Ashley Diamond, a transgender woman who sued the state of Georgia for housing her in men’s prisons and subjecting her to abuse since 2012, was unexpectedly paroled on Monday following a grueling legal battle.

“I’m overjoyed to be with my family again and out of harm’s way,” Diamond said after her release. “Although the systematic abuse and assaults I faced for more than three years have left me emotionally and physically scarred, I’ll continue to fight for justice and to shine a light on the gross mistreatment of transgender inmates in Georgia and nationwide.”

Diamond, 37, filed a lawsuit against the state in February, alleging that prison officials denied her access to hormone treatments and other medical needs, prevented her from expressing her gender identity, and allowed her to be sexually and physically assaulted by other inmates. Her previous requests for transfer to a lower-security level prison were denied.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which represented Diamond, welcomed the news but added that Diamond’s parole did not equal justice.

“While we’re thrilled that Ashley Diamond is out of prison, our lawsuit is far from over,” said SPLC staff attorney Chinyere Ezie. “Ashley has endured more than three years of systematic abuse based on the Georgia Department of Corrections’ unconstitutional policies toward transgender inmates and woeful lack of care.”

“Her release does not erase her barbaric treatment by GDC officials, which was tantamount to torture,” Ezie continued. “Nor is her plight isolated. We will continue to advocate for an end to prison practices that unfairly punish and inflict pain on transgender inmates.”

With a passionate press conference outside the White House on Tuesday morning, a sweeping coalition of climate, labor, Indigenous, and public health groups and leaders called on President Barack Obama to make the United States the first nation to commit to keeping all of its remaining, unleased public fossil fuels in the ground.

Such a move is imperative, the more than 400 organizations and individuals wrote in a letter outlining their demands.

“The cost of continuing federal fossil fuel leasing to our land, climate, and communities is too high,” reads the missive delivered Tuesday. “The science is clear that, to maintain a good chance of avoiding catastrophic levels of warming, the world must keep the vast majority of its remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Federal fossil fuels—those that you control—are the natural place to begin.”

Speaking to Obama’s ability to set an international precedent, the letter continues: “Each new federal fossil fuel lease opens new deposits for development that should be deemed unburnable. By placing those deposits off limits, stopping new leasing would help align your administration’s energy policy with a safer climate future and global carbon budgets.”

The campaign comes just days after the Obama administration announced it would open nearly 40 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to new oil and gas drilling leases, and one month after it approved a permit for Royal Dutch Shell to drill in the Arctic. 

Of course, significant damage has been done on the more than 67 million acres of public land and ocean already leased to the fossil fuel industry.

Human-induced climate change has pushed the Earth to the brink of a major shift as scientists predict rapidly rising global temperatures within the next two years.

A study, titled Big Changes Underway in the Climate System? (pdf) and published by the British Meteorological Office, notes that heightened greenhouse gas emissions will exacerbate the naturally-occurring phenomenon known as El Niño to push global temperatures to record highs.

This temporary warming of surface waters in the Pacific, known as El Niño, drives dramatic shifts in rainfall, temperature, and wind patterns worldwide, and can last for months or even years.

In the short term, this means that the Southern Hemisphere can expect record heatwaves during its 2015-2016 summer season, coupled with the extreme weather events, such as typhoons, typically associated with an El Niño. 

“It looks very likely that globally 2014, 2015 and 2016 will all be amongst the very warmest years ever recorded,” said scientist Rowan Sutton, who peer-reviewed the study.

“This is not a fluke,” Sutton, who works for the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, continued. “We are seeing the effects of energy steadily accumulating in the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, caused by greenhouse gas emissions.”

In the most recent El Niño update released last Thursday, the National Weather Service also noted the planet is currently experiencing the upswing of one of the strongest El Niño events, and quite possibly the strongest, of the past 65 years of recordkeeping.

Organizers of a citizens’ initiative on Wednesday delivered a petition with over three million signatures to the European Commission headquarters in Brussels in their continuing bid to stop trade deals they say pose a threat to democracy and boon to corporate interests.

They say the number of signatures—over 3.2 million at the time of publication—is proof of the vast public opposition to the trade deals in question: the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and United States.

“By signing this petition, an unprecedented three million people from countries across Europe have made it clear that they reject these dangerous Trojan horse treaties which benefit big corporations at the expense of people,” stated Magda Stoczkiewicz, director of Friends of the Earth Europe.

