"Britain beset by fears over immigration as work restrictions end" by Sylvia Hui | Associated Press, December 28, 2013
LONDON — They’re portrayed as pickpockets who will steal British jobs. There are predictions they will beg, the unruly young ones will stir up riots, and some will even try to sell babies.
For months, Britain’s tabloids have repeatedly warned of the horrors they believe will ensue after Jan. 1, when work restrictions will be lifted across the European Union for migrants from Romania and Bulgaria — two of the trading bloc’s newest members.
Those changes, the papers claim, will unleash a mass exodus of the poor and unemployed from the two eastern European countries to Britain.
‘‘In January, the only thing left will be the goat,’’ a Daily Mail headline proclaimed, referring to a remote Romanian village where, the paper claimed, everyone was preparing to move to Britain for the higher wages and generous welfare benefits.
‘‘We’re importing a crime wave from Romania and Bulgaria,’’ another headline declared, quoting a Conservative lawmaker who told Parliament that most pickpockets on British streets hail from Romania.
The alarming stories about a possible Romanian and Bulgarian influx, and a government scramble to tighten welfare rules, are part of the latest chapter in an increasingly bitter debate about Britain’s immigration policies and its uneasy relationship with the EU. Right-wing politicians have won over voters by arguing that foreigners, particularly eastern Europeans, are flooding Britain’s job market with cheap labor and exploiting the country’s benefits system.
Uh-oh.
The upstart UK Independence Party, known as UKIP, has seized on the anti-immigration mood to undermine support for the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister David Cameron.
In response, Cameron has recently stepped up his rhetoric on immigration and rushed to impose curbs on the ability of new migrants to claim state benefits.
He also angered fellow EU leaders when he challenged the established concept that there should be a free movement of workers throughout the economic bloc, arguing that it should be amended to stop mass migrations from poorer to richer member states.
‘‘The politicians are doing it for popularity,’’ said Father Silviu Petre Pufulete, a priest at a Romanian Orthodox Church in London. ‘‘It’s been unfair to the Romanians and it’s just been blown out of all proportion.’’
How big exactly is the potential problem?
Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, and more than 100,000 migrants from the two countries already work in Britain, albeit under work restrictions that limit their access to jobs and state benefits like health care.
The work restrictions use quotas to limit the number of low-skilled Romanians and Bulgarians who can take jobs in Britain and requires them to obtain a ‘‘worker authorization document’’ before taking a position. Those who work without proper papers, and employers who hire them, face fines and prosecution.
Those restrictions — similar to those in place in several other EU countries — will be lifted Jan. 1, giving Romanians and Bulgarians the same rights as other EU nationals to live and seek work freely across Europe.
Britain is bound by EU regulations to let the migrants work, and is powerless to extend the restrictions.
That's why you don't join the EU. National sovereignty is gone.
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Related:
Russian Racists
French Are Racists
I guess you can safely conclude that all of Europe is racist. In fact, the only people who don't seem to possess prejudice, according to my supremacist pre$$, are benevolent and altruistic Jews.
Also see: Britain: Reclaiming the hero it maligned
"Gay British war hero receives royal pardon; Turing took own life after helping to crack Nazi code" by Raphael Satter | Associated Press , December 24, 2013
LONDON — His code-breaking prowess helped the Allies outfox the Nazis, his theories laid the foundation for the computer age, and his work on artificial intelligence still informs the debate over whether machines can think.
But Alan Turing was gay, and 1950s Britain punished the mathematician’s sexuality with a criminal conviction, intrusive surveillance, and hormone treatment meant to extinguish his sex drive.
In other words, he was tortured.
Now, nearly half a century after the war hero’s suicide, Queen Elizabeth II has finally granted Turing a pardon.
Little late, ain't it?
*****************************
The pardon has been a long time coming.
No kidding?
Turing’s contributions to science spanned several disciplines, but he is perhaps best remembered as the architect of the effort to crack the Enigma code, the cipher used by Nazi Germany to secure its military communications. Turing’s groundbreaking work — combined with the effort of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park near Oxford and the capture of several Nazi code books — gave the Allies the edge across half the globe, helping them defeat the Italians in the Mediterranean, beat back the Germans in Africa, and escape enemy submarines in the Atlantic.
Even before the war, Turing was formulating ideas that would underpin modern computing, ideas that matured into a fascination with artificial intelligence and the notion that machines would someday challenge the minds of man. When the war ended, Turing went to work programming some of the world’s first computers.
Turing made no secret of his sexuality, and being gay could easily lead to prosecution in post-war Britain. In 1952, Turing was convicted of ‘‘gross indecency’’ over his relationship with another man, and he was stripped of his security clearance, subjected to monitoring by British authorities, and forced to take estrogen to neutralize his sex drive — a process described by some as chemical castration.
I may not be for the gay agenda, but this is beyond that. This is the the torture of a human being.
S. Barry Cooper, a University of Leeds mathematician who has written about Turing’s work, said future generations would struggle to understand the code breaker’s treatment.
‘‘You take one of your greatest scientists, and you invade his body with hormones,’’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘‘It was a national failure.’’
Depressed and angry, Turing committed suicide in 1954.
Maybe. Or maybe the government just offed the guy like they did Dr. David Kelley. This Turing guy obviously knew a lot of secrets. Dead men tell no tales.
Turing’s legacy was long obscured by secrecy — ‘‘Even his mother wasn’t allowed to know what he’d done,’’ Cooper said. But as his contribution to the war effort was gradually declassified, and personal computers began to deliver on his promise of ‘‘universal machines,’’ the injustice of his conviction became ever more glaring.
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