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[Innovindil]

16 hours ago, urban.spaceman said:

 

 

**** sake. 

[leicsmac]

7 hours ago, Salisbury Fox said:

The rules of engagement in NI did mean that you could only open fire when you perceived that your life was in danger or the life of another. So each shot would be judged lawful or unlawful depending on the circumstances. E.g you could have shot someone in the act of throwing some explosives at me but after it had been thrown and the guy was running away you could not shoot him as the threat had gone.

I'm not disputing that the rules were in place or that they made sense to some and gave the veneer of respectability, I'm saying that as at least some folks would say the British Army were certainly not on their homestead and hadn't been invited by any kind of unified authority, the "legality" of anything they did there was entirely subjective. That was why I came in on the original post, tbh - Ms Bradley can certainly say that the British Army was by and large following UK laws, but not what might be tentatively described as "the laws" - if such things indeed exist.

[Jon the Hat]

BBC reporting "strong rumours" that Shamina's baby boy has died at 2 weeks old.  Nice one home secretary.

Edited 8 March 2019 by Jon the Hat

[Heathrow fox]

7 million people in the states are behind with their car repayments I heard last week.Worse than 07/08 crash.Also loads of lay offs nation wide and house prices starting to fall in certain areas.There are loads more indicators that suggest  another nose dive when most people haven’t really recovered from the last one.

[Bobby Hundreds]

1 hour ago, Jon the Hat said:

BBC reporting "strong rumours" that Shamina's baby boy has died at 2 weeks old.  Nice one home secretary.

[Jon the Hat]

1 minute ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

Lets hope so!  It does raise a point ,which is probably the idea.

[Buce]

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/08/algeria-protests-grow-at-presidents-decision-to-stand-for-fifth-term

 

Care to comment @the fox?

[Free Falling Foxes]

1 hour ago, Jon the Hat said:

Lets hope so!  It does raise a point ,which is probably the idea.

BBC reporting the child died of breathing difficulties. Not surprised. Every time she appeared on TV the poor thing was hidden under her abaya.

[Salisbury Fox]

5 hours ago, leicsmac said:

I'm not disputing that the rules were in place or that they made sense to some and gave the veneer of respectability, I'm saying that as at least some folks would say the British Army were certainly not on their homestead and hadn't been invited by any kind of unified authority, the "legality" of anything they did there was entirely subjective. That was why I came in on the original post, tbh - Ms Bradley can certainly say that the British Army was by and large following UK laws, but not what might be tentatively described as "the laws" - if such things indeed exist.

The British Army was following UK laws, there is nothing tentative about it and they do exist as Lee Clegg found out to his detriment.  I don't want to get into the history of how and why NI is part of the UK, but as long as this status remains then it is subject to UK laws.  I therefore disagree that the legality of the UK's authority is subjective, but accept that a proportion of the populace do not accept this.  I believe that it is dangerous to suggest that UK authority/laws do not extend to the entire UK as it would encourage other Nationalist groups to take up arms.  If you want to be a separate nation then use democracy and not bombs and bullets.

[Buce]

36 minutes ago, Salisbury Fox said:

The British Army was following UK laws, there is nothing tentative about it and they do exist as Lee Clegg found out to his detriment.  I don't want to get into the history of how and why NI is part of the UK, but as long as this status remains then it is subject to UK laws.  I therefore disagree that the legality of the UK's authority is subjective, but accept that a proportion of the populace do not accept this.  I believe that it is dangerous to suggest that UK authority/laws do not extend to the entire UK as it would encourage other Nationalist groups to take up arms.  If you want to be a separate nation then use democracy and not bombs and bullets.

2

 

I don't wish to take a position in this discussion but as a fyi you are incorrect - an obvious example being the exemption under the 1967 Abortion Act.

 

There are other examples:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_law

[Salisbury Fox]

30 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

I don't wish to take a position in this discussion but as a fyi you are incorrect - an obvious example being the exemption under the 1967 Abortion Act.

