Indonesia is burning, literally, one of the worst environmental and humanitarian disasters of our era, though you likely haven’t heard about it on TV.

A federal appeals court affirmed and expanded a prior ruling to grant immigrant detainees in the Ninth Circuit access to bond hearings every six months.

In the days of slavery and Jim Crow, there was a type of work song commonly sung by black Americans known as the hammer song. Blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, popularized this particular tune. The work song is constructed in the following form—a line repeated three times for a

On September 1, the United States government rejected several recommendations from countries which suggested how the U.S. could better uphold human rights. Rejected recommendations included abolishing the death penalty, ending spying on private communications of people of the world, and allowing foreign aid to assist rape victims in war zones who need access to safe abortions.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections is threatening and intimidating corrections officers speaking out against dangerous work conditions, according to a letter [PDF] published on August 27 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee. The organization asked the DOC to clearly state it will not seek to silence or retaliate against employees for their speech.

A local police chief and an officer in Carrollton County, Kentucky, were indicted by a grand jury this week after allegedly placing a 31-year-old mentally ill inmate on a bus to Florida instead of taking him to the hospital for a court-ordered psychological evaluation. Attorney General for the state of Kentucky Jack Conway said in a press release today that officers Ronald Dickow and Michael Willhoite were indicted on charges of kidnapping and official misconduct.

2015 has been a big year for Corizon Health Services: in the span of six months, the nation’s largest for-profit inmate healthcare provider has managed to break not one, but two different state records for the largest wrongful death settlement payouts in history.

Matthew Ajibade, Roberto Ornelas, and Garrett Gagne: These were the first three people killed by American police this year. Since their deaths at the hands of police on Jan. 1, police have killed another 687 people, averaging three daily, according to The Guardian’s “The Counted,” currently the most comprehensive database of killings by U.S. police. This stands in sharp contrast to police in Norway. They fired guns twice last year. And Norwegian police haven’t killed anyone since 2006, and that police-related fatality was the only one that year.

Former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, who pushed for nuclear disarmament in meetings with President Ronald Reagan, told Der Spiegel that the US as an “insurmountable obstacle on the road to a nuclear-free world,” and suggested, “That’s why we have to put demilitarization back on the agenda of international politics.”