Category Archives: Freedom

MERIDIAN A project designed to open doors for Meridian students will be announced Monday.

The Meridian Freedom Project is a year-round after-school program for middle school and high school and high school students in the Meridian Public School District. Slated to open in June 2014, the program seeks to build a corps of academically capable, socially conscious and mentally disciplined young leaders in Meridian.

"We're replicating the Sunflower County Freedom Project (SCFP) and will be the first affiliate of that project," said Anna Stephenson, who serves as program development director of the Meridian Freedom Project (MFP).

In 1998, Sunflower County Freedom Project founders and Teach For America alumni Chris Myers-Asch, Shawn Raymond and Gregg Costa set out to establish a program to create more pathways to college for their students in Sunflower County. Fifteen years later, 100 percent of the students completing the Freedom Fellowship, a six-year-commitment to the Freedom Project, go on to attend four-year colleges and universities across the country.

As SCFP's first expansion site of the newly formed Freedom Project Network, the Meridian Freedom Project will allow for future Freedom Projects. MFP will honor the legacy of the Meridian Freedom Schools at its opening during summer 2014, in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer '64. The Freedom Projects are led by Teach For America Alumna who returned to their roots to teach in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta. SCFP Executive Director Vaish Shastry is from Pine Bluff, Ark., while both of Stephenson's parents are native Mississippians, her father, a native of Meridian.

"I am thrilled to help grown the Freedom Project in Meridian," Stephenson said. I have seen the power it has on Freedom Fellows in Sunflower, and I cannot wait to watch it transforms the lives of our Meridian students."

According to Stephenson, the idea behind MFP is "to create another opportunity for kids to find a pathway to college." The project's success is attributed to its dedication to providing year-round rigorous core academic support, arts enrichment, health and fitness training, character development and educational travel. Freedom Fellows those who participate in the project live by four LEAD principals: Love, Education, Action and Discipline. By practicing these principles of the Freedom Project, participants become leaders in their schools and communities.

Support for the MFP began with Parents for Public Schools graduates who traveled to Sunflower in 2012 to tour the program. According to Stephenson, they were immediately hooked. The MFP Board Amy Elliott, chairman; Dr. Bill Scaggs, president emeritus of Meridian Community College; and Flo Bradley, CEO of FloBradley.com established an administrative collaboration with The Montgomery Institute.

"Observing the young people engaged in Sunflower as they live the LEAD principles is a 'game-changing' experience," Scaggs said. "They demonstrate remarkable self-respect and optimism, as well as a couple of old fashioned characteristics: grit and gumption!"

The Meridian Freedom Project is geared to students in grades sixth through 12th in the Meridian Public School District, beginning with those in grades sixth through eighth and progressing with them until they graduate from high school.

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Meridian Freedom Project debuts Monday

Internet freedom has declined in the United States over the past year as a result of its surveillance policies, reflecting a trend that appears to have caught on worldwide, according to a recently released study.

The study [PDF], conducted by Freedom House, gauged Internet freedom in 60 countries by tracking obstacles to access information online, limits on content, and violations of user rights. Among the issues cited in the report are government agencies' outright blocking of specific Internet content, surveillance measures, and legal and violent repercussions taken against those who use the Internet to criticize governing or religious bodies.

Iceland was the top-ranking nation on the list, which may not come as a surprise considering its recent role as a safe-haven for controversial Internet whistleblowers. Edward Snowden, for example, has recently expressed a desire for refuge in the country.

Estonia was the second-ranked country on the list (down from first last year), followed by Germany and the U.S., both of which received a score of 17 on Freedom House's scale of 1-to-100, which assigned points for higher rates of violations of Internet freedom. Australia, France, Japan, Hungary, Italy, and the UK round out the top ten.

Despite its relatively high ranking, the U.S. showed a significant decline in overall Internet freedom as a result of the revelations of its surveillance capabilities and their impact on the global Internet, Freedom House explained.

"While there is no evidence that the NSA surveillance programs were abused to suppress political speech, they have drawn strong condemnations at home and abroad for their wide-reaching infringements on privacy," the report says. "Since many large technology companieswith millions of users around the worldare based in the United States, the NSA was able to collect information on foreigners without having to go through the legal channels of the countries in which the targeted users were located."

However prevalent this trend may be in the U.S., it is also a sign of a much broader movement among international governments of all kinds. In 35 out of the 60 countries examined, Freedom House marked increases in the sophistication of communications monitoring technology, the scope of the people monitored, and the enactment of laws enabling the government to spy on its citizens.

Russia, for example, has increased its surveillance capabilities significantly since the Arab Spring began in late 2010, going as far as legalizing the government's wiretapping of opposing political parties, the report says.

The report also included the caveat that the problem is likely more common than its research reflects.

"There is a strong suspicion that many of the remaining 25 countries' governments have also stepped up their surveillance activities, though some may be better than others at covering their tracks," the report says.

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U.S. surveillance erodes its leadership in Internet freedom

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