Monopoly
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European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager talks to the media at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium March 20, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman
April 8, 2019
By Richard Lough
PARIS (Reuters) – Europe needs to decide on a digital tax and should lead the way if there is insufficient consensus globally, the EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, said on Monday.
There is still disagreement among EU members over how to implement a so-called “GAFA tax” – named after Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – to ensure the global internet giants pay a fair share of taxes on their massive business operations in Europe.
France has been driving hard for such a tax, but at a meeting of EU finance meetings over the weekend, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Denmark blocked a draft EU-wide GAFA tax proposal, officials said.
“We are becoming an increasingly digital world and it will be a huge problem if we do not find a way to raise (digital) taxes,” Vestager told France Inter radio.
Vestager, who is widely talked about as a candidate for the European Commission presidency when Jean-Claude Juncker’s term expires in November, said European countries first needed a deal which could lead to a EU-wide harmonized tax.
“The best thing is a global solution. But if we want to obtain results in a reasonable period of time, Europe must take the lead,” the commissioner added.
Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly, France’s lower house of Parliament, will on Monday begin debating a draft national GAFA tax law. The bill proposes a 3 percent tax on digital advertising and other revenues of tech firms with worldwide revenues of more than 750 million euros ($842 million).
Vestager, a former Danish economy minister, has a high profile in Brussels for attacking tax avoidance and monopoly powers among U.S. multinationals, and is seen as a contender to be the next Commission president.
She hasn’t announced a public bid for the job, but if she does she would likely need the backing of French President Emmanuel Macron.
Asked if she was interested in the Commission presidency, she said: “I take a lot of interest in the future of Europe. My point is that before we decide on any kind of new face for the Commission, we really need to know what we want to do.”
Internet giants are coming under increasing pressure from regulators globally. Separately on Monday, Britain proposed new online safety laws that would slap penalties on social media companies and technology firms if they fail to protect their users from harmful content.
(Reporting by Richard Lough and Simon Carraud; Editing by Susan Fenton)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Italian far-right leader Matteo Salvini (R), French far-right leader Marine Le Pen (C) and Austrian far-right leader Heinz-Christian Strache give a thumbs up at the end of the “Europe of Nations and Freedom” meeting in Milan, January 28, 2016. REUTERS/Alessandro Garofalo/File Photo
April 7, 2019
By Alissa de Carbonnel and Giulia Paravicini
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini sends texts with smileys to French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and posts selfies with Austrian far-right politician Heinz-Christian Strache.
The face of the leader of Italy’s far-right League party is beamed onto big screens at right-wing rallies from Prague to Sofia.
Buoyed by his own success and voter fatigue with mainstream parties, Salvini is trying to build bridges before elections on May 26 to the European Parliament, the European Union’s legislature.
With the two biggest political blocs expected to lose their combined majority, he and other far-right leaders hope to form an opposition, eurosceptic alliance with enough seats in the assembly to block or hold up legislation.
“Our idea is to come together … into a new party that better reflects the euroskeptical views that unite us,” Salvini’s foreign affairs advisor Marco Zanni told Reuters. “Now is our chance to unite forces once and for all.”
But when Salvini starts his campaign for the elections on Monday in Milan, representatives of only three, relatively small far-right European parties will be present.
Le Pen will not be there. Nor will representatives of Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party (PiS), which governs Poland.
Salvini promises a much bigger rally next month. But the absence of Le Pen and other leading far-right and nationalist leaders speaks to the policy differences and rivalries that have long stood in the way of unity among such groups.
Far-right leaders share the broad ideological goals of curbing the EU’s perceived liberal course and returning power to the member states’ capitals. But they differ in other areas, and an attempt by U.S. President Donald Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon, to act as a power broker among Europe’s populist groups has fizzled.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER?
Investors expect heightened political uncertainty after the May 26 election, in which 705 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will be elected, or 751 if Britain fails to leave the EU as planned.
General dissatisfaction over slow economic growth, security threats posed by Islamist militants and a backlash against migration across open EU borders have boosted support for eurosceptic nationalists in many member states.
“There is a growing confidence of voters to go against the norm,” said Susi Dennison, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The ‘anti- forces’ are much more motivated right now than the pro-Europeans.”
Their gains and Britain’s planned departure from the EU will mean a shake-up of the pan-national groups created by parties in the EU parliament, whose main role is checking and amending EU laws drawn up by the executive European Commission.
