Anti-communism in the United States

Bulgaria is the least free country in the European Union after Hungary. This is according to Freedom House's annual ranking in the organization's report on the state of freedoms and rights around the world. The survey covers 210 countries and territories.

Bulgaria is classified as a "free" country in the latest Freedom House report on democracy and freedoms around the world.

Bulgaria has 79 points out of 100, one point more than last year (78). According to the rating for political rights, Bulgaria has 33 points out of 40 possible, and according to the rating for civil liberties - 40 out of 60 possible.

The New York-based Freedom House watchdog organisation says in its latest annual report, published on Wednesday, that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed European democracies of all political types under "severe strain".

Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic has dismissed claims made in a report by the international watchdog organisation Freedom House that Serbia is no longer a true democracy.

Brnabic insisted that Serbia was the most democratic state in the Western Balkans, adding that other international and domestic organisations had not ranked Serbia in a "non-democratic" category.

Freedom House, an American organization dedicated to supporting and defending democracy around the world, publishes its annual report on the state of democracy and civil liberties in countries around the world for 2019.  

As in countries across the world, pro-democracy grassroots movements had little success in stopping assaults on independent institutions, the report found.

"While protest movements in every region have illustrated widespread popular demand for better governance, they have yet to reverse the overall pattern of declining freedom," Freedom House said in a statement.

A court in Ioannina, northwestern Greece, on Friday handed guilty verdicts to eight of nine defendants over their role in causing a fellow student at the city's Dairy School to take his own life in 2015.

The former students were convicted for violently and viciously bullying 20-year-old Vangelis Giakoumakis for several months, leading to his suicide.

A police officer who witnessed the attack on daily Hürriyet’s headquarters in Istanbul two years ago has said he cannot identify the defendants in the case because too much time has elapsed.

U.S. President Donald Trump removed his chief strategist Steve Bannon from the National Security Council on April 5, reversing his controversial decision early this year to give a political adviser an unprecedented role in security discussions.

A Bulgarian court of appeal on Tuesday granted a defence request to postpone hearings in the case of 13 Bulgarian Muslim clerics sentenced for preaching radical Islam.

The lawyers of the defendants have asked the Appeals Court in the city of Plovdiv, in southern Bulgaria, to allow new evidence, according to BGNES news outlet.