Table Of Content
Black people also face discrimination in health care and experience worse outcomes than their White counterparts, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, people of color experienced strikingly higher mortality from the virus. Asian Americans were the victims of a surge in discrimination and harassment in 2020, attributed in part to President Trump’s attempts to focus blame for the pandemic on China, where the initial outbreak occurred. The protests also succeeded in drawing media and advocacy attention to many police departments’ deep resistance to any reform or accountability mechanisms, and putting a spotlight on the presence within law enforcement of some officers with direct links to racist and White supremacist groups. However, judicial appointments in recent years have added to existing concerns about partisan distortion of the appointment and confirmation process. Republican leaders in the Senate had stalled many federal judicial nominations in the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, resulting in an unusually large number of vacancies at the beginning of 2017.
Freedom in the World — United States Country Report
At the end of the year, there was no plausible legal or constitutional means for Trump to change the outcome. Many Republicans nevertheless refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden’s planned accession to the presidency in January 2021. In California, dual-diagnosis addiction treatment programs offer comprehensive care for individuals with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders. Programs include medically assisted detox, intensive outpatient, outpatient, residential rehab, and partial hospitalization. Using an evidence-based approach, clinicians utilize therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy, or dialectical behavioral therapy and mindfulness to address substance use disorders and co-occurring mental health challenges.
Electoral Process
The overall unionization rate in the United States rose slightly to 10.8 percent in 2020, but this reflected the year’s pandemic-related job losses rather than an actual increase in the number of unionized workers. The country’s labor code and decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) during Republican presidencies have been regarded as impediments to organizing efforts, but even Democratic administrations have largely failed to reverse the deterioration. Among other tactics, many employers categorize workers as contractors or use rules pertaining to franchisees to prevent organizing. In recent years, large protests and aggressive law enforcement responses have been sparked by highly publicized police killings of Black civilians, many of which were recorded on video.
Valley Health Associates
Additional services include 12-Step recovery, group therapy, family counseling, and relapse prevention to promote sustained recovery. Freedom in the World assesses the real-world rights and freedoms enjoyed by individuals, rather than governments or government performance per se. Political rights and civil liberties can be affected by both state and nonstate actors, including insurgents and other armed groups. Taiwan overcame another set of challenges in 2020, suppressing the coronavirus with remarkable effectiveness and without resorting to abusive methods, even as it continued to shrug off threats from an increasingly aggressive regime in China. Taiwan, like its neighbors, benefited from prior experience with SARS, but its handling of COVID-19 largely respected civil liberties.
City of Pittsburgh announces new EMT training program at Black History Month event - 90.5 WESA
City of Pittsburgh announces new EMT training program at Black History Month event.
Posted: Fri, 02 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Each rating of 1 to 7, with 1 representing the greatest degree of freedom and 7 the smallest degree of freedom, corresponded to a specific range of total scores. While the underlying formula for converting scores into status remains identical, starting in the 2020 edition Freedom in the World no longer presented the 1–7 ratings as a separate element of its findings. The parlous state of US democracy was conspicuous in the early days of 2021 as an insurrectionist mob, egged on by the words of outgoing president Donald Trump and his refusal to admit defeat in the November election, stormed the Capitol building and temporarily disrupted Congress’s final certification of the vote. But the outburst of political violence at the symbolic heart of US democracy, incited by the president himself, threw the country into even greater crisis.
The complete list of the questions used in the scoring process, and the tables for converting scores to status, appear at the end of this essay. Explore the interactive Freedom in the World 2021 map here, where you can view country scores, Freedom Status, and also view by trend. Visit our Countries in Detail page to view all Freedom in the World 2021 scores and read individual country narratives. In 1975 the service shut down after the city of Pittsburgh launched its own ambulance service — based on Freedom House’s singular achievements. Safar and Hallen began recruiting unemployed Black men from the Hill to receive medical training in order to implement Safar’s ideas for pre-hospital emergency care while providing vital — and high-quality — ambulance service to area residents. He believes the story of Freedom House is the perfect narrative for this moment in time — as the world is attempting to heal and learn from the racial justice uprisings that took place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
House Freedom Caucus chair calls for end to taxpayer-funded media after NPR scandal ends with editor's exit - Fox News
House Freedom Caucus chair calls for end to taxpayer-funded media after NPR scandal ends with editor's exit.