Their petition, which has the support of over 500 European organizations, states:

As the London-based Global Justice Now explains in a media statement, the petition

“Three million people demanding an end to the TTIP negotiations shows that the EU does not have the public mandate to continue this deal,” the organization’s director, Nick Dearden, adds. “People across Europe are standing up to protect our labour rights, our environmental standards and vital public services, like the [National Health Service], from TTIP. Everything that we know about this secretive trade deal shows that it is very little about trade and very much about enshrining a massive corporate power grab.”

Top-ranking Volkswagen officials on Friday cast blame for the company’s large-scale diesel emissions-fixing scandal on a small number of unidentified and relatively low-level engineers and technicians.

In public statements issued at the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, new CEO Matthias Müller condemned the “unlawful behavior of engineers and technicians involved in engine development.”

Müller, former head of Porsche, took over after Martin Winterkorn resigned from the position of CEO earlier this week claiming he is “not aware” of any wrongdoing on his part.

The company built a software “defeat device” that allowed cars to cheat on emissions control tests and spew up to 40 times the level of pollutants legally permitted. The scandal is now known to have affected 11 million cars worldwide.

Echoing Müller, other top officials publicly condemned the lower-ranking workers they say are responsible.

Bernd Osterloh, chairperson of the company’s work council who also sits on the executive committee, charged: “A small group has done damage to our company. We need a climate where mistakes are not hidden.”

Berthold Huber, acting head of the company’s supervisory board, stated: “The supervisory board has, on the basis of current information, recommended suspending some employees immediately until the whole case is cleared up.” It is not immediately clear who faced disciplinary action.

“It is time to build on the progressive movement of the past and make public colleges and universities tuition-free in the United States,” presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wrote in an op-ed on Thursday, saying such a move would “be the driver of a new era of American prosperity.”

“If our economy is to be strong, we need the best-educated workforce in the world. We won’t achieve that if, every year, hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college while millions more leave school deeply in debt.”
—Sen. Bernie Sanders

“In my view, education is essential for personal and national well-being,” Sanders declared, elaborating on a key aspect of his populist platform. “We live in a highly competitive, global economy, and if our economy is to be strong, we need the best-educated workforce in the world. We won’t achieve that if, every year, hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college while millions more leave school deeply in debt.”

In his call to make higher education free for all, Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.), who is seeking the White House as a Democrat, noted that public colleges and universities are tuition-free in countries including Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Mexico. “They’re free throughout Germany, too,” he wrote, “and not just for Germans or Europeans but to international citizens as well.”

“Governments in these countries understand what an important investment they are making,” he continued, “not just in the individuals who are able to acquire knowledge and skills but for the societies these students will serve as teachers, architects, scientists, entrepreneurs and more.”

Sanders has already been beating the free tuition drum on the campaign trail. This week in Iowa, for example, he told a crowd at William Penn University: “Generally speaking, to make it into a good middle class job today, you need a college degree. So some of us think that if, as a nation, we have determined that free public education historically has been from kindergarten through high school, that in the year 2015 now is the time to extend that idea to colleges and universities.” The line drew enthusiastic applause.

Watch below:

A cadre of young climate activists packed a Seattle, Washington courtroom on Tuesday to hear oral arguments in a case that they say could change the course of their futures.

The trial is over the refusal by the Department of Ecology (DOE), which oversees state environmental laws, to set a cap on carbon emissions. And eight young teens who showed up for its opening day were more than just spectators—they were plaintiffs.

“We’re the ones who have to live with it if the oceans are acidic and the planet is 5 degrees warmer,” said Gabriel Mandell, 13. “The snowpack is melting. Ocean is acidifying. The Earth is warming. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong, and we need to fix it.”

Zoe Foster, 12, added, “Kids understand the threats climate change will have on our future. I’m not going to sit by and watch my government do nothing. We don’t have time to waste. I’m petitioning my government to take real action on climate, and I won’t stop until change is made.”

In a case brought by the youth-focused nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, based in Oregon, the petitioners argue that they presented the DOE with current scientific data on climate change and petitioned the agency to consider statewide emissions reductions to 350 parts per million (ppm) by the end of the century to help Washington do its part in curbing climate change. But the DOE denied their requests, even after an initial ruling in May that ordered the agency to reconsider the petition.
“I’m not going to sit by and watch my government do nothing.”
—Zoe Foster, 12

Now the kids are back in court. Any further delay on the case risks their right to a livable future, they said Tuesday.

And according to some legal experts, the decision could set a precedent for similar cases taking off around the country.

“Under the law, the people of this state, including the kids who have brought this case, have a fundamental right to a healthy environment,” said Andrea Rodgers, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center who is representing the plaintiffs. “Faced with the increasing harms posed by climate destabilization and ocean acidification, the young people brought this lawsuit to vindicate this right on behalf of themselves and future generations.”