By Michael J. Abramowitz 18 January 2018 (Freedom House) – Political rights and civil liberties around the world deteriorated to their lowest point in more than a decade in 2017, extending a period characterized by emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role in the global struggle for human freedom. […]
By Lauren Said-Moorhouse and Amanda Coakley 1 January 2018 (CNN) – As the world began to ring in 2018, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for global unity to overcome growing challenges. In his New Year message on Sunday, Guterres said the world appeared to have “gone in reverse” before adding, “On New Year’s Day 2018 […]
By Tim Craig 15 December 2017 NOYES, Minnesota (The Washington Post) – Chad Cosley tracks them as if they were deer. He looks for footprints and frequently checks his network of trail cameras, which had been documenting wildlife along the U.S.-Canada border but now also capture would-be refugees fleeing the United States under President Trump. […]
15 December 2017 (Los Angeles Times) – This last year has been a dangerous one for journalists around the globe — a record 262 men and women are imprisoned because of the nature of the work they do, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. It’s part of a disturbing trend of attacking and undermining […]
By Ralph Atkins and Mehreen Khan 17 December 2017 ZURICH (Financial Times) – Austria’s far-right nationalist Freedom party will control several powerful ministries when the country’s new government is sworn in on Monday, after it struck a coalition deal that will significantly toughen Vienna’s stance on immigration and asylum seekers. In a breakthrough for the […]
13 November 2017 (AP) – Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has sanctioned a bloody drug war that features extrajudicial killing. He called Barack Obama a “son of a whore.” This week, he boasted that he murdered a man with his own hands. All that went unmentioned in public by President Donald Trump when the leaders held […]
GENEVA, 23 August 2017 (United Nations) – The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has called on the Government of the United States of America, as well as high-level politicians and public officials, to unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country. In […]
26 August 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – How low can Trump go, and how long will it take him to get there? One way to gauge public sentiment is to aggregate data from multiple polls and compute an estimate. Fortunately, the good people at FiveThirtyEight are doing this for us at their excellent site, How popular […]
By Alleen Brown, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri 27 May 2017 (The Intercept) – A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The […]
15 May 2017 (Alt NASA) – Thank you for supporting us. We have not been able to post because of our hostile working conditions. If you have a friend or family member working for NASA, EPA, or NPS, the stories they tell are true, it is truly a hard time. Officials have been trying […]
