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Muslim couple forced to sell house after protests by Hindu neighbours

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A Muslim couple in India have been hounded out of their newly-purchased home by their Hindu neighbours who said they would not allow them to live there because of their religion.
Hindu residents of the posh TDI City – an upscale residential bloc in the northern city of Moradabad – began protesting on Tuesday night after news of the sale became public.
The incident resulted in a huge outrage in India after a video from the protest went viral. It showed one of the residents Megha Arora saying that Dr Ashok Bajaj, a resident, had sold his house to a Muslim family without consulting them.
“We cannot tolerate a Muslim family living right in front of our local temple. This is also a question of the safety of our women,” she said.
“We want the sale to be revoked and are asking the administration to cancel the registration of the house in the name of its new owners. We cannot allow people from another faith to come and live here. We will not allow them to enter and continue to protest as long as they don’t go away,” she added.
Many of the residents also visited the district magistrate’s office to lodge a complaint. Outside, they shouted slogans against Dr Bajaj and the Muslim couple.
The protests have had their intended effect. On Friday, Dr Bajaj told the BBC that a resolution, mediated by the city’s elected representative, had been reached and the new Muslim owners would re-sell the house to a Hindu family already living in the housing society.
Dr Bajaj, who runs an eye hospital in the city and had lived in the society for more than six years, said he had sold the house to the Muslim couple who are both doctors and that their families had known each other for 40 years. The Muslim couple, he said, were no longer comfortable moving into the house.
He added that the furore over the sale was “uncalled for” and that he had not expected it to become national news.
But there is evidence that incidents of violence and discrimination against India’s Muslim community have grown in the past decade under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Anti-Muslim hate speech incidents have surged, with a majority reported from states ruled by the BJP – Moradabad is also located in the BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh. The BJP has consistently denied these claims.
Tanvir Aeijaz, professor of politics and public policy at Delhi University, says the incident in Moradabad “shows that religious polarisation has sunk in, that it’s working at the ground level”.
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Dr Bajaj says the protest started after he introduced the Muslim couple to his neighbours as a gesture of goodwill.
The backlash to the sale of the house, he said, “has come out of nowhere” as there are other Muslim families already living in the colony and that “we had always had a good rapport with our neighbours”.
“The controversy is changing the fabric of the city. Our intention was not to create any kind of unrest with this transaction,” he said, adding that “there is no law” against this transaction.
The colony also did not have a residents’ association that would need to approve the sale, he said. “Now they have woken up to make it.”

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International

Clampdown on fake Google reviews announced

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Google has agreed to make “significant changes to its processes” to help tackle fake reviews of UK businesses, the regulator has announced.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says the firm – which accounts for 90% of search in the UK – will attach warnings to companies found to have artificially boosted their star rating.
The worst offenders will have their review function deactivated, meaning they cannot receive any new reviews.
Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews will be banned from posting – regardless of where they are in the world.
Consumer group Which? called the changes “a step in the right direction” but said they would need to be backed up with strong enforcement action, potentially including “heavy fines” if Google failed to stick to them.

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How an epic series on Asia’s wildlife was filmed

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Filming the BBC’s landmark series Asia took its crew on a four-year-long odyssey from the open ocean to the “roof of the world”.

From frozen mountains to parched deserts, and lush tropical rainforest to vast grassland steppes – Asia is Earth’s largest continent and home to an incredible array of environments.
Perhaps because of that sheer size and variety, until last year the BBC had never devoted a wildlife series entirely to it. The vastness, the crowded megacities and the extreme diversity of environments makes it harder to encapsule in a handful of episodes.
The Natural History Unit’s landmark series Asia took four years to make. “Many parts of Asia are extremely remote, largely unknown, or frequently off-limits,” producer Matthew Wright says. “Its wildlife is less well-studied than that of Africa and the Americas, so we had fewer leads to go on when we started our research.”
“We started by scouring scientific papers, books, websites and social media looking for stories. We spoke to colleagues, conservationists and tour guides too. Once running orders were drawn up, we spent two years and over 2,500 days filming,” said Wright.

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The far-reaching impacts of wildfire smoke – and how to protect yourself

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The air we breathe can have profound effects on our physical and mental health. Is there any way of protecting yourself from this pervasive problem?

All but 1% of the world’s population is exposed to unhealthy air that exceeds World Health Organization (WHO) limits for pollutants. In parts of the world, air quality has rapidly improved through policies that aim to limit pollution. But elsewhere, gains in air quality are at risk of being lost.
More than 25% of the US population is exposed to air considered “unhealthy” by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to a report by the climate non-profit First Street Foundation. By 2050, the number of people exposed to “unhealthy” days is set to increase by more than half. The worst days of air pollution (“hazardous” or maroon, under the EPA’s system) are expected to rise by 27%.
Wildfire smoke is one of the factors driving this trend. One study of PM2.5 (see fact box: What is PM2.5?) from wildfire smoke found that levels had increased by up to five micrograms per cubic metre in the western US in the past decade – enough to reverse “decades of policy-driven improvements in overall air quality”, the authors concluded.

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