Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 17 November 2022

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1. Hunt to unveil ‘new age of austerity’
2. Republicans win ‘razor-thin’ majority
3. Zelenskyy stands by his claim
4. Bank governor blames Brexit
5. Tehran wants to kill Britons
6. Myanmar to release UK diplomat
7. Eggs rationed in supermarkets
8. UK mothers face high death rate
9. Musk gives staff ultimatum
10. Tesco rebrands its discount section

published 17 November 2022

1. Hunt to unveil ‘new age of austerity’

Jeremy Hunt is due to set out his plan for the UK in his Autumn Statement today. The chancellor said everyone will have to pay more tax, and warned that he has faced decisions of “eye-watering difficulty”. The Times said Hunt will say that the wealthiest must bear the “heaviest load,” as he unveils £30bn worth of spending cuts and £24bn in tax rises over the next five years. However, said the i paper, the measures will form a “new age of austerity” in the UK.

CBS News has projected that the Republicans have secured the 218 seats needed for a majority in the lower chamber of Congress. Although the party’s margin in the House of Representatives is “razor-thin,” it is “enough to stall” Joe Biden’s agenda for the next two years, said the BBC. Republicans will now take control of key committees, “giving them the ability to shape legislation and launch probes of Mr Biden, his family and his administration,” said Sky News.

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he had “no doubts” that Ukraine was not to blame for the missile strike that killed two people in Poland on Tuesday. The Ukrainian president said he had received assurances from his top commanders that “it wasn’t our missile”. However, the leaders of Poland and Nato said the missile was probably fired by Ukrainian forces defending their country. Meanwhile, the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said “there may be a political solution where politically the Russians withdraw”.

The governor of the Bank of England said that Britain is suffering worse economic performance than its rivals because of Brexit and a dramatic fall in the size of the workforce since the Covid pandemic. Asked whether Britain leaving the European Union was contributing to the country’s underperformance, Andrew Bailey said that “there is an effect,” including a “long-run downshift” in productivity. He added that Liz Truss’s mini-budget had “damaged our reputation internationally because of what happened”.

Iran plans to kidnap or kill Britons it sees as “enemies of the regime,” the head of MI5 has warned. Ken McCallum said Tehran “projects threat to the UK directly, through its aggressive intelligence services” and revealed at least 10 such potential threats in recent months, including death threats to two London-based journalists over the reporting of the country’s protests. He also revealed that eight “potentially deadly” terrorist plots by both Islamist and Right-wing extremists had been thwarted in the past 12 months.

A former UK ambassador is among the 6,000 prisoners set to be released by Myanmar’s military. The former diplomat, Vicky Bowman, was jailed earlier this year by the military junta. A “fluent Burmese speaker,” she is a “well-known member of Myanmar’s small international community”, said the BBC. The military has arrested more than 16,000 people since it overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi's democratically elected government in February 2021. It said the pardons were to mark Myanmar National Day.

Egg rationing has begun due to bird flu and soaring production costs, said the Daily Mail. Wetherspoon has removed eggs from fry-ups in a number of its pubs, Asda is limiting customers to two boxes and Lidl has imposed a three-box rule in some stores. Sainsbury’s, meanwhile, has begun importing barn eggs from Italy despite its longstanding boast of only using only free-range hens. The UK is facing its largest ever outbreak of bird flu, with a highly pathogenic variant on the loose.

Women in the UK are three times more likely to die around the time of pregnancy compared with those in Norway, according to a report in the British Medical Journal. The comparison of maternal mortality rates in eight European countries was published in the BMJ. The analysts found that Slovakia had the highest maternal death rate among the countries studied and the UK had the second highest. They said that heart disease and suicide were the leading causes of death, which “underlines the importance of women’s mental and cardiovascular health”.

Elon Musk has given employees until this evening to commit to “extremely hardcore” work or else leave the company, according to a leaked copy of a late-night internal email. “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Twitter’s new owner wrote in the memo. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

Tesco is renaming the “Reduced to Clear” section of their supermarkets as part of a “facelift”. The new permanent signage will now describe yellow-sticker products as “reduced in price – just as nice”. The move comes after a YouGov survey commissioned by the chain found that more than two thirds of customers now seek out markdowns, and 33% said they look out for discounted products more frequently. Some 29% of respondents said that they would shop reduced items more often if the section “was made more visually appealing”.

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