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What happens when a Trump, a Saddam, a Gaddafi, refuses to leave office? The military must remove them — or if it doesn’t, it becomes their plaything. That game of brinksmanship is exactly how Saddams and Gaddafis capture militaries. By daring them to, and when they don’t — bang! — their back is broken.

The capture of a police force is not just the capture of a police force. It threatens the whole fabric of a democracy. The monopoly on violence that the people’s agents should have is being transferred to the authoritarian. Why else would police forces beat people on the streets? Give hateful young men a free pass to kill people?

The rule of law only means something when an authoritarian can’t simply disappear people from the streets, ordering his paramilitary to do it, ignoring the constitution, discarding due process — with total impunity. But all that is exactly what Trump can do.

Trump threatened to send in “federal agents” — and then he did. Which “federal agents”? The ones he used just a few weeks ago, in Portland. The “Homeland Security” force which has become the precise equivalent of his Irani Republican Guard or SS: a paramilitary which isn’t accountable to the people, any democratic institution, wears no badges, can’t be identified, and is controlled only by the authoritarian, at his discretion and whim.

What did Trump’s stormtroopers do in Kenosha? They disappeared people, just like in Portland. They simply picked groups of people, roared up in unmarked cars, and…abducted them. To where? To jails. For what reason? For no reason — there were no warrants involved, no due process, no Constitutionality whatsoever. People were simply made to vanish. Like in the Soviet Union. Like in Saddam’s Iraq or Gaddafi’s Libya. Like in Nazi Germany.

The only people who don’t think, who still dismiss these comparisons as alarmist are the ones who have never experienced authoritarianism. Those of us who have? We know that abductions by paramilitaries in unmarked cars at the whim of a tyrant are really, really bad.

once the state is free to do real violence — who is going to protest? Speak out? Even criticize?

When a tyrant can have almost anyone in a country they like disappeared, how far away do you really think torture is? Rape? Murder? I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m trying to speak to you like an adult. Will you listen?

America’s intellectuals and pundits didn’t say authoritarianism, didn’t say fascism — again. America’s good cops didn’t exactly stand up for democracy. America’s generals didn’t assure the nation they’d intervene. America’s people didn’t wake up.What happened after an authoritarian showed he had the power to have people disappeared — people who protested the killing of innocents which itself was inspired by the authoritarian, at the hands of a young radicalized man — was…Nothing.

Men who can put kids in cages and radicalize younger men to do real violence? They don’t want you to live in peace, freedom, harmony, and goodness. They want you to live in fear, despair, and terror. And they will begin using extreme violence to do it.

levels of such horrific violence and brutality that Americans still cannot understand or grasp precisely because they have been lucky enough to have never yet personally experienced them.

It is happening here. Exactly — exactly — the way it happened there, to us. In our childhoods, to our parents, in all those distant, strange broken lands. This is how a democracy dies. This is how it all collapses. This is how the fanatics seize power for a generation or more. This is how the fascists win.Kenosha. Portland. Washington, DC.

I want you to understand how powerful this feeling of deja vu is. It is one of the most frightening things we survivors have experienced. Where will we go now? What will we do now? America never really accepted us, and now, it’s collapsing

Never again. It’s the vow every survivor makes. That’s why we are trying to warn you. It is happening all over again, here, exactly — exactly, precisely, absolutely — the way that we saw it happen before, and before, and before.

None of us have the time left now for petty divisions, intellectualizations, the games pundits play, the way I lost my column when I began to warn of all this. I didn’t pay the bigger price — you did.You don’t have another mistake left to make.This is it, and you’re blowing it, sleepwalking into collapse, letting the fascists steal your futures.Do not let it happen here.

Meloni now faces a dilemma. She could double down on the nationalistic, far-right ethos of her party, galvanizing her loyal base, or she could broaden her political horizon, slowly turning Brothers of Italy into a big-tent party hosting conservatives of different persuasions.

She even wrote an open-hearted memoir titled I Am Giorgia, designed to reach out to people beyond her base by sharing her personal story. The book sold more than 100,000 copies, a remarkable figure for a book written by a politician

an unmet demand for a center-right coalition that could host both moderates and proponents of what Brothers of Italy’s most traditional supporters refer to as destra sociale, or “social right.”

