WASHINGTON: Vacationing in India, engineer Amrutha Tamanam rushed to return to the United States after Donald Trump abruptly announced a $100,000 fee for the visa she holds.

As she scrambled to get back to the country she’s called home for a decade, racially motivated far-right trolls launched coordinated efforts to disrupt flight bookings from India, calling their campaign “clog the toilet.”

The White House would later clarify that the new H-1B fee was a one-time payment not applicable to current holders. But leading US companies had already advised their employees abroad to swiftly return to avoid the fee or risk being stranded overseas.

Tamanam, an Austin-based software engineer, began searching for a flight from the city of Vijayawada, as users on the far-right message board 4chan moved to overwhelm reservation systems, in a bid to block Indian visa holders from booking tickets.

One 4chan thread encouraged users to find India-US flights, “initiate the checkout process”, but “don’t check out,” thereby clogging the system and preventing the visa holders from reaching the United States before the announcement took effect.

The campaign may have had a direct impact on Tamanam, who encountered repeated crashes on airline websites. The checkout page, which typically allows users a window of a few minutes, timed out much faster.

After multiple attempts, she eventually managed to rebook a one-way ticket to Dallas on Qatar Airways, spending around $2,000 — more than double the cost of her original round-trip fare.

“It was hard for me to book a ticket, and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel,” Tamanam told AFP.

‘Keep them in India’

The 4chan thread — which also circulated among far-right Trump supporters on Telegram and other fringe forums — read: “Indians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!”

Responding posts, many riddled with racist slurs, advised users to hold seats for popular India-US routes on airline websites and booking platforms — without completing the purchase.

The stated goal was to block availability on high-demand flights, making it harder to find available seats and inflating prices.

Illustrating the scale of the operation, one 4chan user posted a screenshot of their browser and claimed: “I got 100 seats locked.”

“Currently clogging the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight,” another wrote.

Several 4chan users also posted about holding up seats on Air India and slowing the airline’s website. However, an Air India spokesperson told AFP the site experienced no disruptions, with systems operating normally.

‘Shared antipathy’

Though it was difficult to measure the campaign’s overall effectiveness, the trolling was an attempt to “cause panic among H-1B visa holders,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told AFP.

“The real scary thing about 4chan is its ability to radicalise people into extremist beliefs,” Beirich said, adding that several US mass shooters had published manifestos to the site.

H-1B visas allow companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialised skills — such as scientists and computer programmers — to work in the United States, initially for three years but extendable to six.

The United States awards 85,000 H-1B visas per year on a lottery system, with India accounting for around three-quarters of the recipients.

In an age of information warfare, the troll operation illustrates how bad actors can launch disruptive attacks “with the stroke of a keyboard,” said Brian Levin, founder of the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

“As nationalistic politics takes hold across the world, an informal international association of opponents will use an array of aggressive tools, including the internet,” Levin told AFP.

“What I think is so relevant is how rapidly it spread, how diverse the nations represented were, and how shared antipathy across international borders can be mobilised online.”

NEW JERSEY:  Dr Maryam Shoukat, a 27-year-old Pakistani doctor pursuing her residency in the United States, passed away today just 30 minutes before her scheduled liver transplant. 

She had been admitted in critical condition with acute liver failure. Dr Maryam had travelled to US with the dream of serving humanity, but her life was cut short before she could realise that goal.

Earlier this month, Maryam was admitted to Rutgers University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, after her liver suddenly failed. Her condition rapidly deteriorated, and doctors made it clear that an urgent liver transplant was the only way to save her life. 

In this critical situation, her husband, Dr Hamza Zafar, reached out to APPNA (Association of Physicians of Pakistani descent of North America) for help.

APPNA immediately launched an emergency fundraising campaign, raising $273,000 within just one day, and said the total had now reached close to $400,000.

This extraordinary response led the hospital to reduce the total transplant cost from $900,000 to $450,000. APPNA quickly paid $100,000 to the hospital, allowing Dr Maryam’s name to be officially placed on the transplant list. A matching donor liver was also found soon after.

