Category Archives: Freedom

OMAHA, Neb., July 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Our Founding Fathers were visionaries, creating a framework of freedom that remains strong more than 300 years after the drafting of the United States Constitution. We celebrate their contributions, especially in light of last week's Fourth of July holiday.

Other innovations throughout the years also have provided a degree of independence and freedom especially from the tyranny of housework. The Maids (www.maids.com), the only franchised residential cleaning service to clean for health using environmentally preferable products, call attention to some of the top inventions throughout the years that have changed the way we approach cleaning.

1. Vacuum cleaner

One of the most popular household inventions has to be the vacuum cleaner. Colonial women cleaned floors with brooms or on hands and knees with cloths, and it wasn't until nearly 100 years later that devices were developed to suck up dust from floors. Those early contraptions weren't easy to use: they had to be pushed while cranking a handle. In 1901, a British engineer named H. Cecil Booth patented a vacuum cleaner using motor power. In 1907, a U.S. inventor named James Spangler was working as a janitor, but his asthma was aggravated when he swept floors. He used a box, pillow case, fan and a broom handle to develop a "suction sweeper," and later received financial support from W.H. "Boss" Hoover. It wasn't until after World War II that vacuum cleaners became commonplace as more and more homeowners turned to carpeting to cover floors.

2. Paper towels

How often do you grab a paper towel to wipe up a spill or clean something? You can thank a school teacher, who, in 1907, was certain the children in her classroom were catching colds because they shared a cloth towel. She cut up paper, enabling each child to use an individual square. Her "invention" prompted the Scott Paper Company to develop a commercial product and towels for households were sold in 1931.

3. Washing Machine

Early settlers hand-washed their clothing in tin tubs or in streams and other nearby water sources. The invention of the washing machine went a long way toward lightening the housework load. The earliest washing device the scrub board was invented in 1797. In the 1850s, a machine using a cylinder that resembled modern machines was built. Hand-powered, rotary machines soon followed. In 1908, the Thor electric-powered washing machine was introduced by the Hurley Machine Company of Chicago.

4. Dishwasher

Another much-appreciated invention that has made life easier is the dishwasher. Josephine Cochrane, a wealthy woman who often threw large dinner parties, built a device in 1886 because her servants kept chipping her fine china. Soon she built devices for friend and later hotels and restaurants, and, after patenting her design, the invention debuted at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She started the Garis-Cochran Manufacturing Company, which became part of KitchenAid.

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Celebrate freedom from hours of housework with The Maids

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/9/2012 2:38:51 PM Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is the latest big name to sign the Declaration of Internet Freedom, according to backer Free Press. His name was even listed first online among individual signers, even though the rest of the list was alphabetical.

It is no big surprise that Rep. Issa would sign on. Many of the same groups and individuals who opposed online piracy legislation, citing threats to Internet "freedom," are signatories to the declaration. Issa was one of the strongest opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the House bill scrapped after Internet powerhouses banded together to stop it.

"It is crucial that we secure the principles outlined in the Declaration of Internet Freedom," said Issa in a statement, "to defend against those who seek to interfere and disrupt our vibrant online community and the economic growth it supports." He also put in a plug for his own, similar, Citizen's Digital Bill of Rights.

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Issa Signs Internet Freedom Declaration

Freedom of religion is a right, but more than just the right to attend the church of our choice. It also assures that government does not force anyone to act contrary to their conscience. The Health and Human Services Act violates this right.

Catholics believe that sexuality is a gift, offering us an amazing opportunity to participate in Gods creative power. Use of contraception reduces this beautiful gift to a mere act of pleasure, one in which our human desires and selfishness are deemed more important than the higher order of Gods plan. The HHSA mandates that all insurance policies provide coverage for contraception, forcing the Catholic Church and its affiliates (social services, hospitals, schools/colleges) to act in direct contradiction to their beliefs.

The HHSA would also require the Catholic Church to provide coverage for some abortive services. Worse than being asked to sanction the artificial prevention of a pregnancy, is asking Catholics to sanction the termination of an innocent human life. We believe that from the moment a life begins at conception, no one has the right to take that life except the author of life himself. Pro-choice gives an unborn baby no choice. No Catholic (or person of conscience) can sanction, or pay for, that.

Freedom is intended to foster dignity, not encourage depravity. Whose dignity is fostered by either contraception or abortion? I am a Catholic, proud that my faith teaches that Gods laws supersede those of humans. I applaud our leaders for taking this unpopular, yet unwavering, stand.

In doing so, they are not imposing judgment or beliefs on anyone. Rather they are asking that the standards of the world not be imposed on us. May God give us the grace to continue to show his compassion to individuals, while remaining uncompromising in our principles.

