Iran Tehran hijab protest: Iranian police arrest 29 women New wave of protests spread across country, sparking personal freedoms debate Covered woman wearing chador and hijab downtown Tehran. Photograph: Christian Aslund/Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images
Police in Iran’s capital have arrested 29 women accused of being “deceived” into joining protests against a law that makes wearing the hijab compulsory.
Women across the country have been protesting by climbing onto telecom boxes, taking off their headscarves and waving them aloft on sticks.
Although women in Iran have fought against the hijab for nearly four decades, the new wave of protests has grabbed more attention and sparked a debate rarely seen before over personal freedoms.
Second woman arrested in Tehran for hijab protest Read more
One recent image taken from Mashhad shows a religious woman, in full chador, standing on a telecoms box holding up a headscarf, in solidarity with women who - unlike her - don’t want to wear it.
Tehran police said on Thursday that the campaign had been instigated from outside Iran through illegal satellite channels. “Following calls by satellite channels under a campaign called White Wednesdays, 29 of those who had been deceived to remove their hijab have been arrested by the police,” the semi-official Tasnim news, which is affiliated to the elite Revolutionary Guards, reported on Thursday.
The reformist Shargh newspaper covered the protestsunder the headline “Reactions to the removal of headscarves in the streets”. Such discussions have rarely reached national newspapers, which operate under heavy censorship, but comments by judicial officials allowed Shargh to write about the matter.
Soheila Jolodarzadeh, a female member of the Iranian parliament, said the protests were the result of longstanding restrictions. “They’re happening because of our wrong approach,” she said, according to the semi-official Ilna news agency. “We imposed restrictions on women and put them under unnecessary restrains. This is why ... girls of Enghelab Street are putting their headscarves on a stick.”
nahid molavi (@NahidMolavi) انتخاب کرده چادری باشد و برای حق انتخاب بقیه زنان این سرزمین بیرق برافراشته. زیبایی دیگر چه میتواند باشد؟! #دختران_خیابان_انقلاب pic.twitter.com/bzzI0MX7js
Iran’s prosecutor general, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, described the protests on Wednesday as “childish”, “emotionally charged” and instigated “from outside the country”.
Masih Alinejad, a US-based journalist and activist, started the White Wednesdays campaign in May 2017, encouraging women to wear white headscarves or take them off in protest at the rules.
“The Iranian police announced in 2014 that they’ve warned, arrested or sent to court nearly 3.6 million women because of having bad hijab, so these arrests are not new, if people are protesting it’s exactly because of such a crackdown,” she told the Guardian.
Iranian officials have accused her of receiving money from foreign governments to fund her two separate anti-compulsory hijab campaigns – the first one is My Stealthy Freedom. Alinejad denied it, saying that although she works for the US government-funded Voice Of America service, she has received no funds for either of her campaigns.
House of Representatives GOP lawmaker condemned for inviting Holocaust denier to State of the Union Matt Gaetz says Charles Johnson, banned from Twitter for seeking help ‘taking out’ Black Lives Matter activist, is not white supremacist Matt Gaetz said Charles Johnson was ‘not a Holocaust denier, he’s not a white supremacist’. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
A Florida congressman is under fire for inviting a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union on Tuesday.
Matt Gaetz, a first-term Florida Republican, insisted that he gave the ticket to Charles C Johnson only by happenstance, telling the Daily Beast that the notorious alt-right troll just “showed up at my office” on the day of the speech.
The Anti-Defamation League wrote an open letter to Gaetz denouncing his choice to invite Johnson and urging the politician to cut ties with him. “It is an insult to the memories of those killed in the Holocaust, to their families, and to the Jewish community to bring to the State of the Union as your guest a Holocaust denier,” the group said.