“I don’t see what elements may support the definition of Brothers of Italy as a far-right party,” Meloni told Foreign Policy, “we are a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party, which I am currently president of, which is the family of the European and Western conservatives, joined by more than 40 parties in several countries, spanning from the Likud in Israel to the Tories in the U.K. and the GOP in the U.S.”

“Unfortunately, the mainstream culture is oversimplifying, depicting anyone who talks about fatherland, family, sanctity of life, Christian and classical civilization as a dangerous extremist in order to deny his or her free speech rights. We’ve seen this in the U.S., with the demonization of Trump, who’s been canceled on social media, and we are increasingly seeing the same attitude toward conservative movements in Europe,” Meloni told Foreign Policy.

“We’ve been presented as the new face of the old post-fascist forces, but when we founded the party in 2012 the whole idea was to break with the past and build a new, post-ideological force predicated on the defense of the national interest. It’s safe to say we’re now a Gaullist party more than a far-right one,”

Brothers of Italy has been careful to distance itself from neofascist organizations and extremist groups, but sometimes the two dimensions touch each other. Last January, for instance, Meloni observed, as she does every year, the anniversary of the killings of three members of the Italian Social Movement in Rome in 1978, an event that was also commemorated by hundreds of militants making the fascist salute in the area where the massacre took place. The rally was not organized nor supported by Brothers of Italy, but the neofascist activists and the party share a common heritage that may blur the line between the suit-and-tie heirs of the social right and outright fascist apologists

In 2019, some local leaders of Brothers of Italy in the Marche region organized a dinner party to celebrate the anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, and the symbol of the party appeared next to the portrait of Italy’s dictator and other fascist memorabilia. The party formally disavowed the event

Dog whistles are also common in Brothers of Italy’s communication style. The party promoted a campaign against the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who had allegedly funded a center-left party in Italy. The claim was, “Keep the money of the usurers,” a reference to one of the most indelible antisemitic tropes. The term “usurer” is still used in the party’s rhetoric to describe international bankers, Eurocrats, and foreign powers of all sorts attempting to erode Italy’s sovereignty

“The problem is that Italy never went through a serious process of elaboration of its fascist past. Many Italians still believe fascism wasn’t altogether evil and the country never really developed a culture of rights and political pluralism,”

Unlike Germany, which got into a process known as “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or “overcoming the past,” involving culture, education, and public debates grappling with the idea of collective culpability during the Nazi regime, Italy never had such a debate

“We strongly believe in the project of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party,” said Carlo Fidanza, a member of the European Parliament who’s in charge of Brothers of Italy’s foreign affairs portfolio. “Our goal is to enlarge the house of the European conservatives, not to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.” When Fidanza says enlargement, what he really means is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

At the European level, Meloni is confronted with a dilemma similar to the one she’s facing in Rome; she would need to decide whether to move to the center, sticking to the more moderate conservatives, or to join the broad far-right coalition that is tempting her traditional allies

Now that the Republican Party is embroiled in a fight between Trump loyalists and traditional party members, Meloni is keeping an eye on the situation, secretly hoping that what will come out when the dust settles is a “Trumpist GOP, without Trump,” as one Brothers of Italy official put it.

Authorities believe members of the group made contact with neo-Nazi groups in England and Portugal in an attempt to be recognized. In August, a suspect spoke at a far-right conference in Lisbon

search warrants were carried out under the 1952 Scelba law that prohibits any attempts to recreate the defunct Fascist Party

Several Italian parties support fascist ideology and publicly align themselves with the tenets of fascism, but they cannot call themselves fascist. Under Italian law, people can be arrested for making fascist salutes, but it is not illegal to sell memorabilia with fascist symbols or the image of Mussolini.

Critics have accused the Modi administration of using the NRC to target Assam’s large Muslim community.