 

There are other examples:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_law

Fair enough, but I don't think it changes the sentiment of my post given we are talking about a response to terrorism.

[Buce]

'It's dangerous': full chaos of funding cuts in England's schools revealed

The impact of the funding crisis in England’s schools is laid bare in a Guardian investigation that reveals a system falling apart at the seams, with teachers covering for canteen staff and cleaners while essential funds are raised by parent donations and “charity” non-uniform days.

 

Teachers and parents who responded to a Guardian callout complained there was not enough money even for basics such as textbooks, stationery and science equipment. They say children with special educational needs (SEN) are the hardest hit, as schools facing deficits struggle to fund additional support.

Schools that cannot afford cleaners are dirty and falling into disrepair. Staff have been made redundant, class sizes have gone up, subjects have been scrapped and teaching hours cut, as headteachers resort to desperate measures to make ends meet.

• In North Yorkshire, one secondary school is raising funds by holding extra non-uniform days – six a year, at the end of each half term – potentially earning an additional £3,000 for the school’s funds.

• Teachers in schools in Essex and inner London are being asked to stand in after lunchtime supervision was cut. In one Somerset school, teachers are doing cleaning duties as cleaning staff have been cut.

• Schools have set up Amazon wishlists and crowd-funding pages “so parents can buy such luxuries as pencils, glue sticks, rulers etc” according to one school in the east of England.

• Hours are being reduced at both the start and end of the day to save money. In Birmingham many primary school pupils are being sent home at lunchtime on Fridays; pupils at one Kent grammar school are being asked to come in late one morning.

• Managers in Gloucestershire are delaying turning on heating until November, even though teachers and students are wearing coats indoors to stay warm.

• Photocopying is strictly rationed, pastoral care and mental health support has been cut, and teachers are asked to teach subjects in which they are not specialists.

• Pupils with special educational needs are getting less attention because of cuts to teaching and support staff, with schools concentrating their remaining resources on those with the highest levels of disability.

In the run-up to the spending review later this year, pressure is mounting on the government to address the crisis. Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “This is simply not acceptable. How on earth does the government think we can deliver a world-class education system under such conditions?”

 

Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said it was “particularly troubling” that children with special educational needs were often the worst off.

“This government should be ashamed. It is a disgrace that in one of the richest countries in the world, schools are forced to beg for funding from parents,” Rayner said.

“The principle of free education regardless of income is a human right but it is being undermined by Tory cuts to our schools. A whole generation of students are paying the price for austerity.”

The Liberal Democrat education spokesperson, Layla Moran, said: “This investigation should shame the Tory government. With teachers covering for cleaners and parents donating money for essential services there is no way Conservative ministers can deny there is a lack of funding for our schools … to fail to act is to leave both teachers and children in the midst of what is clearly a crisis.”

Last week, in an unprecedented move, school governors from all over the country descended on Westminster to add their voices to the protest.

 

“As a governor of long standing, I can confirm that these cuts are very real and very damaging,” said Diana Boyd, chair of governors at Elm Grove primary school in Brighton. “It is essential the government understands their impact on children – who are, after all, the future of our country.”

Figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that sixth form colleges have seen funding cut by 21% since 2010 as overall school funding has slumped by 8% in real terms in the same period.

Many who responded to the Guardian said their school had lost staff, with a direct impact on behaviour and learning. Some schools were reluctant to take SEN children on roll because of staff cuts.

A senior school leader in the east Midlands said: “I feel that as a country we are not aware of the crisis that is coming with SEN and disabilities.”

A teaching assistant from Nottinghamshire who was made redundant in the summer said cuts at her school were putting children in danger. “There are three children with Type 1 diabetes who now only have one properly trained person to look after them. The TA who is left is run ragged. It’s dangerous.”

In a week of intense debate about knife crime and school exclusions, parents highlighted a link between budget cuts and exclusions. “There used to be a unit where kids with problems could be worked with to try to resolve social-emotional problems,” said one Devon parent. “Now kids with problems are problem kids and get shown the door a lot sooner.”

