Ashish Kumar Sen

S-a-m-e-e-r M-i-s-h-r-a. That’s how you spell success. The 13-year-old Indian American boy from West Lafayette, Indiana, won the coveted 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington on Friday night.

She's their favourite, but suppose Hillary loses.... Indians mull their options.

Agriculture scientist Norman Ernest Borlaug, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, played a significant role to usher in the Green Revolution by developing successive generations of disease-resistant, high-yield wheat varieties in the 1960s and the '70s. In an interview with Washington Times reporter Ashish Kumar Sen, Mr. Borlaug, 94, refutes President Bush's assertion that countries such as India and China are to blame for the shortage of food stocks and higher prices. The fault, he says, lies with the world's obsession with biofuels.

The Bush administration insists a growing demand from the burgeoning middle classes in developing nations, and not its focus on biofuels, is the key reason behind rising food prices.

The White House, led by President George W. Bush, sold the Iraq war to the American people with a slick "political propaganda campaign" aimed at "manipulating sources" and "downplaying the major reason for going to war." Those are the words not of a hardened Bush critic, of which there are many, but of the President's former spokesman Scott McClellan who has penned an explosive memoir, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" due in bookstores on Monday.

Bobby Jindal, the first Indian American Governor of a US state, has made to Senator John McCain’s shortlist of vice-presidential candidates. Jindal is one of the three Republican Party leaders the presumptive presidential candidate will meet with this Memorial Day weekend at his retreat outside Sedona, Arizona. The other two are McCain’s former rival for presidential nomination Mitt Romney and Florida Governor Charlie Crist.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour, according to his physicians. Kennedy had been hospitalised in Boston over the weekend after he suffered a seizure.