STOCKHOLM: Press freedoms worldwide have declined significantly over the past five years to hit their lowest level in 50 years, a report by a democracy think tank showed Thursday.

Afghanistan, Burkina Faso and Myanmar — already among the poorest performers in press freedoms — posted the biggest falls, the report by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) said.

The fourth-biggest drop was in South Korea, it added, citing “a spike in defamation cases initiated by the government and its political allies against journalists, and raids on journalists’ residences”.

“The current state of democracy in the world is concerning,” IDEA Secretary General Kevin Casas-Zamora, told AFP.

More than half of countries in the world (54%), registered a drop in one of the five key democracy indicators between 2019 and 2024, the report said.

“The most important finding in our report is the very acute deterioration in press freedom around the world,” Casas-Zamora said.

Between 2019 and 2024, it saw “the biggest drop over the past 50 years”.

“We’ve never seen such an acute deterioration in a key indicator of democratic health,” he said.

Press freedoms declined in 43 countries across all continents, including 15 in Africa and 15 in Europe.

“There’s a toxic brew that is coming together, which involves, on the one hand, heavy-handed interventions on the part of governments,” some of them “legacies of what happened during the pandemic”.

On the other hand, “you have the very negative impact of disinformation, some of which is real disinformation and some of which is used as a pretext by governments to clamp down on press freedoms”.

The think tank is concerned about the consolidation of traditional media worldwide, as well as the “disappearance in many countries of local media which plays a very important role in supporting a democratic debate”, Casas-Zamora said.

The report only covers the period 2019 to 2024 and does not include the first effects of US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January.

But “some of the things that we saw during the election at the end of last year and in the first few months of 2025 are fairly disturbing”, Casas-Zamora said.

“Since what happens in the US has this ability to go global, this does not bode well for democracy globally,” he added.

• Trump again annoyed at Netanyahu, but rupture unlikely.
• Analysts see Trump’s support for Israel despite disagreements.
• Israel kept Washington in dark about Qatar strikes, officials say.

WASHINGTON: Less than four months ago, President Donald Trump met with the leader of Qatar, praising his opulent palace and signing a sweeping defence agreement with the Gulf monarchy, a key ally that hosts the biggest US base in the Middle East.

Israel’s surprise attack on Tuesday against Hamas leaders in Doha has jolted that relationship, angering Trump and drawing fierce condemnation from Doha and Western allies.

Ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and targeting the political offices of the Palestinian group, the strikes killed a Qatari security agent and five others, but failed to kill the Hamas leaders. Trump said he was “very unhappy about every aspect” of the Israeli operation.

But for all the indignation, the strikes are unlikely to change the president’s fundamental approach toward Israel, analysts and US officials say. If anything, the bombings underlined the cold calculus beneath the Trump-Netanyahu relationship.

Israel has shown it is not afraid to act against US interests. The administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not formally warn Washington of its impending bombing campaign on Tuesday, US officials said.

That lack of warning recalled Israel’s September 2024 attack on Hezbollah, when Israel wounded thousands of the group’s members with booby-trapped pagers, without informing then-President Joe Biden.

Trump, for his part, has occasionally expressed displeasure with Netanyahu. But his administration has strongly supported Israel’s campaign to weaken Hamas and allowed it to largely take the lead on key issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.

“On this one, I think Trump is annoyed by Netanyahu’s tactics,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and veteran US peace negotiator.

But, Miller added, “(Trump’s) instinct is that he agrees with Netanyahu’s notion that Hamas cannot just be hollowed out as a military organisation. It needs to be fundamentally weakened.”

Asked for comment, the White House referred Reuters to remarks by Trump on Truth Social on Tuesday night, during which he said the bombings did not advance US or Israeli interests.

“However,” Trump wrote, “eliminating Hamas, who have profited off the misery of those living in Gaza, is a worthy goal.”

The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

No rupture likely

Some analysts declined to rule out the possibility that Netanyahu may yet exhaust Trump’s patience if he springs more surprises on Washington.

 In practice, that could mean a withdrawal of political cover for Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza, which has provoked outrage among European and Arab nations as famine conditions spread.

