On March 4, 18 United States senators sent the Food and Drug Administration a letter urging it to remove its longstanding ban on blood donations from gay men. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin joined 16 other Democrats and Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders in signing the letter, in which they noted that “prospective donors who have engaged [...]

[Read more →]

Union Pacific Railroad and the City of Ames are engaged in an ongoing series of negotiations to determine the fate of the Squaw Creek Bridge, know locally as the Dinkey Bridge, which runs parallel to 6th Street, east of the Iowa State campus. The bridge is an iconic landmark in Ames. The Dinkey was a [...]

[Read more →]

“Chickens get stressed,” Mary Jane explained as she opened the door to her homemade chicken coop and revealed a lovely oil painting on the wall, beside the shelf of droppings and above the woodchip floor. The painting helps create a stress-relieving, country-quaint atmosphere for this mixed urban/rural environment that Mary Jane Brotherson and her husband [...]

[Read more →]

June 29, 2009, marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, New York. The riots were a spontaneous refusal of patrons at a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn to be cowed by police, who had raided the establishment as part of an ongoing series of humiliating arrests of gay men. The [...]

[Read more →]

Last month, I was part of a group of 10 Iowa State students who traveled to the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas, as part of the university’s Alternative Spring Breaks program. The 1200-acre farm belongs to Heifer International, a non-profit that raises livestock to send to impoverished areas of the United States and throughout the [...]

[Read more →]

Now that the Bush administration is no longer in power, it’s possible that some of its senior members may face prosecution for their involvement in U.S. torture programs. Despite lobbying efforts by members of the CIA, President Bush left office without issuing a “preemptive pardon” to protect officials who have engaged in torture from being [...]

[Read more →]

On October 29, 2002, President Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act, a large legislative response to the pandemonium that led to his narrow victory of the White House.  The act was authored by Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut with information from a congressional report co-chaired by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald [...]

[Read more →]

In the final week of August 2004 in New York City, thousands gathered in Union Square to protest the Republican National Convention – the site of George W. Bush’s re-nomination – and their discontent over the president’s war in Iraq. The decidedly less-than-warm welcome resulted in the arrests of 1,806 people, a number unparalleled in [...]

[Read more →]

The Supreme Court issued an order on May 12 stating that it would not be able to hear a case involving black South Africans suing 50 of some of the worlds largest corporations because the court lacked a quorum. The suit is being brought against such corporations as British Petroleum, Exxon Mobile, IBM, 3M, Citigroup, [...]

[Read more →]

From March 13 to 16, veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gathered at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland, to give personal testimonies of their actions while in combat. The event was organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War and was modeled on the Winter Soldier hearings that took place in [...]

[Read more →]