"The Paradox of Migration: Reconciling Economic Competition and 'Common Values' in Britain"

[From the introduction] This paper looks at Great Britain as an important case for explaining the inherent paradox of migration policy in Western Europe. Where immigration is an opportunity to jump-start latent industrial or struggling service economies, it is also a dominant political challenge in maintaining national identity and cohesion. This is particularly the case for Britain, where national identity is an inchoate, regularly re-defined concept (see Cesarani 1997; Hampshire 2006). Britain has seen positive economic growth and production in opening up their labor market to over half a million A-8 Accession workers, mainly from Poland and Lithuania. And under the banner of “controlled migration,” the Labor government has introduced a five-tiered, point-based entry system to bring highly skilled and need-based non-European migrants to Britain. However, where there is a desire to meet economic needs through migration, immigration has never been more of a contested, salient political issue. The promotion of citizenship requirements emphasizing integration (in English language and UK knowledge assessment) for non-EEA migrants, is an important innovation for defining British national identity, articulating for the first time a set of ‘common values’ to underscore the British national community. Britain’s migration calculus, maximizing the economic and social benefits of immigration against the efforts to isolate potential costs of immigration through the first, real definition of “Britishness” exemplifies the inherent paradox of migration for Western European states where more formed or consolidation visions of nation-state pre-dated large-scale migration. Following a review of context in which migration and citizenship laws were changed, discussing Britain’s strategic use of European Enlargement as being able to maintain selective admission alongside economic openness, the second part looks at British policy in detail by examining the most recent development of immigration and citizenship policy, beginning with the 2002 White Paper “Secure Borders, Safe Haven,” and manifesting in the 2005 Five-year strategy, “Controlling Our Borders.” Finally, I conclude with preliminary comparisons between Britain and other Western European countries, who are only now coming to terms with the realization that they are ‘countries of immigration,’ taking on all the benefits and responsibilities that come with it

Initiating maize pre-breeding programs using genomic selection to harness polygenic variation from landrace populations

BACKGROUND: The limited genetic diversity of elite maize germplasms raises concerns about the potential to breed for new challenges. Initiatives have been formed over the years to identify and utilize useful diversity from landraces to overcome this issue. The aim of this study was to evaluate the proposed designs to initiate a pre-breeding program within the Seeds of Discovery (SeeD) initiative with emphasis on harnessing polygenic variation from landraces using genomic selection. We evaluated these designs with stochastic simulation to provide decision support about the effect of several design factors on the quality of resulting (pre-bridging) germplasm. The evaluated design factors were: i) the approach to initiate a pre-breeding program from the selected landraces, doubled haploids of the selected landraces, or testcrosses of the elite hybrid and selected landraces, ii) the genetic parameters of landraces and phenotypes, and iii) logistical factors related to the size and management of a pre-breeding program. RESULTS: The results suggest a pre-breeding program should be initiated directly from landraces. Initiating from testcrosses leads to a rapid reconstruction of the elite donor genome during further improvement of the pre-bridging germplasm. The analysis of accuracy of genomic predictions across the various design factors indicate the power of genomic selection for pre-breeding programs with large genetic diversity and constrained resources for data recording. The joint effect of design factors was summarized with decision trees with easy to follow guidelines to optimize pre-breeding efforts of SeeD and similar initiatives. CONCLUSIONS: Results of this study provide guidelines for SeeD and similar initiatives on how to initiate pre-breeding programs that aim to harness polygenic variation from landraces. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-015-2345-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Islam in Europa: Integration durch Recht und ihre Grenzen

Die Integration des Islam ist vor allem über unabhängige Rechtssysteme erfolgt. Dieser Artikel verfolgt Wegmarken und rekurrierende Konflikte in diesem Prozess, vergleicht einen individualrechtlichen und korporativen Pfad der Integration im Hinblick auf ihre Möglichkeiten und Grenzen, und weist auf durch selbstläufig rechtliche Integration evozierte Spannungen zwischen Recht und Politik hin. Es besticht die Elastizität liberaler Institutionen gegenüber einer Religion, die in nicht geringem Maß Irritation für diese sein muss