Heartbreaking to think of those parents on that long journey knowing what’s ahead of them. May they have the strength to endure it as there is nothing worse.
NY Times taking a bit of a battering for their coverage.
I think its pretty obvious what the problem with the balcony was if you look closely at the photos.
Firstly it appears to have been secured to the wall using timber (maybe this is a common practice in the US?? Not in Ireland anyway)
Secondly the timber has dry rot which would suggest that the balcony was not waterproofed correctly.
Why so?
Decent article in the LA Times today about the balcony collapse. Finally some decent reporting of the incident.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-berkeley-balcony-collapse-20150617-story.html#page=1
Tying in some dickheads trashing houses when away to this is ridiculous.
What’s the next story now that this is over?
this is our 9/11 lads
But the star is appearing to be getting away unscathed
the j1 is a right of passage lads for some many students
No - Mary Lou has called them out on social media - ‘Shame on the Irish Daily Star for its front page today. No regard for the unimaginable loss of the families of these six fine young people’
You’ll get accommodation for a song at Berkeley next year…
What did they have on front page?
Picture of body bags seemingly
Yeah with pictures of the dead alongside. Standard tabloid shite, though the Examiner supposedly have similar.
Businessman Donald Trump has his eyes on the White House and, if he gets there, it seems the J-1 is one of his targets for the axe.
Trump is the current frontrunner among candidates for the Republican nomination despite a string of gaffes and criticism of comments aimed at women and migrants.
His campaign website, donaldtrump.com, lists a range of policies he would seek to implement were he to be voted into the Oval Office, including a requirement firms hire Americans first, ahead of job candidates of other nationalities, and the mandatory return of all foreign nationals with a criminal conviction.
The list of proposals also targets the J-1 visa, a rite of passage for tens of thousands of Irish teenagers in recent decades. According to the Trump site, it would be scrapped and instead replaced by a jobs programme aimed at “inner-city youth”.
According to the proposal, “the J-1 visa jobs program for foreign youth will be terminated and replaced with a resume bank for inner city youth provided to all corporate subscribers to the J-1 visa program”.
More than 150,000 Irish students have used the J-1 option to visit the US in the past 50 years.
The Berkeley balcony tragedy in June, in which five Irish students and an Irish-American teenager were killed and others seriously injured, thrust the J-1 programme into the spotlight when a severely criticised article in the New York Times said it had become “not just a source of aspiration, but also a source of embarrassment for Ireland”.
It prompted a furious response, including a strongly-worded letter from former president Mary McAleese, in which she said: “I was a J-1 visa student in California over 40 years ago.
“Tens of thousands of Irish J-1 students have spent happy summers there over the years since. By far the vast majority have been a credit to Ireland and only the very tiniest minority have not.”
Under the J-1 scheme, third-level full-time students completing degree level courses can work in the US for four months between May 15 and September 15, with the option of securing an additional month. Applicants must be over 18 years of age and under 28.
Students can already apply for a J-1 for 2016, although one company which helps with the process, Sayit, issued a warning earlier this year regarding a J1 “summer accommodation scam taking place on various campuses” targeting those in the US this summer.
It’s about time someone culled this piss up for the middle class kids…
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It used to not be a piss up and for many with fees basically back it is no longer just that.
They’ll just go to Canada instead anyway and smoke some weed
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Are you saying they are going there to save and gain valubale life experience?? My mates cousin was in New York this summer, 22 of them in a one bedroom apartment. A lady I work with, her son and 9 others in the same situation in San Fran, 3 came home early as they drank their money and couldn’t get work… I doubt they tried too hard…Same story in nearly every case, work and piss it away…which is fine in isolation but that many cunts at it every summer… they’ve given us a worse name than the scumbags in Australia. Loads of letting agents wont rent to Irish down around San Diego after these rich kids have smashed the place up year after year. We are a distugsting country at times but pass it all off as some craic and high-jinx when it is anything but. It’s a good kicking a lot of these cunts want- fuck em out onto buling site for the day or into hospitals cleaning shit and piss pans and they wont be long sorting their shit out.
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