Title Image: A protester holds up a copy of the Polish constitution. Image: @DukaKofi via Twitter. Over the last months, Poland’s nationalist ruling party Law and Justice (PiS) has tightened its grip on power through a series of authoritarian laws, placing the country’s media and highest constitutional court under its control. Human Rights organizations, the…
Author: Linus Hoeller
The early 21st century has seen a resurgence in dictatorships and authoritarian governments throughout the world, including regions like Europe previously thought to now be stable democracies. However, models like the Soviet-inspired communist state or “traditional” dictatorships are outdated and will not survive through the 21st century. Instead, a new form of authoritarian regime is…
The European Union can now cut ‘hate-inducing’ live broadcasts and delete sections from their online archive. The Guardian, the 9-million reader newspaper that published Snowden’s revelations on global surveillance, published an article titled ‘is it ethical to punch a Nazi?’ Anti-Trump protesters in Berkeley turned a peaceful demonstration into a riot, burning things and smashing…
Vancouver, in western Canada, was the stage for a showdown between two opposing demonstrations – one against Maduro’s authoritarian rule in Venezuela and one supporting the country’s president. Though the demonstrations stayed peaceful, the two opposing sides did have shouting matches and the supporters of Maduro also brought along revolutionary music which they blasted from speakers….
Here’s a topic, for a change, that isn’t really new at all but all the more puzzling – Number Stations. Spy stations, or (admittedly less catchy) number stations, are shortwave radio stations operated by intelligence agencies, embassies and militaries around the world, broadcasting strings of seemingly random numbers, at seemingly random times, on seemingly random…
“This is where they smashed my skull”, he says, making me feel the back of his head. You can clearly feel the injury. Then he shows me one of his arms, pointing out a long scar. The man sitting opposite of me is Abdul Hamid, who was ‘disappeared’ and tortured by the Syrian government for…
Title Image (c) SPIEGEL Online (www.spiegel.de) Article by Linus H. President Aleksandr Lukashenko seems more unsettled than usual by the annual 25th of March protests in Belarus, a country which he has led in an authoritarian manner for almost 30 years. The call for democracy is getting louder, and the authorities respond with harsh crackdowns. More…
Article by Linus H. Right-wing populism is sweeping through the world, with a president Trump being elected in the United States, the UK being in the process of leaving the European Union, and neo-fascist parties receiving unprecedented numbers of votes in many European countries. But a large part of the younger population, those that will…
Some people may know about China’s organ harvesting program, with up to 13,000 forced organ “donations” annually, may have heard about political opponents being murdered in Moscow or concentration camps in North Korea – but not only Russia, China and wacky central African regimes with the lifespan of a one day fly make people disappear….
Article by Linus H. On most maps showing world-wide data, there is a blank spot labeled “no data available” in northwestern Africa, south of Morocco and northwest of Mauritania. It’s a slab of land of 266,000km² and a population of only roughly half a million, mainly uninhabited desert, but nonetheless it is a key focus…