It’s a rather grey and gloomy Sunday here. Maybe it will improve later as it did yesterday. The sun didn’t really come out but we did manage to go for a walk up Lark Hill in the late afternoon. Of course, it will need to stop raining if we are going to go out for a walk again today.
Emma Brockes wrote in yesterday’s Guardian about the difficulty of keeping her family to a routine. If she can get the children to school half an hour early they get breakfast at school. Oddly, and surely she was exaggerating, the school opens its gates to non-breakfast club children at 8.30 and locks them at 8.33, causing difficulties for late arrivals. Obviously life in New York is challenging. And as I read, I wondered what someone living in New York is doing writing regularly for a newspaper over here. Such is the modern world of work.
Later I read this article about Stella Moris, who is married to Julian Assange. She has two children, kept secret the media for most of their life so far. She has to explain to them that there are people who don’t want to let daddy come home. What a sad situation for her, for Julian Assange and perhaps especially for her children.
And then I read this, from the Telegraph:
“British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has lost an appeal against a second jail term in Iran after spending more than five years in detention, her supporters said on Saturday.
The 43-year-old project manager, who lived in London with her husband and now seven-year-old daughter, has been held in Iran since 2016 and served a five-year sentence.
In late April, she was sentenced to another year's imprisonment and banned from leaving the country for a further 12 months.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe's Iranian lawyer was told in a phone call on Saturday that "the appeal on her second case failed", according to the #Free Nazanin Twitter account run by her supporters.
The judge made the ruling without a court hearing, it said, adding that so far there is no summons date for her return to prison.
Iran has not issued any official statement, following its usual practice.
Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, who represents the constituency where Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe's husband and daughter live, tweeted that she "could now be returned to prison at any time".
The MP urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson to "act now to #Free Nazanin".
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe is one of a number of Western passport holders being held by Iran in what rights groups condemn as a policy of hostage-taking aimed at winning concessions from foreign powers.
The project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency and data firm's philanthropic arm, was arrested in April 2016 while visiting family.
She was convicted of plotting to overthrow the regime, a charge she strenuously denied.
She completed that sentence in March this year, only to be given a fresh one-year jail term for "propaganda against the system".
The UK's then-foreign minister Dominic Raab condemned the second sentence, saying that Iran's treatment of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe amounted to torture and she was being held unlawfully.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been living with her parents in Tehran while her appeal was under way, barred from leaving the country.
Her husband and daughter last month took part in a protest organised by Amnesty International near the Houses of Parliament to mark her 2,000th day in detention.”
So now the family is depending on Liz Truss and Boris Johnson to try to sort things out. But once again, that’s another story of a child growing up without a parent and the other parent having to explain why this is happening.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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