Salvini’s anti-immigrant League is forecast to more than quadruple its representation in the EU assembly with 27 seats.
Along with the projected rise for Le Pen’s National Rally and Strache’s Freedom Party of Austria, which is in a coalition government with Strache as vice-chancellor, the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group to which they belong could be boosted to 61 seats from 37.
Salvini, whose party co-rules Italy, wants to embrace other leaders whose parties are in rival groups such as Kaczynski.
The two held a meeting in Warsaw in January, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban hailed the prospect of them forming an alliance as one of the greatest developments of this year.
Forming one big political group can also unlock funds and opportunities for patronage.
“They’re going to get much more resources if they’re able to sit together,” said Cas Mudde, an expert on the far-right at the University of Georgia.
But policy differences make it likely that parties critical of the EU will remain divided into at least two groupings, one centered around Salvini and the other around Kaczynski.
Salvini admires Russian President Vladimir Putin – Kaczynski vilifies him. Both are anti-immigration but at odds over how to handle it. Italy is net giver to the EU budget, Poland is a net receiver. Their views on the economy do not align.
For right-wing parties in Denmark, Finland and Sweden which see Russia as a threat, Salvini and Le Pen’s pro-Kremlin sympathies are also a red line.
“It is a crucial aspect for many countries,” Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Akesson told Reuters. “It will not succeed, there will be no such group.”
Many parties competing at the national level will also find it difficult to sit together.
Orban has chosen to remain with the parliament’s biggest political grouping despite being suspended from it last month. For all his praise of coalition-building among eurosceptics, being in a group with Europe’s power brokers confers a mainstream respectability that other populists lack.
Some hope that will change after the election.
“Leaving a strong group to join a weak group is a difficult political decision, but leaving to join a group that is also quite strong and growing is less so,” said Ryszard Legutko, a PiS lawmaker and co-chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group.
“It is the first time there’s a real chance things might change, that this political, even ideological monopoly can be somehow undermined,” Legutko said.
IN FROM THE COLD
Links among the far-right remain largely limited to personal relationships. When leaders who have long been isolated at home and lack influence abroad attend each other’s rallies, it is about showing they are not marginal.
“It is about validating one another,” said Duncan McDonnell, Professor of Politics in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University. But he said the far-right increasingly saw itself as “part of a new wave”.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) could win many more seats in the next European Parliament, opinion polls show, and might throw its hat in with Salvini’s ENF group. The polls show the Forum for Democracy (FvD) in the Netherlands, led by Thierry Baudet, could win four new seats in the EU assembly and it has said it will join Poland’s PiS in the ECR.
Spanish newcomer Vox has become the darling of eurosceptic groups following its success in a regional election last December in Spain, which until then had been resistant to the populist currents sweeping Europe.
Vox is now being courted by both by Poland’s PiS and Salvini’s League. But looking ahead to the next European Parliament – where polls suggest Vox will win about five seats, up from none today — Vox leader Santiago Abascal told Reuters: “It may be that we’ll be alone.”
Vox has capitalized on domestic tensions over Catalan separatism – it regards Catalonia as an integral part of Spain – but some other far-right parties do not share its view.
“Their support of the (separatists’) coup d’etat by Catalonia is an enormous barrier (to cooperation),” he said.
Even if parties are not the same group, Zanni of Salvini’s League says there will be greater cooperation to try to influence or thwart EU policy.
“The risk is longer-term paralysis,” Dennison said, “that over time will erode the idea of EU as an effective actor.”
But European Parliament strategists say younger right-wing political groups have shown far weaker party discipline.
“The eurosceptics are a wing of many feathers, and I’m not sure it will beat effectively,” said one senior official in the European People’s Party, the main centre-right group.
(Additional reporting by Johan Ahlander in Stockholm, Belén Carreño and Ingrid Melander in Madrid, Joanna Plucinska and Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw, Robert Muller in Prague, Simon Carraud in Paris and Crispian Balmer in Rome, Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
Source: OANN
Across the country, frenzied legislators are responding to the pharmaceutical industry’s orchestrated fear campaign around measles by seeking to impose further mandating of Merck’s measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Although ongoing mumps outbreaks involving thousands of at-risk adolescents and young adults completely dwarf the number of measles cases, no one is covering the mumps story—because it will expose the fact that Merck has been in court for over eight years due to scientists blowing the whistle on Merck’s fabrication and falsification of the effectiveness of the mumps component of its MMR vaccine. Instead of punishing Merck for its chicanery, legislatures are rewarding the company by making it impossible to refuse Merck’s profitable vaccine, subjecting a generation of American children to the risk of serious complications from mumps infection at an age that nature never intended.
