Laboring over it for you:
"Britain’s Labor Party leader backs replacing House of Lords" by Danny Hakim | New York Times November 02, 2014
LONDON — The House of Lords traces its roots to the 14th century. Now the Labor Party is proposing to consign it to history.
In a speech Saturday, Ed Miliband, the Labor leader, called for replacing the House of Lords with an elected body similar to the US Senate. In his remarks, he stressed that the House of Lords was not geographically representative of the United Kingdom, with London having more members than Wales, Northern Ireland, East and West Midlands, and Yorkshire combined.
“It’s an economic issue. It’s a social issue. It’s a fairness issue,” he said during a speech in Blackpool, in northwest England. “The northwest has nearly the same population as London, but five times more members of the House of Lords are from London than from the northwest.”
“No wonder the recovery isn’t working for most parts of Britain, when the voices of most parts of Britain aren’t being heard,” he added.
“It’s time to reform the way we are governed.”
The House of Lords was dissolved, along with the monarchy, after a civil war in 1649, but reinstated a few years later when the monarchy was restored. Royalists were not in a forgiving mood; they dug up the bodies of deceased rebel leaders, including Oliver Cromwell, who had been buried at Westminster Abbey, and put their heads on spikes.
Miliband’s proposal received a tamer response, though the Liberal Democrats, who are part of the governing coalition with the Conservative Party, assailed it nonetheless. They blamed Miliband for the failure of a move in 2012 that would have made the chamber largely, but not entirely, an elected body.
“This is simply lip service from a Labor Party who have no intention of actually delivering,” said Sir Malcolm Bruce, the party’s deputy leader.
The speech comes as the parties position themselves before next year’s election.
How do you like your $hit show fooley politics over there?
Such a proposal would require the same process as a constitutional change or major legislation. It would have to be proposed by the prime minister’s government, pass both houses of Parliament, and have the assent of the queen.
The House of Lords and the House of Commons make up the two chambers of the British Parliament, and they are far larger than the US Congress, which has 535 members.
The House of Lords has more than 750 members, known as peers, most of whom are now appointed by the queen on the advice of the prime minister or an independent commission, or they inherit their seats.
In 1999, all but 92 hereditary positions were eliminated as part of a reform effort. Twenty-six members of the House of Lords are bishops or archbishops in the Church of England.
The chamber has had its share of scandal, including one regarding allegations that peerages were being purchased by Labor supporters in exchange for political donations or loans, though no charges were filed by prosecutors in 2007 after a lengthy investigation.
Yeah, focus on that penny ante scandal and not the ubiquitous elite pedophile rings in Britain.
--more--"
Speak of the devils:
"Torrent of rapes in Britain put uncomfortable focus on race, ethnicity" by Katrin Bennhold | New York Times November 02, 2014
ROCHDALE, England — Shabir Ahmed, a delivery driver for two takeout places, did not have to go looking for young girls. Runaways and rebellious teenagers would show up at the restaurants, often hungry and cold. He slipped them free drinks and chicken tikka masala. “Call me Daddy,” he would say.
But soon, Ahmed, a father of four, would demand payback. In a room above one of the restaurants, according to testimony and evidence in later legal proceedings against him, he would play a pornographic DVD and pass around shots of vodka.
Then, on a floor mattress with crumpled blue sheets and kitchen smells wafting from below, he raped them, and later forced them into sex with co-workers and friends, too.
The girls were too scared of him to talk. And when they did, no one believed them. Once, a 15-year-old got so drunk and upset that she smashed a glass counter. Ahmed and his colleagues did not hesitate to call the police.
After she was released, she was coerced into sex four or five times a week, sometimes with half a dozen men at a time, in apartments and taxis around Rochdale, a town in northwest England near Manchester.
Related: The Rotten in Rotherham
The police and other agencies were alerted more than 100 times over six years to the possibility that something very wrong was happening before Ahmed, now 61, was arrested and charged as the leader of a sexual exploitation ring that involved eight men of Pakistani descent and one Afghan.
It truly is a Muslim-hating, Zionist-promoting media.
In May 2012, he was given a 19-year prison sentence for raping and abetting rape in a case involving at least 47 girls, all of them white.
Ahmed showed no remorse. He called the judge a “racist bastard,” the girls “prostitutes” and blamed white Britons for “training” their daughters in drinking and sexual activity at a young age.
The recent revelations that at least 1,400 teenage and preteenage girls had been sexually exploited over 16 years by so-called grooming gangs in another northern English city, Rotherham, stunned the nation because of the sheer scale of the abuse.
And I haven't seen much since. Hmmmm.
And it put an uncomfortable spotlight on issues of race, religion, and ethnicity in an increasingly multicultural nation: Nearly all of the rape suspects are Pakistani men, and nearly all of the victims are white.
That agenda-pushing ax is being ground all the time.
But the problem and the slow law-enforcement response are by no means limited to Rotherham, where evidence files are said to have disappeared and no charges have been filed since the release two months ago of an independent report documenting the widespread abuse. (Only one case in Rotherham, involving three teenage girls, had been prosecuted.)
