by Jake Johnson | Feb 12, 2026 | Article, elections, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Trump
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Feb. 12, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Doing President Donald Trump’s bidding, the Republican-controlled US House on Wednesday approved legislation that would potentially prevent millions of Americans from participating in federal elections by instituting draconian voter ID requirements, mandating documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, and requiring states to share voter information with the Department of Homeland Security.
The White House-backed legislation, an updated version of the so-called SAVE Act that the House approved in 2024, passed with the support of every Republican who took part in the vote and one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas—notably the recipient of a pardon from the president.
Election experts and watchdog groups said the bill represents a massive assault on the right to vote, with many of its provisions directly in line with what Trump has demanded ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“Congressional Republicans are attempting to commandeer the midterm election cycle and increase voting margins in President Trump’s favor by putting a finger on the scale of our elections and pushing nonsensical, anti-democratic laws to stop voters from casting a ballot,” said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert. “This overreaching, un-American bill tacks on unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to vote, all of which would harm voters across the political spectrum.”
The bill is likely dead on arrival in the narrowly divided Senate, with every Democrat and at least one Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, expected to oppose it.
But its passage through the House with unanimous support from the Republican caucus—whose members claim to be driven by a desire to prevent noncitizens from voting, which is already unlawful, and combat voter fraud,
by Qassam Muaddi | Feb 11, 2026 | Article, Israel, Palestine, Politics and Movements: International, Reprint, west bank
This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Feb. 11, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
Israel just erased Palestinian existence from the West Bank by law, and it’s not an overstatement.
It has so far been commonplace to say that Israel’s annexation of the West Bank exists in all but name, since a state of de facto annexation was being established on the ground even though the West Bank was still regarded as legally separate. That changed on Sunday.
While Israel did not announce a de jure annexation of the West Bank, it has laid the legal groundwork for it. The Israeli government’s security cabinet made a series of decisions on Sunday that changed the legal status quo in the West Bank, dramatically shrinking the already limited authority of the self-governing body known as the Palestinian Authority (PA). This signals the practical beginning of a formal annexation of the West Bank — starting with specific areas.
The Israeli security cabinet made a series of decisions on Sunday that changed the legal status quo in the West Bank. This signals the practical beginning of an annexation of the West Bank.
The bill conferring these authorities to Israel was approved by the cabinet in its final draft, and is to be voted on by the Israeli Knesset. When it passes, Israel will have the authority to impose Israeli law in areas of the West Bank that had been under PA control, especially laws regulating building permits. The bill, originally introduced in 2023 and known as “the Antiquities Bill,” concerns dozens of Palestinian historical sites in the West Bank. In addition, the Israeli cabinet decided on Sunday to allow Israelis to purchase real estate
by Nora Loreto | Feb 10, 2026 | Article, Canada, Oil, Politics and Movements: International, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Trump
This story was originally published on Truthout on Feb. 09, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
A separation movement in the Canadian province of Alberta claims to be gaining steam, and its leaders say they now have a meeting booked with U.S. Treasury Department officials. They will be asking for a line of credit worth $500 billion in U.S. currency to help transition Alberta from a Canadian province into a U.S. state.
Led by businessman Mitch Sylvestre, the Alberta Prosperity Project has launched a petition through a campaign called Stay Free Alberta to build support for a referendum to separate from Canada. The group has no official support from any of the elected parties in Alberta.
Behind its rallying cry of faith, family, and freedom, the Alberta Prosperity Project wants a new constitution for Albertans — one “that recognizes the Supremacy of God as foundational to Civil Society and the Rule of Law.”
Unlike in the province of Quebec, where separatist leaders hold elected office, Alberta’s separatist movement has no formal foothold in its province’s politics. Quebec, an overwhelmingly French-speaking province, is the only jurisdiction in Canada with a sizable sovereignty movement. That province had referenda in 1980 and 1995 that asked whether or not Quebecers wanted to separate from Canada, the latter narrowly failing. The separatist political party, Parti Québécois, is expected to form the next provincial government, and has promised a referendum in its first mandate.