A teacher in an inner-city school in London said the school’s computers used by pupils for IT lessons were nine years old and take 16 minutes to load. “Our lessons are 50 minutes. Over a quarter of a lesson is spent logging on,” she said.

The same teacher said she and colleagues were asked to take on duties that were once jobs in their own right. “Dinner ladies [lunchtime supervisors] have been replaced with unpaid lunchtime duties – every teacher does three a week. We also do a break duty, a morning gate duty and an evening gate duty.”

 

An English teacher in Rotherham said she spent £300 of her own money on books for her pupils. She spends £10 a term on pens that her students like to use and more on sanitary pads and deodorant: “Hygiene poverty definitely impacts on school attendance and cuts mean not all schools are equipped with things girls need to stay safe and clean.”

 

Schools in her area are in a poor state of repair, undermining pupils’ self-esteem. “Pupils see this as a reflection on themselves – a scruffy, run-down, cold, poorly resourced school as a reflection of how the government values them. I don’t think they are wrong.”

The headteacher of a primary school in Essex said she had lost a specialist phonics teacher who helped pupils achieve a 90% pass rate, while staff who provide early intervention mental heath support have also gone. At the other end of the scale, pens and glue sticks are off the school’s shopping list as too expensive.

Many contributors said parents were being asked for regular “donations” while fundraising efforts by parent-led associations are now being used to pay for essentials.

Labour MP Jess Phillips highlighted the impact of funding cuts in her constituency this week after her son’s school in Birmingham warned it may close early on Fridays to save money. “I’m guessing my Tory colleagues kids’ schools are not so similar[ly] crippled that they can only stay open 4.5 days a week,” she tweeted.

Steve Randerson, a governor at another Birmingham primary school that has been forced to cut its hours, said: “It’s a fairly depressing situation. The school’s doing everything it can to manage with the resources it gets.”

A chemistry teacher from Cheshire described four years of redundancies, school buildings no longer fit for purpose and diminishing resources: “No current GCSE textbooks, limited photocopying, sharing exercise books between classes, broken equipment not replaced.”

[leicsmac]

8 hours ago, Salisbury Fox said:

The British Army was following UK laws, there is nothing tentative about it and they do exist as Lee Clegg found out to his detriment.  I don't want to get into the history of how and why NI is part of the UK, but as long as this status remains then it is subject to UK laws.  I therefore disagree that the legality of the UK's authority is subjective, but accept that a proportion of the populace do not accept this.  I believe that it is dangerous to suggest that UK authority/laws do not extend to the entire UK as it would encourage other Nationalist groups to take up arms.  If you want to be a separate nation then use democracy and not bombs and bullets.

I totally agree that change is much better through peaceful process.

 

Just to be absolutely crystal clear here, I can see where you're coming from that you think the UK's authority in this matter and therefore the question of legality is absolute, but for me the issue (and this is possibly verging on a philosophical debate) is that for pretty much anything to have rules, those rules have to be agreed upon by all parties involved and/or set by a higher authority. Warfare tends to involve two sides who are having a remarkable lack of agreement with each other, so they tend to not agree on such rules, either (apart from some globally-mandated ones like forbidden use of WMD etc). A victor, for instance, almost never commits war crimes, despite perhaps having done so under the textbook definition of the term. One side of a conflict doesn't get to set the terms of the conflict and then say they're sticking to them and the "others" aren't and they're "terrorists" for doing so - at the end of the day that simply ends with the belief that each time the strongest party sets the rules of such things, and Might Makes Right is fine to believe but don't pretend it's either fair or moral or "lawful".

 

The above is really why I think laws or rules in any type of conflict are subjective and why I have a problem with actions in warzones being deemed "lawful" or "unlawful" to give a veneer of either respectability or demonisation to what is being done - simply because most often both sides choose different rules or laws and both sides think they're absolutely right about it.

 

If you think this leads to a moral morass with no clarity where no one is invalidated but no one is right, either, you'd be correct. But it is what it is.

