This Just In: Rolling UK News Thread

For the topical but not necessarily political - though the news prompting this is likely to get very political.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22630303

apparent eyewitness account:
https://twitter.com/BOYADEE

Cool

I'm uncomfortable with how quickly this has become a terrorist attack on a British soldier.

Are all politically or religiously motivated attacks terrorism?
Did they know he was a soldier, as reports say he wasn't in uniform?

I've read various reports saying that he was wearing a help for heroes t-shirt

Boris already calling this attack 'deluded' in a tweet

Witness account here: http://www.lbc.co.uk/listen-woolwich-eyewitness-describes-attack-72446

(WARNING: fucking horrible listening)

fucking hell

Are all political or regious motivated attacks terrorism

?

Fair starting point imo

I kind of feel that if it's a one off and not part of an organised group or campaign and doesn't involved mass killings that it falls somewhere short of terrorism. "Murder motivated by extremist political ideals" or something idk I'm uncomfortable about how the T word is used here and in the US to drive questionable security policy.

i'd want to distinguish between wannabe terrorists and paramilitaries maybe but i've got no qualms with calling it terrorism as long as the media use that to apply to any acts of not robbery-motivated violence committed against civilians unknown to their assailants

They drove at him and knocked him over, then started beheading him, they then dragged his body into the road.
Apparently it was filmed and the men shouted "Allahu Akbar" while standing over the body. The two didn't attempt to flee, they charged police and were shot.

"They sound like theyre linked to that muslim group" being both the answer and the justification, yeah i agree i guess its probably got to be part of a sustained or organised operation

the underlying trend seems to be "mass killing apparently perpetrated by white guy = craziness not terrorism" which sucks quite a lot

citation needed

This is on the ITV page:

http://news.images.itv.com/image/file/208857/image_update_fb93de818cc75f59_1369243638_9j-4aaqsk.jpeg

http://www.itv.com/news/story/2013-05-22/woolwich-police-incident/

there was 2 guys one with a gun and one of them stopped a bus and asked people to take photos??!!

It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EROXP8JDG9M

wtf

given they seem to have wanted to be photographed, i'm not sure posting dreadful links and pictures is a net win here.

i'm assuming that's a dreadful link btw. fuck if i'm clicking it.

It's not dreadful, sorry: It is the killer saying why he did it, that he is sorry for the women who had to witness it, but that they will never stop attacking

@Caek, sorry, but visually it is not shocking footage, just posting what I saw, and it's basically the suspect explaining why he did it. That seems relevant to me.

relevant to what?

i'm not saying pretend it didn't happen, but when you're doing exactly what terrorists want you to do, you want to be sure it's worth something.

They are showing it on BBC World/News now, too.

Ok Caek, sorry to have insulted you. It's relevance is yet to be determined obviously, but if you think a video of a man saying why he did it is irrelevant, then so be it.

I don't get this "You are letting the terrrrists win!" by pointing to this video. At all.

so? television news wants viewers. doubtless a video like that does the job.

xp

But then I'm a journalist and think nearly everything related to an event like this should be broadcast.

This is the "this just in" thread tbf

Was showing the crumbling of the twin towers "letting the terrorists win" too? Ofcourse not. It is showing what is happening.

look, i'm not saying images/videos/texts like that are always valueless and not worthy of debate.

i'm saying (1) at a minimum, that debate should take place in as calm an environment as possible, not minutes after (there is no debate right now, there is just people either reporting events or pushing an agenda they had before this incident -- that's not debate), and (2) there should be a pretty high threshold to show a video whose clear intent was to create terror.

rolling news is toxic bullshit, basically.

removes bookmark.

I agree with you about the debate part, it is too soon to draw conclusions. I am highly annoyed by people calling it a "terrorist" attack, or "Islamic attack" even (wtf BBC).

I do however, if this is about shocking news coming in, the video I linked is not one to abuse to make this point over. It wasn't gorey and I didn't make it clickable.

kinda ignoring the realities of the ways in which and the rate at which we communicate nowadays. Rolling news no longer monopolises the arbitration of initial perceptions and because people have access to so much info before it can be verified/reported, it's pretty much the lesser of two evils by default. Plus I think you're underestimating the ability of people to change their minds when face with new information

i'm not ignoring realities. i'm criticising them. the lesser of two evils is still toxic bullshit that we could choose not to cooperate with/assist.

