t r u t h o u t

Feature

Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons

by: Maya Schenwar, t r u t h o u t | Report

(Artwork: Paul Giambarba / t r u t h o u t)

On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn. They work for pennies, literally. Armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad disciplinary report from a guard - whether true or false - could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. »

Military Sending Foreign Fighters to Home Nations

by: Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, The New York Times

Washington - The United States military has secretly handed over more than 200 militants to the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries, nearly all in the past two years, as part of an effort to reduce the burden of detaining and interrogating foreign fighters captured in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to American military officials.

The system is similar in some ways to the rendition program used by the Central Intelligence Agency since the Sept. »

On King Speech Anniversary, Obama Nomination Takes Its Place in History

by: The Los Angeles Times

Forty-five years to the day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois will formally accept his party's nomination for president. Here are some key landmarks in African American political history:

1847 Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, launches an abolitionist newspaper called the North Star.