It's called a COVER-UP because it reaches into the GOVERNMENT and ROYAL FAMILY!
You are being ruled by sick perverts, Britain. We all are!
In nearby Sheffield, a local official has accused the police of ignoring information she had passed along over the past decade, including addresses where she said abuse was taking place and names of suspected abusers.
The police and prosecutors say they are now pursuing cases more aggressively across the country, including in Manchester, where about 180 suspects are under investigation. Simon Bailey of the Association of Chief Police Officers last month spoke of “many more Rotherhams to come.”
I will be looking for them.
Ahmed is a rare example in such a case of someone who has been charged, tried, and convicted of rape, shedding light on how grooming gangs work and have contributed to a broader pattern of sexual abuse of children involving British celebrities, politicians, private schoolteachers and clergymen.
Yeah, somehow all the sexual perversion is the result of Pakistanis and Muslims!!
Ahmed’s case and a handful of others prosecuted since 2010, from Rochdale and Keighley in the north to Oxford in the south, followed the same template: Mostly Asian men were found to have groomed mostly white British girls between the ages of 12 and 18, getting them to use alcohol or drugs and then forcing them to have sex, either for personal gratification or for trafficking and prostitution.
Nazir Afzal, a Pakistani-Briton who is the chief crown prosecutor in charge of sexual crime, said the recent cases were not primarily about race. “It’s not the ethnicity or religion of the abusers that defines them; it’s their attitude toward women,” Afzal said in a recent interview. “These men will abuse the girls and women who are the most accessible to them, regardless of their religion or the color of their skin.”
Ahmed, he pointed out, was separately convicted of 30 counts of child rape of a Pakistani girl, a case that resulted in a 22-year prison sentence later in 2012 but received much less media attention. Ahmed planned to appeal at the European Court of Justice, his lawyer, Naila Akhter, said.
Over the last two years alone, Afzal’s office has dealt with sex offenders from 25 countries and victims from 64. Nearly nine of 10 convicted sexual abusers in Britain are white men, he said, and by far the most common pattern of child sexual abuse takes place not just within the same community but within the same home.
Look at him shift everything to parents!!
Not only is the topic itself sickening and disgusting, so is the "journalism."
Oh, right, both pieces are NYT slop. That explains it.
In online grooming, the fastest-growing form of abuse, with victims first contacted online, there appears to be no clear racial pattern, either. But Afzal said that in the type of child sexual exploitation known as localized or on-street grooming, men of Pakistani heritage feature prominently.
White men are still the largest group at 49 percent of known offenders in this category, according to a 2012 study by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, which identified 2,409 victims over a 14-month period across England even before the Rotherham report was published.
But at 33 percent, “Asian men” — most commonly referring to Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and Afghans — were disproportionately represented, given that they represent just over 7 percent of the population.
--more--"
Related: UK opens National Sperm Bank amid donor shortage
Btw, don't lose your head, but there is another demon baby on the way.
"Court says UK spies get bulk access to NSA data" by Raphael Satter | Associated Press October 30, 2014
LONDON — The British government’s insistence that its spies don’t use the vast espionage powers of the US National Security Agency to sidestep UK restrictions on domestic eavesdropping was called into question by a court document published Wednesday.
Oh, your government lied to you about spying, too?!!!
The two-page memorandum challenges that official line, carrying an acknowledgement by Britain’s electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ that it scoops up an undisclosed amount of ‘‘unanalyzed intercepted communications content’’ from its foreign intelligence partners without a warrant.
For human rights groups challenging UK surveillance, the document shows that GCHQ can use its allies to engage in mass spying without proper oversight.
‘‘The British public had been consistently persuaded by government over the last year that GCHQ are not using the NSA as a backdoor to sidestep protection in the law,’’ said Eric King, whose group, Privacy International, has joined London-based rights group Liberty and Amnesty International in suing the spy agency.
King, whose group obtained the memo as part of its lawsuit, said it shows ‘‘a huge gap in protection for British people.’’
GCHQ declined to comment.
Andrew Defty, who teaches politics at the University of Lincoln, said GCHQ was probably right to argue that the exchange of unfiltered raw intelligence isn’t restricted by Britain’s intercept legislation, known as RIPA.
‘‘This is in all likelihood not illegal,’’ said Defty, the co-author of ‘‘Watching the Watchers,’’ a book about parliamentary oversight of Britain’s intelligence services. ‘‘However, it does appear to go against the spirit of the law, which would seem to rest on the principle that interception must take place for a reason.’’
What did you expect from a law-breaking, war-criminal government controlled by bankers?
Defty said the revelation illustrates the need to update Britain’s intercept law after the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about mass spying.
‘‘RIPA needs replacing,’’ he said.
But never mind....
--more--"
Related: US and UK Spied on Israel
And Israel knows it.
Also see: Edward Snowden’s story unfolds in chilling ‘Citizenfour’
Being shown in Sweden first.
U.K. Treasury Chief Set To Pay Off World War I Bonds
Treasury’s redemption scheme stretches all the way back to Napoleonic and Crimean wars and Irish potato famine.
Good Lord!
