General News/Current Affairs Thread

good to see the war on terror is going so well.

Boston's been hit now :( supossibly we've had threats for the London Marathon this weekend too
 
I would say the funeral will be a bigger target.

Those Boston bombs are probably some individual whom had a grudge. RIP.
 
What's the motivation behind the bombings though? Chaos for the sake of chaos? A distraction for something bigger?

I'm calling it as a native threat though - suggestions I've seen that Al Qaeda or North Korea are behind it are absolutely asinine. The target just doesn't match up with previous international targets of Al Qaeda. Sure it's on Patriot's Day and has got a lot of coverage, but something doesn't feel right about it (aside from y'know, it being a bombing that's killed people).

EDIT:
A Saudi 20 year old is currently being held as a suspect. Source

EDIT:
Now apparently Boston Police are saying no suspects have been taken into custody yet...
 
One won't suffer as he's dead, the other will probably get death penalty (if it still exists in Massa) or life in prison.
 
Apparently our Monarch made a speech today. Bad timing considering some bloke in Manchester already had plans to shock the world.
 
Everybody knew that but this was as out of the blue as you can get and also hence why immigration policies that are definitely not in reaction to UKIP were bumped off the top of the news heap yesterday.

Speaking of which; yay or nay on those policies?
 
Judging by the BBC News app, that football guy quitting is not what bumped the queen off the news, because there is only a single mention of it outside of the sport section.

As for immigration policies, I don't know what the policies in the news were, but I gather they amount to pretending to tighten border control. I say bollocks to anti-immigration policies. If people want to come here, then let's make sure we create enough jobs and houses to accommodate them, so that they can work and pay taxes just like the rest of us. There is huge potential in the migrant workforce, but there is too much petty racism masked as nationalism preventing progress. With so much migration of working-age people to the UK, there is no need to incentivise domestic breeding, so child benefit should be phased out and replaced with something far more modest and restrictive to reflect this.
 
More scapegoating of ordinary people just trying to get along by the political elite, gotta love it. "It's not our fault you're unemployed or poor, it's those people over there! They took your job and your money! It certainly wasn't our greed and incompetence that cost you, no, it was THEM!"

What's needed is free movement of goods and labour throughout the entire world, then British people won't feel hard done by and could just leave for one of our better off former colonies. It's hardly surprising people in Eastern Europe go "Hey, I can freely go live and work somewhere with higher wages and standards of living, awesome" and I don't begrudge them that opportunity. The slightly unfair thing is that British people are no longer free to do the same with underpopulated richer countries like the US, Canada and Australia. It would be nice if they'd all open their borders to us as well, but their politicians also like to scapegoat foriegners, so they don't.

Borders... nations... what a load of outdated old toss it all is anyway. I don't know why people feel any kind of loyalty or fraternity to people just because they happen to have been born or raised on a certain arbitrarily designated patch of land - Exactly the same percentage of British people are awful human beings as can be found among the wider population of Earth. Exactly the same percentage are decent and fair-minded. Unfortunately, one of those groups massively outnumbers the other, which is the reason democracy is inherantly flawed and we get stuck with these backward xenophobic policy decisions.
 
I wholly agree, Ayase. Furthermore, to facilitate a little more global mobility, the UK should teach languages a little more in schools.
 
That's true, I always thought I had no aptitude for languages because I spent seven years learning French at school without ever...learning any French. If quantity could be replaced by some quality so kids were leaving school with some degree of confidence in a second language, the world would be a better place. I agree that learning about other languages and cultures is important (and I'm pleased to see more than one post on the topic which aligns with my own views, as it seems raw nationalism is often the preference among folks on the internet).

R
 
I think I mentioned what my Spanish classes (or at least the few I went to) were like on here before....not good...at all. It wasn't necessarily the teacher's fault though, we seemed to have a new teacher every two months, and most of the kids in the class were absolute mentalists. I remember one poor woman who had just come from Spain was reduced to tears when she left the room for 5 minutes only to come back and find everything of even the most nominal value- and nearly all of which she had personally purchased just for our class's benefit- had been stolen :(

Some schools do actually teach Japanese instead of the usual bunch though, I wish mine had.
 
The way languages are taught in school (or were when I was that age) I think far too much time is spent on reading and writing and nowhere near enough on listening to and understanding the spoken language, speaking and correct pronunciation (which are the ACTUAL important things if you want to successfully communicate). I've learned more French in the last bloody month than I did several years of school - The National Curriculum seems to be what works best for teachers and Ofsted, not what's best for students to actually learn.
 
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