General News Thread

The red button service is due to be discontinued too.

^^
Thought the BBC red button service is staying. it was due to finish earlier this year but the bbc reversed the decision

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51295430

Suspending the closure is not a reversal. The article clearly states they'll make a "fresh decision".

Sooner or later it will go. They don't give a toss about the sort of people who rely on the service.

I guess that one of the digital TV benefactors like Sky will step in and provide an equivalent free service.

Or will their paymasters via their monopoly newspaper decades long and relentless anti-BBC-coverage-and-lobbying-Government-to-close-down-any-opposition continue to denigrate the idea of a neutral licence funded public broadcaster obliged to be held to standards of neutrality and factual accuracy that their own print or digital journalism or TV coverage are not obliged to adhere to themselves, and just continue to fleece their held-to-hostage-subscription customers blind under the false impression that they are just complying with supply-and-demand "free market" forces.

I think that the problem with Ceefax, Oracle, 4Tel or Red Button is always the same in the modern world and that is that they can't find a 'business model'.
I say that because that was the reason quoted when 4Tel went.
My preference for such services is based upon the restrictions imposed by the technology, the journalist must be brief as for each item they only have (if memory serves) 140 characters. So no trying to sell a TV programme off the back of it.
Yes MSN, for example, is available but I spend as much time on that batting away the adverts as reading the news.

Priti Patel slams XR's blockade of printing presses to Murdoch's newspapers for not covering climate change as 'unacceptable' If she finds this action unacceptable why hasn't she dealt with the unacceptable immigrant invasion from across the channel with the same kind of action??

There isn't an immigrant invasion, only right wing racist shit rags describe it that way, there is still a migrant/refugee crisis though, and only because both the UK and US have actively help fuck up most of the countries these people are fleeing from, you know, through arms sales to either their neighbours or their dodgy governments

The papers still don't understand that a few dodgy cunts coming over to claim benefits or whatever and people fleeing for their lives aren't the same thing, it pisses me off when the two get lumped together. Bloody foreigners, coming over here so they don't get killed in a genocide, a chemical attack, or because they don't support a radical government, send them all back, it's not our problem, oh wait, what about all those doctors, nurses, care workers, manual labourers and those that are willing to do jobs that Brits won't, doesn't matter, foreign

Topless Extinction Rebellion protest outside parliament

Now that's a protest that I agree with
They aren't stopping anyone from getting to work, and they are certainly getting their points across.

I would agree with that point Charl...
But are there any babechannel babes protesting in that picture we recognise?....

In other news a huge explosion has hit the Beirut port weeks after the huge explosion...