GERRY MacLEOD

Greenville

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Letter: Act violates freedom of religion

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/9/2012 10:35:34 AM The United Nations Human Rights Council concluded its meeting last week with a raft of resolutions, including one supporting Internet expression as a basic human right and promoting broadband deployment.

In a resolution on "the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet," the UN council affirmed that "[T]he same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression." The resolution "calls upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the Internet and decides to continue its consideration of how the Internet can be an important tool for development and for exercising human rights."

The U.S. has already made promoting Internet freedom internationally a part of its foreign policy goals, outlined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a speech in 2010, in which she likened the freedom to connect to the Internet to freedom of assembly during a speech that mirrored the Four Freedoms speech of Franklin Roosevelt.

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UN: Internet Freedom Is a Human Right

Left unsaid in a high-profile new document about Internet's principles is whose interests it represents--and how they'll be backed.

Junius Brutus Stearns/Wikimedia Commons

Last week, a collection of Internet bold-faced names rolled out a Declaration of Internet Freedom. Groups like the advocacy organization Free Press and the New America Foundation's Open Technologies Institute took the lead on its creation, and the first batch of signatories included the likes of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Harvard Law School professor and former Obama administration official Susan Crawford, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing, Internet pioneer and Google evangelist Vint Cerf, Ben Huh of ICanHasCheezburger.com and related sites, and a raft of other groups and individuals who make good livings on or around the Internet. The plan is for the public to debate, edit, and remix the document's core principles, "as only the Internet makes possible," as two of the planners put it. But here's what the Declaration of Internet Freedom held at its creation:

We stand for a free and open Internet.

We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:

With bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), treaties like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement(ACTA), and holidays like Independence Day (July 4th) in the news, it's an opportune time for a project like this. It's also the right time to poke at its meaning. For one thing, as Atlantic Wire's Rebecca Greenfield pointed out, the declaration's bare-bones founding principles are strikingly vague. The application of "defend[ing] everyone's ability to control how their data and devices are used" is going to get very complicated, very quickly, especially when so many of the social platforms and tools that Internet users love, like Facebook and Google, are built on a trade-off between data and access. And yet at the same time, the principles are easy to get behind. Few people think what they're doing is censorship, and it's a decent bet everyone from AT&T to the Motion Picture Association of America to even the Chinese government believes that they're abiding by some version of "openness."

But there's something else about the Declaration of Internet Freedom project that jumps out. On a press call announcing the declaration, tech policy activist and Techdirt publisher Mike Masnick, a signatory, talked about the fact that the document was an attempt to set forth the principles of "the wider Internet community." It makes you wonder how a project like this goes about establishing that it is, indeed, somehow representative of something bigger than a large handful of Internet luminaries and advocacy groups whose names are on the document.

In other words, when you write a Declaration of Internet Freedom, who's "we"? And what leverage do they bring to bear?

At the risk of being pedantic, historically declarations have tended to be things that (a) represent some defined body and (b) have some way of being enforced. Take the Declaration of Independence. It was "the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America," as represented in the rebellious Second Continental Congress. (Granted, the only folks represented were well-off white men.) For enforcement, the states had armed revolution at the ready. For the Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason with an assist from James Madison -- and from which the Declaration of Independence was in part remixed -- was "made by the representatives of the good people of Virginia," and the means of upholding it was, well, active resistance against the British. The post-World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a product of the United Nations' General Assembly. For member nations, enforcement happens in the U.N., though things are admittedly fuzzier for non-member countries. If the Declaration of Internet Freedom's constituency is the several dozen people and groups listed at launch, that's not nothing -- but it is limited. With notable exceptions, the signers on the document are clustered on the coasts of the United States. Of course, more signers will come, but what that means isn't entirely clear. Representative government has its imperfections, but it generally also has its rules for amassing authority laid out for all to see. With something like the Declaration of Internet Freedom, it's trickier to track what a presumption of authority might be based on.

When the questions of representative participation and enforcement are put to the backers of the declaration, their answers suggest that they're still very much in the thinking-things-through stage. Techdirt's Masnick suggests that the declaration is about articulating norms that, when violated, "create a natural enforcement mechanism" like the mass public outrage that greeted SOPA and PIPA in the United States and ACTA across the globe. That dynamic "doesn't need to be written into the principles or in any particular regulation," argues Masnick. "[It's] just the recognition that the public accepts these things and that any effort to go against them will be opposed." For Free Press's Internet campaign director Josh Levy, the focus is on boosting the public's watchdogging of the rules governing the Internet.* (Thus the "We support transparency and participatory processes for making Internet policy" language in the declaration.) "They can't conduct business as usual when there are a million eyes watching them," holds Levy. "They need to know that they're being watched so that they can no longer try to conduct things behind closed doors, with special interests."

