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Don’t underestimate North Korean troops in Russia, ex-soldiers tell BBC

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What Haneul remembers most about his time in the North Korean military is the gnawing, continuous hunger. He lost 10kg in his first month of service, due to a diet of cracked corn and mouldy cabbage.
Three months into training, he says almost his entire battalion was severely malnourished and needed to be sent to a recovery centre to gain weight.
When they were later deployed as frontline guards to the border with South Korea, rice replaced corn. But by the time it reached their bowls, much had been siphoned off by rear units, and the remainder had been cut with sand.
Haneul says his unit was among the best-fed, a tactic to stop them defecting to South Korea. But it failed to prevent Haneul.
In 2012, he made a death-defying dash across the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) – the strip of land dividing the North from the South.
His experience and that of other military defectors helps shed light on the condition of thousands of North Korean troops deployed to the frontline in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

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International

FTX executives shave serious time off their sentences

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Ryan Salame and Caroline Ellison, FTX executives convicted for their roles in the notorious crypto fraud led by their former boss Sam Bankman-Fried, have both shaved time off their lengthy prison sentences.

Salame, a former top executive of FTX, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency trading platform, pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges in September 2023, and was sentenced in May to 7 1/2 years in federal prison. He began his sentence in October. But the Federal Bureau of Prisons currently lists his release date as March 1, 2031, more than a year earlier than his initial release date in April 2032. Business Insider first reported Salame’s new release date.

Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and the former CEO of FTX’s hedge fund arm, Alameda Research, was sentenced to 2 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to seven federal counts of fraud and conspiracy and was a key witness against Bankman-Fried. Her current release date is listed as July 20, 2025, three months earlier than her initial release date.

Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison, does not have a release date listed on the prisons website.

The Bureau of Prisons didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. However, in several past statements about early release dates, the bureau has told CNN that it does not comment on the conditions of any individual inmate, but inmates can earn good conduct time that is calculated into their projected release date.

Qualified inmates are currently eligible for up to 54 days of GCT time for each year of the sentence imposed by the court. Inmates have other ways of earning time credits while incarcerated, including participation in various prison programs.

FTX was a high-profile crypto startup that allowed people to buy and sell digital assets. It had its name emblazoned on an arena in Miami and on every Major League Baseball umpire’s jersey. The exchange had several celebrity endorsers and was widely believed to be a gold-standard for safety and security.

But FTX collapsed in November 2022 when customers pulled their funds as rumors spread about FTX’s unusually close ties to its founder’s crypto hedge fund, Alameda

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Accusations of genocide. Charges of corruption. Improbably, Netanyahu had a good year

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This time last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the doldrums.

“He started very low,” said Nadav Shtrauchler, a political strategist who has worked closely with Netanyahu. “The lowest point that he had.”

Many Israelis accused him of being asleep at the wheel on October 7, the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Some even said he enabled it by funding Hamas.

His political support was dismal – even if the Gaza war let him brush aside calls for an election. Polls suggested support for his Likud Party was down 25% from just three months prior.

On its face, the year that followed was hardly uplifting. It brought tens of thousands of deaths, regional conflict, indictments, and accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide. And yet, Netanyahu ends the year having transformed his standing in Israel.

“I am running a marathon,” he told a Tel Aviv courtroom earlier this month, facing charges – which he denies – of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. “I can run it with 20 kilos on my back, and I can run it with 10 kilos on my back.”

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‘It’s a scary time’: US universities urge international students to return to campus before Trump inauguration

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Fear and uncertainty are spreading across many US college campuses ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, with some schools advising international students to return early from winter break amid promises of another travel ban like the one that stranded students abroad at the start of Trump’s last term.

In a country where more than 1.1 million international students enrolled in US colleges and universities during the 2023-24 academic year, the former president has pledged more hardline immigration policies upon his return to the White House, including an expansion of his previous travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries and the revocation of student visas of “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.”

International students generally have nonimmigrant visas that allow them to study in the US but don’t provide a legal pathway to stay in the country.

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