When younger children experience mumps, the virus is relatively harmless; infected children often exhibit no symptoms. When mumps strikes adolescents or adults, on the other hand, the infection can cause far more serious adverse effects, including inflammation of various organs (brain, pancreas, ovaries and testicles)—as well as damage to male fertility.
Inflammation of one or both testicles (a condition called orchitis) occurs in approximately one in three post-pubertal men who get mumps and can contribute to sperm defects and subfertility as well as impairing the function of cells that produce testosterone. An estimated 30% to 87% of men with bilateral orchitis induced by mumps experience full-blown infertility—a major cause for concern given the significant declines in male fertility observed over the past several decades. Thus, it appears that Merck’s vaccine, instead of protecting children, not only delays onset of disease to later age cohorts but has the potential to cause serious and permanent injury.
Merck and Mumps Vaccines
Let’s look at a quick history of mumps and MMR vaccination in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensed Merck’s initial mumps-only vaccine in 1967. In 1971, Merck introduced its first combination MMR vaccine, followed by the MMR-II vaccine in 1978 (which repurposed the rubella component) and the MMR-plus-varicella (MMRV) ProQuad vaccine in 2005. Since the initial 1967 vaccine, Merck has enjoyed a unique monopoly position in the U.S. market for mumps and MMR vaccines, with combined sales of MMR-II and ProQuad bringing in over $720 million in 2014 alone. Merck consistently places in the top five pharmaceutical companies globally, and the market valued its stocks at a seven-year high as of late 2018.
In order to score the lucrative MMR monopoly, Merck needed to satisfy the FDA that all three components of the combination vaccine could achieve 95% efficacy, but the mumps portion was bedeviling. In fact, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by two senior Merck scientists in 2010 under the False Claims Act, the company has known since the late 1990s that the mumps component of the MMR is “far less” than 95% effective. A 2005 study published in Vaccine estimated the effectiveness of mumps vaccination to be closer to 69%, and the authors noted that their results were consistent with other studies.
The two whistleblowers assert in the lawsuit—which is reportedly headed to trial sometime this year—that Merck has “willfully and illegally maintained its monopoly” through “ongoing manipulation” and by “representing to the public and government agencies a falsely inflated efficacy rate for its Mumps Vaccine.” Specifically, the two scientists claim that Merck executives ordered them to use “rigged” methodologies, including taking antibodies from rabbits and adding them to human blood vials, in order to gull regulators into assuming an antibody response robust and durable enough to merit licensing. When those “enhanced” tactics did not achieve Merck’s “fabricated [95%] efficacy rate,” the whistleblowers allege, the company resorted to simply falsifying the test data and engaging in other fraudulent activities.
Vaccine expert breaks down the horror of vaccines in America.
Unprotected Adolescents and Young Adults
The poor performance of the MMR’s mumps component and the doubtful “durability” of mumps-specific immunity following vaccination are of concern. In fact, we are already living with the legacy of this badly flawed vaccine. Rather than protecting a generation of American children from mumps infection in childhood, the vaccine has merely postponed the onset of the virus to older age groups, putting them at much greater risk. Researchers confirm an increase in the median age of mumps patients, a surge in the size and number of mumps outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations and higher rates of complications—including the serious male complication of inflammation of the testes (orchitis).
Across the country, galloping mumps epidemics have been ravishing an older generation of vaccinated individuals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 150 outbreaks (9,200 cases) in the year and a half from January 2016 to June 2017, affecting “schools, universities, athletics teams and facilities, church groups, workplaces, and large parties and events.”
Over the past several years, the number of college campuses reporting mumps outbreaks has exploded—at institutions ranging from Harvard and Temple to Syracuse, Louisiana State and Indiana universities. At the University of Missouri, which in 2016 reported 193 mumps cases on campus, the health center director reported not having seen anything like it “in her 31 years at the school.” Commenting on the fact that all of the afflicted students had had the requisite two doses of MMR, she noted, “The fact that we have mumps showing up in highly immunized populations likely reflects something about the effectiveness of the vaccine.”