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Defining the 'We' in the Declaration of Internet Freedom

ST. PAUL, MN--(Marketwire -07/09/12)-

Key Facts:

Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) mainly constitutional, implementation of state health exchanges is occurring. But implementation creates new and lasting challenges, adding $340 billion to the nation's deficit and creating $17 trillion in long-term, unfunded liabilities that will burden the already floundering economy and intrudes on patient privacy.

"Many Americans do not recognize the governmental overreach of power that implementation of the state and national healthcare exchanges creates," said Twila Brase, President of the Citizens' Council for Health Freedom (CCFH). "But once these portals are implemented, they will be very hard to dismantle, and the access they allow to individual data is disturbing. These portals provide five major government agencies access to personal information. They are not the one-stop-shopping 'marketplaces' that they have been described to be."

Many Americans don't understand the flow of information allowed through the state healthcare exchanges. According to the CCHF, the exchange is a web portal that enables data transfers, financial transactions, and bureaucratic functions for the purpose of implementing the federal controls of the PPACA.

Brase continues to urge state legislators to refuse to implement these exchanges in their states and prevent the exchange system from moving forward.

"I've spoken to a number of legislators in the months leading up to the Supreme Court decision," Brase concluded. "Many agree that the states are the only barrier to implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. They must refuse to implement state exchanges to protect their fiscal health and the privacy and choices of all citizens."

Twila Brase is president and co-founder of the Citizens' Council for Health Freedom. She has been called one of the "100 Most Powerful People in Health Care" and one of "Minnesota's 100 Most Influential Health Care Leaders." The CCHF's efforts have stopped government-issued treatment directives, added informed consent requirements for access to patient data and defeated a proposed Health Insurance Exchange.

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Citizens' Council for Health Freedom Continues Push to Have States Forego Health Exchange Implementation

July 7, 2012 - Frontier League (FL) Florence Freedom FLORENCE,KY- The Evansville Otters scored four runs in the first inning against Freedom starter Daniel DeSimone(2-5) and held off a late Freedom threat for a 7-6 victory. DeSimone was dealt the loss, pitching four innings allowing seven hits, and six earned runs.

Going into the third inning, the Freedom trailed 4-0, but they stormed back to take the lead. Peter Fatse had an RBI single in the inning, as David Harris was able to score on a bases loaded passed ball by catcher Billy Killian, and Drew Rundle hit a three run homerun, his fourth of the year. The Rundle homerun gave the Freedom a 5-4 lead.

The Freedom trailed yet again in this ballgame, but took advantage of some sloppy Evansville defense to get back in the game. With two outs in the seventh inning, and a runner on first base, Fatse hit a fly ball down the left line that appeared to be the final out of the inning, but was dropped by Luis Uribe to extend the inning. After Eddie Rodriguez was hit by a pitch which loaded the bases, Rundle hit a hard grounder to second base which Taylor Black couldn't handle. That error led to the Freedom cutting the deficit to 7-6.

The Freedom in the ninth inning, loaded the bases once more, this time against Otter closer Eric Massingham. The right-hander proved why he will be pitching in next week's all-star game as he pitched out of a one out bases loaded jam. With one out, he got Jim Jacquot to hit a ground ball to third baseman Stephen Marino who threw to home plate to get the force out. Then on a 0-2 pitch, John Malloy flew out to right field for the final out. With the loss, the Freedom saw their four game winning streak come to an end.

The Freedom and Otters will wrap up their series and the first of their season with a night game tomorrow. The game can be heard with Steve Jarnicki starting at 5:50 pm on Real Talk 1160 and realtalk1160.com.

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The opinions expressed in this release are those of the organization issuing it, and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts or opinions of OurSports Central or its staff.

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Evansville Edges Freedom Saturday Night

Ron Paul, the man who brought 'End the Fed' into Republican mainstream now has tabbed Internet freedom as a new crusade to be carried on by his son Rand in the Senate.

It doesn't have quite the ring of "End the Fed," but Ron Paul's next revolution is a little more tuned in to the 21st century: the battle for Internet freedom.

The Texas congressman and GOP presidential candidate made eliminating the Federal Reserve the cornerstone of his libertarian political program for more than three decades. Alongside his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky, however, the Paul movement is going to shift gears to online liberty after Paul pre's bill to audit the Fed gets its moment in the sun in the House later this month. (The bill will die there, however, as it has no prospects in a Senate controlled by Democrats.)

The announcement, built into a manifesto called "The Technology Revolution," released today, from the Paul-backing grassroots group Campaign for Liberty, raises three questions. What does the family Paul want out of Internet freedom? Will they be successful? And what does the change do for the libertarian movement more broadly?

The manifesto builds its case around two fundamental views: the Internet moves faster than government's ability to regulate it and the main obstacles to economy progress and individual freedom online come from government intervention.