Government sources say those excluded from the list retain their rights and have 120 days to appeal at local “Foreigners Tribunals”. If that fails, they can take their cases to the High Court of Assam and ultimately the Supreme Court. What happens to those who fail at all levels of appeal is yet to be decided, they said.

Last month the local chapter of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party expressed dismay after it became apparent that many Hindus had also been excluded from the list. Officials said the government may pass legislation to protect legitimate citizens. The government is already in the process of bringing legislation to grant citizenship to Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist immigrants from neighbouring countries. Muslim immigrants are not included in the law.

As the dark clouds of ethnic and religious tensions gather yet again across the world, the experiences of these Bosniaks not only about surviving a genocide but also living through the post war era and dealing with all the disappointments surrounding the promises of transitional justice are more relevant and significant than ever before.

As the dark clouds of ethnic and religious tensions gather yet again across the world, the experiences of these Bosniaks not only about surviving a genocide but also living through the post war era and dealing with all the disappointments surrounding the promises of transitional justice are more relevant and significant than ever before.

Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the butchery of Srebrenica. To say that what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995 was the first such crime on European soil after World War II is to completely disregard the horror of the concentration camps discovered in 1992 or the rape camps for which there is no precedent in European history. Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a long process of systematic extermination.

Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the butchery of Srebrenica. To say that what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995 was the first such crime on European soil after World War II is to completely disregard the horror of the concentration camps discovered in 1992 or the rape camps for which there is no precedent in European history. Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a long process of systematic extermination.

what happened in the 1990s in Bosnia serves as an inspiration to far right terrorists across the world as well as their "anti-imperialist" allies. Today, we can no longer claim that another genocide is impossible.

what happened in the 1990s in Bosnia serves as an inspiration to far right terrorists across the world as well as their "anti-imperialist" allies. Today, we can no longer claim that another genocide is impossible.

“The ‘cordon sanitaire’ which once kept far-right groups and thought out of mainstream discourse has collapsed, both here and on the continent.”

increases in hate crime across Britain, and warnings over rising Islamophobia and antisemitism.

Outside the UK, the report said that the international far-right terror threat had hit “unprecedented levels” following the attacks in Christchurch, El Paso, Halle and Hanau. It found that the threat was involving younger and more violent individuals, and that the ideological paths into extremism had become more diverse because of the rise of conspiracy theories, incels and the “manosphere”.

“In 2020, far-right terror operates through a virtually leaderless online, global community waging its battles internationally, from Christchurch in New Zealand to Halle in Germany, through a new generation of increasingly young and more extreme terrorists, but the authorities have been slow to make connections between offline hate crimes and the ideological ecosystem behind them.”

the Christian democratic ideology can be characterized in terms of three core principles: a morally tinged conception of the “natural order” as a harmonious and organically integrated society; a remedial conception of the welfare state as a way to protect social unity and stability from the threat of radical takeover; and a conception of democratic practice as a constant process of compromise and reconciliation between conflicting social interests.

This approach is justified with reference to another classically Christian democratic idea: that everyone should contribute to the best of their ability to the well-being of society as a whole. While this involves some measure of socioeconomic redistribution, it steers clear of the more radical idea that society should aspire to some form of substantive—as well as formal—equality.

Biden has a similar view of the Democratic Party’s role in the contemporary United States. Given the way in which the Republican Party has been transformed under the leadership of Trump, Biden seems to think it’s now the role of the Democrats to reunite the whole nation under the banner of its traditional moral and political principles of inclusiveness and civility.

In contrast to Sanders’s advocacy for universalist welfare entitlement programs such as “Medicare for All” and free public college tuition, Biden thinks that the role of state intervention in the economy should be focused on the protection of socially disadvantaged groups

the deeply conservative dimension to Biden’s promise to “heal” the divisions that cut across American society—one that is reminiscent of European Christian democracy’s historic emphasis on the values of “national unity” and “restoration” of the social order in the aftermath of World War II

the logic of the Christian democratic parties in Europe that supported welfare-state policies in the aftermath of World War II as explicitly anti-revolutionary measures.

throughout the 1950s and ’60s, it was Christian democrats—not social democrats—who pushed forward many policies incentivizing homeownership for the working classes in both Germany and Italy

Biden’s approach to such law-and-order questions again parallels the thinking of Christian democratic parties in Europe. For instance, during the 1960s and ’70s, both Italian and German Christian democrats took a very firm stance against the so-called “Red Terrorism” of far-left revolutionary groups such as the Brigate Rosse and Baader-Meinhof—in some cases going as far as reviving extraordinary criminal justice procedures that hadn’t been used since the end of the fascist and national-socialist regimes. These measures were justified precisely as a compromise between the far-right’s demands for a complete suspension of the democratic order and the center-left’s calls for a more lenient approach.