So I live 1km from this. Helicopters been around. Really dreading the next few days.

not to validate this thread too much just yet, but if the rolling news cycle is how it goes then it's important to have people involving themselves in that but noting that e.g. contrary to bbc opinion, clean-shaven afro-caribbean men wearing high street clothing can't reasonably be described as "muslim looking".

CNN affiliate ITN aired a video showing a man holding a meat cleaver and saying, "we swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you."

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/05/22/article-2329089-19F062A4000005DC-917_634x510.jpg

the lesser of two evils is still toxic bullshit that we could choose not to cooperate with/assist.

How true is that though? I came across the story via twitter so naturally much of what I saw initially was hyperbolic and contradictory.

In the face of that is it not important for professional news sources to stay on top of developments as they occur in order to stop misinformation from warping the record before the dust settles?

Man, this could probably be the "Woolrich Terrorist Machete Murderers thread" and not the "This Just In: Rolling UK News Thread" tbh.

classic K-awesome ilx OP too.

For the topical but not necessarily political - though the news prompting this is likely to get very political.

: D

would be curious to know how caek defines "worth something"

i don't think rolling news is inherently toxic, though it's far from perfect, and a place to be a corrective is very important as merdeyeux says

In the face of that is it not important for professional news sources to stay on top of developments as they occur in order to stop misinformation from warping the record before the dust settles?

yes, but they demonstrably fail. it's not corrective. it just says stupid shit louder than people on twitter.

rolling news is often factually wrong, often about important stuff (in the last month: the tornado, the boston bombings, etc., etc.); it doesn't run corrections; the comment and analysis they include is at best glib; and at their very best, their really really good stories can be summed up as "hey everybody, look at THESE assholes!", about some people who actually are assholes.

I'm sorry but you are severely underestimating the stupidity of people on twitter.

The absence of rolling news wouldn't stop Boya Dee from telling the world that Robocop was bussin shots.

Not to say that Boya Dee is stupid but many of the people that retweet that and add their own spin on it will be.

ok granted, the rolling news coverage on rolling news channels is more often correct than the rolling news coverage on twitter.

Channel 4 news just said EDL planning a rally in Woolwich tonight. urghhh...

The absence of rolling news wouldn't stop Boya Dee from telling the world that Robocop was bussin shots.

boya dee didn't tell the world this

rolling news coverage on twitter is not a single entity that can be correct or incorrect

boya dee didn't tell the world this

That's the point.

newsflash, people put their own dumb spin on traditional news reportage as well

These guys were guilty huh

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2678209/Woman-dubbed-Angel-Woolwich-confronting-Lee-Rigbys-killers-detained-Mental-Health-Act-race-rant-pharmacy.html

what dyou expect she's half french

There's another end of season finale coming

Wasn't Danczuk going to name names last week?

Leon Brittain ... better not post anything in case I get arrested but hands up who is surprised?

In the interests of balance there is a veteran Labour MP whose reputation is much more of an open secret

The accusations about Brittan seem to be different to the ones he was hinting at originally.

the fact that Brittan and (other person who I maybe shouldn't name, though allegations against have been in public domain for some time, I think?) are both jewish seems to be exciting David Icke ZOG types no end

There's a third person who is Jewish too so, yes, the idiots are out in force, unfortunately I'm contributing to idiocy myself now I fear by posting what I posted on this thread

Police have only stated that inquiries are ongoing following an allegation of verbal racial abuse at the store. No one has been arrested or spoken to.
Police were called to the Bulwark Estate at around lunchtime on Monday, over concerns for the welfare of a woman - believed to be Ms Loyau-Kennet.

So, probably not her right?

A 30-metre (100ft) wide sinkhole has opened up in county Durham in the north-east of England, and it is so deep that its bottom cannot be seen.

The gaping void, thought to be the result of mine workings, was discovered on Thursday by Sam Hillyard, a Durham University academic, at Cowshill, in the rural area of Weardale – and it has since grown three times as big.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/01/rotherham-child-sex-abuse-difficult-questions

ffs

here we go

don't bother looking at the details slavoj, i know you're busy.

"Comments will close here shortly and reopen in the morning (GMT). Thank you for your contributions so far."

lol

fuck i just got trolled by Žižek. I should know better

Looking forward to The Pervert's Guide to Television abt Jim'll Fix It

"rhymes", aye alright slavoj

don't bother looking at the details slavoj, i know you're busy.