Edited 9 March 2019 by leicsmac

[the fox]

18 hours ago, Buce said:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/08/algeria-protests-grow-at-presidents-decision-to-stand-for-fifth-term

 

Care to comment @the fox?

No problem, mate.

 

"On Thursday Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the 82-year-old president who has been in power since 1999, praised demonstrators for their discipline but warned them of unidentified actors who might try to infiltrate their ranks to spread discord and chaos."

 

Lol what a joke. I highly doubt the president is the one who made the statement. The man is in a wheelchair and can barely manage to link two words together. I think he said in 2012(?)That his orchard is ripe (which pretty much means "I'm too old for this, I can't do it any more"). I honesty don't think that he's the one who wants to be the president, he's being used as a puppet. The people had enough.

 

The constitution was changed to allow him (or should I say them?) To stay in the seat. The constitution says that the president has to have a great Physical and mental health to rule, which he doesn't.

 

 

My people are worried because the country is a landmine, a wrong step will send you to your grave. The last time there was a fight over power (in the early 90's), the land was painted with blood.

 

Me and my mates talk about this all the time, he just told me last night that in the 90's, his father used to wake up at 7 in the morning and walk to a place in the City (2-ish miles away from where we live) and in that place, you would casually find fresh, decapitated heads hanging there. The head of not the army or the terrorists, but normal people who have nothing to do with anything. There is a place in Algeria where people used to drink from and they would find bodies chopped to pieces floating there. Put it this way, there are families to this day still searching for their relatives who gone missing for over 20 years. Saw a picture of a women holding a sign in the protests that had a picture of a little boy and read iirc "this is my son, 13 years old, missing since the 90's" and the poor women's eyes were blood-red.

 

 

I'm not the most knowledgeable of the 90's, but many people think that some from the current system started terrorism in the country because the party that won the elections was religious. Both sides seem to admit that. So, they get mercenaries to grow beards and go chop heads, so some random people looked and said "hey, this terrorism thing doesn't sound half bad" so the went out and chopped heads. So, terrorists from the outside had to join the "fun", right? So, let's recap what happened.

 

 

The military dressed as terrorists were killing people, the terrorists dressed as the military were killing people, other crazy people joined in for the fun of it and killed people. So, when a group of guys with AK-47's stop a bus full of people, they will ask what side they (the people on the bus) are on and 90% of the time, the answer is wrong and they get executed in the side of the road like animals. A bus full of people died just like that.

 

 

It was a mess to say the least, the party that won got framed for terrorism, so in 1999, the current president had the general pardoning to restore peace and the people who committed crime walked free and gone unpunished. The only ones left are the families of the victims. It's hard to live for 20 years thinking " what happened to my family?, were they shot in the head, got their throats slit, or were they decapitated and chopped to pieces? Did their killer save them a grave?" 

 

 

The people are afraid and the trust is pretty much nonexistent because of 100's of thousands of people that died as just numbers, "casualties", there is nothing stopping you from becoming the next number.

 

 

Listen, man. I love my country and won't abandon it no matter what. I don't think this gonna end well for us, I truly don't. The history is repeating itself.

 

I just don't wanna be another number that's listed in the " casualties" in 10-20 years time. The current president isn't the one calling the shots, the country is held hostage and the people are looked at as monopoly money, a tool to achieve, a stepping stone and that's not right, man. My ancestors died for us to live as free people, and 50+ years later, we are still not free. 

 

 

It is what it is, I guess.

 

 

Edited 9 March 2019 by the fox

[Izzy]

@the fox

 

Your written English is outstanding mate 

[Salisbury Fox]

11 hours ago, leicsmac said:

I totally agree that change is much better through peaceful process.

