On Wednesday, at least 27 women at the T Don Hutto immigration detention center in Texas began a hunger strike, The Guardian reports. The women are protesting conditions at the so-called “residential center.”

The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg, who covers Guantanamo Bay more closely than anyone, got this photo of a "how-to weigh a detainee hunger striker guide" before it was removed from the prison wall.

Last January, Kentucky State Penitentiary inmate James Embry died, following "weeks of erratic behavior" and a hunger strike. A new AP investigation shows that lax and incompetent prison officials stood by and let it happen.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the two Pussy Riot members still in a Russian prison for the crime of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred," is on hunger strike starting today in order to protest her living conditions. In a lengthy open letter to the Guardian explaining her strike, Tolokonnikova claims that the first year in her two-year sentence has been hellish, beginning with the head administrator of her penal colony telling her upon arrival: "You should know that when it comes to politics, I am a Stalinist."

In one of the finest demonstrations of Orwellian language in recent memory, a hunger strike by cell-bound California prisoners is denounced as a "gang power play" by the government official who controls all of California's prisons.

Last August, Tad Friend wrote an excellent article in the New Yorker about the spectacularly bizarre life of downtown New York scenester John Lurie, focusing on his weird on-again, off-again friendship with an artist named John Perry, portrayed as a moody and dangerous figure who ended up stalking Lurie and making threats against his life.

California Congressman Duncan Hunter's opponents really want to debate him, enough that they'll starve themselves for at least eight days in protest (they're on day six now.) Will Duncan Hunter have blood on his hands?

Four Columbia students have announced an immediate hunger strike, posting a list of impossible-to-measure benchmarks that must be met by the university before these anonymous people will once again begin making their brave trips to the dining hall. At issue is, uh, everything about the school, more or less, but especially the recent business with nooses and Nazis.