[shun]

Originally Posted by riverkid

We sometimes use the past perfect WHEN IT IS NEEDED to mark one action as coming before another. Often, when the situation you mentioned comes about, other things in the sentence make it clear and the Past Perfect is not used.

In the news, it is when we needed to use Past Perfect now, which indicates things happened before a past case.

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Originally Posted by riverkid

Every past action has a consequence, but not all of them have a SIGNIFICANT ENOUGH consequence for any given ENL to choose the present perfect. Also, what one person views as significant, another may not, or even when the past action is viewed as significant, the speaker wishes to downplay it.

Are you aware such explanation tortures many students? What is "significant enough"? There is not such a standard to judge that. We use tense to express Time, not such Meaning as any "significance". People don't know how to use time to explain Present Perfect, so that they take up a theory of Current Relevance". Can't other tenses express a SIGNIFICANT ENOUGH consequence? Every tense can do so!

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Originally Posted by riverkid

BUT, AND THIS IS CRUCIAL. Not every sentence uses the present perfect. Often we introduce, highlight, give importance to a story/newspaper article by using the Present Perfect to introduce and thereafter we switch to the simple past.

Look at most of the news, and you see they contradict you. As they often say the time first, so they use Simple Past and then, much later, Present Perfect.

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Originally Posted by riverkid

Not every sentence uses the present perfect.

What kind of argument is this? Of course, not every sentence uses Simple Past. And again, not every sentence uses Simple Present. However, do you think that things said in Simple Present or Simple Past have no importance? It is nonsensical.