The mumps virus has also made a “comeback” in other settings where younger adults congregate. For example, a naval ship deployed to the Persian Gulf, the USS Fort McHenry, has been unable to come ashore since early January because of a mumps contagion that has devastated its crew—even though the military vaccinates all personnel against the virus and despite the Navy having immediately subjected the crew in question to another MMR booster. News accounts have declined to comment on mumps complications but describe the quarantine as “a morale killer” for crew members who are accustomed to having monthly port calls. Infection control protocols stipulate that the Navy cannot declare the situation “under control” until “50 days after the last affected service member recovers.”
Endangering Rather Than Protecting Youth
All of these cohorts are part of an age group that should never get mumps. As Children’s Health Defense recently noted, whereas “flares of illness in vaccinated groups should prompt some serious questions about vaccine failure,” legislators and government agencies “are displaying a dangerous indifference to vaccination’s unintended consequences.” Dancing to puppet strings manipulated by Merck, legislators across the country are trying to foist even harsher MMR mandates on unwilling Americans, dooming a generation of children to the serious risks of late-onset mumps infections.
The viewpoints expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Infowars.
Paul Joseph Watson exposes the hypocrisy of the left.
Source: InfoWars
Across the country, frenzied legislators are responding to the pharmaceutical industry’s orchestrated fear campaign around measles by seeking to impose further mandating of Merck’s measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Although ongoing mumps outbreaks involving thousands of at-risk adolescents and young adults completely dwarf the number of measles cases, no one is covering the mumps story—because it will expose the fact that Merck has been in court for over eight years due to scientists blowing the whistle on Merck’s fabrication and falsification of the effectiveness of the mumps component of its MMR vaccine. Instead of punishing Merck for its chicanery, legislatures are rewarding the company by making it impossible to refuse Merck’s profitable vaccine, subjecting a generation of American children to the risk of serious complications from mumps infection at an age that nature never intended.
When younger children experience mumps, the virus is relatively harmless; infected children often exhibit no symptoms. When mumps strikes adolescents or adults, on the other hand, the infection can cause far more serious adverse effects, including inflammation of various organs (brain, pancreas, ovaries and testicles)—as well as damage to male fertility.
Inflammation of one or both testicles (a condition called orchitis) occurs in approximately one in three post-pubertal men who get mumps and can contribute to sperm defects and subfertility as well as impairing the function of cells that produce testosterone. An estimated 30% to 87% of men with bilateral orchitis induced by mumps experience full-blown infertility—a major cause for concern given the significant declines in male fertility observed over the past several decades. Thus, it appears that Merck’s vaccine, instead of protecting children, not only delays onset of disease to later age cohorts but has the potential to cause serious and permanent injury.
Merck and Mumps Vaccines
Let’s look at a quick history of mumps and MMR vaccination in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensed Merck’s initial mumps-only vaccine in 1967. In 1971, Merck introduced its first combination MMR vaccine, followed by the MMR-II vaccine in 1978 (which repurposed the rubella component) and the MMR-plus-varicella (MMRV) ProQuad vaccine in 2005. Since the initial 1967 vaccine, Merck has enjoyed a unique monopoly position in the U.S. market for mumps and MMR vaccines, with combined sales of MMR-II and ProQuad bringing in over $720 million in 2014 alone. Merck consistently places in the top five pharmaceutical companies globally, and the market valued its stocks at a seven-year high as of late 2018.
In order to score the lucrative MMR monopoly, Merck needed to satisfy the FDA that all three components of the combination vaccine could achieve 95% efficacy, but the mumps portion was bedeviling. In fact, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by two senior Merck scientists in 2010 under the False Claims Act, the company has known since the late 1990s that the mumps component of the MMR is “far less” than 95% effective. A 2005 study published in Vaccine estimated the effectiveness of mumps vaccination to be closer to 69%, and the authors noted that their results were consistent with other studies.
The two whistleblowers assert in the lawsuit—which is reportedly headed to trial sometime this year—that Merck has “willfully and illegally maintained its monopoly” through “ongoing manipulation” and by “representing to the public and government agencies a falsely inflated efficacy rate for its Mumps Vaccine.” Specifically, the two scientists claim that Merck executives ordered them to use “rigged” methodologies, including taking antibodies from rabbits and adding them to human blood vials, in order to gull regulators into assuming an antibody response robust and durable enough to merit licensing. When those “enhanced” tactics did not achieve Merck’s “fabricated [95%] efficacy rate,” the whistleblowers allege, the company resorted to simply falsifying the test data and engaging in other fraudulent activities.
