Supporters of Leonard Peltier are calling on President Biden to grant clemency to the Indigenous leader and activist, who marked his 80th birthday behind bars on Thursday after nearly a half-century in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. The ailing Peltier, who uses a walker and has serious health conditions, including diabetes, has always maintained his innocence over the 1975 killing of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

In Sudan, a recent United Nations fact-finding mission documented “harrowing” human rights violations committed by both the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, schools, hospitals, water and power supplies. Civilians have also been subjected to torture, arbitrary detention and gruesome sexual violence. Over 20,000 people have been killed and 13 million displaced over the past 16 months.

Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump focused heavily on abortion rights and the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump repeated his false claim that Democrats support infanticide, and claimed that allowing individual states to set their own laws on abortion was an improvement. Harris highlighted the risk to pregnant people now navigating a patchwork of laws and restrictions in the U.S.

We’re joined by award-winning Cherokee writer and journalist Rebecca Nagle, whose new book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, has just been released. By taking a look at the more than a century-long fight for tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma, Nagle investigates the development and future of tribal law since the beginning of colonial relations between Indigenous peoples and European settlers, from the Trail of Tears to the “war on terror.

As the climate crisis continues to accelerate, wealthy governments in the West are clamping down on climate protest. According to a new report from Climate Rights International, demonstrators around the world are being arrested, charged, prosecuted and silenced, simply for using their rights to free expression.

At least 196 environmental defenders were killed last year, most of them Indigenous or Afro-descendant. The deadliest country was Colombia, where at least 79 land, water and climate defenders were killed.