I was wondering the same thing.

It's I read a newspaper with read read as "reed"

It can be both "I read" or "I am reading".

Yes. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Qur%27an#Etymology

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%82%D8%B1%D8%A3#Arabic

iton, pronounced ee-ton

It really varies in spoken Hebrew, but the textbooks I've seen say that the Sephardic Ayin and Aleph are both simply silent characters, though the Ayin is thought to have originally been either a glottal stop or a voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/. There have been many changes over the centuries and different dialects treat it differently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin#Phonetic_representation