Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin

“Marta Jiménez, a hairdresser in Cuba’s eastern city of Holguín, covered her face with her hands and broke down crying when I asked her about Trump’s blockade of the island—especially now that the U.S. is choking off oil shipments. ‘You can’t imagine how it touches every part of our lives,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s a vicious, all-encompassing spiral downward. With no gasoline, buses don’t run, so we can’t get to work. We have electricity only three to six hours a day. There’s no gas for cooking, so we’re burning wood and charcoal in our apartments. It’s like going back 100 years. The blockade is suffocating us, especially single mothers,’ she said crying into her hands, ‘and no one is stopping these demons: Trump and Marco Rubio.'” (02/11/25)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/cuba-suffers-under-oil-embargo

Source: spiked
by Elisha Maldonado

“Hong Kong once prided itself on a free press and an independent judiciary. Before the 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule, the city had been promised that its liberties would endure. Yet now a newspaper publisher faces the rest of his life in prison merely for doing his job.” (02/10/26)

https://archive.is/3vKEa

Source: Coyote Blog
by Warren Meyer

“You don’t sell surveillance out of the gate with a system that tracks down a person in the neighborhood behind on taxes or child support. No, you sell it as a system to find that adorable lost dog (notice not even generic pets or certainly not cats because dogs are the new children for this generation). They can fight all the backlash by saying, ‘Oh come on, who can be against finding lost dogs?’ Then, months or years later, the terms and conditions have morphed and broader search capabilities are enabled without the user even knowing …. When it really gets scary, they are not even going to tell you about it. I do not believe this is just a marketing mistake — Ring appears to have adopted neighborhood surveillance as their core business model.” (02/10/26)

https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2026/02/amazons-creepy-normalizing-of-the-surveillance-state.html

Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Education
by Amanda Nordstrom

“Public universities don’t get to pick which political viewpoints are safe to express. But administrators at two major universities are trying to do just that. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, administrators treated the College Republicans’ pro-ICE political message like a civil rights violation. … At Penn State, an anti-ICE poster discovered outside the student center on Jan. 29 sparked heated reactions across the ideological spectrum. When some people raised the call to identify and punish whoever created the poster, Penn State responded by condemning it and announcing that University Police and Public Safety were investigating. These incidents are two sides of the same coin: administrators using official investigations to police protected political speech, in this case, on opposing sides of the immigration debate.” (02/10/26)

https://www.thefire.org/news/two-universities-two-posters-one-first-amendment-problem