Iranian protesters – The anti-government protests sweeping Iran are now in their eighth week, with no sign of ending, despite a bloody crackdown. The rest of the world has watched with alarm, with some countries taking steps in support of the protests.

What do Iranians want?

The protesters first want to be heard and get news coverage by the world’s media. The Iranian government has taken steps to minimise this as much as possible. For instance, foreign correspondents there (the BBC and others are banned) are not permitted to report the protests, film them or even take pictures.

As a result, citizen journalism and posting videos of protests on social media are key to getting the news out. But the government tries to stop this also. According to internet monitoring group NetBlocks, during the last seven weeks, the internet in Iran has often been shut down or massively interrupted.

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At the same time, 32 journalists have been arrested, according to the International Federation of Journalists, and the two remaining social media apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, have been blocked.

Opposition figures and civil society activists continuously call for more pressure on the regime to stop the violence and to hold it accountable. According to rights groups, more than 300 people, including at least 41 children, have been killed since the protests started.

Last month, 43 international human rights organisations urged the United Nations Human Rights Council to hold an emergency session about Iran, investigate the crackdown and take legal action against those responsible.

Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, or king, of Iran and a central figure for opposition outside the country, wrote to UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the UN’s children’s charity Unicef. He asked for multinational investigations into the killing of children in Iran. Along with other well-known opposition figures, Prince Reza has repeatedly called on Western leaders to condemn the violence by the Iranian government openly.

Many activists and opponents of the Iranian regime have also called for Iranian diplomats to be expelled from other countries and for the recall of foreign diplomats from Tehran.

Figures such as Hamed Esmaeilion, Prince Reza or Masih Alinejad, who has campaigned against the compulsory hijab (headscarf) rule in Iran, have for years tried to push the Iranian government into even deeper international isolation. To this end, Masih Alinejad has also been trying to get the Iranian football team banned from the 2022 Fifa World Cup.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/

Iranian protesters look to outside world for help
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FTX investors have been warned that the crypto exchange may be forced to file for bankruptcy protection if it doesn’t get a cash infusion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

The news follows reports that Binance balked at an earlier promise to buy the troubled trading empire after looking at its books. Bloomberg reported the FTX exchange faces an $8 billion shortfall.

SAM Bankman-Fried told FTX.com investors on Wednesday (Nov 9) that without a cash injection the company would need to file for bankruptcy, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Read Also – US elections: Biden hails better-than-expected midterms results

Before Binance pulled an about-face and bailed on its takeover offer, Bankman-Fried informed investors his crypto exchange faced a shortfall of up to US$8 billion, said the person, who requested anonymity discussing private talks. FTX is attempting to raise rescue financing in the form of debt, equity, or a combination of the two, the person said.

FTX has been on a tailspin for a week following CoinDesk’s reports of the blurred lines in the books of Sam Bankman-Fried’s once-mighty empire.

Bankman-Fried’s acknowledgement of his firm’s deep financial hole and limited options reflects the uncertain fate of FTX and its clients. It’s the latest twist in a stunning turn of events for the crypto industry’s onetime wunderkind, who was once worth US$26 billion and likened to John Pierpont Morgan.

Still, Bankman-Fried remained defiant during a hectic period of roughly 24 hours that included mounting speculation that Binance wouldn’t go through with the deal.

He repeatedly told investors during a conference call on Wednesday afternoon that it was simply not true that Changpeng Zhao was walking away from the takeover, the person said.

See also

FTX Warns of Bankruptcy Without Rescue for $8 Billion Shortfall
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US President Joe Biden has expressed relief after Democrats fended off major Republican gains in the midterms.

Republicans are inching towards control of the House of Representatives, but Mr Biden noted that a “giant red wave” did not materialise on Tuesday night.

Read Also – US midterm elections results

Either party could still win the Senate, which hinges on three races that are too close to call.

The party in power, currently the Democrats, usually suffers losses in a president’s first midterm elections.

Republican strategists had been hopeful of sweeping victories, given that inflation is at a 40-year-high and Mr Biden’s approval ratings are relatively low.

But exit poll data suggests voters may have punished Republicans for their efforts to restrict access to abortion.

Speaking at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, Mr Biden said the results so far had made him breathe a “sigh of relief”.

“It was a good day, I think, for democracy,” he said.

He added that his optimism had been vindicated, and ribbed journalists who had predicted heavy Democratic losses.

