Extravagant wedding celebrations for the son of Asia’s richest man conclude with a reception
Extravagant wedding celebrations for the son of Asia’s richest man conclude with a reception/node/2549906/world
Extravagant wedding celebrations for the son of Asia’s richest man conclude with a reception
Anant Ambani, son of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, and Radhika Merchant, daughter of industrialist Viren Merchant, react during their wedding celebrations in Mumbai, India, on July 12, 2024. (REUTERS)
Extravagant wedding celebrations for the son of Asia’s richest man conclude with a reception
Youngest son of Mukesh Ambani married Radhika Merchant, daughter of pharma tycoons, with a price tag running into the millions
Ambani, who owns Reliance Industries conglomerate, is the world’s ninth-richest man with net worth of $116 billion, according to Forbes
Updated 15 July 2024
AP
MUMBAI: A wedding reception on Sunday wrapped up the monthslong celebrations as the youngest son of Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, married his longtime girlfriend with a price tag running into the millions.
The newlyweds were cheered by friends and relatives at Mumbai’s Jio World Drive — a convention center built and owned by the Ambani family — as part of the “Mangal Utsav” (a festival of Bliss), which marked what many have dubbed as the wedding of the year.
Anant Ambani tied the knot with Radhika Merchant, daughter of pharma tycoons Viren and Shaila Merchant. The wedding rituals, including exchanging garlands by the couple and walking around the sacred fire, began Friday and were completed early Saturday.
Former British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Tony Blair, as well as Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas, American wrestler and actor John Cena, Bollywood superstars Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan and Salman Khan were among the celebrities who attended the ceremonies on Friday and Saturday.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi blessed the newlyweds at a Saturday reception organized by the Ambanis, highlighting the billionaire’s rising clout.
“This is the final and the most auspicious ceremony and the last wedding in our family,” The Times of India newspaper quoted Mukesh Ambani. The Ambanis didn’t say how much they spent on the festivities that have been going on for months.
Indian actor Shahrukh Khan, second left, shares a light moment with his family as they pose for a picture during the blessing ceremony of newlywed couple Anant Ambani son of billionaire Mukesh Ambani's and his wife Radhika Merchant at Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai, India, on July 13, 2024. (AP)
During a three-day pre-wedding celebration in March, Rihanna and Akon performed for a star-studded 1,200-person guest list.
A four-day European cruise in May featured on-deck concerts from the Backstreet Boys and Pitbull, followed by a masquerade ball where Katy Perry sang. At last week’s traditional music night in Mumbai Justin Bieber belted out his music hits.
The Antilia mansion, house of billionaire Mukesh Ambani, is lit up ahead of his son Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant's wedding in Mumbai, India, on July 10, 2024. (AP)
The groom’s father, Mukesh Ambani, is the world’s ninth-richest man, with a net worth of $116 billion, according to Forbes. He is the richest person in Asia. His Reliance Industries is a conglomerate reporting over $100 billion in annual revenue, with interests that include petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecoms and retail.
The Ambani family owns, among other assets, a 27-story family compound in Mumbai worth $1 billion. The building contains three helipads, a 160-car garage and a private movie theater.
The groom, 29-year-old Anant, oversees the conglomerate’s renewable and green energy expansion. He also runs a 3,000-acre (about 1,200-hectare) animal rescue center in Gujarat state’s Jamnagar, the family’s hometown.
The bride, also 29, is the daughter of pharmaceutical tycoon Viren Merchant and is the marketing director for his company, Encore Healthcare, according to Vogue.
Ambani’s critics say his company has relied on political connections during Congress Party-led governments in the 1970s and ‘80s, and under Modi’s rule since 2014.
