NEW YORK (AP) — New York City will add the festival of Diwali to the list of public school holidays in recognition of the growth of the city’s South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities, Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday.

Diwali, known as the festival of lights, happens October or November, depending on the lunar calendar.

However, this year it falls on Sunday Nov. 12 — meaning the 2023-2024 school calendar will not be affected by the change.

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On Tuesday, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste-based discrimination after a vote by the local council. Ahead of the vote, several South Asians stood in line for hours to share their stories with council members.

Academic Prem Pariyar was one of them. He says he fled to the US from Nepal in 2015 after his family was brutally attacked by a group of upper caste people for speaking up against atrocities.

But that didn't stop the discrimination he faced because of his caste. Once, he says, he was invited to lunch at a friend's house in the San Francisco Bay...

A United States court on Tuesday dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by the Hindu American Foundation against four activists and academic Audrey Truschke for two articles published in news website Al Jazeera.

The court noted that it “cannot plausibly infer that any of their [Truschke and others] statements were made with actual malice”.

The US-based Hindutva advocacy group had filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on May 7 last year. Besides Truschke, it had sued Hindus for Human Rights co-founders Sunita...

Nearly two decades ago, at the age of 21, Gopal Patel moved into an ashram on the banks of the River Ganges to study the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s foundational Scriptures.

One of just a handful of Indian students at a “very racist” high school in England, he said, Patel, now 39, found comfort in the epic conversation between the sacred text’s warrior prince Arjuna and the god Krishna.

“It made me go into myself and try to discern who I was as a person, my identity and my cultural background,” Patel said. “By the time I finished reading it, I was like, ‘I want...