Although Biden is a devout Catholic (one who has apparently been wearing a rosary under his sleeve since the death of his son Beau in 2015), he remains firmly within the American tradition of secularism, which posits a strict “wall of separation” between politics and religion. Europe’s Christian democracy, by contrast, is partly rooted in an attempt to directly translate principles of Catholic social doctrine into a democratic political platform. In this sense, Biden is a distinctly Americanized version of this European strand of political conservatism.

Christian democrats succeeded in keeping both the far-left and the far-right out of power for several decades after the end of World War II precisely on the basis of a coalition that united social elites, the urban middle classes, and the rural poor against the perceived threat of radical takeover

if he is indeed elected, Biden is likely to be far more open to political influence than either Clinton or Sanders would have been as president. His presidency would likely leave ample space for the two main factions within the Democratic Party—the Clintonian liberal wing and Sanders’s democratic socialist one—to continue shaping policy in important ways, even though neither is likely to get all of what they want. In this sense, the result wouldn’t be very much unlike the constant struggle for compromise between the center-right and the center-left wings of continental European Christian democratic parties during their period of political hegemony in the postwar years.

As the prospect of both fascist resurgence and communist revolution began to wane in postwar continental Europe, Christian democracy lost its way, falling prey to widespread clientelism and corruption. Ultimately, this is what brought down the Italian democrazia cristiana at the beginning of the 1990s and has also weakened the German Christian Democratic Union and other continental European Christian democratic parties’ political identities ever since. Seen in this light, Biden might succeed in defeating both Sanders and Trump. But his presidency would probably end up being rather weak and aimless, without doing much to address the United States’ deeper social and political problems.

A turning point for the media came in January 2016 when Polish President Andrzej Duda signed controversial laws enabling the government to appoint the heads of public TV and radio, as well as civil service directors. 

More than 200 people were fired as a result, and their roles were taken over by people who support the government

the EU said it jeopardised the bloc's values.

There is greater trust in private independent media compared with public service broadcasters; only 20 percent of Poles believe the media is free from political influence, according to a study published last year.

Private media groups that have supported the opposition complain that they are losing advertising contracts from state-owned companies, which are increasing their spending to pro-government outlets

Since Gazeta Wyborcza published a series of stories that revealed corruption at the Financial Supervision Authority, forcing its chairman Marek Chrzanowski to resign, the ruling party and other state bodies have filed some 50 legal challenges against the newspaper and the lead reporter, Wojciech Czuchnowski.

Another major outlet that has come under pressure is TVN, a private television station owned by Discovery, Inc., a US media company.  In 2018, the government accused a TVN of promoting fascism, referring to photos taken during an undercover assignment that infiltrated Polish neo-Nazis and broadcast footage of its members holding a birthday party for Adolf Hitler.

Poland's media regulator issued a 1.5 million zloty ($389,000) fine to TVN for its coverage of anti-government protests outside Parliament, on the basis that it "propagated illegal activities and encouraged behaviour threatening security."

State media described the July anti-government protests as a "street revolt" that aimed to "bring Islamic immigrants to Poland".

In 1882, the Kingdom of Italy, which was founded only two decades earlier, invaded Eritrea, and seven years later, it conquered Somalia. Between 1895 and 1896 Italy also tried to conquer Ethiopia, but it failed spectacularly, with the Ethiopian troops inflicting on the Italian attackers the worst defeat ever suffered by a European nation in Africa. In 1911, the Italians took Libya.