Vaccine expert breaks down the horror of vaccines in America.
Unprotected Adolescents and Young Adults
The poor performance of the MMR’s mumps component and the doubtful “durability” of mumps-specific immunity following vaccination are of concern. In fact, we are already living with the legacy of this badly flawed vaccine. Rather than protecting a generation of American children from mumps infection in childhood, the vaccine has merely postponed the onset of the virus to older age groups, putting them at much greater risk. Researchers confirm an increase in the median age of mumps patients, a surge in the size and number of mumps outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations and higher rates of complications—including the serious male complication of inflammation of the testes (orchitis).
Across the country, galloping mumps epidemics have been ravishing an older generation of vaccinated individuals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 150 outbreaks (9,200 cases) in the year and a half from January 2016 to June 2017, affecting “schools, universities, athletics teams and facilities, church groups, workplaces, and large parties and events.”
Over the past several years, the number of college campuses reporting mumps outbreaks has exploded—at institutions ranging from Harvard and Temple to Syracuse, Louisiana State and Indiana universities. At the University of Missouri, which in 2016 reported 193 mumps cases on campus, the health center director reported not having seen anything like it “in her 31 years at the school.” Commenting on the fact that all of the afflicted students had had the requisite two doses of MMR, she noted, “The fact that we have mumps showing up in highly immunized populations likely reflects something about the effectiveness of the vaccine.”
The mumps virus has also made a “comeback” in other settings where younger adults congregate. For example, a naval ship deployed to the Persian Gulf, the USS Fort McHenry, has been unable to come ashore since early January because of a mumps contagion that has devastated its crew—even though the military vaccinates all personnel against the virus and despite the Navy having immediately subjected the crew in question to another MMR booster. News accounts have declined to comment on mumps complications but describe the quarantine as “a morale killer” for crew members who are accustomed to having monthly port calls. Infection control protocols stipulate that the Navy cannot declare the situation “under control” until “50 days after the last affected service member recovers.”
Endangering Rather Than Protecting Youth
All of these cohorts are part of an age group that should never get mumps. As Children’s Health Defense recently noted, whereas “flares of illness in vaccinated groups should prompt some serious questions about vaccine failure,” legislators and government agencies “are displaying a dangerous indifference to vaccination’s unintended consequences.” Dancing to puppet strings manipulated by Merck, legislators across the country are trying to foist even harsher MMR mandates on unwilling Americans, dooming a generation of children to the serious risks of late-onset mumps infections.
The viewpoints expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Infowars.
Paul Joseph Watson exposes the hypocrisy of the left.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: Podemos (We Can) party leader Pablo Iglesias delivers a speech during a motion of no confidence debate at Parliament in Madrid, Spain, May 31, 2018. REUTERS/Susana Vera/File Photo
April 4, 2019
By Belén Carreño
MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s Podemos was the rising star of Europe’s far left four years ago, but infighting and a failure to evolve has left it a shadow of the newcomer party it was then as it gears up for the country’s most open election in living memory.
At best, it might emerge from the April 28 ballot as a junior partner in a Socialist-led government, but that outcome would require support from other parties likely to be hard to win over.
Its decline underlines the challenge, in Spain and elsewhere across Europe, of forming viable governments once new parties emerge to break the political status quo.
Podemos was instrumental in setting that pattern as a European trend in a national election in 2015.
Founded a year earlier out of the anti-austerity movement against Europe’s debt crisis, it won 20 percent in that vote, finishing a close third behind the conservatives (PP) and the Socialists (PSOE) and dismantling the monopoly on power those two parties had held since Spain’s return to democracy in the late 1970s.
Now Podemos is down to around 12 percent, its appeal dented by scandals and divisions over how hard-line the party, which supported a minority Socialist government over the past ten months and sits on some local councils, should be.
“We have caused shame due to our internal fights, our top officials and our visibility,” leader Pablo Iglesias told a rally in March. “We have acted like any other political party.”
With polls showing no single party anywhere close to securing an absolute majority on April 28, Podemos remains one of five parties, also including far-right Vox, with a chance of being part of a governing coalition.
But its hopes of partnering the Socialists would likely rest on outgoing Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also persuading skeptical Basque and Catalan nationalists to join that alliance.
In 2015, Podemos (meaning ‘We Can’) surged on a groundswell of anti-austerity support as protesters occupied the Puerta del Sol square in Madrid for weeks during the debt crisis, inspiring similar movements elsewhere in Europe and the United States.
