"Pre-dawn purple and gold and orange swirl deep overhead as the waterfront stirs to life. It's 6 a.m. at Menekaunee Harbor, where the Menominee River empties into Lake Michigan: Workers file into buildings, heavy machinery fires up and 18-wheelers roar and belch and hit the road."

"Peru's internationally-renowned environmentalist Maxima Acuña and her partner were severely hurt Sunday morning in an attack by alleged hitmen hired by the mining company they are fighting against, reported Acuña's daughter."

"MENOMINEE RESERVATION, Wisc. — Guy Reiter was an archaeologist before he was an activist. But the two merged after a dream six years ago. 'I was in a van and when we drove by the White Rapids I looked over and saw an elder sitting on a dam, in full Indian regalia,' Reiter says. 'He flagged me down, I climbed the dam, and he started talking to me in Menominee.'"

"For decades, a creek in the mountains west of Denver sometimes ran yellow from toxic waste gurgling out of abandoned mines — a painfully familiar story in the picturesque wreckage of Colorado's 1859 gold rush. But after a three-decade, $62 million Superfund cleanup, Clear Creek now lives up to its pristine-sounding name, at least most of the time."

"Sen. Tim Scott teamed up with Instagram on Wednesday to preview the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, which opens to the public Sept. 24."

"Interior Secretary Sally Jewell unveiled a sweeping conservation plan in Palm Desert on Wednesday, promising to protect millions of acres of California desert while encouraging solar and wind farms in limited areas."

"President Barack Obama plans to designate on Thursday an undersea range of canyons and peaks off the US Eastern seaboard as the country's first Atlantic marine national monument."

"PORTLAND, Ore. — Federal prosecutors today told a jury that the leaders of the armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year 'moved as a military force.'"

"Norway and Turkey were the only two of 53 countries to vote against an international ban on the dumping of mining waste at sea, at a major conservation summit in Hawaii last week."

"PORTLAND, Ore. — The trial of Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan and five of their followers, antigovernment protesters charged in the armed takeover of a national wildlife refuge earlier this year, will begin here on Tuesday in a federal court."