Daily Archives: March 7, 2012

Chennai, March 7 (IANS) Even as their number is rising, the financial freedom of urban, working women in India is low and needs significant improvement, says a survey conducted across 11 cities.

"The Life Freedom Index score for urban women at 58.3 on a scale of 100 indicates that their financial freedom is low and needs significant improvement," Sanjay Tripathy, executive vice president (Marketing and Direct Channels) at HDFC Life Insurance Company, said while sharing the findings of the survey with the media here Wednesday.

According to Tripathy, the Indian urban woman needs improvement in areas like financial planning, sufficiency and adequacy.

For the majority of the urban women, children's education is at the top on their priority list when they chalk out their financial plan followed by health expenses, family holidays and house rent/EMIs.

The survey says the women's financial plans are not reviewed at regular intervals and realigned with life's significant events.

Only 19 percent of those surveyed said they reviewed their financial plan frequently while 65 percent did that once in a while.

Forty-two percent of the urban women chalked out their financial planning with the help of friends and relatives, while 26 percent consulted professional financial advisors.

Tripathy said HDFC Life would come out with products based on the survey findings in a couple of months.

The survey was conducted by HDFC Life along with market research firm ValueNotes.

The rest is here:
'Urban Indian women have low financial freedom'

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Cape Air could drop some flights on March 26

Freedom Air will resume daily flights to Rota and will go back to using a 30-seater aircraft next week, while Star Marianas Air Inc. plans to fly to Rota as early as end-March, airline officials and senators separately said yesterday.

Dennis Cruz, Freedom Air-CNMI station manager, confirmed yesterday that Freedom Air will resume daily flights to Rota as early as next week and will resume the use of 30-seater aircraft that will accommodate more passengers to and from Rota.

Yes I can confirm we will be back to normal daily flights, and we will start using again the 30-seater aircraft, Cruz told Saipan Tribune.

Since November, Freedom Air has been using a seven-seater aircraft to give way to regular maintenance of the 30-seater aircraft. Since then, it has also stopped flying to Rota on Mondays and Fridays.

Sen. Juan M. Ayuyu (Ind-Rota) and Senate President Paul Manglona (Ind-Rota) separately said they welcome Freedom Air's decision to resume normal operations.

Ayuyu and Manglona also said the owner of Rota Resort, Hee Cho, has been working with Star Marianas Air Inc. so that the airline will be able to provide flights to and from Rota as early as the last week of March.

Ayuyu said Star Marianas Air is looking at using two nine-seater aircraft for the Rota flights.

An official from Star Marianas on Tinian said yesterday they need to get clearance from the management before speaking directly to the media.

Excerpt from:
'Star Marianas plans to fly to Rota; Freedom Air to resume daily flights'

Hypocrites always love the fig leaf, and the Republican radicals crusading against womens reproductive rights have been shrewd enough to cloak their real goal with pious claims that theyre just defending Americas freedom of religion.

But since the issues currently making headlines include the power to deny insurance coverage for birth control to non-Catholics, the rights of the religious are hardly the most worrisome issue we face, no matter how strident the disingenuous claims of the GOPs anti-woman warriors.

To a growing segment of the American electorate, a much greater concern than the freedom of religion is the freedom from religion.

Every election year generates a new round of sanctimonious baloney from conservative Christians who purport to speak for every American in defining what the United States is all about. Whether explicit or implicit, the presumption underlying their pronouncements is the idea that America is a Judeo-Christian country whose actions and policies should be guided by the religious doctrines deriving from that tradition.

Lost in all the overheated rhetoric is a crucial principle: the freedom from a dominant or state-sanctioned religion and its dictates is far more fundamental to American history and everything this country is actually supposed to stand for than any individual church or faith has ever been.

Unfortunately, such historical facts seem lost on Rick Santorum, whose religious beliefs have defined his policy positions in the secular world.

"Contraception is a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to the way things are supposed to be," Santorum opined, as ungrammatical as he is serenely untroubled by any doubt about the way things are supposed to be.

Santorums vision is drastically circumscribed by his radical Catholicism, and like most ideologues, he wants to impose those strictures on the rest of us no matter how our belief systems might differ from his. As far as hes concerned, the way things are supposed to be is the product of a fixed religious doctrine that represents the final word of God. Santorums idea of an omnipotent supernatural creator is the only one that counts, and everyone else is supposed to venerate the same deity and the same dogma.

Among other problems, Santorums views betray a shocking ignorance about the history of Christianity. Since he thinks education is for snobs, he probably wont make the effort to inform himself more fully about the faith he professes to uphold, but anyone who actually wanted to learn something would do well to read Elaine Pagelss new book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelations, which details the suppression of some early Christian books of revelation and the elevation of others by bishops intent on establishing orthodoxy and eradicating dissenting views in the fourth century.

Pagels and other scholars have chronicled the inconsistent history of Christian beliefs and the stunning variability of canonical texts as well as official practices, but the resulting body of knowledge seems lost on the GOP leaders now bloviating about Christian tradition. Unfortunately, a working understanding of American history also seems to have eluded them.

See more here:
What About Freedom From Religion?

Baroness Deech calls for 'freedom of speech' to no longer be abused as a defence for hate and racism in universities.

In late 2010 at the LSE, Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in chief of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, referred to the Jewish Lobby a number of times, and accused the Jewish students in the audience of bombing Gaza. They walked out in protest. Last month former US marine Ken OKeefe, speaking at Middlesex University, said that Israel should be destroyed, before comparing Jews to the Nazis.

This is unfettered hate speech on our UK campuses. Then there are the individual incidents, such as the Nazi-themed antics on an LSE ski trip which included a Jewish student. Forty-two per cent of Jewish students have witnessed an anti-Semitic incident on their campus in the last year. It does not seem as if universities are tackling these incidents as they would if other minorities were targeted in the same way.

Whilst in each of these cases, the universities are now reviewing procedures and looking to guard against future incidents, it is fair to say that their initial responses fell short of what outspoken and avowedly anti-racist institutions would aspire to. For each incident, it has taken the intervention of Jewish or other minority students explaining the problem and driving the reaction.

The Education (No 2) Act 1986 says that higher education Institutions must take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for its members, students and employees and for visiting speakers. Freedom of speech seems to have become the catch-all response for universities faced with examples of hate speech such as those I have cited. What they have not grasped is that it is freedom of speech within the law that is to be protected, and hate or racist speech is outside the law. Many university administrators seem to be ignorant of the law or have not updated their Codes on visiting speakers for decades.

They need to consider the relevant legislation: the Equality Act, the Protection from Harassment Act, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act are among the many recent laws that limit freedom of speech and exclude the stirring-up of race hatred and violent hate speech. Universities have a special duty to promote race harmony between various groups on campus, which they are tending to ignore. Meetings and known hate speakers can be risk-assessed, banned or stopped in their course if the law is being broken and there is disruption on campus.

Historically, the students unions were considered to be outside the equality laws, although they present themselves as defenders of human rights in general. The anomaly by which they were not included in the definition of public institutions has been addressed through their potential loss of exempt charity status and the need for universities to monitor how they conduct themselves and spend their money. The national student union, the NUS has now produced clear guidance on how to handle hate speech on campus, responsibilities under the law and details of best practice. The Commons home affairs select committee recently proposed that government set up a central contact point to assist in the assessment of hate speakers.

My question aims to elicit confirmation of legal responsibilities and to set the record straight so that freedom of speech, a central tenet of our society, is respected and not abused as a stock defence against action on racism.

Baroness Deech raised to life peerage in 2005, and has been the Gresham Professor of Law since 2008.

Here is the original post:
End freedom of 'hate speech'