Protests continue at the Sacred Stone Spirit Camp. Image: video still

In North Dakota, indigenous activists are continuing to protest the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline, which they say would threaten to contaminate the Missouri River. More than a thousand indigenous activists from dozens of different tribes across the country have traveled to the Sacred Stone Spirit Camp, which was launched on April 1 by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The protests have so far shut down construction along parts of the pipeline.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has also sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over its approval of the pipeline. Amy Goodman spoke to Dave Archambault, chairperson of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. He’s in Washington, D.C., where there is a hearing in the tribe’s lawsuit on Wednesday. Also appearing is Winona LaDuke, Native American activist and executive director of the group Honor the Earth. She lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.

In Oklahoma, funeral services were held Friday for Khalid Jabara, a Lebanese-American man police say was shot dead by his next-door neighbor in a possible hate crime. Police say Stanley Majors will be charged with first-degree murder. Majors has harassed the Jabara family for years.

The August 12 killing came less than a year after Majors was arrested and jailed for hitting Jabara’s mother with his car while she was jogging. At the time, the mother, Haifa Jabara, already had a restraining order against Majors, after he had threatened and harassed her. But eight months later, Majors was released on $60,000 bond even though Tulsa County prosecutors called him “a substantial risk to the public.”

As the Jabara family mourns the death of Khalid Jabara in Tulsa, we remember a similar fatal shooting last year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In 2015, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and her husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat, were shot dead by a white neighbor. Razan was 19 years old, Yusor was 21, and Deah was 23. Police initially said the killings resulted from a dispute over a parking space, but relatives of the victims described the killings as a hate crime. The suspected gunman, Craig Stephen Hicks, has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder.

The interview with Khalid’s brother and sister, Rami Jabara and Victoria Jabara Williams, and with Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, the father of Razan and Yusor, continues here.

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Eric has completed the 2016 Midyear Reading, BALANCE. We strongly recommend you get all 12 signs. If you prefer, choose your individual signs here. Photo by European Southern Observatory.