Israel’s military campaign in the Palestinian enclave was triggered by a Hamas-led rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“As his Arab friends complain to him about what Israel is doing — and they are doing so now — he may say to them give me a credible plan for the day after in Gaza and with an alternative to Hamas running it and I will tell Bibi you have done enough,” said Dennis Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for Democratic and Republican administrations.

Israel’s strike in Doha will likely dampen Trump’s hopes for more Gulf states joining the Abraham Accords, a landmark agreement brokered by his first administration in which several Arab countries forged diplomatic ties with Israel.

Still, a rupture between the two men seems unlikely, argued Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, saying that Trump appreciates strength and transactions that end wars.

“If Netanyahu can continue to appeal to those two sides of this president then he will be okay. I’m not concerned about the relationship,” said Oren.

Hot and cold

The Trump-Netanyahu partnership has seen ups and downs, administration officials acknowledge.

“It’s been hot and cold since the campaign,” said one senior White House official.

In May, Trump travelled to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates during his first major foreign trip, skipping Israel, which many analysts viewed as a snub. The Republican president returned to office in January promising to reinvigorate relations with Netanyahu that had deteriorated under his Democratic predecessor.

During that trip, Trump agreed to lift sanctions on the new Syrian government at the behest of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That move alarmed Israeli officials who question the motives of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda commander.

But just a month later, the Trump-Netanyahu alliance seemed back on track. After Israel launched an air war on Iran in June, Trump — who campaigned on ending foreign conflicts — surprised even some of his own political allies by sending B-2 bombers to partially destroy Iran’s key nuclear facilities.

If that created goodwill within the Netanyahu administration, it did not benefit Trump’s foreign policy interests, at least in the short term.

Days later, Trump profanely chastised Iran and Israel for breaking a US-brokered ceasefire. In July, the US appeared to criticise an Israeli strike in Damascus, which destroyed part of Syria’s defence ministry. And on Tuesday, Israel notified the US shortly before the Qatar strike, but there was no coordination with or approval from Washington, two US officials said.

“The US can seek to cajole and push Israel to take decisions,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy US national intelligence officer on the Middle East. “But Netanyahu will continue to act in a manner that it views as in the best interests of Israel alone.”

• VP Vance and victims’ families attend memorial events at Ground Zero. 
• Nearly 3,000 people killed in coordinated attacks on World Trade Centre. 
• Moment of silence, bell tolls at 8:46am to mark time Flight 11 hit North Tower. 

New York prepared to mark the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001 on Thursday, 24 years after the deadly plane hijackings that claimed almost 3,000 lives and forever changed the United States.

Vice President JD Vance was expected to attend memorial events at Ground Zero in Manhattan where the World Trade Center’s twin towers were destroyed in coordinated attacks that also saw a jetliner crashed into the nerve center of American military power, the Pentagon in Washington.

Another jet, Flight 93, crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside when passengers overran the hijacker and took control of the aircraft.

This year’s gathering takes place against a backdrop of sharp political division both in the city and nationally.

New York is in the grip of an unprecedented mayoral election campaign in which socialist Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani is facing off against former governor Andrew Cuomo and sitting mayor Eric Adams.

New Yorkers go to the polls on November 4.

It was unclear which of the mayoral candidates would attend the ceremony that is always attended by the sitting mayor as well as community leaders.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Mamdani, a Muslim and naturalised US citizen, calling him a “communist lunatic,” while one Republican lawmaker has called for the race’s frontrunner to be deported.

Mamdani holds a 22 point lead in the race, according to the latest polling from The New York Times and Siena.

“It was this horrific day that was also for many New Yorkers the moment at which they were marked an ‘other’,” Mamdani told The Times, describing the surge in Islamophobic attacks that followed 9/11.

It was unclear if Trump would attend New York’s commemorative events as he has in years past.

The United States has faced a rash of political violence in recent months, with the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk following the targeted killing of a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and the firebombing of a Democratic governor’s residence.

New York will mark a citywide moment of silence at 8:46am (1246 GMT), the time that hijacked Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

Places of worship across the city will sound their bells to mark the impact as families of the victims read the names of those killed at ground zero.

The official death toll was 2,977 including the passengers and crew of the four hijacked planes, victims in the twin towers, firefighters, and personnel at the Pentagon. The death toll excludes the 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers.