The Uintah County sheriff’s department arrested 21 protesters who chained themselves to a fence at the construction site of the first tar sands mining operation in the U.S., in the Uintah basin of northeast Utah, according to the activist group Utah Tar Sands Resistance . “Uintah sheriffs used force to pull the protesters apart, and also targeted those providing media coverage. One protester is reported as injured,” stated a post from Peaceful Uprising , another activist group. The sheriff’s department has declined to comment on the arrests. The Utah Supreme Court dismissed a case against the project last month. Though the Uintah mine, owned by Canadian-based US Oil Sands , is the first tar sands mine in the US, Canada has been heavily mining the Alberta region for tar sands for several years. The heavily contested Keystone XL pipeline would transport Canadian bitumen–the stuff extracted from tar sands–from Alberta […]