― woof, Tuesday, 2 September 2014 09:55 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these details being?

everything in the report basically - it's a really horrible messy story ft. terrible abuse, misogyny, class contempt, racial/cultural anxiety, a combo of managerialism & cuts screwing over decent projects, and the occasional suggestion of active corruption on the part of the police or council. idk, big-theory pontificating feels a poor response to it.

(it's here - about a hundred pages less appendices, manageable.)

this isn't a 'response,' it is merely zizek using this story to illustrate his general critique of liberalism via communitarianism, rotherham alongside the vatican, ciudad juarez, british columbia etc etc

the criticisms that he gets facts wrong or lacks inductive rigour are mostly overstated like the ludicrous plagiarism scandal of the other week

since as pontiff he naturally lacks perfect knowledge of all of his many domains (usa, france, uk, slovenia, germany.....) there will always be a degree of crudity or error

unless he is demonstrably and materially incorrect in his facts it is not especially relevant that he is not going into any detail (nevermind that it is an op-ed piece anyway)

zizek would surely categorise the liberal injunction to 'respond' to be as vapid and self-serving as the purely rhetorical denials of the prelate, the particularist response to isolated, predictable failures of a general program, made without reference to that program

He isn't wrong much; it doesn't matter if he's wrong on details he's a big-picture guy; it was an op-ed piece; particularism is vapid. Borrowed kettles!

I am a particularist. I don't mind big broad join-the-dots opinions/pontificating sometimes (though here I am not persuaded – the institutional unconscious talk does seem divorced from detail - but I don't generally get on with psych/lacan angles tbh), accept that isolating this as just a local or practical failure is an institutional defensive strategy & think 'universal struggle' is a good ideal, but it didn't seem well-connected to what I've read on rotherham. So it didn't seem very good.

I'd hope the pontiff would make sure he'd talked to local ecclesiastics before he said his bit. make sure the cathedra isn't a bit wobbly.

'response' was lazy of me, yeah.

isolated, predictable failures of a general program

which program do you mean here?

so what are the important details he is missing

the program is communitarianism

Bystanders have claimed a man was seen 'walking down the road cutting the head off a cat' before the incident took place.

Rickie Benson, a builder working up the road from the horror scene, said: "I heard there was a man walking up the road cutting the head off a cat.

xp
sorry, slow replies, no time lately - I just don't think his article tallies with the report, or with what people who've picked through it & have some experience have been saying, eg:
https://storify.com/God_loves_women/wise-thoughts-on-rotherham

Has there been any discussion on the new internet obscenity laws which have been effective since the 1st? The law makes video on demand depictions of certain legal sexual acts illegal. The law seems pretty arbitrary in deciding which acts should be banned.

This gives an overview of the law changes: http://obscenitylawyer.blogspot.co.uk/ Link is definitely NSFW and is biased.

I don't live in the UK and I have no personal interest in this sort of pornography, so this law does not affect me. However, I am a big fan of free speech and I worry about internet freedom in the future.

These laws have been in force for many years in relation to DVDs. What the new regulations do is extend that policy to 'TV-like' video on demand services. There seems to be a lot of confusion over what that means in practice but various websites have already been excluded from that bracket. There is no bar on watching such material unless it conflicts with pre-existing laws on sexual violence and the like. It looks like it might put UK porn producers at a competitive disadvantage vs their US rivals depending on what delivery platform they use but it's nowhere near as restrictive as the law in Australia, for example. It doesn't seem likely to change a great deal.

Judging from Twitter, it seems to be more of interest to people outside the UK than inside.

i know twitter is a vile ocean of hatred etc but with gerry mccann trending this morning, i clicked his blue hyperlinked name to see why, and apparently there's like a huge rolling gang of people who think he killed his daughter? is this a thing in general in this country? i know there was the media storm about it and he and his wife were declared as suspects by the portuguese police, but i've never met anyone irl who actually holds the view that they were responsible.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Gerry%20McCann%22&src=tren

I think a lot of edgy turds on the internet think he did? Or get a kick out of saying that he did, like it means they're Frankie Boyle or something.

it seems to be like wall to wall - maybe it's a kind of troll community.

It's a really big thing on an awful lot of forums imo, it seems to come up when they do another new round of publicity tours. Search "grief whore" in other places and you might well find what I mean.

This wave seems to have been triggered by Gerry's tweet saying that he was touting for exclusives of the 10th anniversary "My Hell" stories, and the commencement of the tv tour to drive up interest.

