Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Fick innit?




Business leaders issue stark warning following OECD education study

CBI chief says England's position near bottom of global league table of young adult education risks economic 'car crash'


Randeep Ramesh, social affairs editor

The Guardian, Tuesday 8 October 2013 21.57 BST


Britain's business leaders have warned that the country risks an economic "car crash" as a respected international thinktank issued a stark warning that millions of English adults cannot read, write or add up better than primary school children.

An investigation by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that a quarter of adults in England have the maths skills no better than a 10-year-old, a conclusion that also prompted a political row in which the Conservatives attacked Labour's record in government.

That means an estimated 8.5 million adults are only able to manage one-step tasks in arithmetic, sorting numbers or reading graphs. The same body also concluded that one in six adults could only just decipher sentences and read a paragraph of text – the literacy level of a child in their final year of primary education.



More bollox here: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/08/uk-economy-warning-oecd-education

Hils
I hope you didn't smear the polish after taking that picture.

Should we be Worried, I remember the last warning like this saying their were hundreds, not thousands.

Also comes on the back of the islamic school in Dearby closure. Making Western women wear islamic clothing.

Whats going on in this country??????

9 October 2013 Last
MI5 chief Andrew Parker warns of Islamist threat to UK public
By Frank Gardner

BBC security correspondent

Andrew Parker was named as the new head of the Security Service earlier this year. Thousands of Islamist extremists in the UK see the British public as a legitimate target for attacks, the director general of MI5 has warned.

Andrew Parker was making his first public speech since taking over as head of the UK Security Service in April.

Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Yemen present "the most direct and immediate threats to the UK," he said.

He also warned of the damage done to British security by the leaking of classified documents from GCHQ.

Addressing the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall, Mr Parker added the security services must have access to the many means of communication which terrorists now use.

'Not perfect'

Threats to the UK are growing more diverse and diffuse, he said, but warned: "It remains the case that there are several thousand Islamist extremists here who see the British public as a legitimate target."

He explained that "knowing of an individual does not equate to knowing everything about them".

"Being on our radar does not necessarily mean being under our microscope," he said.

"The reality of intelligence work in practice is that we only focus the most intense intrusive attention on a small number of cases at any one time.

"The challenge therefore concerns making choices between multiple and competing demands to give us the best chance of being in the right place at the right time to prevent terrorism."

Mr Parker added: "We are not perfect, and there are always things we can learn, do better and sharpen up on."

With 30 years in MI5, Mr Parker was previously deputy director general and before that director of its counter-terrorism division at the time of the London bombings in 2005.

'Stopped at airports'

In his speech, he named al-Qaeda and its affiliates in south Asia and the Arabian peninsula as presenting "the most direct and immediate threats to the UK".

By that he meant primarily its elements in Pakistan and separately in Yemen, from where al-Qaeda has three times succeeded in smuggling explosives past security on to planes in the last four years.

Former GCHQ Director Sir David Omand: "Nobody is reading all your emails"
Referring to the ongoing conflict in Syria, he said a growing proportion of MI5's casework concerned individuals from the UK who had travelled to fight there.

He said extremist Sunni groups in Syria were aspiring to attack Western countries.

This has long been a concern of Western governments - that British-based jihadists will one day return from the killing fields of Syria and turn their new-found skills on the population back home.

A number of people have been stopped at airports and some have been arrested on suspicion of terrorism.

"For the future, there is good reason to be concerned about Syria," he said.

Mr Parker said 330 people had been convicted of terrorism-related offences in Britain between 11 September 2001 and 31 March 2013.

He added that in the first few months of this year, there had been four major trials related to terrorist plots.

Chillingly, he reminded the public that these included plans for a 7/7-style attack with rucksack bombs, and named two other plots.

There were guilty pleas in each case, he said, with 24 terrorists convicted and sentenced to more than 260 years in jail.

'Reach and limits'

Mr Parker's speech also went on to reveal some of the fears and frustrations his service was experiencing over both the advances in technology and those who leak government secrets into the public domain.

He warned that terrorists now had tens of thousands of means of communication "through e-mail, IP telephony, in-game communication, social networking, chat rooms, anonymising services and a myriad of mobile apps".

Mr Parker said it was vital for MI5 - and by inference its partner GCHQ - to retain the capability to access such information if the Security Service was to protect the country.

Intelligence officials in both the US and Britain have been absolutely dismayed at the wealth of secret data taken by the former CIA contractor Edward Snowden when he fled to Russia.