Buoyed by the better-than-expected night, Mr Biden said he plans to stand for re-election in 2024. “Our intention is to run again, that’s been our intention,” Mr Biden, who turns 80 this month, told reporters.

Republicans, meanwhile, were closing in on the 218 seats they need to wrest control of the House from Democrats.

If Republicans win either chamber of Congress, they will be able to block the president’s agenda. The White House is also braced for congressional investigations into the Biden administration.

Mr Biden said he was prepared to work with Republicans and would host bipartisan talks next week.

But the president also said he believed the American people would view any Republican-led inquiries as “almost comedy”.

US elections: Biden hails better-than-expected midterms results
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Rishi Sunak – Millions of middle earners will be more than £3,500 poorer because of plans by Rishi Sunak for a stealth raid on income tax that will last at least six years, an analysis for The Times has shown.

The prime minister and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, are thought to have agreed to extend until 2028 a freeze on income tax thresholds that had been due to end two years earlier. The agreement came at a meeting on Monday to discuss how to plug the £35 billion gap in public finances.

Prime minister and chancellor thought to have agreed to extend until 2028 a freeze on income tax thresholds. The agreement came at a meeting on Monday to discuss how to plug the �35 billion gap in public finances. Freezing tax thresholds drags more workers into paying more tax every year because a greater share of their wages are pushed into higher brackets.

Read Also – Rishi Sunak admits not enough asylum claims are being processed

Thousands more earners will be dragged into higher tax brackets, which won’t rise in line with inflation.

Middle earners on £50,000 could be around £3,500 poorer, according to research from Blick Rothenberg.

The plans could rake in an extra £5billion a year for the Chancellor.

Yesterday the PM’s press secretary admitted that all of Mr Sunak’s summer leadership vows are now up for review thanks to the dire state of the economy.

They said: “We are looking at all the campaign pledges and we are looking at whether it is the right time to take them forward.

“We need to take some time to make sure what is deliverable and what is possible.

“Obviously those are pledges that were made a few months ago now.

“The context, particularly economically, has changed significantly since that time.”

Source – https://www.thesun.co.uk/

Rishi Sunak’s stealth tax to cost middle earners £3,500
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Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick has highlighted the number of Albanian migrants arriving in the UK this year.

On some small boats, “80% of the individuals are coming from Albania”, he told MPs.

So how many have arrived and why are they leaving Albania, which Mr Jenrick called a “safe country”.

How many Albanian migrants come to the UK?

There has been a rapid increase in the number of Albanians migrants crossing the English Channel:

• In 2020, 50 arrived on small boats
• In 2021, 800 made the crossing
• In 2022, 12,000 have arrived so far

“The rise has been exponential and we think that is in the main due to the fact that Albanian criminal gangs have gained a foothold in the north of France,” Clandestine Channel Threat Commander Dan O’Mahoney told the Home Affairs Select Committee last week.

Of this year’s Albanian migrants, about 10,000 were single, adult men, he said.

Read Also – Swansea estate cuts bills by generating energy

How many Albanian migrants are granted asylum?

In the year to June 2022, 7,267 asylum applications were submitted by Albanian migrants, double the number the previous year.

In general, 53% of claims by Albanians are accepted.

About 14% of successful claims were by single, adult men. Most were by women and children.

Some Albanian migrants are believed to make asylum claims on the grounds they have been trafficked to the UK.

Albanians are the most commonly referred nationality for trafficking support in the UK.

Rather than claiming asylum, some Albanian migrants choose to disappear and work illegally in the UK, before returning to their home country, Mr O’Mahoney said.

Eligible Albanian citizens can apply for visas, of varying length, to enter the UK for tourism, business, study and other activities.

How many Albanians are sent back?

In 2022, in the months to June, 440 people were returned to Albania – almost all were single, adult men.

Albanians represent the highest number of foreign offenders sent back in the year to March 2022.

A bilateral agreement signed in 2021 by then-Home Secretary Priti Patel aimed to speed up the removal of Albanian criminals and failed asylum seekers from the UK.

“More than 1,000 Albanians, including some who crossed the Channel illegally to come to the UK” have been sent back under this agreement, the Home Office says .

The deal does not allow the government to remove Albanians with a current asylum case in the UK.

Albanian migrants: Why are they coming to the UK
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Swansea – Access to solar panels and a home battery has reduced energy bill worries for Nikita Harris on one of Europe’s largest green retrofit projects.