Fascist troops conquered Ethiopia in 1936, with the help of chemical weapons, and took Albania in 1939

“Having colonies was seen as a way of being modern,”

It’s estimated that during the 60 years of Italian colonialism, almost 1 million people died due to war, deportations, and internment

widespread summary executions, torture, and mass incarceration. To crush the Libyan resistance, in 1930 the Italian general Rodolfo Graziani, nicknamed “the butcher of Fezzan,” put the civilian population in concentration camps. In Ethiopia, the Fascists deployed chemical attacks. When Ethiopian rebels tried to kill him, in 1937, Graziani had 19,000 Ethiopian civilians executed in retaliation.

After the end of World War II, Italy’s new ruling class, largely composed of anti-Fascists, created two intertwined myths: the myth of the “good Italian colonialist” and the myth of the “good Italian soldier.”

The aim was to create a sense of cohesion between the new anti-Fascist government and the general population, by reassuring the latter they don’t share the blame of the dictatorship’s deeds

The myth of the good colonialist was devised as a propaganda tool to make the point that Italy should keep its colonies that were conquered before Fascism, which didn’t work out.

When Ethiopia requested the extradition of Graziani in 1949, Italy refused, despite the fact that he was included in a list of war criminals of the United Nations for the use of toxic gases and the bombing of some Red Cross hospitals.

In 1952, the Italian government commissioned a study of its past colonial activities from a group of 24 scholars, largely former colonial officials, including governors and geographers. The committee, known as “Comitato per la documentazione dell’Opera dell’Italia in Africa,” (Committee for the Documentation of the Italian Activities in Africa) continued its work until 1984, producing 40 volumes, most of them hagiographies.

Unlike other European countries, Italy never had prominent voices confronting its colonial crimes

“The French public might not have agreed with the position of Sartre or Fanon, but they knew who they were,”

colonial brutality is the subject of a classic of Italian cinema: Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a nomination at the Academy Awards, chronicled the brutal French repression of Algeria. It posed no problem, because the bad guys were the French.

the Italian governement intervened in 1982 to prevent the distribution of a movie that would have put Italy’s colonialism in bad light: Lion of the Desert, chronicling Italy’s repression of the Libyan resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar, was not aired until 2009, during a state visit by Muammar al-Qaddafi

As recently as 1997, Italy formally protested against the United Kingdom because the BBC aired a documentary, called Fascist Legacy, about Italian war crimes. The Italian state TV channel RAI bought a copy of the movie but never aired it.

in 2012, a mausoleum honoring Graziani, the war criminal, was erected near Rome. A court ordered it to be taken down, because it violated a law against “Fascist propaganda” (Graziani also headed the pro-Nazi army of the Salò Republic), but the order was never carried out. While it has been defaced and mocked with graffiti, the mausoleum still stands.

Italy decolonization was “a passive process, not an active one.” Italy did not go through a lengthy independence war, as France did in Algeria, nor did it witness a large-scale civil rights movement, as Britain did in India: Italy simply lost its colonies because it lost the war

there were “two types of removal: one from the authority but also one from the Italian people.” She points out that many Italian families have recent ancestors who fought in colonial wars in Africa. “If people were to check in their attics, they will likely find memorabilia of that period,” but they ignore it

a small but growing number of Italian authors who are tackling Italy’s colonial violence head on

Italian authorities should build monuments to the victims and start teaching about colonial violence in schools: “Many high school books still claim that Italy went to Africa to bring civilization.”

Despite the fact that Italy is fast becoming a multiethnic society, and despite the fact that its colonies came to an end almost 80 years ago, the country doesn’t seem ready to face its own past.

In early June, the International Crisis Group did something its leaders said was a historic first: It issued a statement on an internal crisis in the United States. The ICG, an independent organization headquartered in Belgium, analyzes geopolitics with the goal of preventing conflict. It is known for issuing authoritative, deeply sourced reports on war-torn countries — say, how to end the brutal conflict in Yemen.

In language similar to how it might describe fragile foreign states, the ICG cast the “unrest” as a crisis that “put the nation’s political divides on full display.” And it chided the Trump administration for “incendiary, panicky rhetoric that suggests the U.S. is in armed conflict with its own people.”

“Over the long term, the nation will need to take steps to end the police’s brutality and militarization as well as structural racial inequality if it wants to avoid similar future crises,” the ICG said.

The ICG decided it saw a confluence of factors in America that it sees in far more troubled countries. One appeared to be growing militarization of the police. Another was the seeming politicization of the military. Also key: Some U.S. political leaders, including Trump, seem determined to exploit racial divisions instead of pushing for unity. The ICG is now debating whether to launch a program that focuses on U.S. domestic issues in a systematic way

past U.S. administrations, Republican and Democrat, all had credibility gaps when it came to promoting human rights while protecting U.S. interests. Obama, for instance, was criticized for authorizing drone strikes against militants that often killed civilians

“I think there’s a qualitative difference with this administration, for whom human rights seems to be treated purely as a transactional currency,”

In 2019, Freedom House released a special essay titled “The Struggle Comes Home: Attacks on Democracy in the United States.” The Washington-based NGO, which receives the bulk of its funding from the U.S. government, was established in 1941 to fight fascism. Its report, which ranks how free countries are using various indicators, described a decline in U.S. democracy that predated Trump and was fueled in part by political polarization. Freedom House warned, however, that Trump was accelerating it.

Rights activists worry the panel will craft a “hierarchy” of rights that will undermine protections for women, LGBTQ people and others, while possibly elevating religious freedom above other rights

“There is intense racism and law enforcement abuse of human rights in China, in Russia, in Brazil and a lot of other countries that the United Nations has a hard time mustering the will to condemn,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a former senior human rights official under Obama. “But none of those countries is the indispensable nation. What human rights organizations and institutions are saying by focusing on the United States is something that they cannot explicitly admit, and that is that they believe in American exceptionalism. They understand that America falling short of its ideals has a far greater impact on the world than a Russia or a China doing what we all expect those authoritarian states to do.”

A top State Department official, Brian Hook, later wrote a memo to Tillerson arguing that the U.S. should use human rights as a weapon against adversaries, like Iran and China. But repressive allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, should get a pass, it said. “Allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies,” Hook wrote.

the memo appears to have laid out the policy approach the Trump administration has taken on human rights, even after Tillerson was fired in early 2018. His successor, Mike Pompeo, frequently weighs in on human rights but almost exclusively to bash governments hostile to the United States or, occasionally, ones with which the U.S. has limited strategic interest.

it sometimes goes to great lengths to protect abusive U.S partners, as it has done by pressing ahead with arms sales to Saudi Arabia despite its assassination of a writer for The Washington Post

“The current administration doesn’t think most of its supporters care about international violations of human rights broadly,”

The international furor against the Trump administration was especially intense in mid-2018, as the U.S. was separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, then putting the children in detention camps. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights called the U.S. actions “unconscionable.”

Trump administration officials also say human rights activists are never satisfied, no matter who is in the White House. This is not an unfair argument: The groups routinely criticize even administrations most friendly to their cause. Bush was eviscerated over his handling of the war on terrorism, especially his decision to invade Iraq, even though he and his aides asserted that they were liberating and protecting people. Obama’s human rights legacy was declared “shaky.” For U.S. officials who must make choices between bad and worse options every day, the endless criticism is frustrating.

Pompeo’s disdain for the human rights community is one reason he created what’s known as the Commission on Unalienable Rights. The secretary asserts that activists keep trying to create categories of rights, and that “not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right.”

Privately, administration officials say they do a lot of excellent human rights work that doesn’t get attention. They note that Congress has kept up funding for much of that work, even though Trump has tried to slash that funding. They also argue that the Trump team’s objectives and priorities are clearer than those of past administrations, especially when distinguishing friend from foe. While Obama tried to engage Tehran and Havana, the Trump administration casts those regimes as irredeemable, and it’s willing to attack them on human rights to weaken them. On the other hand, while Obama kept Hungary’s leader at a distance, Trump has welcomed him to the White House. Critics may see that as another example of Trump liking dictators, but his aides say it is a way to limit Russian and Chinese influence in Eastern Europe.

Human rights leaders say there are two noteworthy bright spots in the Trump administration’s record. It has put significant resources into promoting international religious freedom — routinely speaking out on the topic, holding annual ministerial gatherings about it, and launching an international coalition of countries to promote the ideal. A few weeks ago, Trump issued an executive order instructing Pompeo to further integrate the promotion of religious freedom in U.S. diplomacy. The administration also has used a relatively new legal tool, the Global Magnitsky Act, to impose economic sanctions on numerous individuals implicated in human rights abuses abroad. The sanctions have fallen on people ranging from Myanmar military officials suspected in the mass slaughter of Rohingya Muslims to an allegedly abusive Pakistani police official.

“In comparison to the remainder of its human rights record, the Trump administration’s use of the Global Magnitsky sanctions has exceeded expectations,”

The religious freedom alliance, for instance, includes countries such as Hungary, whose government the U.S. is trying to court but which traffics in anti-Semitic rhetoric. The religious freedom push also dovetails with a priority of Trump’s evangelical supporters, who have long pushed for greater protection of Christian communities overseas.

Under intense outside pressure, the administration imposed Magnitsky sanctions on more than a dozen Saudis for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi; but it spared the man the U.S. intelligence community considers responsible for the killing, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Trump has defended

The dire situation of Uighur Muslims in China illustrates how both the Magnitsky effort and the religious freedom effort have collided with Trump’s own priorities.

In recent years, the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uighur Muslims, putting them in camps from which ugly reports of abuse have emerged. China claims it is “reeducating” the Uighurs to stamp out terrorist thinking in the population. Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress are furious over the detention of the Uighurs.

Pompeo, meanwhile, has raised the Uighurs as an example of why the U.S. must promote religious freedom. But Trump has been unwilling to use the Magnitsky sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the mistreatment of the Uighurs. He told Axios he doesn't want to impose the penalties because it might derail trade talks with Beijing, the success of which he sees as critical to his reelection

Trump’s diatribes against journalists — and his claims that many legitimate media outlets are “fake news” — are believed to have inspired some countries to impose tougher laws curtailing press freedoms.

When the State Department spokesperson recently tweeted out criticism of Beijing’s treatment of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, a Chinese official tweeted back at her with some of Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe.”

In 2018, a U.N. envoy, Philip Alston, unveiled the findings of an investigation into poverty in the United States. Alston has said he was initially invited to study the topic under the Obama administration, but that the Trump administration — under Tillerson — had reextended the invite. Alston’s report minced few words. The United States, he reported, was home to tens of millions of people in poverty, and that was likely to be exacerbated by Trump’s economic policies.

Nikki Haley, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fought back. She called Alston’s work “misleading and politically motivated,” insisted that the Trump administration’s plans would lift people out of poverty, and argued that the U.N. should focus on poverty in less-developed countries.

The council instead requested a broader, more generic U.N. report on systemic racism and police brutality against Black people and also asked for information on how various governments worldwide deal with anti-racism protests. The resolution did, however, mention the Floyd death and the report is expected to cover the United States, among other countries.

could make future attackers visible before they carry out their attacks.

Members might not know each other, but they recognize common memes and symbols, and would-be perpetrators post selfies with their guns and manifestos moments before launching attacks. They also publish their plans, along with game-like "goals" to set themselves, expecting to be rated by others for their success or failure in murdering people.

the attacker told the judge under questioning that setting up the Twitch live stream had been vital to his plans — in fact, it was "the whole point," he told the judge. He wanted to encourage others just as he had been encouraged by the Christchurch mosque attack. He added that he had chosen Twitch because he had learned from the Christchurch attacker that Facebook would take the stream down too quickly

When questioned in court, many of the police officers said it simply wasn't their job to investigate the background of the crime. After all, from a narrow legal point of view, this seemed reasonable. The case was clear: There was a confession and a video recording the act — why dig any deeper? "So often I heard them say: It's not my job to understand the context," said Feldman. "Which leads me to ask, well then whose job is it?"