Immigration concerns endure in UK town hit by riot
The images from Rotherham were among the most striking of the recent riots across England and Northern Ireland
Updated 7 sec ago
AFP
ROTHERHAM, United Kingdom: Ten days after the riots, the scars of violence are still visible outside the hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham, northern England, where many residents remain shellshocked and still worried about immigration. “It was terrifying,” Clive Wingate, who lives near the now-infamous Holiday Inn Express, said. “When they were lighting the bins to push into the building, where there were people inside, what were their intentions?” the 66-year-old pensioner asked. The images from Rotherham were among the most striking of the recent riots across England and Northern Ireland. Hundreds of men, some draped in the English flag, gathered outside the hotel, chanting “kick them out” while outnumbered police came under fire from bricks and burning objects. The nationwide riots — the worst in the country since 2011 — began after a knife attack that killed three girls during a dance class on July 29 in Southport, another northern town. False rumors that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker spread on social media, and although police corrected the record, anti-immigration riots erupted for more than a week, leading to more than 1,000 arrests. At the Holiday Day Inn in Rotherham, an economically deprived town in South Yorkshire, a police cordon still marked it as a “crime scene” this week. Signs of fire damage and plywood covering doors and windows remained as indicators of the violence. The leafy area several kilometers (miles) from the town center is usually peaceful, residents said, adding that the asylum seekers housed there while their applications are processed were not a major problem. The rioters “deserve jail, they are morons,” said Charlotte Bedford, who was out walking her dog. “If you want to protest, protest peacefully,” added the 34-year-old. Several rioters received heavy sentences. They included three years in prison for a 19-year-old who threw bricks at police officers and two years and eight months for a 60-year-old man who pulled an officer to the ground. Phil Fletcher, a 65-year-old who worked in property maintenance, criticized the violence, but was not surprised by the riots. “There are millions of people fed up with immigration. It’s not our country anymore,” said the pensioner, who voted for the anti-immigration Reform UK party in the general election in early July, won by Labour. Not far from him, a woman added: “18,000 arrived since the beginning of the year,” referring to the number of migrants arriving on small boats in southeast England after crossing the Channel. “That’s too many. Immigration has to be the priority for this government,” she added. According to its supporters, Brexit was supposed to allow the UK to take back control of its borders. But legal and irregular immigration, including via the small boats, have since reached record levels. Natalie Jackson, a 28-year-old teaching assistant, said that the UK is “a small island.” “We are overpopulated. We can’t even get a doctor’s appointment anymore,” she said. Caroline Roberts, a 66-year-old seamstress, added: “Nobody is listening to people that are complaining.” “If you say anything, you are called a racist. “It’s making people very angry. The help they (migrants) get, our own children can’t get it. We are short of money here,” she added. Rotherham, which has a population of 265,000, grew during the Industrial Revolution but suffered decades of economic decline as the local steelworks and mines closed. The town also experienced a notorious child sexual exploitation scandal between 1997 and 2013 which is still reverberating today. Gangs of men with Pakistani heritage abused around 1,400 girls, mostly white and from disadvantaged backgrounds, whom they raped and sexually exploited, according to watchdog reports into the scandal. The official report severely criticized authorities for a failure to address the abuse, attributing it to issues around race, class and religion and a fear that the perpetrators’ ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism. This has only increased the distrust of immigration and institutions in the town. “There was always going to be more anger here,” explained Riaz Ayaaz, referring to the legacy of the abuse scandal. The 29-year-old Muslim, born in Rotherham, said that his mosque had asked worshippers to “look out for each other,” to not “react” to possible provocations and to “trust the police.” For him, a “lot of people” used the deaths of the three girls in Southport “as an excuse to vent out their frustrations.” He called for a focus on “wider scale issues,” particularly the economy, “which impacts everything else.”
US, French naval forces conduct operations in Philippine sea
Vessels involved in the operations included US Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey and the French Navy Aquitane-class frigate FS Bretagne
Updated 26 min 30 sec ago
Reuters
BEIJING: The US and French Navy conducted bilateral operations in the Philippine Sea on Tuesday to advance their interoperability “in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific,” the US 7th Fleet said in a statement on Thursday.
Vessels involved in the operations included US Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey and the French Navy Aquitane-class frigate FS Bretagne, with the ships conducting formation sailing, combined communication, and simulated refueling at sea, according to the statement.