“Where I used to worry going to bed, I don’t have to worry now,” said Nikita, 26, whose home in Swansea now runs partially on a battery.

Some 644 properties are being connected to a unique energy-sharing scheme, social housing provider Pobl said.

Housing Minister Julie James has called the scheme “transformational”.

Power from linked solar panels on roofs across the Penderi estate is used to charge batteries in homes.

Nikita’s battery is fitted to a wall just inside the entrance of her terraced property.

By limiting the use of her big appliances to when the sun is up, the mother-of-two said she had cut her electricity bills significantly.

“I used to spend £20 a week on my electric,” she said, “now with the solar panels and battery I’m putting in £10 a week.

“By having the battery in my home… I feel calmer,” she said, explaining how sad she is for other people faced with having to limit their electricity use.

With energy storage and smart energy management technology now installed in 200 homes, Pobl said the estate had already started to cut the amount of power being drawn from the national grid.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/

Swansea estate cuts bills by generating energy
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Rishi Sunak has admitted not enough asylum claims are being processed, but promised to fix the system.

He was responding to questions from Sir Keir Starmer who accused the government of having lost control.

The Labour leader also called for Suella Braverman to be replaced with a “proper home secretary”.

Last week MPs were told that just 4% of those coming to the UK via small boat Channel crossings in 2021 had received decisions on their asylum claims.

The government is also facing questions about severe overcrowding at the Manston asylum processing centre in Kent, which has reportedly led to outbreaks of disease and violence.

There have been reports of over 4,000 people staying at the centre, despite it being meant to hold just 1,600 when it was built.

Migrants are supposed to be kept at the centre for 24 hours only but the chief inspector of immigration has said some people had been there for over a month.

On Monday, Ms Braverman said illegal migration was “out of control” and acknowledged the system was “broken”.

Repeating her comment at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir asked Mr Sunak “who broke it?”

“If the asylum system is broken and his lot have been in power for 12 years – how can it be anyone’s fault but theirs.”

The prime minister defended his government’s record, pointing to an increase of staff at Manston and the number of hotel beds available for arrivals.

“These are significant steps that demonstrate we are getting a grip of this system,” he told Sir Keir.

He accused Labour of not having a plan to fix the problem, describing their policy as “a blank page”.

Sir Keir said the government had wasted £140m on the Rwanda scheme which has so far failed to deport any failed asylum seekers.

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He urged the government to “scrap the Rwanda gimmick, crack down on smuggling gangs, end the small boat crossings, speed up asylum claims and agree an international deal on refugees?

“Start governing for once and get a grip.”

This was a difficult PMQs for the new prime minister for two reasons.

Firstly, he is Conservative prime minister number five after 12 years of Conservative government, and so there is nowhere to hide and no-one else to blame when things go wrong.

And secondly, because of the bluntness of his home secretary.

Suella Braverman said the other day that illegal immigration was “out of control”.

And Sunak was forced to admit the speed of processing asylum claims isn’t good enough.

The prime minister is, for now, managing to keep his side on side – with tribal stuff that Conservative MPs lap up about Keir Starmer having wanted Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister.

But you have to wonder about the shelf life of those attack lines as the problems for the government stack up.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/

Rishi Sunak admits not enough asylum claims are being processed
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Russia – The 110 Russians freed include 72 seamen from commercial vessels held since February while 108 Ukrainian female prisoners of war are released.

Moscow and Kyiv have carried out one of the biggest prisoner swaps of the war so far, exchanging a total of 218 detainees, including 108 Ukrainian women, officials from both countries say.

Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s staff, said there were 12 civilians among the women freed on Monday.

“Another large-scale exchange of prisoners of war was carried out today,” Yermak wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “… We freed 108 women from captivity. It was the first [Ukrainian] all-female exchange.”

He said 37 of the women had been captured after Russian forces took the Azovstal steelworks in the city of Mariupol in May.

Mariupol, a port city on the Sea of Azov in southeastern Ukraine, withstood weeks of Russian bombardment. Resistance was concentrated in a dense network of tunnels under its Azovstal steel plant.

“Ukraine does not abandon anyone,” Yermak said. According to him, some of the people exchanged were mothers and daughters who had been held together.

Images released by Yermak showed dozens of women, some wearing coats and military fatigues, disembarking from white buses.

The oldest woman is 62 years old while the youngest is 21, the Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said.

