Manhattan Portage is glad to be the official bag sponsor of the annual Oslo Freedom Forum taking place in Oslo Norway May 7th-9th, 2012. This special event will bring the most daunting humanitarian issues of our time out of the shadows of obscurity and to the forefront of global awareness. This year’s event will be streamed live and in its entirety online. To read more about these remarkable speakers please visit: http://www.oslofreedomforum.com/

The fourth annual Oslo Freedom Forum, titled Out of Darkness, Into Light, will bring the most daunting humanitarian issues of our time out of the shadows of obscurity and to the forefront of global awareness. The event will feature visionaries from academia, advocacy, business, media, politics, social entrepreneurship, and technology who will shed light on some of the world’s least known and most repressive regimes and exchange ideas on how best to tackle humanitarian crises.

The conference will include luminaries from Wikipedia and Google; the best-selling authors of The Shadow War, Consent of the Networked, and You Can’t Read This Book; anti-slavery pioneers from Cambodia, Haiti, and Nepal; opposition leaders from Ethiopia, Russia, and Singapore; individuals using the arts to highlight human rights crises; and on-the-ground activists from regimes in Equatorial Guinea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe, to name only a few.

The program will include a spotlight on the many forms of modern-day slavery; exposés on how Western public relations firms, IT, and arms companies support dictatorships, the drug war’s impact on human rights; a focus on the burgeoning democracy movement in Russia; perspectives on dealing with poverty through individual rights; an examination of global censorship; and a discussion on the current state of the Arab uprisings. ‘)}