Prisoners across the United States are launching a massive strike on Friday, on the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, to protest what they call modern-day slavery.

Organizers say the strike will take place in at least 24 states to protest inhumane living and working conditions, forced labor, and the cycle of the criminal justice system itself. In California alone, 800 people are expected to take part in the work stoppage. It is slated to be one of the largest strikes in history.

In the era of Black Lives Matter, the issues of racist policing, the school-to-prison pipeline, and other factors that contribute to the mass incarceration crisis are coming to the forefront of civil and human rights movements.

“Slavery is alive and well in the prison system, but by the end of this year, it won’t be anymore,” reads the call to action from groups including Support Prisoner Resistance, the Free Alabama Movement, and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC). “This is a call to end slavery in America.”

It continues:

As the organizers explain in their call to action, “Certain Americans live every day under not only the threat of extra-judicial execution—as protests surrounding the deaths of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and so many others have drawn long overdue attention to—but also under the threat of capture, of being thrown into these plantations, shackled and forced to work.”

Following a disciplinary review hearing which took place Thursday, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning confirmed early Friday morning she has been sentenced to solitary confinement for attempting to take her own life while serving a 30-year prison sentence at Ft. Leavenworth prison in Kansas.

The attempted suicide took place in July and, according to Fight for the Future, a group which has advocated on her behalf, followed “years of the government systematically denying her access to medically recommended treatment for gender dysphoria, and previous threats of solitary confinement following minor prison ‘infractions,’ including possession of mislabeled general research materials that Chelsea used for article writing and an expired tube of toothpaste.”

Earlier this month, as Common Dreams reported, Manning ended a five-day hunger strike after the military finally agreed to provide her with gender transition surgery as well as other medically prescribed treatments.

In 2013, Manning was convicted by a military court for passing military and government documents to the media outlet Wikileaks, many of which contained evidence of possible war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Manning’s attorney, the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, confirmed the sentence of solitary confinement in a tweet Friday:

Following the ruling, Manning released the following statement to supporters:

In addition to supporters who have railed against the military’s treatment of Manning while incarcerated at Ft. Leavenworth, a larger effort is being made to have her released from prison altogether.

As with other whistleblowers charged with criminal conduct for their alleged disclosures under the Obama administration—including Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, and others—Manning’s advocates argue she should received a presidential pardon.

“It should be beyond question at this point that the archive that Manning gave to WikiLeaks – and that was later published in part by the Guardian and New York Times – is one of the richest and most comprehensive databases on world affairs that has ever existed; its contribution to the public record at this point is almost incalculable,” wrote Trevor Timm, co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in an op-ed last week. “To give you an idea: in just the past month, the New York Times has cited Manning’s state department cables in at least five different stories. And that’s almost six years after they first started making headlines.”

Timm said it’s “past time the administration did the right thing,” and let her go.

A federal judge has ordered that former CIA officials can be deposed in a lawsuit against the architects of the agency’s torture program, in what human rights advocates say is a vital step for accountability.

The order (pdf), issued by U.S. District Court Senior Judge Justin Quackenbush earlier this week, rejected an attempt by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that would have protected the officials from oral questioning. The deposition will be carried out as part of a discovery process for a case against the program’s architects, psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of three men who were subjected to beatings, exposure to extreme temperature, sleep and food deprivation, and other abuses while in CIA custody.

Two of the four officials are John Rizzo and Jose Rodriguez, who both held high-ranking positions in the agency at the time the torture program was being developed and implemented. In a blog post about the order, the ACLU wrote of Rizzo, who was the CIA’s chief lawyer for much of George W. Bush’s administration:

Rodriguez has also defended the CIA’s torture of detainees and, while at the agency, authorized the use of certain tactics. He also ordered the destruction of scores of videotapes showing waterboarding and other torture.

Voters in U.S. counties previously covered by the Voting Rights Act (VRA) will have at least 868 fewer places to cast ballots in the 2016 election than they did previously, according to a new analysis released Friday.

In fact, the report (pdf) from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights finds that in the wake of the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting the VRA, “[c]ounties and states with known records of voting discrimination are closing polling places on a massive scale.” This is among other negative outcomes of the ruling, which Common Dreams has covered extensively. 

Many closures happened in places that would have had to gain federal approval to change voting laws prior to the high court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, “which made Section 5 of the VRA inoperable and opened the door to racial discrimination at every juncture of the electoral process,” as the report explains.