Presumably they're doing all of that to keep their daughter's disappearance in the news, maybe pay for investigations etc? I guess they could feasibly have made some money out of it all though.

is this a thing in general in this country?

It was at the time, there were plenty of jokes about it. It was his wife though who seemed to have offended a lot of idiots by not appearing to be sufficiently distraught.

It is a staple of the Web detective community, which is huge. Lots of people have gone over the published evidence and decided they did it, without any actual info on other theories the police might be working.

a similar community emerged with the Amanda Knox case IIRC, truly the dregs of the web

I think most of the suspicion comes from the obsession they have with Goncalo Amaral, even to the point when they made petitions to the court in his divorce settlement, and the amount of money they spent on the injunction against his book.

yeah it feels like a really grim army

yeah it feels like a really grim army

That's it in a nutshell. I dislike the kind of people who get obsessed with this topic. On the other hand I don't personally dismiss the idea that there may be something fishy about the case. That's as far as I'll go. I just don't know either way so generally keep my mouth shut.

Just to check, the 'they' in aldo's comment is the McCanns though? Not that there's any right way to go wrong after something like this* happens to you.

*both the kid's disappearance and the media circus.

Yeah, the 'they' is the McCanns. Various figures were thrown around at the time about how much they spent on the injunction, but people like Carter-Ruck don't come cheap.

I only read Amaral's book to see what was so exposing in it that they fought so hard (especially, as his defence team stated, they hadn't pursued other books before or after even if the titles were more provocative against the McCanns) and mainly because it's a very short read. The biggest thing which stood out to me, and in no way implies guilt, is how unco-operative the McCanns were with the police at the time; cancelling a witness interview because you didn't want to reschedule a tennis pro session is one detail that I remember.

I think you have two groups - ones that are fixated on the McCann's specifically who, for whatever reason, are obsessed with 'bringing them to justice' and a broader element of web sleuths who don't really care that much but think it's a jolly good mystery to be pored over and solved. As ever, the neatest theory implicates the parents. People have always done this, though - the only real difference is you couldn't @ Charles Lindburgh or John Ramsey.

Obviously nothing should be surprising any more but every paper in the land splashing the photo of a nurse over their front pages with allegations she’s a serial killer of children, interviewing her neighbours, trying to speak to her parents, etc, etc prior to her being charged with anything seems like an extraordinary abuse.

some scummy stuff on Newsnight yesterday: trawling one of the novichok victim's private social media comments, and just generally not allowing her any privacy/dignity because she has addiction problems and was living in a halfway house, then obv you can run roughshod over her seems to be the rules.

I thought trial by press undermined any further trial. Meant yo weren't going to get an objective jury etc.
Or that any jury would already be swayed & hope that does still mean something.

There are certain restrictions on what can be said in relation to active police cases but, by and large, it's not against the rules to identify people who have been arrested. This wouldn't be the case in other countries, necessarily, where you can only call a suspect by their first name and the initial of their surname, not their full details, address, etc.

This case is different in some respects to most murder investigations, in that it's not entirely clear at this stage whether any crime has actually been committed. The investigation covers both whether there have been any murders and, if so, who might be responsible for them.

Additionally, the nature of the allegations - that someone is suspected of killing 10+ children, should probably mean there's a moral case for not identifying anyone until there's enough evidence to charge them. In this one, the suspect has been released on bail and hasn't been charged with anything. It seems enormously dangerous to put her details out there.

yeah , I remember stories of confusion about the prefix paed causing people to be attacked so something as directed as that sounds does sound dangerous. & deeply irresponsible.

you'd have thought things would've changed since this guy

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2014/03/26/20/pg-35-jefferies-2-pa.jpg

Interesting legal stuff happening today:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/15/gangsters-who-drove-billy-kid-fatal-gun-fight-convicted-murder/

Seems to be the first case of its kind in England - three men convicted of murder after a fourth who was with them was shot by (unidentified) men they were shooting at. Almost guaranteed to end up in the Supreme Court, not sure it’ll hold up. Some of the news reports have mentioned ‘transferred malice’, which would normally be the case if you shot someone and hit someone else accidentally, not when you shoot someone and they shoot back, hitting someone else. It’ll potentially be a very significant precedent if it is upheld.

Separately, the first tv broadcast of a murder sentencing has taken place.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/27/old-bailey-trial-televised-first-time-ever-judge-sentences-man/