 

Just to be absolutely crystal clear here, I can see where you're coming from that you think the UK's authority in this matter and therefore the question of legality is absolute, but for me the issue (and this is possibly verging on a philosophical debate) is that for pretty much anything to have rules, those rules have to be agreed upon by all parties involved and/or set by a higher authority. Warfare tends to involve two sides who are having a remarkable lack of agreement with each other, so they tend to not agree on such rules, either (apart from some globally-mandated ones like forbidden use of WMD etc). A victor, for instance, almost never commits war crimes, despite perhaps having done so under the textbook definition of the term. One side of a conflict doesn't get to set the terms of the conflict and then say they're sticking to them and the "others" aren't and they're "terrorists" for doing so - at the end of the day that simply ends with the belief that each time the strongest party sets the rules of such things, and Might Makes Right is fine to believe but don't pretend it's either fair or moral or "lawful".

 

The above is really why I think laws or rules in any type of conflict are subjective and why I have a problem with actions in warzones being deemed "lawful" or "unlawful" to give a veneer of either respectability or demonisation to what is being done - simply because most often both sides choose different rules or laws and both sides think they're absolutely right about it.

 

If you think this leads to a moral morass with no clarity where no one is invalidated but no one is right, either, you'd be correct. But it is what it is.

The rules in NI were that you could only fire aimed shots in self defence or to preserve the life of others and therefore I fail to to see how these 'rules' were not morally legitimate what ever side you were on.  We are not going to agree on this and so I will leave it to lie. Have a good day.

[DennisNedry]

21 hours ago, Jon the Hat said:

BBC reporting "strong rumours" that Shamina's baby boy has died at 2 weeks old.  Nice one home secretary.

 

Sad as it is for the innocent baby, it is nobody's fault but Shamina Begum's, in my opinion.

[leicsmac]

8 minutes ago, Salisbury Fox said:

The rules in NI were that you could only fire aimed shots in self defence or to preserve the life of others and therefore I fail to to see how these 'rules' were not morally legitimate what ever side you were on.  We are not going to agree on this and so I will leave it to lie. Have a good day.

That's totally fair enough.

 

And the same to you - starting with three points for City, please.

[foxy boxing]

21 hours ago, Jon the Hat said:

BBC reporting "strong rumours" that Shamina's baby boy has died at 2 weeks old.  Nice one home secretary.

Did the home secretary kill Shamina's baby! No

Did anyone force Shamina to go and live and have babies in a warzone with a terrorist organization! No

did she ask to come home before her other babies died! No

could she have travelled to somewhere else to have her baby, maybe to somewhere else in syria which is relatively safe! probably Yes

the home secretary is responsible for the security of this country and it's citizens and she chose to be with a terrorist organization that wanted to destroy everything this country holds dear and just because it hasn't worked out like she hoped she wants to resume her life in the U.K

the only blame is with herself for getting herself into the situation she is in and the people that groomed her to do so.

[the fox]

5 hours ago, Izzy said:

@the fox

 

Your written English is outstanding mate 

That means a lot to me, mate. (Thanks to autocorrect lol)

[Izzy]

18 minutes ago, the fox said:

That means a lot to me, mate. (Thanks to autocorrect lol)

Lol

 

Forget autocorrect, you really wouldn’t know that English isn’t your first language by your use of slang, abbreviations and humour.

 

I do sometimes honestly forget you’re Algerian. Very, very impressive mate.

[EastAnglianFox]

On 08/03/2019 at 15:13, Jon the Hat said:

BBC reporting "strong rumours" that Shamina's baby boy has died at 2 weeks old.  Nice one home secretary.

 

It is sad that an innocent child has died in those conditions but to blame the Home Secretary, goodness me that is ridiculous.

[Countryfox]

26 minutes ago, the fox said:

That means a lot to me, mate. (Thanks to autocorrect lol)

 

5 minutes ago, Izzy said:

Lol

 

Forget autocorrect, you really wouldn’t know that English isn’t your first language by your use of slang, abbreviations and humour.

 

I do sometimes honestly forget you’re Algerian. Very, very impressive mate.

 

If Carlsberg made fan boys ...

[Izzy]

8 minutes ago, Countryfox said:

 

If Carlsberg made fan boys ...

It’s almost as bad as your Babylon hero worship 

[Countryfox]

6 minutes ago, Izzy said:

It’s almost as bad as your Babylon hero worship 

 

Sir Babs to you, you mere mortal ! ...