sword) and kachera (soldier-shorts). Although little historical evidence exists to explain why these particular articles were chosen, the five Ks continue to provide the community with a collective identity, binding together individuals on the basis of a shared belief and practice. As I understand, Sikhs cherish these articles of faith as gifts from their gurus. Turbans are an important part of the Sikh identity. Both women and men may wear turbans. Like the articles of faith, Sikhs regard their turbans as gifts given by their beloved gurus, and its meaning is deeply personal. In South Asian culture, wearing a turban typically indicated one’s social status – kings and rulers once wore turbans. The Sikh gurus adopted the turban, in part, to remind Sikhs that all humans are sovereign, royal and ultimately equal. [3 media outlets, 1 religion newsletter. Get stories from The Conversation, AP and RNS.]\ Sikhs in America Today, there are approximately 30 million Sikhs worldwide, making Sikhism the world’s fifth-largest major religion. Sikh Day parade on Madison Avenue, New York. AP Photo/Craig Ruttle After British colonizers in India seized power of Punjab in 1849, where a majority of the Sikh community was based, Sikhs began migrating to various regions controlled by the British Empire, including Southeast Asia, East Africa and the United Kingdom itself. Based on what was available to them, Sikhs played various roles in these communities, including military service, agricultural work and railway construction. The first Sikh community entered the United States via the West Coast during the 1890s. They began experiencing discrimination immediately upon their arrival. For instance, the first race riot targeting Sikhs took place in Bellingham, Washington, in 1907. Angry mobs of white men rounded up Sikh laborers, beat them up and forced them to leave town. The discrimination continued over the years. For instance, after my father moved from Punjab to the United States around the time of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and racial slurs like “Ayatollah” and “raghead” were hurled at him. It was a time when 52 American diplomats and citizens were taken captive in Iran and tension between the two countries was high. These slurs reflected the racist backlash against those who fitted the stereotypes of Iranians. Our family faced a similar racist backlash when the U.S. engaged in the Gulf War during the early 1990s. The racist attacks spiked again after 9/11, particularly because Americans did not know about the Sikh religion and conflated the unique Sikh appearance with popular stereotypes of what terrorists look like. The rates of violence against Sikhs surged after the election of President Donald Trump. The Sikh Coalition estimated in 2018 that Americans Sikhs were being targeted in hate crimes about once a week. A Sikh American Journey parade in Pasadena, Calif. AP Photo/Michael Owen Baker Scholars and government officials estimate the Sikh American population to number around 500,000. As a practicing Sikh, I can affirm that the Sikh commitment to the tenets of their faith, including love, service and justice, keeps them resilient in the face of violence. For these reasons, many Sikh Americans, including those affected by the mass shooting in Indiana, I believe, will continue to maintain their unique Sikh identity, proudly and apologetically. This is an updated version of an article first published on Aug. 9, 2018. The Union Theological Seminary is a member of the Association of Theological Schools. The ATS is a funding partner of The Conversation US. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Simran Jeet Singh, Union Theological Seminary. Read more:French row over mosque isn’t simply about state financing – it runs deep into Islamophobia and French secularismCompassionate courage moves beyond ‘cancel culture’ to challenge systemic racism – but it’s hard workHow ‘complementarianism’ – the belief that God assigned specific gender roles – became part of evangelical doctrine Simran Jeet Singh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Divers returned Saturday to the murky, roiling waters of the Gulf of Mexico in search of lost crew members aboard a capsized lift boat off Louisiana, the Coast Guard said. “They took a break overnight because of the weather, operating as long as they could, but got back out there this morning and they're in the water now," said Petty Officer John Michelli. Michelli said an update on the search progress would be released later Saturday.
A senior Iranian official offered an upbeat assessment of progress in talks aimed at bringing the United States back into world powers' 2015 deal with Tehran on its nuclear program, saying Saturday that a “new understanding” appears to be taking shape. Iran has been negotiating with the five powers that remain in the agreement -- France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China — in Vienna over the past two weeks. An American delegation also has been in Vienna, but not talking directly to Iran.
The 13-year-old's death from a police bullet has sparked a city-wide look at use of force policies in Chicago.
Indianapolis police were seeking a motive for the shooting that killed at least eight people at a FedEx facility.
