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President Biden on Tuesday signed a proclamation creating a national monument in honor of Mamie Till Mobley and her son Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose brutal killing in Mississippi helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The monument, spread over three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, will tell the story of Till’s murder in 1955, and of his mother’s efforts to ensure it would never been forgotten. “I can’t fathom what it must have been like,” Biden said Tuesday — on what would have bill Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday. “It’s hard to believe I was 12 years old. I know no...

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve. With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will restore two sprawling national monuments in Utah that have been at the center of a long-running public lands dispute, and a separate marine conservation area in New England that recently has been used for commercial fishing. Environmental protections at all three monuments had been stripped by former President Donald Trump. The White House announced the changes Thursday night ahead of a ceremony expected Friday. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, expressed disappointment in Biden’s decision to restore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments, which the Trump administration downsized significantly in 2017. The monuments...

A large area of the Petroglyph National Monument was damaged by visitors earlier this month. More than 300 stacked rocks called "cairns" were recently found by park neighbors on June 17 and reported to park staff. Officials said creating cairns can damage archaeological sites and increase damage from erosion. “We ask that our visitors please respect these sacred landscapes and refrain from moving or stacking rocks, and practice ‘Leave No Trace’ principles when visiting the monument," Petroglyph National Monument Superintendent Nancy Hendricks said. "Moving, stacking, or making shapes out of rocks is a form of vandalism and will impact every...

President Trump used his executive powers to designate Camp Nelson as a national monument, establishing a 380-acre site in Kentucky to honor African Americans’ role as soldiers during the Civil War. Camp Nelson is the first national monument designation under President Trump. Established as a Union supply depot and hospital during the Civil War, Camp Nelson became a recruitment and training center for African American soldiers and a refugee camp for their wives and children. Thousands of slaves risked their lives escaping to this site with the hope of securing their freedom and, ultimately, controlling their futures by aiding in...

O say can you see, the Statue of Liberty? A portion of Lady Liberty mysteriously went dark save for the iconic colossal's torch and crown on Tuesday night. The statue was cast in darkness for at least an hour around 11 p.m. and even the National Park Service seemed perplexed by the New York harbor’s black void. “Some lights on the Statue were temporarily off tonight,” a spokesman for the Statue of Liberty National Monument tweeted. The “unplanned outage” may have been due to emergency generator project as part of its “last remaining Hurricane Sandy recovery,” but park official Jerry...

Betty Jones, an elderly Navajo medicine woman, grew up among the red rock canyons, mesas, and ancient cliff dwellings of Southeastern Utah. Now, a proposed national monument may prevent her from collecting traditional herbal medicines she’s gathered all her life.Her family believes Jones is in her mid-nineties, since her birth certificate was issued after her actual birth. The proposed 1.9-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument would potentially limit her access to sacred sites and impact herb collection. She also says that she is entitled to grazing rights on the land under an agreement with the federal government dating to the 1940s.“My...

President Barack Obama said in his weekly address today that he had set aside “more than 265 million acres of public lands and waters” as national parks and monuments, which is “more than any administration in history.” Among the national monuments he created, Obama said in his weekly address, was “Stonewall.” This monument commemorates riots that took place in 1969. Citing Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, leading into his citation of Stonewall, Obama said: “As President, I’m proud to have built upon America’s tradition of conservation.” The president said in his June 24 proclamation [1] creating the “Stonewall National Monument:”...

President Barack Obama created the first national monument to gay rights on Friday, designating the site of the Stonewall riots in Manhattan where the modern gay rights movement took root nearly five decades ago. The Stonewall National Monument will be anchored by Christopher Park, a small park just across from the iconic Stonewall Inn tavern, and covers a 7.7 acre swath of Greenwhich Village where the uprising took place after police raided the gay bar in 1969. Obama said the monument would "tell the story of our struggle for LGBT rights" and of a civil rights movement that became a...

On June 28, 1969, patrons at a gay bar in New York City's West Village neighborhood decided they had finally had enough after yet another police raid. As the NYPD attempted to enforce a law making it illegal to serve alcohol to "homosexuals," the resistance of the bar patrons turned into an uprising - the Stonewall Uprising - an event now widely credited with sparking the modern LGBTQ rights movement in the U.S. Now, nearly 50 years later, that same location - where members of the community stood up to government injustice - has been designated a new national monument...

President Barack Obama announced Friday he was designating the area around the Stonewall Inn in New York City as the country's first national monument to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. "This week I'm designating the Stonewall National Monument as the newest addition to America's national park system," Obama said in a video released by the White House on Friday. "I believe our national parks should reflect the full story of our country -- the richness and diversity and uniquely American spirit that has always defined us, that we are stronger than ever. That out of many, we are...

The area surrounding the Stonewall Inn is poised to become the first national monument dedicated to gay rights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the property will always be a bar. There’s actually nothing in the national monument designation or even the city’s landmark law to prevent New York’s most famous gay bar from someday becoming a coffee shop, a frozen yogurt joint or anything else. […] The space was occupied for years by other businesses, including a bagel shop and a Chinese restaurant, before it reopened as a bar in the 1990s. In Stonewall’s current incarnation, under new owners since...

New York’s iconic Stonewall Inn, where the modern gay-rights movement took root, will become the first national monument honoring the history of gays and lesbians in the U.S. under a proposal President Obama is preparing to approve.

President Obama is poised to declare the first-ever national monument recognizing the struggle for gay rights, singling out a sliver of green space and part of the surrounding Greenwich Village neighborhood as the birthplace of America’s modern gay liberation movement... Protests at the site, which lasted for six days, began in the early morning of June 28, 1969 after police raided the Stonewall Inn, which was frequented by gay men. While patrons of the bar, which is still in operation today in half of its original space, had complied in the past with these crackdowns, that time it sparked a...

President Obama will reportedly mark Pride Month by designating a part of the Greenwich neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn as the nation’s first gay-rights national monument.

President Obama will pay homage to women's equality Tuesday, according to White House officials, designating the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, a historic house in the District that has housed the National Woman's Party since 1929, as a national monument. The site, to be named the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument, honors both the National Woman's Party benefactor Alva Belmont and Alice Paul, who founded the party and served as its chief strategist. Obama will deliver remarks at the house, which served as the party's fifth headquarters and is on Capitol Hill, on Equal Pay Day, an annual commemoration that aims...

President Barack Obama on Friday spared from future development nearly 350,000 acres of land within the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, a move that cheered environmentalists but sparked new criticism of Obama's willingness to use his executive authority.

President Obama on Wednesday will designate nearly half a million acres in New Mexico as a national monument, the latest in a series of executive actions intended to improve environmental protections of federal lands. The president will sign a proclamation establishing the Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument, the largest such designation of his presidency, during a ceremony at the Department of the Interior, the White House said Monday. It will be the 11th time the president has established a national monument during his term, and the largest designation in terms of land mass during his presidency.By contrast, former President...

President Barack Obama is fulfilling a State of the Union pledge to preserve more federal lands by adding more California coastline to a national monument. Obama on Tuesday signed a proclamation permanently protecting some 1,665 acres in Northern California's Mendocino County, just north of Point Arena. …

WASHINGTON -- California's Mojave Desert may seem ideally suited for solar energy production, but concern over what several proposed projects might do to the aesthetics of the region and its tortoise population is setting up a potential clash between conservationists and companies seeking to develop renewable energy. Feinstein said Friday she intends to push legislation that would turn the land into a national monument, which would allow for existing uses to continue while preventing future development.