WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Stanley]

See THIS report on youth unemployment.
The experts are talking about a "lost generation" as more than one million under-24-year-olds are left in limbo, without a job or a training course that should lead them to one. Five young people currently in that situation told us how they are dealing with the challenge.
This is well worth a read. I can't stress too much that this is a disaster that is happening now!

[PanBiker]

I still think the push to send all kids to university for a degree and a big debt is one of the big bogeys in the room. Bring back proper 5 year college courses for training into skilled trades, and proper apprenticeships, we still need thousands of folk in them. They are actually the cohort of workers that make the country work. Electricians, builders, plumbers, plasterers, drain engineers, mechanical engineers. and the hundreds of other trades that don't need a degree. I think you will probably get my drift. Of course there is a place for higher degree education but not for the masses if the courses that many do wont provide guaranteed work. I can definitely state that if you are a decent joiner, roofer, electrician or plumber you will never be short of work.

The biology degree guy that got the last IT job that I applied for is proof that any degree wont do. He got the job, spent a lot of money and the project failed, the council abandoned the plan and got nothing apart from a massive loss.

[Stanley]

I think you're quite right Ian. It has always been true and now is even more important. AI doesn't do away with the need for the people who enable the world to function.

See THIS report. The world is a very dangerous place!
A man has pleaded guilty to 14 counts of aiding suicides in Canada after he sold toxic chemicals online. Kenneth Law, 60, entered the guilty pleas in an Ontario court on Friday, as part of a deal with prosecutors, who withdrew more serious murder charges. Authorities said the former chef also sold about 1,200 packages of the toxic substances to recipients - who he met in online suicide forums - in 40 countries, roughly a quarter of which were sent to the UK. The charges all relate to Canadian victims - but families of British victims have said they were angry UK prosecutors would not charge Law over the deaths of 79 Britons, which authorities say are linked to products he supplied. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it had agreed to the Canadian plea bargain on the basis Law's sentence take the British deaths into account. A letter from the CPS, seen by the BBC, said Law would not face charges in the UK because he could challenge the extradition after being convicted of similar offences in Canada. Specialist CPS prosecutor Andrew Hudson said that including UK victims in the Canadian sentencing process was the "quickest and most effective route" to justice. Hudson said a successful extradition was "far from guaranteed and would have taken years to conclude", while any UK prosecution "could have been blocked under double jeopardy principles".
I've been aware of this case for a while but it seems to be reaching a conclusion.
Reading this make me think I have had a very sheltered life!

[Stanley]

THIS caught my eye.....
3 hours ago
A mouse plague is terrorising farmers across large swathes of Australia, with the rodents running rampant around homes and ravaging fields of grain. It comes as farmers are already under pressure from unpredictable fuel and fertiliser supplies due to the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran. This new battle has seen farmers pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into either re-planting crops that have been devoured by the mice or spending precious farming hours laying down bait – sterile seeds laced with mouse poison. "It's a big cost and it's not just the price of the bait," says Geoff Cosgrove, 43, who runs a 14,000-hectare farm in Mingenew, Western Australia (WA), growing wheat, canola, lupin and barley. "They do play with your mind - running around at night, in the ceiling, the air conditioning units. You can hear them and you can smell them - it's like a decaying body." Cosgrove has been farming for 25 years and in that time, he's only ever had to bait twice. This year's mouse plague is "way worse than the one in 2021", he says. That year a mouse plague swept through many parts of Australia, with large areas of New South Wales (NSW) and parts of Queensland suffering their worst plague in memory. The situation was so dire in NSW that hundreds of prisoners were forced to relocate after mice caused extensive damage at their jail. This time, farmers in WA first began reporting plague-like numbers of mice in March, with their neighbours in South Australia following suit shortly after.

[Stanley]

See THIS for an expected update today....
4 hours ago
The second tranche of documents relating to Lord Mandelson's appointment as the UK's ambassador to the US will be published on Monday, three sources involved in the process have told the BBC. While Number 10 has refused to confirm the publication date, a government spokesperson said the latest batch "will be among the largest publications ever laid in Parliament". Lord Mandelson was sacked as ambassador last year after the emergence of new revelations about the extent of his relationship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In February, MPs voted to force the government to publish all papers relating to the appointment through a humble address, a parliamentary process. The government initially opposed the motion, arguing that it did not want to publish material that could damage national security or diplomatic relations. But in a last-minute compromise, the government agreed to first send sensitive documents to the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which would decide what could and could not be published.
This is evidently going to run and run. It does nothing for the efficient governance of the country.....

[Stanley]

THIS caught my eye....
When I called Imtiyaz Ali to ask if we could meet, nearly a year after a plane crash killed his brother Javed, his sister-in-law Mariam, and their two children, we first decided to speak at his home in Mumbai. Hours later, he changed his mind. "Let's meet at the hotel instead," he said. Later, beneath the dim lights of a business hotel in Mumbai, he explained why. Javed and his family had built a life in the UK, but they returned often to Mumbai to see Imtiyaz and the rest of the family. But after the crash, the house no longer felt quite the same. Something in it had shifted irreversibly - altered in ways the routines of ordinary life could neither explain nor repair. "It feels," Imtiyaz said carefully, "like Javed is still there." His mother Farida Bano would later put it more simply: "He follows me everywhere," she told the BBC. "Day and night." In a few weeks, investigators are expected to release their final report into the crash of Air India Flight AI171, the Ahmedabad-to-London flight that fell from the sky less than a minute after takeoff last June. There was only one survivor among the 242 people on board. For a year, the families of the victims have lived with unanswered questions: what happened in the cockpit, why the aircraft lost thrust, whether the disaster was human error, mechanical failure or something else entirely. I had met Imtiyaz twice before, in Ahmedabad, in the stunned days after the crash, when families were still waiting for DNA confirmation to identify their loved ones. Back then he spoke with the dazed logic of someone still bargaining with reality. "Maybe he will come back," he told me then. Nearly a year later in Mumbai, the disbelief had faded - the waiting remained. "This confusion, this limbo haunts us," he said, describing the absence of closure about what had happened.
Hopefully the impending report will help the families who are still waiting for closure.....