Cheyenne River Sioux Chairman Brings Pipeline Opposition to Meeting With Obama
Cheyenne River Sioux Chairman Harold Frazier met with President Barack Obama this week to press the administration on the Dakota Access Pipeline and the increasingly militarized police response to the months-long protest encampments near Standing Rock. FSRN’s Nell Abram spoke with Chairman Frazier shortly after that meeting. The…
Veterans Share Iraq and Afghanistan War Experiences
More than 200 veterans and active-duty service members of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gathered outside Washington, D.C. this week to do something few of them had ever done publicly before: testify, in their own words, about what they saw and did while deployed. Echoes of Vietnam,…
Washington’s Skagit River Valley Stimulus Project Restoration Nears Completion
A multi-year effort to restore tidal marsh habitat in Washington’s Skagit River Delta, funded through the federal economic stimulus package, is nearing completion — capping a project that brought together two groups more accustomed to fighting each other than collaborating: farmers and fisheries advocates. A Stimulus Project With…
Asylum-Seeking Mothers Protest Family Detention From Inside a For-Profit Facility in Texas
Nearly 80 mothers detained with their children at a private immigrant family jail in South Texas have launched a hunger strike, refusing to eat, work, or use the facility’s services until they and their families are released — a direct challenge to a detention system that has locked…
One Iraq War Resister Faces Trial, Another Fights to Stay in Canada
Two American soldiers who refused to deploy to Iraq now find themselves on opposite sides of a widening legal divide — one facing a return to the United States and near-certain court-martial, the other still fighting through Canada’s courts for the right to stay. Their diverging paths illustrate…
Proposal for a New Mining Law Meets Opposition in Bolivia
A proposed overhaul of Bolivia’s mining laws has drawn protest from an unusually broad and, for President Evo Morales, uncomfortable coalition — independent miners organized in cooperatives on one side, and Indigenous and farmer organizations on the other. The two camps oppose the bill for starkly different reasons,…
UN Climate Talks Open in Lima, Activists Prepare for Parallel Summit
Delegates from nearly 200 countries have converged on Lima, Peru this week for the opening of the 20th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP20 — a high-stakes negotiating session meant to lay the groundwork for a new global climate agreement due to be finalized in Paris…
Estimated Death Toll in Haiti’s Earthquake Rises to 230,000
Haiti’s government has raised its official death toll from last month’s devastating earthquake to 230,000, communications minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue announced this week — up sharply from the 212,000 figure the government had been citing just days earlier. The new number continues a steady, grim climb since the…
Speech: Obama Shifts War Rhetoric on Iraq, Afghanistan
President Obama declared the formal end of America’s combat mission in Iraq in a primetime address from the Oval Office this week, using the moment to pivot the nation’s attention — and its military resources — toward the ongoing war in Afghanistan. “Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and…
Yale Law School Panel Takes Stock of Government Overreach and Secrecy
A panel of legal experts, technologists, and journalists gathered at Yale University this year to confront an uncomfortable reality: government use of hacking tools has outpaced the legal framework meant to govern it, leaving courts and Congress scrambling to catch up. The conference examined the growing use of…
