Free Republic

Thousands of music videos are expected to soon disappear off of YouTube because the independent record labels behind those artists are not involved in new deals being cut by the Google-owned streaming site. YouTube will announce in "a matter of days" that videos on the site featuring recording artists from some independent labels will be blocked, the FT reports. The ban is aimed at forcing the "refusenik" labels into signing licensing agreements with a new service, coming soon from Google. When the forthcoming service, YouTube Music Pass, is finally launched later this summer, subscribers are expected to be able to...

Iceland just elected the parties which plunged them into crisis only five years ago. Is it casino capitalism all over again, or just a slap in the face of the EU? In terms of redemptive electoral stories, the return of the Independence Party in Iceland is quite significant, albeit that they will come back to government with only a few percentage points more votes than they polled at their nadir in the depths of the Icelandic crisis in 2009. However the biggest winner was Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, the leader of the Progressive Party, who propelled his party to hold 19 seats...