US Congress: Republicans rush for the exits to imperil Trump's midterm hopes Read more
Johnson, who was permanently banned from Twitter in 2015 after asking for help “taking out” a Black Lives Matter activist, denied the Holocaust in a 2017 Reddit Ask Me Anything. “I do not and never have believed the six million figure,” he said. “I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic.” Johnson also added that he thought the second world war was the result of “the efforts of communism to spread itself throughout the world”.
On Thursday, Gaetz insisted in an interview with Fox Business that Johnson was “not a Holocaust denier, he’s not a white supremacist”.
Johnson, a former writer for rightwing websites such as the Daily Caller, has maintained influence on the right. He helped to broker a meeting between the congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Julian Assange in 2017 and Donald Trump has reportedly read articles from Johnson’s current website.
Johnson’s invitation to the State of the Union marked just the latest brush with controversy for Gaetz in the past week. The Florida Republican had appeared with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his Infowars show. Gaetz has come to prominence in recent weeks as a fervent critic of the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election by the special counsel Robert Mueller.
Reproduction Permission given to create Britain's first 'three-person babies' Two women with gene mutation that causes degenerative disorder will undergo therapy A scientist performs mitochondrial donation therapy, which could allow babies to be conceived with genetic material from three individuals. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
Doctors in Newcastle have been granted permission to create Britain’s first “three-person babies” for two women who are at risk of passing on devastating and incurable genetic diseases to their children.
The green light from the fertility regulator means that doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre will now attempt to make healthy embryos for the women by merging fertilised eggs created through standard IVF with DNA from female donors.
Q&A What is mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT)? Show Hide MRT is an experimental treatment that was made legal in Britain in 2015. It aims to prevent serious disorders from being passed to children, caused by mutations in mitochondria, tiny structures that provide energy inside cells. Children inherit all their mitochondria from their mothers. MRT uses healthy donor mitochondria to replace the faulty ones. The child therefore has the usual 46 chromosomes from its parents, plus additional DNA from the donor's mitochondria. To perform MRT doctors fertilise an egg from the affected woman with her partner's sperm using normal IVF techniques. But instead of letting the egg then develop into an embryo, the chromosomes are taken out and dropped into a healthy donor egg that has had its own chromosomes removed. The resulting embryo now has DNA from both parents, as usual, plus mitochondrial DNA from the donor.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) confirmed on Thursday that it had approved the procedures which will now be overseen by Mary Herbert, professor of reproductive biology, and her team at the Newcastle clinic.
The women will be the first in Britain to have so-called mitochondrial donation therapy, a radical IVF procedure that was made legal by parliamentary vote in 2015. The Newcastle centre was granted a licence to perform the treatment, also known as mitochondrial replacement therapy, in March last year
While doctors at Newcastle Fertility Centre said they could not to talk about the cases, citing patient confidentiality, minutes from the HFEA’s approval committee reveal that the two women carry mutations in a gene that causes a rare condition known as myoclonic epilepsy with ragged red fibres, or Merrf syndrome. No more details are given on the women because both wish to remain anonymous.
Merrf syndrome can be a devastating neurodegenerative disorder that worsens over time and often results in an early death. The condition, which affects one in 100,000 people, is typically diagnosed in early childhood or adolescence when people develop sudden spasms which progress to a loss of muscle control, weakness, deafness and dementia.
‘Three-parent’ babies explained: what are the concerns and are they justified? Read more
Having reviewed the women’s medical and family histories, the HFEA committee agreed that any children they conceived may be affected by “serious multi-systemic and progressive disease” which would severely affect their quality of life. Neither woman was deemed suitable for an IVF procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which can pick up harmful mutations in IVF embryos, but can only help if at least some of the embryos are healthy.
Salvatore DiMauro, an expert in mitochondrial disease at Columbia University in New York, said he was glad to hear that Newcastle was going ahead with the procedure to help the women. “It’s good to do this. Merrf is a crippling disease. It’s the only way to be sure it is not passed on,“ he said.