Authorities in Pakistan have decided to start vaccinating people aged 50 to 59 next week, hours after the country reported over 100 fatalities in a single day for the fifth consecutive day. Saturday's figures bring Pakistan's death toll from the pandemic to 16,094, out of more than 750,000 total confirmed cases in the country of some 233 million people. Pakistan has largely relied on donated or imported Chinese vaccines, which had been offered only to health workers and elderly people.
Attorneys and witnesses have used the words “reasonable” or “unreasonable” often at the trial of the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murder and manslaughter in George Floyd's death. The concept of reasonableness has been crucial at trials of officers ever since the landmark Graham v. Connor ruling 32 years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. Here is a look at the issue and the key role it's likely to play as Derek Chauvin's trial draws to a close.
More than 1,000 vicars have indicated they will defy vaccine passport rules if they are implemented in churches, describing them as a “fundamental betrayal” of Christian belief. In an open letter to the Prime Minister concerning vaccine passport proposals, the church leaders said: “To deny people entry to hear this life-giving message and to receive this life-giving ministry would be a fundamental betrayal of Christ and the Gospel. “Sincere Christian churches and organisations could not do this, and as Christian leaders we would be compelled to resist any such Act of Parliament vigorously.” “For the Church of Jesus Christ to shut out those deemed by the state to be social undesirables would be anathema to us and a denial of the truth of the Gospel,” it added. The letter, which is signed by a mix of vicars, reverends, pastors and elders from a range of Christian denominations, also said: “There is also a legitimate fear that this scheme would be the thin end of the wedge leading to a permanent state of affairs in which Covid vaccine status could be expanded to encompass other forms of medical treatment and perhaps even other criteria beyond that. “This scheme has the potential to bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it and to create a surveillance state in which the government uses technology to control certain aspects of citizens’ lives. “As such, this constitutes one of the most dangerous policy proposals ever to be made in the history of British politics... “We agree with those members of Parliament who have already voiced opposition to this proposal: that it would be divisive, discriminatory and destructive to introduce any such mandatory health certification into British society. “We call on the Government to assert strongly and clearly that it will not contemplate this illiberal and dangerous plan, not now and not ever.” Signatories to the letter include Christian leaders from Baptist, evangelical, free church, Church of England, presbyterian and a range of independent churches from across the UK. The call, backed by more than 1,100 clergy, is being led by Rev Dr William Philip, senior minister at the Tron Church in Glasgow, who led the successful Scottish church leaders’ judicial review last month. Unlike in England, the Court of Session heard that a ban on church services in Scotland was unconstitutional and breached human rights. It marked the first legal victory against Covid laws. The open letter, which has also been signed by Rev David Hathaway, founder and president of Eurovision Mission to Europe, comes as last week the Government was warned by its own equalities watchdog that Covid-status certificate schemes or “vaccine passports” could be discriminatory.
Hannah McKay/WPA Pool/Getty ImagesPrince William and Prince Harry walked behind the Duke of Edinburgh’s coffin at his funeral today. Separated by their cousin Peter Phillips, Princess Anne’s son, the brothers walked behind Prince Philip and the queen’s four children, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward. None were wearing military uniforms, but all were wearing medals, a compromise reached after an internal debate in the royal family about the appropriate dress for Harry and Andrew. The royal procession on foot followed Prince Philip’s coffin, which was carried on a green Land Rover which he helped design. The Duke of Edinburgh's casket was covered in his personal standard and carried his sword, naval cap and a wreath of flowers. His children and grandchildren watched as his coffin was carried by a group of Royal Marines into St George’s Chapel in Windsor for the funeral service itself. The queen arrived separately with a lady-in-waiting in a Bentley. She will sit in the chapel, masked and alone for the duration of the service. The Daily Mail reported she was wiping away tears as she arrived.The royal family were pictured all masked inside the chapel, with its 30 mourners (a number in accordance with coronavirus protocols), all seated separately.A spokesperson for Meghan Markle said she would be watching the ceremony from home in California, adding, “She was hopeful to be able to attend, but was not cleared for travel by her physician at this stage in her pregnancy.”A wreath provided by Harry and Meghan and laid for The Duke of Edinburgh was designed and handmade by Willow Crossley, the same florist who took charge of the flowers at the couple’s wedding reception in Frogmore Gardens.The wreath featured a variety of locally sourced flowers, with Harry and Meghan specifically requesting it include acanthus mollis (Bear’s breeches), the national flower of Greece, to represent the Duke’s heritage; and eryngium (sea holly), to represent the Royal Marines. The wreath also featured campanula to represent gratitude and everlasting love, rosemary to signify remembrance, lavender for devotion, and roses in honor of June being The Duke of Edinburgh’s birth month. The card accompanying the wreath was handwritten by The Duchess of Sussex.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
Prince Philip’s former protection officer yesterday revealed his son once assumed that the Duke was "someone from the pub" when he phoned the family’s house. Richard Griffin, who spent over 30 years in protection officer roles for the Royal Family, told the BBC that the child’s confusion resulted in an anecdote that the Duke used to "dine out on". Mr Griffin said: "He rang up one day and my five year-old son answered the phone. He used to call me 'Dick' so he said, 'Can I speak to Dick please?'. "He [his son] said, 'He’s in the garden, I’ll go and get him. Who shall I say is calling?' He [the Duke] said, 'The Duke of Edinburgh'. He said all he heard was my little boy yell out, ‘Dad, can you come to the phone, someone from the pub wants to speak to you!’” Speaking shortly before the Duke’s funeral on Saturday, Mr Griffin said that the Duke "wouldn’t bother" phoning his house via a switchboard, instead ringing directly.