According to APPNA’s General Secretary, Dr Muhammad Sanaullah and Dr A. Fazal Akbar, the organisation’s President, Dr Humera Qamar, along with Dr Zeeshan, Dr Babar Rao, Dr Fateh Shehzad, and Dr Siddique Khurram, played vital roles in this life-saving effort. 

They shared that all members came together with the hope of saving a life that, once recovered, would go on to save many more through her service as a doctor.

Tragically, just as Dr Maryam was about to be taken to the operating room for the transplant today, her condition suddenly worsened, and she passed away only thirty minutes before the procedure.

APPNA leaders expressed deep sorrow, saying that Dr Maryam Shoukat’s journey was a story of sacrifice, courage, and hope. She came to heal others, but in her final days, she needed healing herself.

• Russia’s top diplomat addresses UN amid rising Europe tension.
• He warns of militaristic rhetoric, plays down drone incursions.
• US military action near Venezuela “alarming,” he says.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the West on Saturday that any aggression against Moscow would face a “decisive response,” warning against attempts to down aircraft in Russian airspace and accusing Germany of militaristic rhetoric.

As Russia’s war rages in Ukraine, tensions have mounted along NATO’s eastern flank in recent weeks as Estonia said Moscow sent three fighter jets into its airspace and NATO warplanes shot down Russian drones over Poland.

“Any aggression against my country will be met with a decisive response. There should be no doubt about this among those in NATO and the EU who … are telling their voters that war with Russia is inevitable,” he told the United Nations General Assembly.

The spate of airspace incursions linked to Russia has unnerved countries in eastern Europe, where Russia is seen as the biggest threat since the end of the Cold War. Hopes have dimmed of any imminent end to Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

US President Donald Trump said this week that he endorsed the idea of shooting down Russian jets that violate NATO airspace, part of a rhetorical shift that saw him mock Russia’s military performance in Ukraine and call it a paper tiger.

Lavrov brushed off Trump’s most recent remarks during a press conference that followed his General Assembly speech, but issued a warning about any moves against aircraft inside Russia.

“If there are attempts to down any flying object, any object… in our airspace, then I think people will very much regret undertaking such an egregious violation of our territorial integrity and sovereignty,” he said.

He said that only the “politically blind” would expect Ukraine to one day return to the borders it had before Russia invaded in February 2022, an indirect response to Trump’s assertion that Kyiv could retake all its occupied land from Russia.

Lavrov also singled out German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, referring to what he said was “militaristic rhetoric” and said Moscow was alarmed by remarks by politicians in EU and NATO capitals of a looming World War III as a “likely scenario.”

Russia hopes for ‘frank dialogue’

Despite taking aim at NATO and the European Union, Lavrov made clear Moscow remained hopeful of “frank dialogue” with the United States under Trump despite the US president’s recent shifting stance.

The US and Russia, he said, will hold a third round of talks in the coming months aimed at improving each other’s embassy operations, which have been severely curtailed by a decade of tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions and other curbs.

Lavrov met US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday on the sidelines of the annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly.

Lavrov said he did not see economic relations between Russia and India as under threat, as Trump has placed tariffs on products from India, calling on it and China to stop purchasing Russian oil.

Russia concerned over US buildup near Venezuela

Despite his cautious tone on Trump, Lavrov voiced alarm over a US naval build-up and military action in international waters around Venezuela to combat drug cartels, describing the situation as “very serious.”

Without naming the US, Lavrov questioned whether “certain creative actors” could try to use a proposed draft UN Security Council resolution to create a larger international force to fight gangs in Haiti to justify an attack within Venezuela.

The draft text being considered by the 15-member body has been put forward by the US and Panama. It needs at least nine votes and no vetoes by Russia, China, the US, France or Britain to pass.

“I cannot rule out that certain creative actors could think of getting a mandate at the Security Council and later say that there are gangs from Haiti harboured in Venezuela. I cannot rule that out,” said Lavrov.