NRIs Corner

An Indian-origin man, who is running for a local election in Britain’s West London next month, was suspended by the British Labour party as its candidate after it was found that he was embroiled in a court case.

Cranford ward candidate Gurpal Virdi, who is a former Metropolitan police officer from Hounslow, has been accused of indecently assaulting a 16-year-old boy between Sep 30 and Dec 31 in 1986 and has been summoned to appear before the Westminster Magistrate’s Court May 30, Get West London website reported Monday.

A Sikh school in Britain has reassured its students and their parents that its premises are completely safe after it was claimed that the school was constructed on contaminated soil, media reported Monday.

Diggers at free school, Khalsa Secondary School in Stoke Poges in southeast Britain, were reportedly found to be taking up turf of contaminated soil during a re-development work in the premises, the Trinity Mirror reported Monday.

It has been claimed by the nearby local village residents that the site is a possible threat to pupils and staff as the soil is severely contaminated.

Delhi Police have not yet ascertained the reason for the brutal killing of a British citizen, whose body was found Sunday inside a plastic sack in a market, and are awaiting more information about his background, an official said.

Police have collected the footage of CCTV cameras installed in Bhogal market in south Delhi from where the body of 40-year-old Andrew Raymond Rodick was found inside a plastic sack Sunday morning. His hands and legs were tied and the body was wrapped in a carpet.

Indian-origin internet advertising mogul Gurbaksh Chahal, who escaped jail despite beating his girlfriend 117 times, has been fired from his post of CEO and chairman by his company.

The board of directors at RadiumOne, a Silicon Valley company that focusses on real-time advertising across web, mobile and Facebook, met over the weekend and “voted to terminate the employment of Gurbaksh Chahal as CEO and Chairman of the company,” the company said in a statement.

The award-winning Indian professor who was found dead in his residence on a university campus in Oman Friday, was a brilliant student, teacher and a scientist, his former colleague said.

M.Kabir, a visiting professor at the Centre for Development Studies here, told IANS that it was only last week that Hisham Abdul-Khader visited here for a day to attend his niece’s wedding.

“It was about 13 years back he left the state government service here and joined at the Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Muscat,” Kabir said.

An Indian national has been found dead at his residence on a university campus in Oman.

Hisham Abdul-Khader, 57, who worked as an associate professor in the chemistry department of Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Muscat, was found Friday.

“His body was found in his room. We came to know about the tragedy late Friday night around 22.30 p.m. He was staying alone,” Times Of Oman quoted a person close to the professor as saying Saturday.

The professor went for an evening stroll Friday before his death, a witness said.

A British man jailed for ‘posing as a Muslim’ in Pakistan, has spoken about his ordeal for the first time since returning to the UK.

Masud Ahmad was arrested in Pakistan in November under blasphemy laws, but fled while on bail.

The 73-year-old is part of the minority Ahmadiyya sect, who are considered heretics in Pakistan.

One of the restrictions on their religious freedom is that they cannot publicly recite the Koran.

According to the BBC, late last year, a young man posing as a patient visited Ahmad at his homeopathy clinic in Lahore.

Two Indian American doctors are among six people charged by the US federal regulator with insider trading in advance of eBay’s acquisition of an e-commerce company to reap more than $300,000 in illegal profits.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged that Suken Shah and his brother Shimul Shah received confidential tips from Christopher Saridakis, the CEO of the marketing solutions division of GSI Commerce, an e-commerce company.

A Malayalam film director has proposed a movie on an Indian social worker in the UAE who has helped in the repatriation of over 2,000 dead bodies of Indian expatriates, a media report said Saturday.

Ashraf Thamarassheri, a social worker based in United Arab Emirates’s Ajman, has been assisting expatriate families with documentation work for repatriating dead bodies of their loved ones and was reportedly chosen as the best social worker by the Malayalam TV channel Media One, Emirates24|7 reported Saturday.

A man has been jailed for two years for causing the death of an Indian-origin woman in Britain after she finished her relationship with him.

Stalker Ryan Dey was arrested in November last year, a month after the death of 29-year-old Kamaljit Sidhu in Birmingham.

Dey was accused of harassing and stalking his former girlfriend for several months before she leaped from a bridge to her death.

Birmingham Crown Court was told how lorry driver Dey had been seeing Sidhu for around 18 months when she tried to end the relationship last October.

An Indian origin man has been charged with simple assault for allegedly groping a sleeping fellow female passenger for about five minutes on a flight from London to San Francisco.

Vinay Pochampally molested the victim by placing his hand down the woman’s shirt two hours into British Airways Flight 285 last Tuesday, according to a US District Court criminal complaint cited by the Smoking Gun.

It is unclear whether Pochampally is a US citizen, nor do court records identify his lawyer, the investigative news site said.

Two Indian-American doctors among six persons have been charged by federal regulator with in an insider trading scheme where they reaped nearly USD 3,00000 from confidential information.

Suken Shah and his brother Shimul Shah received confidential tips from Christopher Saridakis, the CEO of the e-commerce company about its proposed acquisition by eBay in March 2011.

