Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party planned ahead: Some of their first major actions targeted the independence of the courts. Now, there are few ways for citizens to fight more direct attacks on civil society.
Category: Press Freedom
By Linus Hoeller, Northwestern University Reports Without Borders consistently ranks Austria among the best countries when it comes to press freedom in their annual investigations. In RSF’s 2021 report, Austria ranked 17th – putting into the second-highest bracket of countries altogether and near the top even of the European countries[1]. Curiously, there are some discrepancies…
Linus Hoeller, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism Historical overview of the region’s democratization and backsliding When the “communist” dictatorships of Eastern Europe fell, one by one, in 1989 – and, with the exception of Romania, in a remarkably peaceful fashion – western euphoria was great. These countries and their people, newly “liberated” from their…
Linus HoellerNorthwestern UniversityReporting on the ground from the nation’s third-largest city, Chicago Nearly three weeks after an eventful election in the former British colony known formally as the United States of America, the incumbent far-right president D. Trump has yet to concede to his victorious centrist challenger J. Biden, calling about an unprecedented democratic crisis….
By Linus Hoeller Title image: a man looks at a list of PiS scandals on display outside the presidential palace in the week leading up to the election. (Linus Hoeller / The World Uncensored) Update June 29th, 07 UTC: Polling stations closed at 9 pm Sunday evening, after which an exit poll was released, showing…
Unrest & Protests across the U.S. as outrage over George Floyd Police Killing escalates: an Overview
Protests and riots erupted in countless U.S. cities for the fourth night following the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed, black American. One of the police officers involved in the killing, who had been seen kneeling on Floyd’s neck while he begged for forgiveness and said “I can’t breathe,” has since been charged with third-degree…
Photography by Tianxiao Xu Presentation and writing by Linus Hoeller North Korea is closed off from the outside world like no other country. It consistently ranks at the very bottom of freedom indices – no free press, no free elections, no freedom of movement, assembly, speech. For three generations, the Kim dynasty has ruled the…
By Linus Hoeller Title Image: Documents taken from www.nytimes.com Over one million Uighurs have been placed in high-security re-education facilities by Chinese authorities, the United Nations estimate. A Muslim minority of around ten million people in western China’s Xinjiang province, the Uighurs are the target of a systematic campaign by the central government to re-shape…
US press freedom is now considered “problematic” according to a key index. Here’s why.
Opinionated essay Children are starving in Yemen. Poverty is skyrocketing in Venezuela. Violence in Afghanistan is showing no sign of stopping. Chances are good that you’ve recently been reminded about these happenings through your Facebook, Reddit, Twitter feeds. Social media is a powerful tool for making stories heard. However, it may be delaying us from…