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In North Carolina, for example:

And in Texas:

If it seems like Big Pharma has escaped accountability for its role in perpetuating the nation’s deadly opioid epidemic, those suspicions are not unfounded.

According to a former top Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official, the industry’s influence over Congress has successfully quashed efforts to regulate the pharmaceutical drug market aiding an unprecedented addiction to legal drugs.

“When you sit with a parent who can’t understand why there’s so many pharmaceuticals out in the illicit marketplace, and why isn’t the government doing anything, well the DEA was doing something. Unfortunately what we’re trying to do is thwarted by people who are writing laws,” Joseph Rannazzisi, who for 10 years served as head of the DEA’s Diversion Control Division, told the Guardian.

In an exclusive investigation published on Monday, the Guardian, with Rannazzisi’s help, explains how Congress turned its back on suffering families and, under the guise of combating the national epidemic, has routinely passed legislation that effectively shields the industry.

One such law is the recently-passed Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, which “requires the DEA to warn pharmacies and distributors if they are in breach of regulations”—namely “crooked doctors and pharmacists” in suspicion of over-prescribing prescription drugs—”and to give them a chance to comply before licenses are withdrawn,” the Guardian reports.

Rannazzisi declared the new law a “gift to the industry,” explaining how it does neither of the things it purports to do. “This doesn’t ensure patient access and it doesn’t help drug enforcement at all,” he said. “What this bill does is take away DEA’s ability to go after a pharmacist, a wholesaler, manufacturer or distributor.”

“The bill passed because ‘Big Pharma’ wanted it to pass,” he added. “When I was in charge what I tried to do was explain to my investigators and my agents that our job was to regulate the industry and they’re not going to like being regulated.”

The Washington Post has also been reporting on the drop in enforcement actions against pharmaceutical distributors, dubbed “pill mills,” which it said was due in part to “resistance from higher-level Justice Department officials who were being heavily lobbied by the wholesalers.”

“Congress would rather listen to people who had a profit motive rather than a public health and safety motive.”
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A prominent Honduran leader of a rural land rights movement was killed on Monday night in what supporters claim was an assassination organized by wealthy landowners.

“How many more activists have to be brutally murdered before the authorities take effective action to protect them, or even be willing to talk about this crisis?”
—Erika Guevara-Rosas,
Amnesty InternationalJose Angel Flores, president of the Unified Campesinos Movement of the Aguan Valley, or MUCA, had been under police protection since March, teleSUR reported, after the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights ordered the Honduran state to protect him from death threats in 2014.

Former MUCA president Johnny Rivas, who hosts a radio show on the local station Radio Progreso, blamed “death squads chasing peasant families fighting for land rights” for the murder.

Of Flores’ organization, teleSUR wrote: “MUCA has been on the forefront of alternative food production and economic development projects in the Aguan on land recovered through large-scale land occupations. The movement struggles to strengthen food sovereignty while continuing to demand comprehensive agrarian reform.”

“The situation in the Aguan has been called the most intense agrarian conflict seen in Central America in the last 15 years,” the Latin American outlet added.

Flores was killed in Tocoa, in the northern Honduran department of Colon.

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The Spanish-language wire service EPE reported on the details of the attack:

About 150 other activists have been killed so far in the region, the local campesinos organizations told teleSUR.

The battle between landowners and peasant farmers has led to so much bloodshed that people describe Bajo Aguan, where MUCA operates, as “killing fields.”

“Many illegal mass graves have been discovered in recent years,” teleSUR wrote.

Honduran Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres, who was assassinated in March, also devoted her life to fighting for land rights. Violence against land defenders is on the rise across Latin America, and Honduras remains one of the most dangerous countries for activists in the world.

“Honduras has turned into a ‘no-go zone’ for anyone daring to campaign for the protection of the environment. How many more activists have to be brutally murdered before the authorities take effective action to protect them, or even be willing to talk about this crisis?” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International.

And the U.S. continues to funnel millions of dollars in military funding to the Honduran government, despite the targeted assassinations and other human rights abuses.

“We are indignant that in the face of the ongoing and documented violence, repression and corruption involving the Honduran government, the U.S. State Department has certified that it is satisfied that the Honduran government has taken effective steps to improve human rights,” grassroots coalition Honduras Solidarity Network said Wednesday. “This clears the way for $55 million more in U.S. aid.”