Category: Freedom

LA Bans Puppy Mills; Pet Stores to Sell Only Rescued Animals

LA joins quite a few other cities in North America to ban the sale of animals from puppy mills. Puppy mills are horrible breeding facilities focused on profit at the expense of animal welfare and many people buying a pet don’t realize that pet stores get their puppies from such morally bankrupt places. Bans on puppy mills help cities deal with the vast quantity of rejected animals from people’s homes that need to be taken care of in city shelters.

The city council voted 12-2 in favor of a law that would require pet stores to sell only rescued animals. In addition to reducing euthanizations, the law seeks to put an end to puppy and kitten mills that keep animals in poor conditions and then ship them to pet stores.

The law would still allow individuals to buy directly from breeders.

If you’re going to take care of another being please think about all the ramifications it could have on your life.

Read more at the Huffington Post.

In New York City Gay Marriage is Worth $259 Million

You read that correctly, a $259 million (USD) boom in New York City’s economy is thanks to respecting human rights! Changing the law to reflect reality and letting homosexuals marry one another has generated some needed economic growth for the local economy. All of this in just one year!

“Marriage equality has made our City more open, inclusive and free — and it has also helped to create jobs and support our economy,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement.

More than 8,200 same-sex marriage licenses have been issued over the past year, representing more than 10% of the 75,000 licenses issued in the city, according to a survey conducted by the City Clerk’s Office and NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing organization.

Read more at CNN.

Mobile Devices for Development

The use of mobiles in development is nothing new; however, it’s always good to remind ourselves how useful this technology can be. Mashable has a list of five reasons mobile devices are good for international development (and in developed nations too).

4.
Preserving the Rainforest
Brazil’s Surui tribe, a group native to the Amazon Rainforest, has been subject to the devestating effects of logging on its ancestral lands. Google helped the Surui devise a solution, through the use of Android phones, to monitor one of the land’s most valuable resources, its carbon stock.

Carbon offsets are sold to companies to counterbalance the negative toll their manufacturing, transportation or electricity are having on the globe.

While it may seem antithetical to use smartphones to help preserve the tribe’s traditional culture and lands, the Surui’s leader, Chief Almir, believes technology is a tool with great power to do good. As a testament to his work with Google, he hopes to open a center for technology and culture on the tribe’s ancestral lands.

Read more.

WikiLeaks Releases Syria Files

WikiLeaks continues to bring the world information that would otherwise be hidden from the masses, this time it’s millions of emails and documents from Syria. The Syria Files have been given to some media organizations to filter through (much like the last large release of documents from WikiLeaks).

This new release should shed light on the volatile situation in Syria and potential more. Already, it appears Italy was illegal helping Syria, who knows what else will be found. The more open and transparent countries are the more democratically they can function (the irony in all of this is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being threatened by America).

“It helps us not merely to criticize one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it,” the announcement quotes Julian Assange, who is currently in the Ecuador embassy in London, where he is awaiting a decision on his appeal for political asylum.
…
There are 2,434,899 documents in the leak involving 678,752 different senders and 1,082,447 different recipients, WikiLeaks says. That’s about eight times the size of “Cablegate” in terms of a number of documents and 100 times the size in terms of data. Cablegate was the release by WikiLeaks of US State Department confidential cable exchanges between American embassies and Washington, which angered the US administration.

Read more.

Declaration of Internet Freedom

Around the world governments are trying to restrain the ability of people to freely share information across the internet. Bills like SOPA in the USA and Bill C-30 in Canada to the more recent TPP all focus on propping up old media monopolies and curtailing people’s privacy and communication rights. The most effective and extreme example of clamping down on the internet can be seen in the Great Firewall of China.

WIth the above in mind, it’s good to see that a group of people have taken up the challenge of creating a universal declaration of freedom for online access and participation!

The Preamble:

We believe that a free and open Internet can bring about a better world. To keep the Internet free and open, we call on communities, industries and countries to recognize these principles. We believe that they will help to bring about more creativity, more innovation and more open societies.

We are joining an international movement to defend our freedoms because we believe that they are worth fighting for.

Let’s discuss these principles — agree or disagree with them, debate them, translate them, make them your own and broaden the discussion with your community — as only the Internet can make possible.

Go to the Declaration of Internet Freedom.

Canadians please check out OpenMedia.