Pharmaceutical companies are “killing us with chemicals and poisons, radiation, chemotherapy, and all of their wonderful CT scans and PET scans. These are all harmful,” the medicinal cannabis activist tells Mnar Muhawesh on “Behind the Headline.”

From The Laura Flanders Show: The history of the US is packed with people of color and poor people who’ve been stripped of their rights — to vote, to wages, to housing or even just the right to stay in the country — through incarceration, segregation, slavery and deportation. For just as long, black communities have created safety, and won a say in democracy, through buying and keeping land cooperatively.

Since 9/11, agencies like the FBI have been tasked with preventing the next terrorist attack. However, in their zeal to catch terrorists before they strike, they’ve created more terrorist plots than any actual terror groups.

Adhyl Polanco, an NYPD officer who spoke out publicly against the department’s use of illegal quotas for summonses and arrests, filed a lawsuit in federal court this week alleging his superiors discriminated and retaliated against him based on his race and speech. According to Polanco’s lawsuit, the NYPD was threatening officers with “termination and negative employment actions, such as low performance evaluations and punitive postings,” to force them to meet Stop & Frisk and arrest quotas.

There’s no such thing as “American exceptionalism,” CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou tells Mnar Muhawesh is this episode of “Behind the Headline,” And while the U.S. claims to be defending human rights around the world, it’s really just securing its oil interests.

California has agreed to restrict the use of long-term solitary confinement in a settlement agreement filed in federal court this week. Restrictions are expected to reduce the number of inmates in isolation, cap the number of continuous years an inmate can spend in solitary confinement to five, and establish measures by which inmates can more easily achieve release back to general population.

On August 26, activists delivered 260,000 signatures to the Justice Department, demanding a federal investigation of Sandra Bland’s suspicious death in a Texas jail. Although officials ruled her death a suicide, many suspect she was murdered and, regardless of her official cause of death, her needless arrest during a traffic stop directly led to her demise.

Last week, in the conclusion to my series of articles on genocide, I asked whether, with at least 4 million Arabs killed by sanctions and modern Western wars, should we call it genocide against Muslims? Yesterday, Watching the Hawks invited Mnar Muhawesh, the founder of MintPress News, to discuss the genocidal body count in the Middle East.

Three Ferguson protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement recently unveiled Campaign Zero, a set of 10 demands for police reform. Shadowproof readers discussed the possibilities on social media, and while many supported the ideas in the plan, others argued that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The financial collapse of 2008 and the absence of true economic recovery in the years since has left millions more children in poverty than before the recession. About 22 percent of American children live in poverty, and even that figure may not fully account for all those who are struggling.