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A Pirahã family. Caleb Everett, CC BY-SANumbers do not exist in all cultures. There are numberless hunter-gatherers embedded deep in Amazonia, living along branches of the world’s largest river tree. Instead of using words for precise quantities, these people rely exclusively on terms analogous to “a few” or “some.” In contrast, our own lives are governed by numbers. As you read this, you are likely aware of what time it is, how old you are, your checking account balance, your weight and so on. The exact (and exacting) numbers we think with impact everything from our schedules to our self-esteem. But, in a historical sense, numerically fixated people like us are the unusual ones. For the bulk of our species’ approximately 200,000-year lifespan, we had no means of precisely representing quantities. What’s more, the 7,000 or so languages that exist today vary dramatically in how they utilize numbers. Speakers of anumeric, or numberless, languages offer a window into how the invention of numbers reshaped the human experience. In a 2017 book, I explored the ways in which humans invented numbers, and how numbers subsequently played a critical role in other milestones, from the advent of agriculture to the genesis of writing. Numberless cultures Cultures without numbers, or with only one or two precise numbers, include the Munduruku and Pirahã in Amazonia. Researchers have also studied some adults in Nicaragua who were never taught number words. Without numbers, healthy human adults struggle to precisely differentiate and recall quantities as low as four. In an experiment, a researcher will place nuts into a can one at a time, then remove them one by one. The person watching is asked to signal when all the nuts have been removed. Responses suggest that anumeric people have some trouble keeping track of how many nuts remain in the can, even if there are only four or five in total. This and many other experiments have converged upon a simple conclusion: When people do not have number words, they struggle to make quantitative distinctions that probably seem natural to someone like you or me. While only a small portion of the world’s languages are anumeric or nearly anumeric, they demonstrate that number words are not a human universal. It is worth stressing that these anumeric people are cognitively normal, well-adapted to the environs they have dominated for centuries. As the child of missionaries, I spent some of my youth living with anumeric indigenous people, the aforementioned Pirahã who live along the sinuous banks of the black Maici River. Like other outsiders, I was continually impressed by their superior understanding of the riverine ecology we shared. Yet numberless people struggle with tasks that require precise discrimination between quantities. Perhaps this should be unsurprising. After all, without counting, how can someone tell whether there are, say, seven or eight coconuts in a tree? Such seemingly straightforward distinctions become blurry through numberless eyes. Children and animals This conclusion is echoed by work with anumeric children in industrialized societies. Prior to being spoon-fed number words, children can only approximately discriminate quantities beyond three. We must be handed the cognitive tools of numbers before we can consistently and easily recognize higher quantities. In fact, acquiring the exact meaning of number words is a painstaking process that takes children years. Initially, kids learn numbers much like they learn letters. They recognize that numbers are organized sequentially, but have little awareness of what each individual number means. With time, they start to understand that a given number represents a quantity greater by one than the preceding number. This “successor principle” is part of the foundation of our numerical cognition, but requires extensive practice to understand. None of us, then, is really a “numbers person.” We are not predisposed to handle quantitative distinctions adroitly. In the absence of the cultural traditions that infuse our lives with numbers from infancy, we would all struggle with even basic quantitative distinctions. Number words and written numerals transform our quantitative reasoning as they are coaxed into our cognitive experience by our parents, peers and school teachers. The process seems so normal that we sometimes think of it as a natural part of growing up, but it is not. Human brains come equipped with certain quantitative instincts that are refined with age, but these instincts are very limited. For instance, even at birth we are capable of distinguishing between two markedly different quantities – for instance, eight from 16 things. Alex, an African gray parrot, was trained by ethologist Irene Pepperberg to count objects. AP Photo/File But we are not the only species capable of such abstractions. Compared to chimps and other primates, our numerical instincts are not as remarkable as many presume. We even