The alert that such a catastrophe might hit prompted thousands of Japanese to cancel holidays and stock up on essentials
The advisory concerned the Nankai Trough between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean
Updated 15 August 2024
AFP
TOKYO: Japan was set on Thursday to lift a week-old warning that a “megaquake” potentially causing colossal damage and loss of life could strike, the government said.
The alert that such a catastrophe might hit the archipelago of 125 million people prompted thousands of Japanese to cancel holidays and stock up on essentials, emptying shelves in some stores.
Japan’s disaster management minister Yoshifumi Matsumura said the “special call for attention” would be lifted at 5:00 p.m. (0800 GMT) assuming there was no major seismic activity.
Matsumura cautioned, however, that the “possibility of a major earthquake has not been eliminated,” urging people to regularly check their preparedness “for the major earthquake that is expected.”
Last Thursday, Japan’s weather agency said the likelihood of a megaquake was “higher than normal” after a magnitude 7.1 jolt earlier in the day that injured 15 people.
That was a particular kind of tremor known as a subduction megathrust quake, which in the past has occurred in pairs and can unleash massive tsunamis.
The advisory concerned the Nankai Trough between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean.
The 800-kilometer (500-mile) undersea gully runs parallel to Japan’s Pacific coast, including off the Tokyo region, the world’s biggest urban area and home to around 40 million people.
In 1707, all segments of the Nankai Trough ruptured at once, unleashing an earthquake that remains the nation’s second-most powerful on record.
That quake — which also triggered the last eruption of Mount Fuji — was followed by two powerful Nankai megathrusts in 1854, and one each in 1944 and 1946.
Japan’s government has previously said the next magnitude 8-9 megaquake along the Nankai Trough has a roughly 70 percent probability of striking within the next 30 years.
In the worst-case scenario, 300,000 lives could be lost, experts estimate, with some engineers saying the damage could reach $13 trillion, with infrastructure wiped out.
Experts, however, said the risk was still low, and the agriculture and fisheries ministry urged people on Saturday “to refrain from excessively hoarding goods.”
The statement came after supermarkets put limits on purchases including bottled water, and as demand for emergency items such as portable toilets and preserved food soared online.
The megaquake warning even prompted Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to cancel a four-day trip to Central Asia due to take place last weekend.
Some bullet trains reduced their speed as a precaution and nuclear plants were instructed by authorities to double-check their disaster preparations.
Sitting on top of four major tectonic plates, Japan sees some 1,500 quakes every year, most of them minor.
Even with larger tremors, the impact is generally contained thanks to advanced building techniques and well-practiced emergency procedures.
The Japan Meteorological Association (JMA) warning was the first under new rules drawn up after a 2011 quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that left around 18,500 people dead or missing.
The 2011 tsunami sent three reactors into meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing Japan’s worst post-war catastrophe and the world’s most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
“The history of great earthquakes at Nankai is convincingly scary,” geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith A. Hubbard wrote in their Earthquake Insights newsletter last week.
But there was only a “small probability” that last week’s magnitude 7.1 earthquake was a foreshock, according to Bradley and Hubbard.
“One of the challenges is that even when the risk of a second earthquake is elevated, it is still always low,” they said.
South Korea’s Yoon calls for new working group with North
‘The freedom we enjoy must be extended to the frozen kingdom of the North, where people are deprived of freedom and suffer from poverty and starvation’
North Korea was recently hit by severe flooding in its northern regions near China
Updated 15 August 2024
AFP
SEOUL: South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Thursday proposed an “Inter-Korean Working Group” aimed at relieving soaring tensions with Pyongyang and exploring avenues for economic cooperation.
Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in years, with the North recently announcing the deployment of 250 ballistic missile launchers to its southern border.
North Korea has sent thousands of trash-filled balloons southward since May, prompting Seoul to resume propaganda broadcasts along the frontier and suspend a 2018 deal aimed at lowering temperatures between the two militaries.
