"I was so emotional. They were talking directly about proposed marine terminals and the increase in tanker traffic and how it would affect the west coast," she said. "They were asking, if there's a spill, who's going to be held accountable? Who's going to clean it up?"

In an extraordinary project, award-winning landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky and documentary filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier illustrate the severe impact human activity has had on the landscapes of 20 different countries. Human destruction of their environment has, perhaps, never before looked this beautiful. 

Tommy Orange, an Oakland-based author, was surprised his first novel 'There There' hit The New York Times best seller list, 11 weeks in a row. In an interview with National Observer, Orange told reporter Emilee Gilpin about rarely reading as a kid, the important role of fiction in society, and how the success of his first novel rode a strange parallel to Donald Trump's presidency.

During a special meeting, the Fédération des femmes du Québec took a controversial stance to support sex workers, officially declaring that women can make a free-will decision to enter the sex trade as a legitimate career choice. However, that reasoning of free will does not seem to extend to Quebec’s Muslim women who choose to wear religious head coverings, such as hijabs and niqabs.