Category: International
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Faktum Hotels Supplies the Homeless Experience
Faktum Hotels offers a unique experience: sleeping on the streets. With beautiful, high-resolution photos of scenic cityscapes, one might mistake Faktum Hotels for an upscale evening of Michelin Star cuisine and high ceilings. Located in Gothenburg, Sweden, their rooms are advertised as romantic getaways with historic surroundings, posh art, and a borderline pretentious appreciation for…
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An Interview with Vandana Shiva
AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation on this International Women’s Day with world-renowned feminist, activist, thinker from India, Dr. Vandana Shiva. India witnessed nationwide protests earlier this year following the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in December. The rape brought attention to other instances of sexual violence in India,…
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Women & Poverty in Bangladesh
Kalpana Rani Pal’s pottery business is modest by any yardstick, but it is small enterprises like these that are helping reduce poverty levels in Bangladesh. “I earn about Bangladeshi taka 6,000 ($72) a month from selling the earthenware I make,” said Kalpana, 34, who is glad she enrolled for a three-month pottery-making course run…
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Queer, Femmes, and Feminism
Last August, award-winning filmmaker Pratibha Parmar delivered a keynote address at FEMME Conference 2012: Pulling the Pieces Together, in Baltimore, Maryland. This is an excerpt from her talk. Every day, I read and witness how many of us who fall outside the white, hetero-normative, sexist, homophobic, ableist, racist culture pull the multiple pieces of our…
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Argo and the Roots of U.S.-Iran Tensions
News in November 1979 that U.S. diplomats had been taken hostage in Tehran shocked the United States. Students stormed the U.S. embassy, blindfolding 52 Americans and threatening them at gunpoint. The hostages, held captive for 444 days, immediately became the nation’s top news story and dogged President Jimmy Carter’s unsuccessful re-election campaign. Argo traces the…
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Homelessness and Protest in Spain
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services,” states the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its naivety might surprise us when we recognize that this 25th Article is infringed all around the…
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U.N. Fact-Finding Misson on Israeli Settlements
Under international law, Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal. What is perhaps less well known is the impact these settlements, and their 500 thousand residents, have on the local Palestinian communities, and in particular, on women and children. This issue was recently examined by two West Bank-based human rights…
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A Conversation with Noam Chomsky
On January 8, Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, Spare Change News' editor-in-chief, sat down with one of the world’s leading public intellectuals, Prof. Noam Chomsky, in his office at MIT. They had a wide-ranging and free-flowing conversation about the most pressing issues facing our democracy. They covered topics ranging from liberation theology in Latin America, to…
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Sudan and the Anti-Genocide Paparazzi
Crimes against humanity are best carried out in secret. Terror can be inflicted, ethnic cleansing can be waged, torture can be committed, and if it is not an official hot spot that the whole world is already watching then who in the world will even know? That is the way it has pretty much…
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Ten Minutes for Human Rights
Oppression, violence, war. These forces surround and blight all. But amidst the loss and suffering caused to people and communities from these afflictions, a dream of peace is a beacon that can illuminate the darkest of nights. And, as the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. timelessly continues to demonstrate with grace and reason, it…