Gurbaksh Chahal, India-born CEO of RadiumOne, a Silicon Valley company focusing on real-time advertising across web, mobile and Facebook, has dodged jail time even after beating his girlfriend 117 times.

Chahal, 31, pleaded guilty to misdemeanour, domestic violence and battery charges last week, dodging 45 felony counts for the videotaped 30-minute beating of his girlfriend, The Huffington Post reported.

An Indian-origin man traveling in a British Airways flight has been accused of slipping his hand underneath a sleeping woman’s shirt and touching her breasts during a trip from London to San Francisco.

The suspect, Vinay Pochampally, was nabbed by cops at the San Francisco International Airport and charged with simple assault and faces a maximum penalty of up to 6 months in jail.

According to the New York Daily News, a U.S. District Court criminal complaint said that the alleged assault happened on April 15, two hours into Flight 285 from London to San Francisco.

A former boyfriend of Indian-American billionaire investor Vinod Khosla’s daughter has been charged with threatening to publish her naked photos as part of an extortion plot.

FBI agents last week arrested Douglas Tarlow, 27, a Stanford University graduate, who dated Khosla’s daughter Nina for about two years, in connection with the alleged extortion plot, according to The Smoking Gun, an investigative news site. Tarlow was subsequently released from custody and is scheduled for a US District Court preliminary hearing Friday.

US President Barack Obama has announced his intent to appoint three Indian-Americans to his 14-member advisory commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs).

The Indian-Americans include, US Air Force officer Lt Col Ravi Chaudhary, prominent community leader Shekar Narasimhan and popular film and television actor Maulik Pancholy.

N Nina Ahmad of Bangladeshi-origin has also been nominated to the AAPIs.

An Indian-American radiologist who owned and operated a diagnostic testing center in New Jersey has been sentenced to 46 months in prison for overseeing a sprawling cash-for-patients scheme to bribe other doctors for testing referrals.

A Sikh American is being prevented from doing jury duty in Sutter County in Northern California because of his kirpan, the ceremonial dagger worn by Sikhs as part of their religion.

Gursant Singh, who is scheduled for jury duty next week, says he has been told that when he arrives at the courthouse, he should not bring his kirpan, CBS13 reported.

Singh says he’s unwilling to violate his religion’s code of conduct. “I feel very strongly that as a citizen of the United States, I should be able to serve as a juror,” he was quoted as saying.

With Indians and other Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders growing in number at a fast pace, people of colour will be in the majority in the US by mid-century, according to a new report.

They are also quickly reaching the critical mass needed to be politically relevant, says the report from the Centre for American Progress and AAPI Data on how the growth of this group will affect a variety of key policy areas from immigration and education to healthcare and the environment.

An India-born dental surgeon will be felicitated Friday at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, (RCSEd) Scotland, for his contribution in the field of oral oncology.

Jatin Shah, a North America-based head and neck cancer surgeon, will receive the prestigious honorary fellowship in dental surgery from the RCSEd’s Faculty of Dental Surgery at the diploma ceremony of the 500-year-old college Friday.

Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) have detained an Indian national from Benapole, a border town with India, for possessing contraband gold.

The border guards, after receiving a tip-off, caught Putul Rani, 35, from Ghiba border area, Motiur Rahman, commander of Jessore 26 BGB Battalion, said

Rani hails from West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district, bdnews24.com reported.

Five gold bars were found in her possession.

She is now in the custody of Benapole Port Police.
(IANS)

An Indian woman, who was jailed last year for killing her alcoholic husband, is being sent back to India after being released on compassionate grounds, a media report said Thursday.

The appeals court in Oman’s Sur city last week had reduced the the woman term from five-years to six months – which ended Thursday – as her daughters are minors.

The 40-year-old woman, who worked as a teacher in a school in Sur in northeastern Oman, was arrested after her 49-year-old husband’s unnatural death Oct 25 last year, the Times of Oman reported Thursday.

An Indian origin man in the US has reportedly beaten his girlfriend and despite video evidence of the act, he did not face any jail.

According to Huffington Post, Gurbaksh Chahal, who is the CEO of RadiumOne, was sentenced to three years’ probation, 52 weeks in a domestic violence training program and 25 hours of community service.

Chahal, once named one of America’s “most eligible bachelors”, was arrested last August when his girlfriend called 911 and reported a case of domestic violence.

Lack of support among Indian-origin and Asian voters could cost Britain’s Conservative-led government the 2015 general election, a new independent study of the country’s demographics has warned.

According to the research by think-tank British Future, almost one in five new voters at the next election will be from an ethnic minority.

Of those voting for the first time in 2015, 18% will be from non-white backgrounds, compared with 12% of the electorate in 2010.

In the last election, support for the Conservatives among ethnic minorities was 16%, compared with 36% across the population.

In what has been dubbed as a David vs Goliath case, an India-born technocrat has taken America’s largest broadcasters, who claim his start-up’s television streaming service is a theft, to the Supreme Court.