Declaring his “unification vision” Thursday at an event celebrating the country’s liberation from Japanese rule, Yoon said: “As long as the state of division persists, our liberation will remain incomplete.”
“The freedom we enjoy must be extended to the frozen kingdom of the North, where people are deprived of freedom and suffer from poverty and starvation,” he said, calling for the establishment of a new Inter-Korean Working Group.
The body “could take up any issue ranging from relieving tensions to economic cooperation, people-to-people and cultural exchanges, and disaster and climate-change responses,” Yoon said.
Yoon also underscored the “need to change the minds of the North Korean people to make them ardently desire a freedom-based unification.”
“Even though the North Korean regime rejected our offer (to provide flood relief supplies) yet again, we will never stop making offers of humanitarian aid,” Yoon said.
The North was recently hit by severe flooding in its northern regions near China, with state media reporting more than 15,000 flood victims were moved to the capital.
International offers of support have poured in since news of the flooding disaster first emerged, including from Seoul, which offered humanitarian aid via the Korean Red Cross.
But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said that the country’s recovery efforts would be “thoroughly based on self-reliance,” according to state media.
North Korea declared the South its principal enemy earlier this year, and Pyongyang has not responded to inter-Korean liaison hotline calls since April 2023.
Democrats try to block from presidential ballot Green Party, which topped survey among Arab Americans
DNC member files a complaint seeking to remove Jill Stein from the ballot in Wisconsin, arguing that the party is ineligible
Stein, known for her vocal support of Palestinian rights, has emerged as the top choice among Arab American voters in the lead-up to the US elections
Updated 15 August 2024
Arab News
RIYADH: The US Green Party’s presidential nominee, who is emerging as the most favored candidate of Arab Americans, is apparently being targetted by allies of Vice President Kamala Harris.
In what looks like the start of a disqualification campaign, a member of the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to remove Jill Stein from the ballot in Wisconsin, arguing that the party is ineligible, The Association Press reported.
It's the latest move by the DNC to block third-party candidates from the ballot, said the report, noting that Democrats are also seeking to stop independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in several states. The report was carried by various media outlets in the US.
Jill Stein, known for her vocal support of Palestinian rights, has emerged as the top choice among Arab American voters in the lead-up to the US elections on Nov. 5, according to a poll conducted late last month by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
Stein, a physician and environmentalist, got more than 45 percent of Arab Americans ahead of the Democratic Party presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, who received 27.5 percent of the vote. Republican candidate Donald Trump polled only 2 percent, while 17.9 per cent were undecided.
The Green Party's appearance on the presidential ballot could make a difference in swing state Wisconsin, where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by between 5,700 votes and about 23,000 votes, the report said.
Jill Stein is expected to officially become the Green Party’s presidential nominee at its national convention, which begins Thursday. The party has yet to respond to the DNC's move.
Why Jill Stein?
Arab-American voters have increasingly gravitated toward Stein owing to her advocacy for Palestinian human rights and her opposition to the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza since October, ADC’s national executive director Abed Ayoub explained earlier in a post on the social platform X.
The latest survey showed a big jump from support for since ADC’s last opinion poll in May, where she led with 25 percent support. In that poll, President Joe Biden, who was still the presumptive Democratic candidate before he withdrew from the race in July, got 7 per cent of the Arab American vote. Trump polled only 2 percent.
Chris Habiby, the national government affairs and advocacy director for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said Stein’s support of a two-state solution and an end to Israel’s brutal military offensive in the Gaza Strip is driving her popularity among Arab- and Muslim-American voters.
Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip that killed over 40,000 civilians, most of them women and children.
“Dr. Jill Stein has been very clear and emphatic in her anti-genocide message,” he said on The Ray Hanania Radio Show, as reported earlier in Arab News.
In his column on Arab News, Hanania noted that while the poll numbers for Vice President Kamala Harris was much better compared to President Biden’s, her scornful response to a handful of Detroit protesters calling on her to press for a ceasefire in Gaza may not augur well for her campaign.
