Spare Change News

Category: International

  • International Human Rights Day

    International Human Rights Day was held on December 10, 2012 all around the world. Personally, it seems more appropriate to have December as International Human Rights Month, because of all the reasons people complain, fight and celebrate in December. You ask yourself; “When was the last time I celebrated or even gave a thought about…

  • Israel, Palestine, the US, & Peace

    Ten days ago, the United States joined Israel and just seven other countries to vote against the U.N. upgrading Palestine to a non-voting observer state. This decision has made it clearer than ever before that the U.S. is a major obstacle to any progress towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. American officials had the…

  • The Dalai Lama Comes to Cambridge

    It was an unusual scene, to say the least. Scientists and academics stood in line next to young Tibetan monks. Aging spiritual seekers mingled with ambitious young Cambridge undergraduates. And they all filed, one by one, through checkpoints watched by hawk-eyed Secret Service agents with crew cuts and discreet earpieces. This unlikely group was gathered…

  • Earth's Evangelist: Bill McKibben

    “Poor people are not something that we talk about too much or pay much attention to in our world,” Bill McKibben said, sipping a glass of sparkling water to nurse a throat hoarse from a weekend of meetings and rallies. McKibben knows something about poverty. In the early 1980s he helped to start a 15-bed…

  • The Lady: Aung San Suu Kyi in the US

    “I’ve always thought of myself as a politician,” Aung San Suu Kyi explained to a packed audience at the Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on September 27. Suu Kyi is the daughter of General Aung San, who founded the modern Burmese army and is considered the father of Burma’s independence from Britain.…

  • Inside the Arab Autumn

    Mona Eltahawy held up her arms to block the blows from gendarmerie batons. The police had crossed from the cool evening exterior of the crowd into the steaming, dusty, tear-gas-choked innards of a movement. The rule had been that when the police enter the heart of the square, the weight of a dying regime lands…

  • Torture Survivors' Dance

    “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or…

  • Art & Revolution: Ai Weiwei Reviewed

    Edward Said describes the intellectual “as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.” Alison Klaymen’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry shows us what that looks like in practice. Her documentary follows the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei as he and his team prepare for exhibitions in Munich and London;…

  • Mothers Create Safe Space for Kids in South African Gangland

    Gina Ginsburg THE BIG ISSUE SOUTH AFRICA Initially started as a feeding scheme by concerned mothers, the non-profit organisation has branched out and now offers more than 120 children between the ages of three and 18 alternative activities to the social ills that plague their community, such as storytelling, computer literacy, food gardening training, art…

  • How Haiti Earned Its Place in Black History

    The first independent nation in Latin America and the first Black-led republic in the world shaped the African-American identity Jacques Fleury Spare Change News “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” -Martin Luther King Jr. In the two years since the earthquake that devastated Haiti, a country already marred by political depravity and economic…