share some basic instinctual quantitative reasoning with distant nonmammalian relatives like birds. Indeed, work with some other species, including parrots, suggests they too can refine their quantitative thought if they are introduced to the cognitive power tools we call numbers. The birth of numbers So, how did we ever invent “unnatural” numbers in the first place? The answer is, literally, at your fingertips. The bulk of the world’s languages use base-10, base-20 or base-5 number systems. That is, these smaller numbers are the basis of larger numbers. English is a base-10 or decimal language, as evidenced by words like 14 (“four” + “10”) and 31 (“three” x “10” + “one”). We speak a decimal language because an ancestral tongue, proto-Indo-European, was decimally based. Proto-Indo-European was decimally oriented because, as in so many cultures, our linguistic ancestors’ hands served as the gateway to realizations like “five fingers on this hand is the same as five fingers on that hand.” Such transient thoughts were manifested into words and passed down across generations. This is why the word “five” in many languages is derived from the word for “hand.” Most number systems, then, are the by-product of two key factors: the human capacity for language and our propensity for focusing on our hands and fingers. This manual fixation – an indirect by-product of walking upright on two legs – has helped yield numbers in most cultures, but not all. Cultures without numbers also offer insight into the cognitive influence of particular numeric traditions. Consider what time it is. Your day is ruled by minutes and seconds, but these entities are not real in any physical sense and are nonexistent to numberless people. Minutes and seconds are the verbal and written vestiges of an uncommon base-60 number system used in Mesopotamia millennia ago. They reside in our minds, numerical artifacts that not all humans inherit conceptually. Research on the language of numbers shows, more and more, that one of our species’ key characteristics is tremendous linguistic and cognitive diversity. While there are undoubtedly cognitive commonalities across all human populations, our radically varied cultures foster profoundly different cognitive experiences. If we are to truly understand how much our cognitive lives differ cross-culturally, we must continually sound the depths of our species’ linguistic diversity.This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. Read more:When languages die, we lose a part of who we areIf you speak Mandarin, your brain is differentIf we ever came across aliens, would we be able to understand them? Caleb Everett was a 2015 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. He receives funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex on Saturday pledged more than one billion euros in aid for farmers and winemakers reeling from the worst frost in decades.
They may not have been wearing uniform, but the Royal family's military ties were plain to see in the medals they wore to the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral on Saturday. The Queen decreed that the men should wear morning suits with black ties and the women day dresses amid concerns that the Duke of Sussex could have ended up being the only senior royal not in uniform after relinquishing his royal and military ties last year. The Duke of York had also sparked ructions by demanding to go dressed as an Admiral, despite his promotion to that rank in the Royal Navy being deferred after he stepped down from public duties in November 2019 over his relationship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. All the Queen's children and the Duke of Cambridge wore the Garter Star, representing the Order of the Garter which is the highest order of chivalry in the British honours system and at the sovereign's sole discretion. The Duke of Kent, 85 – the oldest member of the Royal family taking part in the walking procession – wore, among his other medals, the King George Coronation Medal, while those present for the Queen's Coronation in 1953, including the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal and the Duke of Gloucester, wore the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal.
They became so close during the course of their nearly 30-year friendship that she was known as “and also” on account of her name always appearing on the Duke of Edinburgh’s guest list. So it was hardly a surprise when the Countess Mountbatten of Burma was included in the 30-strong congregation for Prince Philip’s funeral, handpicked by the Queen. Also known as Penny Knatchbull, later Lady Romsey and Lady Brabourne, the 68-year-old mother of three was the Duke’s carriage driving partner and one of his closest confidantes. Yet it emerged on Saturday that the Countess, pictured below, was actually representing her husband, the Earl of Mountbatten of Burma, who is unwell and therefore unable to attend.
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