What you should know from the week of 03/17/23:

• One Good Thing: Democracy!
• SVB Response: A policy look at the response to Silicon Valley Bank's collapse;
• Putin's Warrant: The International Criminal Court issues a rare arrest warrant for a Head of State;
• French Pensions: Paris in protest over pension penury;
• Google Antitrust: The Department of Justice launches antitrust litigation against Google, alledging advertising monopoly.

One Good Thing:

Marking 50 Years in the Struggle for Democracy

The 2023 edition of Freedom in the World is the 50th in this series of annual comparative reports. More than anything else, five decades of Freedom in the World reports demonstrate that the demand for freedom is universal.

Freedom HouseFreedom House

Although this report from Freedom House begins grimly with "Global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year", however Freedom House notes that democracy's global decline is slowing:

The struggle for democracy may be approaching a turning point. The gap between the number of countries that registered overall improvements in political rights and civil liberties and those that registered overall declines for 2022 was the narrowest it has ever been through 17 years of global deterioration. Thirty-four countries made improvements, and the tally of countries with declines, at 35, was the smallest recorded since the negative pattern began. The gains were driven by more competitive elections as well as a rollback of pandemic-related restrictions that had disproportionately affected freedom of assembly and freedom of movement. Two countries, Colombia and Lesotho, earned upgrades in their overall freedom status, moving from Partly Free to Free.

And authoritarians are having a harder time:

Authoritarian influence at the United Nations and other international organizations faltered as democracies reaffirmed the value of multilateral engagement.