Some 58,000 of the files are from GCHQ, whose intelligence, Mr Parker said, had played a vital role in stopping many UK terrorist plots over the past decade.

Without mentioning Mr Snowden by name, he said ''it causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques".

Doing this, he added, handed the advantage to the terrorists.

In conclusion, Mr Parker said he did not believe the terrorist threat was any worse now than before. But it was "more diffuse, more complicated, more unpredictable".

Situation normal.....




Chaotic UK e-borders scheme failing to stop terror suspects

Border control system was so overwhelmed that 650,000 smuggling alerts were deleted, watchdog reveals


Alan Travis, home affairs editor

The Guardian, Wednesday 9 October 2013


The Home Office's flagship "e-borders" programme, which has taken 10 years to develop and has so far cost more than £500m, has yet to deliver significant benefits to controlling immigration and has had only a limited impact on tracking terrorists, an official watchdog has concluded.

John Vine, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, reveals in a report published on Wednesday that high-profile e-borders alerts are not even being routinely used to stop "high-risk individuals" – such as terror suspects, war criminals and those who have previously been deported from Britain – entering the country at ports and airports, apart from Heathrow.

The e-borders programme, which requires passengers to provide airlines with their personal details before they travel to and from Britain, began in 2004.

The declared intention was to "export the border" to improve immigration control and to ensure passengers considered a threat to Britain could be prevented from boarding their flights. But it is thought that only two airlines have so far signed up for the pre-departure screening checks needed for such no-fly lists to work.



http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/09/e-borders-scheme-failing-to-stop-terror-suspects

We are all in together.

£600000 for a pad in London and

WEDNESDAY 09 OCTOBER 2013

Vice-chancellor of Oxford Professor Andrew Hamilton calls for £16,000 tuition fees
Elite universities should be allowed to charge far more, Oxford chief argues


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/vicechancellor-of-oxford-professor-andrew-hamilton-calls-for-16000-tuition-fees-8867323.html
==========

"Vice-chancellor of Oxford Professor Andrew Hamilton calls for £16,000 tuition fees
Elite universities should be allowed to charge far more, Oxford chief argues".....ends


Yep saw this on later Sky news paper talk Fred.

I had suspicions under the tories that this might happen.

And so the top universities should be allowed to charge what they want. You don't want peasants getting into Oxbridge!

Bye gum Fred , the elastic on these drawers are tight , Stan what time are we meeting Goldielock's for that pie & pint ?

Fred ......Torries will drop a few more points on the polls on that £16 grand proposal alone.

Its all coming good for the Socialists.

PMqs should be good today.

You don't want the oiks going to uni anyway...

You couldnt make it up.

After yesterdays IMF upgrade we get the real state of the economy..........

Markit Economics ‏@MarkitEconomics 30m
Manufacturing output across the UK down 1.2% m/m in August, fastest decline since January (Reuters poll +0.4%)

Do these people know what they are doing ie, the IMF. Perhaphs the credit rating agencys should start to grade them and downgrade them immediatly.

City A.M. ‏@CityAM 31m
Disappointment for UK manufacturing as figures decline in August......

http://www.cityam.com/blog/1381307255/disappointment-uk-manufacturing-figures-decline-august

The International Monetary Fund has upgraded its growth forecasts for the UK by more than any other advanced economy in an embarrassing u-turn for the global financial institution.

Britain is now expected to grow by 1.4pc this year, double the rate projected in April when IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard singled the UK out for criticism and accused George Osborne of “playing with fire” with his austerity programme.

The following month, the Fund urged him to borrow as much as £10bn this year to pay for infrastructure investment and business tax cuts in an attempt to boost growth.

The IMF appeared to moderate its position in its World Economic Outlook, saying that "public investment can be brought forward to offset the drag from near-term fiscal tightening, while staying within the medium term fiscal framework". In May, it said action was "essential".

Instead, it acknowledged the UK’s sharp turnaround, saying: “Recent data have shown welcome signs of an improving economy, consistent with increasing consumer and business confidence.”

Up 2% from monday, i knew the Uni admission fees would go down badly......

electionista ‏@electionista 3h
UK - YouGov/Sun poll: CON 33%, LAB 39%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 10%

UKIP could be bigger than Tories by 2018, says think tank

http://www.ukip.org/newsroom/news/912-heseltine-is-an-out-of-touch-dinosaur-with-racist-slurs-says-amjad

The uni admission fees were not mentioned when that poll was taken. The best universities need to raise their fees.

No, it wasn't a think tank. It was just a UKIP member saying that and as usual it can be ignored.