Pirate Party set to win next week

Iceland’s Pirate Party may be about to make history as the world’s first ‘pirate’ movement to win national general elections.
The data is from 14-19 October and puts the Pirate Party in first place with 22.6%, a point and a half ahead of the centre-right Independence Party (currently in power). These figures would give each party fifteen MPs in Iceland’s 63-seat national parliament (‘Alþingi’).

Snowden's new home?

The party that could be on the cusp of winning Iceland’s national elections on Saturday didn’t exist four years ago.
Its members are a collection of anarchists, hackers, libertarians and Web geeks. It sets policy through online polls — and thinks the government should do the same. It wants to make Iceland “a Switzerland of bits,” free of digital snooping. It has offered Edward Snowden a new place to call home.

Iceland's Bernie Sanders

Birgitta Jónsdóttir is a poet, a Web developer and a former WikiLeaks activist. She’s also founder and leader of Iceland’s Pirate Party, which has been at or near the top of polls ahead of national elections Oct. 29...
Birgitta Jónsdóttir: The Pirate Party started in Sweden in 2006, and it only had one agenda: to change draconian copyright laws. But it's changed and shifted primarily because the questions of human rights and cyber have become much more relevant. So if you want to place it somewhere on the spectrum, I would say it's a party that has its roots in civilian rights. But we are not like many left parties that want to regulate citizens and create nanny states. We believe that regulation should be on the powerful, not the individuals.

Iceland's women are hip

Thousands of female employees across Iceland walked out of workplaces at 2.38pm on Monday to protest against earning less than men.
Iceland is the best country in the world for gender equality, yet women still earn on average 14 to 18 per cent less than their male colleagues. According to unions and women's organisations, this means in every eight hour day women are essentially working without pay from 2.38pm...
The action had precedent: on 24 October 1975 Icelandic women took a "day off". An estimated 90 per cent of the female population participated, leaving work and refusing to cook or look after children to draw attention to their importance in society, but lack of political power and equal pay.
In 2005, women left work at 2.08pm — the minute they began working for free.
In 2008, it was 2.25pm

Unemployment

The number of Icelanders without work has reached a low not seen since before the economic collapse of 2008.
Westfjords news service Bæjarins bestu reports that, according to the latest figures from the Directorate of Labour, unemployment on the national level was at 1.9% in September.

Iceland is different

Iceland has found nine senior bankers guilty for crimes relating to the economic meltdown in 2008.
The Supreme Court in Reykjavik returned guilty verdicts for all nine defendants in the Kaupthing Bank market manipulation case, one of the biggest cases of its kind in Iceland's history.

Tourist haven

In 2003, Iceland began tracking where its tourists were coming from — and according to that data, the largest portion hails from the United States.
Around 325,000 Americans have visited Iceland in 2016, compared with 51,000 in 2010. That’s a sixfold increase. Currently, Iceland’s population is 332,000 — so this year will mark the first time in history that American tourists to Iceland will outnumber Iceland’s population