Russia’s defence ministry confirmed the swap, saying 110 Russians were freed, including 72 seamen from commercial vessels held since February. It said all those returned would be flown to Moscow and provided with medical and psychological assistance.

Ukraine’s interior ministry said some of the released women had been in jail since 2019 after being detained by pro-Moscow authorities in eastern regions.

Source – https://www.aljazeera.com/

Russia and Ukraine swap prisoners, including Ukrainian women
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Hong Kong – Manchester police were sent to the scene after violence against pro-democracy campaigners in the UK city of Manchester.

An investigation is underway into violence at a rally organised by Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners outside the Chinese consulate in the British city of Manchester, after video showed one of the protesters dragged into the grounds of the consulate and beaten.

The violence flared on Sunday when a small group of people gathered outside the consulate, putting up posters and banners, as the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party began in Beijing.

Video on social media showed a group of men suddenly attacking the group’s posters and placards, with scuffles breaking out. One protester was filmed being dragged through the gates onto the consulate grounds where he was attacked by a number of men before a police officer pulled him to safety.

Speaking to the BBC Chinese service, the protester, known as Bob, said “mainlanders” – referring to people from mainland China, as opposed to Hong Kong – came out of the consulate and began tearing up the group’s posters.

“As we tried to stop them, they dragged me inside, they beat me up,” he said, adding that he was finally pulled out by the British police.

Read Also – Una Marson – The story of the BBC’s first black producer

A spokesman for the Greater Manchester Police said an investigation into the incident had begun, and some officers remained at the site, according to a report in the Manchester Evening News.

Fellow Conservative Alicia Kearns, who chairs parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, echoed the call, noting that the Consul General had “full sight” of the attack and “was quite possibly involved”.

“The CCP will not import their beating of protestors and denial of free speech to British streets,” she wrote on Twitter. “Chinese ambassador must be summoned & if any official has beaten protesters, they must be expelled or prosecuted.”

VOA Cantonese published a picture of Bob, the protester, showing cuts to his nose and around his right eye. He told the media outlet that he suffered injuries to his head, face, neck and back as a result of the attack and said he was worried similar incidents could happen again if no action was taken.

A consulate spokesperson said the protesters had displayed an “insulting” portrait of China’s President Xi Jinping.

Source – https://www.aljazeera.com/

Hong Kong protesters attacked at China UK consulate
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Una Marson became the BBC’s first black radio producer and presenter in the 1940s, she brought Caribbean voices and culture to a global audience, but her name is now little known. Sir Lenny Henry explains why he is reviving Marson’s story.

When I think of Una Marson, I think of a trailblazer – a pioneer who connected the Caribbean to the world through her radio programmes. But most people don’t even know who she was, let alone anything about her work at the BBC.

It would take many, many hours to uncover her story but my production company, Douglas Road Productions, makes a valiant attempt to tell it in a new documentary.

We mix rare archive of Una from the 1940s with reflections from historians and writers, and actress Seroca Davis skilfully brings this remarkable woman to life.

Born in 1905 in rural Jamaica, Una was the daughter of a Baptist preacher. She had a middle-class upbringing, learned to type and attended a boarding school. From an early age, she had drive, ambition and the smarts to go far. By 1926, she was assistant editor of a political magazine, the Jamaica Critic. Two years later, she had started her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan, aimed at a young, politically-aware Jamaican audience.

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In the years that followed, she wrote Tropic Reveries, a collection of poems challenging traditional notions of womanhood, and At What Price, a play about a mixed-raced relationship that would later be staged in London’s West End.

By the time she came to London in 1932 to find new opportunities for her writing, Una was a force to be reckoned with. But she found herself in the midst of the colour bar that blocked non-whites from entry into certain jobs and restricted their access to housing and social and cultural life.

In her poem, Little Brown Girl, Una spoke about her isolation in “a white, white city” at that time.

“You speak good English little brown girl, how is it you speak English as though it belonged to you?”, she wrote.

Not one to stand back and do nothing, Una got involved in political activism in the UK. She shared a house with Dr Harold Moody, the founder of civil-rights organisation The League of Coloured Peoples.

Though its name sounds like a Marvel movie franchise waiting to happen, the League had a serious objective – eliminating the colour bar. As its assistant secretary, Una organised receptions, meetings, trips and concerts. The fight against racism inspired her, made her tough and gave her a manifesto for a career.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/

Una Marson – The story of the BBC’s first black producer
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