Officially, the governing United Conservative Party of Alberta (UCP) is not advocating for sovereignty. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she wants Alberta to remain in Canada. However, the idea of sovereignty has been used by the
by Julia Conley | Feb 10, 2026 | Article, cuba, Gaza, Israel, Politics and Movements: International, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Feb. 10, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
As the Cuban government announced Monday that the Trump administration’s oil blockade on the country would soon leave airlines without jet fuel, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that the international community has become far too accepting of acts of economic warfare that collectively punish an entire population, not just government officials.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone that the stage for the worsened suffering of Cuban people was set in Gaza, where both Republican and Democratic US officials have backed Israel’s starvation policy and military assault since October 2023.
“This is what we’ve seen with Gaza, right, this is a new kind of era of depravity opened up, where there used to be—or there was this stated commitment on human rights—that innocent civilians were almost exempt from the rules of war, from blockades,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
🎥 WATCH | Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) reacted to Drop Site News reporting on internal divisions in the Trump administration’s Cuba policy by pointing to Gaza as evidence of a broader collapse in Western human rights norms.She said the “entire Western world” is looking… pic.twitter.com/SnI4niD8JH— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) February 10, 2026
Cuban people have long been victimized by the US government’s decadeslong, illegal trade embargo. But Trump’s decision to cut off Cuba’s oil supply from Venezuela, which was its largest energy supplier, and threaten to slap tariffs on any country that provides oil to the island nation, has left families facing lengthy blackouts and the threat that Cuba’s healthcare system could soon grind to a halt without fuel to keep hospitals running.
Trump has claimed he aims to punish the Cuban government, which he said last month constitutes
by Sasha Abramsky | Feb 9, 2026 | Article, elections, ICE, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, Reprint
This story was originally published on Truthout on Feb. 05, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
On February 3, as Donald Trump was doubling down on his push to “nationalize” elections, Steve Bannon, MAGA’s version of Rasputin, promised his War Room podcast audience that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will be deployed to swarm polling places during the upcoming midterm elections.
“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon warned ominously. “We’re not gonna sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”
To be absolutely clear, neither Donald Trump’s nor Bannon’s proposals are remotely legal (or predicated on fact). The law prohibits intimidating voters where they are casting ballots — and it’s hard to see how the presence of armed, masked agents from a paramilitary outfit that has shown no compunction at kidnapping and killing people would have any other purpose. And the Constitution gives states control over their own elections’ processes, thus directly contradicting Trump’s desire, articulated in an interview with conservative media personality Dan Bongino, for the GOP to “take over” the elections systems of at least 15 states.
Yet Bannon and Trump are deadly serious. For them, any election that doesn’t go their way is illegitimate, and both are willing to use their vast media platforms to agitate for armed interventions at polling places. Both are, apparently, also indifferent to democratic norms, and are willing to push the constitutional system to the breaking point to get their way in the midterms.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded to Bannon’s fiery rhetoric by denying that ICE would be swarming polling stations in November, but it said that
by Stephen Prager | Feb 6, 2026 | Article, ICE, immigration, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, Reprint, Trump
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Feb. 02, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
In the wake of immigration agents’ killings of three US citizens within a matter of weeks, the Department of Homeland Security is quietly moving forward with a plan to expand its capacity for mass detention by using a military contract to create what Pablo Manríquez, the author of the immigration news site Migrant Insider calls “a nationwide ‘ghost network’ of concentration camps.”
On Sunday, Manríquez reported that “a massive Navy contract vehicle, once valued at $10 billion, has ballooned to a staggering $55 billion ceiling to expedite President Donald Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ agenda.”
It is the expansion of a contract first reported on in October by CNN, which found that DHS was “funneling $10 billion through the Navy to help facilitate the construction of a sprawling network of migrant detention centers across the US in an arrangement aimed at getting the centers built faster, according to sources and federal contracting documents.”
SCOOP: A repurposed Navy contract to funnel tens of billions to ICE for a nationwide “ghost network” of concentration camps—just got a lot bigger. https://t.co/yvzszpD8t2— Pablo Manríquez (@PabloReports) February 2, 2026
The report describes the money as being allocated for “new detention centers,” which “are likely to be primarily soft-sided tents and may or may not be built on existing Navy installations, according to the sources familiar with the initiative. DHS has often leaned on soft-sided facilities to manage influxes of migrants.”
According to a source familiar with the project, “the goal is for the facilities to house as many as 10,000 people each, and are expected to be built in Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Utah, and Kansas.”
Now