"Around the world, the real threat to Internet freedom comes not from bad people or inefficient markets we can and will always route around them but from governments' foolish attempts to manage and control innovation," according to the manifesto.

But it's not just government that draws libertarian ire.

"The road to tyranny is being paved by a collectivist-Industrial complex a dangerous brew of wealthy, international NGO's, progressive do-gooders, corporate cronies and sympathetic political elites" that want to shackle the Internet, according to the manifesto.

Success in this struggle is, like so much else in the Paul canon, about keeping meddling hands out of the way so that markets and individuals can make their own decisions.

"Technology revolutionaries succeed because of the decentralized nature of the Internet which defies government control," according to the manifesto.

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Ron Paul's next revolution: Internet freedom

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Fitch Ratings has taken the following actions on the U.S. residential primary servicer rating for Financial Freedom, a division of Onewest Bank, FSB:

--U.S. Residential primary servicer rating for reverse product affirmed at 'RPS3'; Outlook Positive.

The servicer rating actions reflect management changes within several key senior positions and strategic plans to focus on system and operational efficiencies, including several recently completed and in-process enhancements. The rating also incorporates the servicer's proactive adoption of a single point of contact (SPOC) model for its Maturities, Collections and Foreclosure areas. Based on the analysis and the company's profile, Fitch has assigned a Positive Outlook to Financial Freedom's servicer rating.

Although the servicer's customer service metrics, on an annual average, deteriorated slightly compared to the prior year, Financial Freedom implemented measures earlier this year to address this concern. Fitch was provided recent months' metrics which were considerably improved and expects that these efforts will continue; however, Fitch feels that a longer period of time is needed to determine the final impact of these changes.

The rating takes into consideration the financial condition of OneWest Bank FSB (OneWest), a non-rated entity, as financial condition is a component of Fitch's servicer ratings. In addition, the rating reflects Fitch's overall concerns for the U.S. residential servicing industry which include the ability to maintain high performance standards while addressing the rising cost of servicing and changes to industry practices, which are likely to be mandated by regulators and other parties.

Finally, the rating reflects changes Fitch made to its servicer rating category weightings, which was instituted for all forward mortgage servicers in 2011.

The rating was determined in accordance with Fitch's criteria 'U.S. Residential and Small Balance Commercial Mortgage Servicer Rating' and 'Global Rating Criteria for Structured Finance Servicers' which are available on the Fitch Ratings web site at 'www.fitchratings.com'.

As of Feb. 29, 2012, Financial Freedom's servicing portfolio consisted of 145,939 loans with an unpaid principal balance of approximately $24.7 billion. The reverse portfolio is composed of 69% GSE loans (based on unpaid principal balance), 16.2% non-agency RMBS, 9.3% third-party servicing, and 5.3% owned loans.

OneWest is a wholly owned subsidiary of OneWest Bank Group, LLC, which was founded in March 2009 by a consortium of investors including Paulson & Co and J.C. Flowers & Co. IndyMac Mortgage Services (IndyMac), another division of OneWest, operates materially separate from Financial Freedom and maintains its own operations and systems. Financial Freedom has been servicing reverse mortgage product for 19 years and has operations in Austin, TX and Kalamazoo, MI.

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Fitch Affirms Financial Freedom's U.S. RMBS Servicer Rating; Assigns Positive Outlook

Protesters tear up images of the front page of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper after claims of censorship.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: Mak Yin Ting has worked as a journalist for more than 25 years. She is currently the Chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists Association and the Hong Kong correspondent for Radio France International.

(CNN) -- "Hong Kong enjoys a far higher degree of press freedom than before the handover in 1997 and this is on par with the most developed places in the world," said Hong Kong Secretary for Home Affairs, Tsang Tak-sing, to the Legislative Council last November.

Tsang was urging council members to vote down a motion defending press freedom in the territory, put forth by the Democratic Party's Emily Lau amid growing concern about China's influence on Hong Kong's media.

In fact, he sounded like a mainland official citing instances of 'good deeds' when rebutting criticism against China's human rights record.

Such claims contrast sharply with the reality in Hong Kong, where the free flow and access to information has been gradually but steadily restricted following Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997. Although freedom of the press is enshrined in Hong Kong's de facto constitution, the Basic Law, the gap has been shrinking between our city and mainland China, which does not enjoy freedom of expression.

Mak Yinting is the chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists Association.

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region- Is it still special 15 years later?

In Hong Kong, the proliferation of media outlets does not tell the whole story. The figures are robust: a city of seven million people consuming 46 daily newspapers and 642 periodicals as of 2010, according to the Hong Kong Yearbook. Nonetheless, the large number of media outlets does not ensure a diversity of voices, which is a fundamental part of press freedom.

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Is China attacking Hong Kong press freedom?