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Trending: How Iranians Have Morphed the Ice Bucket Challenge

06/09/2014

How Iranians Have Morphed the Ice Bucket Challenge

BBC World Service - Trending, How Iranians Have Morphed the Ice Bucket Challenge

Iranians are adapting in order to take part in the Ice Bucket Challenge

How Iranians are adapting in order to take part in the Ice Bucket Challenge. Plus, people using Facebook to appeal for donations for individuals - how credible are they?

A little town called Pascagoula in Mississippi is the centre of the latest emotional appeal for funds that seemed to be in everyone’s Facebook news feed.  And it was very moving - a little girl, AvaLynn age five, quite seriously bruised.  Her mother posted photos on a Facebook page called JusticeforAvaLynn, saying her daughter was 'kicked repeatedly in the face until she fell off the slide.'  Almost 100,00 likes on Facebook, 200,000 tweets and crucially a fundraising effort by AvaLynn’s mother who asked for $10,000 to help her daughter. But how credible are these sorts of appeals and should they have better checks and balances?

Iranians are taking the ice bucket challenge. But they have to do it with a difference, as they battle with international sanctions stopping donations, a drought and a suspicious regime.

Plus more trends from across the world in just 60 seconds. 

Presenter Mukul Devichand is joined in the studio by Leyla Khodabakhshi, multi media editor from the BBC Persian Service, and April Havens, a journalist based in Southern Mississippi.    

The programme is produced by Anna Meisel

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