Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 19 December 2022

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1. Messi wins ‘greatest final’
2. Dramatic rise in temperatures
3. Musk puts future to the vote
4. ‘Bully’ claims stymie peerage
5. Russia sends opera to front line
6. Tesco workers launch lawsuit
7. Strikes could hit airports
8. Neville compares UK to Qatar
9. Amsterdam may close curtains
10. Clarkson column provokes anger

published 19 December 2022

1. Messi wins ‘greatest final’

Lionel Messi won football’s biggest trophy for the first time as Argentina won their third World Cup in a final hailed by many as the greatest in the tournament’s history. The 3-3 draw with France went to a penalty shoot-out, eventually won 4-2 by Argentina. The Sun said the victory puts the trophy “in the hand of God” and The Telegraph said it “cements” Messi’s status as the greatest player ever. The tie “stretched an entire nation’s limits to the very brink and back again”, said the Buenos Aires Times, “providing joy and anguish in almost equal, excruciating measure”.

The UK’s cold snap is over and temperatures are expected to reach highs of 14C (57.2F) today. BBC weather reporter Jennifer Bartram said “it is unusual to see such a dramatic change” in temperatures but “it’s not unheard of”. She added that “the change is all linked to where our air is coming from” because “we’re replacing bitterly cold Arctic air with something much milder from the Atlantic”. However, according to Sky News, “winter is not over yet”.

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Elon Musk has invited Twitter users to vote on his future as its chief executive officer. In a poll on the social media platform, he tweeted: “Should I step down as head... I will abide by the results...” Within minutes of posting the poll, more than one million people had voted, noted The Guardian, and by Monday morning a narrow majority had voted for Musk to step aside. Musk took control of the company in October in a $44bn (£36bn) deal, following a legal tussle.

There are attempts to block a peerage for Boris Johnson’s former chief of staff over allegations that he bullied junior members of the team in Downing Street. A group of staff who worked with Rosenfield in No 10 are attempting to stop his peerage, reported The Times, saying it would be “entirely inappropriate” because of his conduct. It is claimed that he was responsible for an “overbearing” culture that “allegedly contributed to the departure of a number of young female staff late last year”, said the paper.

Russia will send musicians and opera singers to the front lines of its war in Ukraine to boost morale among troops. The defence ministry said the “front-line creative brigade” will also include circus performers and focus on providing its armies with “moral, political and psychological support”. The Red Army deployed 2,000 “creative brigades” to boost morale during the Second World War, said The Telegraph.

An investigation by The Guardian has found that Burmese workers that produced jeans for Tesco in Thailand said they were trapped in “effective forced labour”, working 99-hour weeks for illegally low pay in “appalling conditions”. The supermarket giant faces a landmark lawsuit in the UK from over a hundred former workers at VK Garment Factory, who claim negligence and unjust enrichment. Tesco said the F+F garments were sold only on the Thai market, but The Guardian has seen images of labels written in English.

Industrial action by Border Force officials “threaten misery for millions of passengers arriving at UK airports during the first restriction-free Christmas in three years”, said The Times. More than 1,000 staff from passport control desks are due to strike from Friday. It is planned that passengers will be held on aircraft to prevent overcrowding in arrival halls during the strikes and they could then be made to wait more than two hours in queues at passport control as strikes coincide with the peak Christmas holiday period.

Gary Neville has divided viewers by comparing striking UK workers with migrant labourers in Qatar. During ITV’s coverage of the World Cup final, the pundit said that British ministers were “demonising” public sector staff and claimed the conditions for striking nurses and railway workers were like those faced by Qatar’s huge foreign labour force. “It shouldn't happen here [in Qatar] ... with the wealth that exists” he said, “but it shouldn't happen with the nurses in our country either”.

Amsterdam’s municipal council is expected to vote to keep brothel curtains permanently closed in a bid to clean up the image of the district and “make it more compatible with the ‘Me Too’ era,” said The Telegraph. Presently, the red curtains are only closed when a client is being entertained or if the sex worker is absent. Under the plan, the curtains will stay shut and clients will be asked to book via a QR code on their smartphones. But sex workers say the change would make it harder to assess potential clients and any danger they might pose.

Jeremy Clarkson is under fire for a column in The Sun in which he wrote that he was “dreaming of the day” when Meghan Markle is “made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”. Broadcaster Carol Vorderman tweeted that “not on any level, in any circumstance, is it ok to write this stuff about any woman” and the actress Kathy Burke described him as a “colossal c***”.

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