Democracy slipping away at record rate, intergovernmental body warns

A greater number of countries are sliding towards authoritarianism, while the number of established democracies under threat has never been so high, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) said on Monday. Populist politics, the use of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions to silence critics, a tendency of countries to mimic the anti-democratic behaviour of

Why did Eastern Europe and the Baltics get so badly hit by the latest COVID-19 wave? – DW News

As winter approaches, cases of COVID-19 are rising across Europe. Eastern Europe and the Baltics are seeing the highest numbers, and some countries and cities are turning to lockdowns to pull them back from the brink. Latvia has the highest rate of new cases of any European Union country, with nearly 900 cases per 100,000

EU condemns Belarus for ‘direct attack’ using migrants

The European Union on Wednesday condemned what it called Belarus’s “aggressive behavior” in organizing illegal border crossings with migrants into Latvia, Lithuania and Poland with the aim of destabilizing the 27-nation bloc. So far this year, more than 4,100 asylum-seekers, most of them from Iraq, have illegally crossed from Belarus into Lithuania. That’s 50 times