United States

In the summer of 2014, accounts of unarmed African Americans who had died in the process of arrest by police began to fill the media. In July 2014 a man in New York City died as a result of a choke hold applied an by arresting officer. In August protest demonstrations escalated into civil violence in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, after a policeman shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, during Brown’s arrest. Protests against those actions and against court decisions not to indict the involved officers continued into 2015, and in April of that year rioting erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, on the day of the funeral of Freddie Gray, a black man who died a week after incurring a severe spinal-cord injury while in police custody. Then, in June, the country was shocked when nine African Americans were shot and killed, allegedly by a young white man in a hate crime, in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The apparently white supremacist motivations of the accused killer sparked a discussion of the display of the Confederate flag on the grounds of the capitol of South Carolina and its perception by many as a symbol of oppression and racial subjugation. In July the South Carolina government legislated the flag’s removal.

Baltimore riotsA man throwing a brick at police in Baltimore on April 27, 2015, following the funeral of Freddie Gray. Patrick Semansky/AP Images

Same-sex marriage and Obamacare Supreme Court rulings and final agreement on the Iran nuclear deal

At the end of June the Supreme Court ruled on a pair of landmark cases. In Obergefell v. Hodges" class="md-crosslink">Obergefell v. Hodges, it found state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions to be unconstitutional under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. That ruling thereby legalized the practice of same-sex marriage throughout the country.

White HousePeople gathering in Lafayette Park to see the White House illuminated with rainbow colours in commemoration of the Supreme Court's ruling that effectively legalized same-sex marriage, June 2015.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Images

In King v. Burwell, the court upheld the portion of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that allowed the government to provide subsidies to poor and middle-class citizens in order to help them purchase health care, thus further solidifying the legality of Obamacare.

On July 14, after some two years of continuing negotiations, the P5+1 and Iran reached a final agreement on limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the reduction of sanctions against the country. The terms of the final agreement largely followed a framework agreement that had been accepted by both sides in April. Over a 10-year period, Iran would greatly reduce its nuclear stockpile and give inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its nuclear facilities in exchange for the gradual removal of sanctions. By September the deal had won enough support in the Senate to ensure that a potential congressional resolution disapproving the deal would not have enough votes to overcome a presidential veto.

European Union; P5+1; Iranian officialsEuropean Union, P5+1, and Iranian officials in Geneva, July 2015.U.S Department of State

New climate regulations, the Keystone XL pipeline, and intervention in the Syrian Civil War

In July 2015 the U.S. and Cuba officially reopened embassies in each other’s capital. In August Obama used executive authority to announce new climate regulations requiring U.S. power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030; however, even before the regulation had been reviewed by a federal appeals court, a lawsuit brought against the action was granted a stay request by the Supreme Court that was to remain in place as the lawsuit made its way through the courts. Environmentalists gained a more permanent victory in November when Obama rejected the proposal to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Opponents of the project had argued that extracting the petroleum from tar sands in Alberta would contribute significantly to global warming.