It came within 350,000 votes of the Socialists, unprecedented for a non-mainstream party. But that election was inconclusive and, by the time a fresh ballot was held six months later, Podemos had lost one million votes as the initial excitement waned.
Since then the party has also fragmented.
In January, Podemos’ co-founder Inigo Errejon left to launch another movement, a defection political analysts linked to his failure to maintain the party’s wider appeal as a counterweight to Iglesias’ more far-left stance.
NO LONGER “BREAKING THE SYSTEM”?
Sanchez has said nothing about possible post-election coalitions.
But while his Socialists lead in opinion polls, his options for securing a second term appear largely dependent on how Podemos fares, especially after the center-right Ciudadanos ruled out an alliance.
The right’s options also appear limited, and a repeat election is a distinct possibility.
The dilemma of managing a fragmented or deadlocked political system is one that Spain shares with several neighbors. Politics have ruptured from Italy to France and Greece as the after-effects of the 2009-14 debt crisis and austerity linger.
In Greece, things turned out differently for the anti-austerity left.
Its standard-bearer, Syriza, has governed since 2015, supplanting the establishment Pasok socialists by accepting the strings attached to bailouts and changing from radical to reformer.
Podemos instead chose a harder line. “(In Greece’s case) we drank from that particular chalice, we were disappointed and returned to pragmatism,” said Theodore Couloumbis, a political analyst in Athens.
But, without being in government, Podemos has also been forced to compromise through its representatives on local councils and as a PSOE ally.
“The party has become normal when it got into power,” said Jose Fernandez-Albertos, a political scientist at the Spanish National Research Council. “Voters see that it will no longer break the system.”
If it manages to get into government, Podemos is likely to see its influence limited by its drop in votes, but could still have an impact, as it has done by pushing the Socialists on issues such as increasing the minimum wage.
“Its usefulness is to maintain the Socialists on the left,” Fernandez-Albertos said.
In neighboring Portugal, the Left Bloc also gained from its anti-austerity stance during the debt crisis but lost support since it became an ally of the ruling Socialists in 2015.
That minority government, also supported by the Communists, has achieved stability, potentially giving Sanchez and Iglesias a model to emulate.
But the Socialists and Podemos barely poll 40 percent together, leaving them far short of a majority and needing to quickly attract more votes from elsewhere.
Rafael Mayoral, a member of the Podemos executive, said the party still enjoyed broad appeal, telling Reuters: “We are a popular force that defends working people, from top to bottom.”
But that hasn’t stopped it from splintering. In a regional election in Madrid next month, it will run on three different platforms.
(Additional reporting by Axel Bugge, Michele Kambas, Renee Maltezou and Richard Lough; Writing by Axel Bugge and Ingrid Melander; editing by John Stonestreet)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Amazon is seen on the door of an Amazon Books retail store in New York City, U.S., February 14, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
April 3, 2019
BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil has proposed a compromise to a seven-year battle that has quietly raged over the Amazon.com internet domain: let the nations bordering the world’s largest rainforest co-govern the digital address with the biggest online retailer.
Amazon.com Inc has been seeking rights to the domain name since 2012. But Amazon basin countries Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname have argued that it refers to their geographic region and thus belongs to them and should not be “the monopoly of one company.”
The global Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees internet addresses, has extended until this month a deadline for the parties to reach a deal.
“As a compromise solution for the ‘dot Amazon’ issue, we proposed our participation in the governance of this digital territory, with a view to safeguarding and promoting the natural, cultural and symbolic heritage of the Amazon region on the Internet,” Brazil’s deputy Foreign Minister Otavio Brandelli proposed on Wednesday.
“This would be an innovative mechanism, setting a positive precedent of public-private partnership in the development of internet governance,” he said in a statement to Reuters, without explaining how it would work.
He said the proposal would give Amazon.com the chance to show Amazon countries and public opinion that it is “a fully responsible corporation, capable of reconciling commercial interest with values cherished by its customers.”
ICANN placed Amazon.com’s request on a “Will not proceed” footing in 2013, but an independent review process sought by the company faulted that decision and ICANN then told the Amazon basin nations they had to reach an agreement with the company.
Amazon.com has offered millions of dollars in free Kindles and hosting by Amazon web services to resolve the issue, according to various reports.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Richard Chang)
Source: OANN
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