Iceland Votes "Já" To Proposed News Haven

eldavojohn writes "The proposed rules shielding journalists harbored in Iceland are now official. It appears that sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome could have a friendlier home base. For those familiar with the Icelandic tongue, the voting results and legalese. Some of the details can be found at www.immi.is."

Comments

err, the rules are not yet official

[Trepidity]

The proposal to draft some rules is now official. The rules themselves will now be drafted by a committee, and then the committee will present them to the legislature, which may then in the future enact them. The proposal is indeed promising, as is the strong (unanimous) support for tasking the committee with fleshing it out, but what exactly the committee will come back with could vary quite a bit.

Re:Bandwagon anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

They did this because Wikileaks posted bank records for one of their failing banks which showed they were transferring billions of dollars out into safe havens as they were going down. Seeing as how the big bank fiasco tanked their economy they didn't take to kindly to this misappropriation of funds and decided Wikileaks was a good thing.

Re:but just for people that look just like me!

[arth1]

Racially homogeneous? You have no idea what you're talking about. In Sweden, around 12% of the population are first generation immigrants, of which around 75% are from non-Western countries.
That's much higher than the average for Europe, with around 6% immigrants, and about the same as in the US (38 million first generation immigrants out of 307 million in 2009).

Looking at the largest Scandinavian cities, Oslo and Stockholm both have around 25% immigrants, most of whom are from non-Western countries. Compared to where I live in the US, I am the one living in a racially homogeneous area, with more than 96% crackers.

Re:is it just me?

[Trepidity]

Being half-Greek, I think you'll find that Greece's bankruptcy has more to do with being Greece than with being socialist. It's not even particularly socialist in practice. There's a huge private sector that pays effectively 0% taxes, and even the officially free health care in practice operates as quasi-private--- doctors work 2nd private practices outside their official jobs, and they uh, strongly suggest that you make an appointment with that one rather than with the free one. Oh, and they don't pay taxes on those private practices, either (cash-only payments, no receipts, no reporting).

If Greece were more like Sweden, where rich people actually pay taxes, public services that are officially provided are actually provided, etc., its budget, and the country in general, would be in better shape.