The vast majority of a person’s genes – about 99.8% – are found on the 23 pairs of chromosomes that sit inside the nucleus in each cell in the body. The women who will be treated in Newcastle carry mutations in the small amount of extra DNA that is bundled up in their mitochondria, the tiny battery-like structures that surround the cell nucleus in their thousands. While men and women both have mitochondria, they are passed solely from mother to child. Mutations in mitochondrial DNA cause thousands of genetic diseases that tend to hit the energy-hungry brain, heart and muscles, and worsen with age.
Mitochondrial donation therapy was pioneered at Newcastle by the neurologist Doug Turnbull to prevent women passing on harmful mitochondrial DNA mutations to their children. To perform the procedure, doctors create a fertilised egg using IVF as normal. But rather than letting it develop into an embryo, the parents’ chromosomes are removed and placed inside a donor egg that has had its own genetic material removed. The embryo so created has all of the parents’ chromosomes, but the mother’s damaged mitochondria are replaced with the donor’s healthy ones. Doctors in Newcastle did not confirm whether they had already performed the procedure.
The two women in Newcastle will not be the first in the world to have the therapy. In 2016, John Zhang, a doctor at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York, announced the birth of an apparently healthy child created in a similar way at a clinic in Mexico. While news of the birth was welcomed by many scientists, some voiced concerns that the child might not have the regular follow-up checks that are needed to ensure it is developing properly.
Professor Sian Harding, director of the British Heart Foundation Imperial Cardiac Regenerative Medicine Centre in London said Britain had reached the point of treating women with mitochondrial donation therapy “after a very thorough public consultation process”.
“It is absolutely fantastic that we have got to this point in such a well-regulated and controlled way,” she added. “It is going to be so important now to follow up and understand whether this is successful and how we can take it forward. If you don’t follow up the children, we just won’t know whether this is the right thing to do.”
An HFEA spokesperson said: “Our statutory approvals committee has considered applications from the Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life, part of Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, for the use of mitochondrial donation in treatment for two patients, both of which have been approved.”
Rihanna Rihanna not welcome in Senegal, religious group says Religious collective reheats conspiracy theories about Illuminati and Barbadian singer, who is due to visit on Friday Rihanna is scheduled to attend a conference in Senegal in her role as an ambassador for the Global Partnership for Education. Photograph: Epsilon/Getty Images
Rihanna has been declared persona non grata by a group of religious organisations in Senegal, who accused the singer of intending to promote homosexuality in collusion with the Freemasons.
The Barbadian pop star is scheduled to attend a conference on eduction in the west African country on Friday alongside the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in her role as an ambassador for the Global Partnership for Education.
But an association of about 30 Islamic associations called No to Freemasonry and Homosexuality have asked the government to cancel her visit.
“Rihanna doesn’t hide it: she’s part of the Illuminati, a branch of Freemasons,” Cheikh Oumar Diagne, a spokesman, told Jeune Afrique, seeming to have picked up on online conspiracy theories about Rihanna’s beliefs.
The singer, Diagne said, was secretly attending a Freemasons’ conference that had been planned for exactly the same dates as the education one but was subsequently cancelled.
Religious organisations are powerful in Senegal, which is over 90% Muslim but is well known for being a tolerant country, where Muslims and Christians celebrate their festivals together.
The Global Partnership for Educationis trying to raise funds for the education of the poorest, most vulnerable children in 65 countries. The GPE has an ambition to reach $2bn a year by 2020 and replicate the successes achieved in global health.
“We’re hoping that the conference marks the moment that momentum shifts globally on education and education financing,” Julia Gillard, the chair of the GPE board and Australia’s former prime minister, said before the meeting. “Over the last few years, there’s been growing global interest in education, particularly girls’ education, but financing hasn’t as yet followed. We need a step change.”
The Senegalese president, Macky Sall, is hosting the conference along with Macron, for whom the trip will be the sixth to Africa of his nine-month presidency. The interior minister, Aly Ngouille Ndiaye, told Jeune Afrique he would ensure the safety of all conference attendees.
