International Affairs

Last week, Promo Marketing, our sister publication, looked into the leftover Cleveland Indians merchandise that won't hit stores following the team's World Series loss. Ordinarily, apparel falsely crowning the game's loser goes to charity. This year, MLB is destroying the merchandise, instead...

Efforts to protect millions of people fleeing violence and rights abuses could be jeopardized if Britain's exit from the European Union triggers a decline in funding for charities, a move many expect, a report on Wednesday showed. More than three months after Britons voted to leave the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May's government has…

A dual national British-Australian man has been arrested and detained in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for sharing on Facebook a link to a fundraising campaign benefiting refugees in Afghanistan. Scott Richards, who lives in the United Arab Emirates city with his family but is a citizen of both Australia and the U.K., was charged with…

An executive in a global Christian charity group secretly has been sending tens of millions of dollars—money intended to aid poverty-stricken families in chaotic Gaza—to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, Israeli investigators say. The news came Thursday as authorities indicted Mohammed Halabi on numerous criminal charges for misappropriating the funds. He is director of the Gaza…

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy venture has made its first major investment, leading a funding round in a startup that trains and recruits software developers in Africa. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, created by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, led a $24 million Series B funding in Andela, the startup said on Thursday. Alphabet’s GV,…

If you have watched or read any news since the U.K. voted to exit the European Union last week, it is very likely these words were mentioned in the coverage: uncertainty, volatility, instability. Financial markets have dropped sharply. Nobody is quite sure what will happen. I don’t know about you, but this certainly put me…

Bill Gates is the most generous man in the world. As of 2015, his lifetime giving total stood at $27 billion, more than the individual gross domestic products of 88 different countries and $6.5 billion more than the next highest individual giver, Warren Buffett. So when Bill Gates wants to give your impoverished country a whole bunch of chickens, you take them. Unless you're Bolivia. Bolivia is having none of that chicken business...

Well, here's a strange one: Pope Francis last week rejected a donation from Argentine President Mauricio Macri, allegedly because of a certain Antichrist-related three-digit number. Macri, in what was either a subtle troll job or an unfortunate coincidence, offered 16,666,000 Argentine pesos (about $1.2 million) to Scholas Occurentes, a global education initiative the Pope backs. The Pope turned it down...

Not long ago, the African country Malawi was a donor darling. Being dirt poor and ravaged by AIDS, it was needy; with just 17 million inhabitants, a dollop of aid might visibly improve it. Better still, it was more-or-less democratic, and its leader, Joyce Banda, was welcome at Westminster and the White House. In 2012,…

Things just got considerably more complicated for foreign NGOs in China. Yesterday, the China’s National People’s Congress passed the foreign NGO “management” law, The Guardian reported. The law, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2017, mandates that all foreign NGOs must register with public security officers, and have an official Chinese sponsor or host organization...