Former Basketball Coach takes on Youth Violence

When new South Bend Community Schools Superintendent Carole Schmidt called a Town Hall meeting to address concerns in the district, Phelps meticulously went over his personal game plan. As usual, it relied heavily on instinct and adrenalin.

"There are about 200 people there and I get up and ask, 'OK, how can we put a team together of community assets to resolve this issue of youth violence, with education being the foundation?' '' Phelps recalled. "She says, 'The community has to come together.'''

Phelps, 71 going on 40, suddenly felt a familiar pang coaches who live for challenges never lose.

"I jump and say, 'I'll coach it!''' Phelps said. "I had no idea I was going to do that. Not sure what made me.''

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Egyptian Pandemic: Sexual Harassment of women

Campaigners in Egypt say the problem of sexual harassment is reaching epidemic proportions, with a rise in such incidents over the past three months. For many Egyptian women, sexual harassment - which sometimes turns into violent mob-style attacks - is a daily fact of life, reports the BBC's Bethany Bell in Cairo.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Area teens shocked by statistics form program to help confront HIV/AIDS

They took a look at the statistics: Those at highest risk for HIV infection are between the ages of 13 and 23. And then the group of teens looked around and realized: those numbers represented themselves.

The teens recently started a new forum called Prevent and Prevail to initiate open conversations about sex, HIV and AIDS.

Frustrated with the constrained atmosphere in school health classes, the teens said they decided it was time to take action. They piloted the forum this month with a small group of people at the Jim Toy Community Center at 319 Braun Court, in Ann Arbor.

The teens are all a part of Dedicated to Make a Change, a nonprofit youth organization in Ypsilanti that promotes social responsibility, justice and diversity through action. Among them are Nils Wilcoxen, 16; Allison Melcher, 16; and Cleo Ku, 15 — all students at the Early College Alliance at Eastern Michigan University.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Local Resteraunts donate profits to charities

If you think an über-twee neighborhood bar that serves beer from the local microbrewery and donates all proceeds to charity sounds like something straight out of the hipster utopia in TV's "Portlandia," you wouldn't exactly be wrong.

The ballroom of Portland's Oregon Public House - a soon-to-open nonprofit pub that will, indeed, serve local beer and seasonal, locally sourced food, pay employees fair wages, and donate all its profit to charities - was recently rented out to film a wedding scene in the IFC show.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Prosecutors recieve insight from ex-gang member

In what may be a first in the nation, San Francisco prosecutors negotiating plea deals for nonviolent felons are conferring with an in-house social worker who emerged from his own checkered past.

Aroche, a 34-year-old former Mission District gang member, was hired in February by District Attorney George Gascón as an "alternative sentencing planner" - a point man on tough love.

If Aroche's background is unique, so is his role. Traditionally, prosecutors focus on punishment, but Aroche seeks to give offenders what they need to live productively, whether drug treatment, education or housing.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Clothing Shop to be renamed after protests

AHMADABAD, INDIA—The owner of the “Hitler” clothing shop in western India says he will remove the sign and rename his store after hearing people’s complaints.

Rajesh Shah said Tuesday he had chosen the name in memory of his grandfather, a strict disciplinarian whom the family referred to as “Hitler.”

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Women are key to Native American Civil Rights

It was a conference on the complexities of American Indian civil rights, but it carried a timeless admonition that civil rights are human rights as expressed in a principled way of life, a message often conveyed by women, “The earth is our mother,” said Henrietta Mann, Cheyenne, “and we are still trying to live in harmony with one another.”

She was the opening speaker at the third annual Pathways to Respecting American Indian Civil Rights conference August 8 – 9 in Denver, Colorado, sponsored primarily by local colleges and government agencies and drawing more than 30 presenters and speakers. Many of whom shared first-hand experience with the issues being discussed.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Burma backs off of direct media censorship

Journalists will still be required to submit their work after publication, however, and are expected to comply with a vague set of “guidelines”. The censors have also warned editors that they could be prosecuted under criminal libel laws.

The announcement, posted on the Ministry of Information website and taking effect immediately, comes after a vigorous anti-censorship campaign by young Burmese journalists, who marched through the cities of Rangoon and Mandalay wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Stop Killing the Press”.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Global food price spike due to drought

The drought that desiccated the Midwest severely reduced the quality and quantity of this year’s corn harvest. This isn’t news in and of itself. The international impact of the drought, however, is.

Yesterday, the World Bank announced that global food prices went up substantially in July.

Global food prices soared by 10 percent in July from a month ago, with maize and soybean reaching all-time peaks due to an unprecedented summer of droughts and high temperatures in both the United States and Eastern Europe, according to the World Bank Group’s latest Food Price Watch report.

From June to July, maize and wheat rose by 25 percent each, soybeans by 17 percent, and only rice went down, by 4 percent. Overall, the World Bank’s Food Price Index, which tracks the price of internationally traded food commodities, was 6 percent higher than in July of last year, and 1 percent over the previous peak of February 2011.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Urban Naturalist Molly Steinwald challenges kids to find wildnerness in their urban surroundings

“I was really excited about big nature,” Steinwald says. “But every time I was working out in the desert, I’d find myself thinking, ‘I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.’ I kept coming back to small-scale, mundane nature that I knew as a kid: ‘I need to get back to help people who never see this stuff.’”

Today, Steinwald is doing just that as director of science education at the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, where she has been charged with reimagining urban environmental education and revamping the venerable institution’s outreach programs for at-risk youth.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Activists protest annual Japan Dolphin Hunt

In the heart of Canada’s financial district at King and Bay, surrounded by multi-story office buildings that blocked out most of the sun, more than 50 people stood in a row on the sidewalk outside the Toronto-Dominion Centre, holding up their banners and signs.

But the men, women and children hadn't come to protest against any of the Big Five banks or blue chip corporations.

Instead, they marked the 2012 Japan Dolphins Day, an event to raise awareness about the plight of dolphins in Taiji, by handing out Japan Dolphins Day pamphlets and copies of the The Cove to pedestrians in front of the office of the Consulate-General of Japan at 77 King Street West in Toronto.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org

Historic Civil Rights Center celebrates 80 years strong

NEW MARKET — The Highlander Research and Education Center, a place of cultural relationship-building, is celebrating 80 years of social justice this weekend with residential workshops, food, art and movies.

Fifty-five years ago, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were photographed in front of the center's library for the 25th anniversary of the Highlander Center, at which King served as the keynote speaker.

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To learn more about the Annual International Social Uprising Resistance and Grassroots Encouragement (S.U.R.G.E.!) Film Festival please visit: www.WeSurge.org