Posted: Tue, 23 Apr 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
The country’s first paramedics were Black. James McDaniel wants to tell their story onscreen
News coverage has also grown more polarized, with certain outlets and their star commentators providing a consistently right- or left-leaning perspective. The cable network Fox News in particular grew unusually close to the Trump administration; several prominent on-air personalities and executives migrated to government jobs beginning in 2017, and key hosts openly endorsed Republican candidates or participated in campaign rallies. Following the 2020 elections, however, Fox joined other networks in calling the presidential race for Biden, and Trump subsequently denigrated the outlet, directing his followers to smaller, more extreme channels that fully endorsed his attempts to overturn the election results.
Nearly two dozen countries and territories that experienced major protests in 2019 suffered a net decline in freedom the following year. The report also features case studies on policy responses to transnational repression in nine important host countries. Our research and analysis frame the policy debate in the United States and abroad on the progress and decline of freedom. Beginning soon after his inauguration in 2017, the president issued a series of three executive orders barring travel from a group of Muslim-majority countries on security grounds, twice revising the original order in response to lawsuits claiming that the bans were blatantly discriminatory. In 2018 the Supreme Court upheld the third version, which banned most entries by citizens of Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and one non-Muslim country, North Korea.
The steps drew fierce criticism from agency employees, media watchdogs, and members of Congress; in November, a federal judge granted an injunction preventing Pack from directing news coverage. The Trump administration consistently left large numbers of vacant positions across the higher levels of government departments and agencies, undercutting Congress’s authority to confirm such appointees and making it difficult or impossible for the agencies to operate as intended by law. In August 2020, the Government Accountability Office found that Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, was serving in violation of laws governing such temporary appointments; the finding cast doubt on the legal validity of several controversial department decisions. Various interest groups have come to play a potent role in the nominating process for president and members of Congress, as the influence of traditional party leadership bodies has declined in recent decades.
In many instances, long-standing and rigid labor protections prevent municipal governments and police departments from imposing significant administrative sanctions on allegedly abusive officers. Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department pulled back from previous federal policies aimed at imposing reforms on troubled local police departments through court-approved agreements. Trump was harshly critical of the mainstream media throughout his presidency, routinely using inflammatory language to accuse them of bias and mendacity. As of 2020 the president had not followed through on threats to strengthen libel laws or review certain outlets’ broadcast licenses, as he largely lacked the authority to do so, though he has been accused of interfering with the other business interests of critical outlets’ owners. In July, a judge found that federal probation officers had revoked the prison furlough of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in retaliation for his plans to publish his own book about the president. The pandemic intensified the Trump administration’s existing lack of transparency in a number of other ways.
Examples included his objections to economic relief for Democratic-led states during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his reluctance to release federal emergency aid to California as it faced catastrophic wildfires in August. Among Republicans, a divide emerged between state officials involved in administering the elections, who generally defended the fairness of the process and the accuracy of the results, and many members of Congress, who gave credence to Trump’s claims and cast doubt on Biden’s victory. Following the Electoral College vote, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell recognized Biden as the president-elect, but other Republican leaders, including several senators and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, continued to support efforts to contest the results.
In May 2020, outrage over the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis inspired one of the largest waves of protests in US history. Under the banner of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, marches occurred in hundreds of cities and smaller communities. Estimated participation in May and June ranged from 15 to 26 million people, and daily protests occurred well into the summer in some cities. An overwhelming majority of the protests were peaceful, but in some settings they were accompanied by violence against police and significant damage to public and private property; local officials in certain cities complained of intimidating demonstrations outside their private homes. Human rights groups and academic experts found that aggressive police tactics were often the cause or prime escalating factor in violent episodes, and hundreds of instances of unprovoked or disproportionate police brutality were documented on video. At least 10,000 people had been arrested in connection with the protests by early June, though minor charges were frequently dropped.
The frequent use of drone aircraft and camera networks, sometimes in conjunction with facial-recognition technology, to monitor protest activity in 2020 prompted complaints about privacy violations and led some protesters to adapt their tactics to make identification more difficult. Because the designations of Free, Partly Free, and Not Free each cover a broad swath of the available scores, countries or territories within any one category, especially those at either end of the range, can have quite different human rights situations. For example, those at the lowest end of the Free category (with lower political rights or civil liberties scores) differ from those at the upper end of the Free group (with higher political rights or civil liberties scores).
