The US border patrol agents apprehended two Indian citizens who were smuggled into the US, officials said. On Thursday afternoon, US Border Patrol agents assigned to Massena Border Patrol Station observed a suspicious vehicle in the parking lot of a casino in Hogansburg in upstate New York, the US Customs and Border Protection said in a press release.
Santha Rama Rau: The prolific wordsmith who wrote for the ‘New Yorker’ and was wooed by a mafia don
In her peripatetic life, the accomplished writer got many opportunities to observe major events and changemakers from up close. Courtesy: The Nikhil and Dottie Wagle Family Collection.
When she was six years old, Santha Rama Rau left India for the first time. Her father, Benegal Rama Rau, a civil servant, moved to England as the first Round Table Conference to discuss constitutional reforms in India got underway in 1930. For her, it was the beginning of a lifetime of travel, during which she wrote books and journalistic articles, had a ringside view of global events and met the changemakers of the time. Rau once told a newspaper that she lived in three-year cycles, spending “a year in New York, a city I adore, a year in India, and a year travelling”.
Cedric Dover. | Credit: Yale University Library Archives.
In 1948, a case came up for hearing in the California supreme court that challenged one of the very bases of racial segregation. The case was of Andrea Perez, a Mexican American woman. Perez, who was legally considered white because of her Spanish heritage, had been denied the right to marry Sylvester Davis, an African American, because of California’s anti-miscegenation law. An indignant Perez petitioned the supreme court, demanding a marriage licence. The court agreed. It struck down the miscegenation law as unconstitutional by a verdict of four to three. Justice Jesse Carter, one of the judges in the majority, wrote a 3,565-word judgement explaining the decision, in which he chose to cite a book written by Cedric Dover, an Anglo-Indian born nearly 8,000 miles away in Calcutta.