World News for Students of English

08-06-2017 15:00

At 10 p.m. on Saturday June 4th, police in London heard reports of a van hitting several people on London Bridge. The van then drove towards a market, where the terrorists left the vehicle and started stabbing people. Eight minutes after the attack began, policemen shot the suspects dead. The suspects were wearing what looked like explosive vests, but these were later established to be hoaxes.

Seven people died in the attacks and many more were injured. Theresa May, Britain’s Prime Minister, later reacted to the attack saying that enough was enough and that taking on extremism and terrorism needed to change. On Sunday morning, police raided flats in East London and arrested 12 people.

On Monday, people of all faiths came together in a vigil to honour victims of the London Bridge attack. Senior police officers and politicians laid flowers and paid their respects. London mayor Sadiq Khan led the vigil in defiance that London will never be broken by terrorism because unity and love for one another are always stronger than the hate of the extremists. He added that the attackers’ perverse ideology had nothing to do with the true values of Islam.

One attendee described how affected she was by the attack, as the people were not of a mere statistic. They were people who used to walk just like her.

Difficult words: establish (prove), hoax (something that is a hoax is fake), vigil (an event when people show their respects and think about what happened), defiance (resistance, confrontation, fight), perverse (disturbing, changed), ideology (a set of ideas), mere (small).

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