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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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Azerbaijan Airlines says plane crashed after ‘external interference’ as questions mount over possible Russian involvement

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Azerbaijan Airlines says the jet that crashed in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day experienced “physical and technical external interference,” according to an early investigation, as questions swirled about Russia’s possible involvement in the disaster.

At least 38 of the 67 people on board the plane were killed in the crash, Kazakh authorities confirmed, including two pilots and a flight attendant. People from Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were among those on board, according to preliminary data from Kazakhstan’s transport ministry.

One passenger told Reuters in an interview on Friday that he didn’t think he would survive after he heard a loud bang and the plane started to “behave unnaturally.”

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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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‘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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