|
In this mailing:
by Soeren Kern
• December 17, 2014 at 5:00 am
"Spanish
newspapers formed suicide pact, invited Google to pull the trigger.
Google did." — Twitter user.
Spain's
ailing newspaper industry, which is utterly dependent upon Google News
search engine to drive traffic and revenues, is now at risk.
The
spirit of the new law "is not really about compensation, but about
extorting money from Google... The final result of the Google Tax: no one
gets paid, media lose traffic and Internet users lose an important
service. Spanish newspaper publishers should be thankful that an external
agent drives readers to their publications for free." — Alfredo
Pasqual, technology commentator.
Europe's
obsession with Google may be more about anti-Americanism than anything
else.
The Internet giant Google has announced that it is shutting down its
Google News service in Spain.
The move came in response to a new copyright law in Spain that would
require Google and other news aggregators to pay Spanish publishers for
linking to their content.
The Spanish law follows similar legislation in other parts of the
European Union, where politicians are increasingly lashing out at Google
over a host of complaints about antitrust, privacy and taxation issues.
Google has accommodated critics in some countries, but with Spain,
the government appears to have completely overreached: Spain's ailing
newspaper industry, which is utterly dependent upon Google News to drive
traffic and revenues, is now at risk.
by Lawrence A. Franklin
• December 17, 2014 at 4:00 am
The
big winner politically in the multilateral effort to roll back the
Islamic State's territorial gains is Iran.
Tehran
has even established an unofficial "no go zone" in Iraqi
Kurdistan. Iran's most invidious influence, however, is possibly the
widespread, invisible presence of agents from its Ministry of
Intelligence [MOIS].
|
Major General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Qods
Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards (middle, with white checked
scarf), visits Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq,
October 2014.
|
The U.S. may not want "boots on the ground" in Iraq, but
Iran sure does. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran's military involvement in the
Kurdish governorates of northern Iraq is multi-varied and on the
increase.
Kurdish Rudaw T.V. has reported on Iran's support for Kurdistan's Peshmerga
(military) campaign to regain villages lost to Islamic State [IS]
jihadists this past summer. Rudaw T.V. even discussed the public visits
of Iran's Major General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary
Guard's Qods Force, to the Peshmerga front line against the IS.[1]
According to a former Iraqi General of Military Intelligence, who
paid a mid-November visit to Kurdistan, the big winner politically in the
multilateral effort to roll back the IS's territorial gains is Iran.[2]
General Saad al-Obaidi commented that without the presence of several
pro-Iran Shia militias and Iranian artillery support, allied bombing raids
against IS targets would have been for naught.
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment