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 Meeting, in the Chairman’s Own Words Nell…
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, Four Decades Later The four-day event, called…
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 an Unusual Coalition The project, centered on…
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 up thousands of Central American women and…
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 the increasingly precarious position of the hundreds…
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, but both groups share something notable in…
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 next year. But inside the heavily secured…
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 January 12 earthquake first struck. In the…
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 the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility…
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 sophisticated hacking software by law enforcement agencies…