The Pirate Party, which was started in Sweden in 2006, has since spread to other countries in Europe. In Germany, the local elections of Sunday, March 25, 2012, allowed the party to enter the parliament of Saarland after an earlier victory admitted it to the Berlin Parliament. This result has inspired its French counterpart to put forward candidates for this year's French Legislative Election. The newly created Alsace branch [fr] of the Pirate Party is preparing an “essentially digital campaign costing zero Euros”. Le blog de la vache libre [fr] hosted a video [fr] interview in which a candidate explains the objectives [fr] of the party, and journalism student Jérémie Nadé describes the anticipated pirate invasion on his blog.
The World Wide Web 2012 conference is hosted this year in Lyon, France, from April 16 to 20, and will feature many prominent figures of the Web, historic and current ones. Global Voices Online author Danica Radovanovic is presenting on the first day a paper about “one of the very popular social and communication dynamics on social networks and media”. Read more on her blog here.
Sandrine Dionys interviewed [fr] Emmanuelle, a young entrepreneur from La Réunion for the Bondy Blog. She rails against the cliché of the Réunion Islanders being dependent on the French government for aid.
Abdellali Hajjat, author of the book The Boundires of National Identity: The Injunction to Assimilation in France and its Territories, explains in an interview [fr] on the blog Contretemps the ideological seeds of Islamophobia and the institutional logic that reinforces it. “Racism needs a crutch to provide the principle of separating national/foreign” he concludes.
Dédé l'Abeillaud (another name for a drone - a male bee in a colony of social bees, which inspires his costume) is the self-proclaimed candidate of biodiversity for the French presidential election of 2012. He boasts of winning over 300 promised votes for local officials, as much as the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen. He humorously details his commitments, particularly the defense of bees, and his political agenda on his blog [fr], where his press representative is said to be “responsible for the clearing of the conscience”.
==> As Africans we need to let go of our victimhood, inferiority complex & acceptance...