Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 18 November 2022

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1. Record fall in living standards
2. Twitter closes offices after ‘exodus’
3. Pelosi to stand down
4. Poll finds collapse in Brexit approval
5. North Korea launch ‘could hit US’
6. Murdoch pays for Boris to visit him
7. Mendy ‘used fame like Savile’
8. Court convicts MH17 men
9. Deaths in crowded Gaza camp
10. Amazon brings Neighbours back to life

published 18 November 2022

1. Record fall in living standards

Britain is facing the highest level of taxation since the Second World War and a record fall in living standards after Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement. The chancellor “chose to target middle-income and wealthier households in an attempt to balance the books,” said The Times, while The Telegraph felt that “it’s hard to spot the difference between the Tories and Labour now”. The Daily Mail’s Sarah Vine said “there was me thinking we’d voted in the Conservatives” but the Daily Express hailed “victory” in its campaign to secure a 10.1% state pension increase.

There are fears about the future of Twitter after the company told employees that office buildings would be temporarily closed, effective immediately. Hundreds of employees are reported to have rejected Elon Musk’s ultimatum to keep working for the business, threatening its ability to keep operating. A former Twitter executive described Thursday’s employee exits as a “mass exodus.” There has been a wave of users on Twitter “saying their goodbyes and linking to accounts on other platforms,” said The Guardian, with “#RIPTwitter, #TwitterDown, Mastodon and Myspace” all trending.

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Nancy Pelosi, who has led Democrats in the US House of Representatives for nearly 20 years, has announced she is standing down from the role. The 82-year-old was the first woman to serve as speaker of the House. “I never would have thought that someday I would go from homemaker to House speaker,” she said in a statement in the chamber. Joe Biden described her as “the most consequential speaker of the House of Representatives in our history”. Her husband was attacked with a hammer during a violent break-in at their home last month.

Only 32% of British voters now think the UK was right to leave the European Union, according to a new poll. Some 56% think Britain was wrong to leave, with the rest saying they don’t know, according to YouGov. This week Rishi Sunak has “appeared to abandon” hopes of signing a promised Brexit trade deal with the US by the next election and former environment secretary George Eustice admitted that the deal the UK had managed to sign with Australia was “not actually very good,” said The Independent.

North Korea has launched an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range that could hit the US mainland, Japan’s defence minister says. The missile landed in the sea roughly 210km (130 miles) west of Hokkaido. North Korea's “pattern” over the past months has been to launch missiles in response to US military activity around the Korean Peninsula, said the BBC. The latest launch came on the same day as North Korea’s Choe Son Hui warned of a “fiercer” response to any increased US military presence.

Official records have shown that Rupert Murdoch paid for Boris Johnson to fly to his Montana ranch for a “private meeting” a month after he stepped down as PM. Johnson and two members of staff stayed overnight in Montana, where the newspaper mogul has recently bought a huge ranch, on 11 October. The cost of travel, accommodation and hospitality paid for by Murdoch was £11,559.84. The House of Commons register of members’ financial interests also revealed that Johnson was paid £276,000 for a speech to American insurers.

The footballer Benjamin Mendy used his celebrity status like Jimmy Savile in order to commit a series of rapes, a jury has heard. The Manchester City player, described as a “serial predatory rapist,” was alleged to have used fame as a mask to “hide the dark side of [his] life and get away with it,” in the way the disgraced broadcaster had done. The 28-year-old and his friend Louis Saha Matturie, 41, have been accused of raping women at the player’s home in Prestbury, Cheshire, and at a Manchester flat. The men both deny all charges.

A court in the Netherlands has found three men guilty of the murder of 298 people onboard flight MH17, which was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Russian nationals Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy and a Ukrainian, Leonid Kharchenko, were given life sentences and ordered to pay “more than €16m” in compensation to the victims but the men remain at large and it is unclear if they will ever serve their sentences. A fourth suspect, Oleg Pulatov, a former soldier of the Russian special forces Spetsnaz-GRU, was acquitted.

At least 21 people have been killed by a fire in a building in a densely populated refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. People were “seen screaming outside the burning building,” while relatives of victims were in the streets “crying and praying,” said the BBC. The number of deaths at Jabalia refugee camp is likely to rise, Dr Salah Abu Laila added. Ten children were among the dead. A gas leak in a kitchen is being blamed. Gaza is under a “crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade” and has been facing a severe energy crisis, said The Guardian.

Aussie soap opera Neighbours is to be revived by Amazon four months after its final episode was aired. The streaming service has agreed a deal with Fremantle, the company that produces the long-running series and filming of new episodes will start next year in Australia. As well as creating a new series of the soap, Amazon said it will be hosting the show’s back catalogue, giving nostalgic viewers access to 37 years’ worth of classic episodes.

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