“Her response was a major political blunder that has sparked robust debate in many swing states where Arabs and Muslims showed during the Democratic primary elections during the past six months that they can deflect thousands of votes away from Biden, all but erasing his slim margin of victory in 2020 over Trump,” wrote Hanania.
“The Democrats are afraid to acknowledge the anti-Biden vote, and the likelihood that it will grow if Harris refuses to take the Arab and Muslim community seriously,” he also said.
Opinion
This section contains relevant reference points, placed in (Opinion field)
Veteran pollster John Zogby, president and founder of the polling company John Zogby Strategies, noted that Harris is currently leading the upward trendline mainly because she is new entering the Democratic Convention and is enjoying a short honeymoon driven by her newness as a candidate.
However, this popularity can change, he said, noting that Arab and Muslim voters have more influence today than they have ever had since first settling in this country, and that the issue driving their vote is Gaza.
In 2022, 2.2 million people in the US reported having Arab ancestry in that year’s Arab Community Survey. The majority of Arab Americans are native-born, and 85 percent of Arabs in the US are citizens.
While the community traces its roots to every Arab country, the majority of Arab Americans have ancestral ties to Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Iraq. The top four states by Arab American population size are California, Florida, Minnesota and Michigan.
The DNC's strange argument
The last time Stein was on the ballot in Wisconsin for the Green Party was in 2016, when she got just over 31,000 votes — more than Donald Trump's winning margin that year of just under 23,000 votes. Some Democrats blamed Stein for helping Trump win the state and the presidency.
The bipartisan elections commission in February unanimously approved ballot access for the Green Party’s presidential nominee this year because the party won more than 1% of the vote in a statewide race in 2022. Green Party candidate Sharyl McFarland got nearly 1.6% of the vote in a four-way race for secretary of state, coming in last.
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks at a Pro-Palestinian protest in front of the White House on June 8, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Getty Images via AFP)
But the complaint filed with the commission by David Strange, deputy operations director in Wisconsin for the DNC, alleges that the Green Party can't nominate presidential electors in Wisconsin, and without them they are forbidden from having a presidential candidate on the ballot.
State law requires that those who nominate electors in October be state officers, which includes members of the Legislature, judges and others. They could also be candidates for the Legislature.
The Green Party does not have anyone who qualifies to be a nominator, and therefore can't legally name a slate of presidential electors as required by law, the complaint alleges.
Because the Green Party could have mounted write-in campaigns for legislative candidates in Tuesday's primary, but did not, the complaint could not have been brought any sooner than Wednesday, the filing alleges.
“We take the nomination process for President and Vice President very seriously and believe every candidate should follow the rules," Adrienne Watson, senior adviser to the DNC, said in a statement. "Because the Wisconsin Green Party hasn’t fielded candidates for legislative or statewide office and doesn’t have any current incumbent legislative or statewide office holders, it cannot nominate candidates and should not be on the ballot in November.”
This is not the first time the Green Party's ballot status has been challenged.
In 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court kept the Green Party presidential candidate off the ballot after it upheld a deadlocked Wisconsin Elections Commission, which couldn't agree on whether the candidates filed proper paperwork.
This year, in addition to the Republican, Democratic and Green parties, the Constitution and Libertarian parties also have ballot access. The commission is meeting on Aug. 27 to determine whether four independent candidates for president, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West, met the requirements to appear on the ballot. The DNC member asks that the commission also consider its complaint at that meeting as well.
There are signs in some swing states, including Wisconsin, that those behind third-party candidates are trying to affect the outcome of the presidential race by using deceptive means — and in most cases in ways that would benefit Trump. Their aim is to to offer left-leaning, third-party alternatives who could siphon off a few thousand protest votes.
The latest Marquette University Law School poll conducted July 24 through Aug. 1 showed the presidential contest in Wisconsin between Democrat Kamala Harris and Trump to be about even among likely voters. Stein barely registered, with about 1% support, while Kennedy had 6%.
