Most countries in Current Time's coverage zone tend to pay much more to award gold medal winners than the 2020 Tokyo Olympics' current top medal winner, the United States ($37,500). Though support for national athletics programs may vary, the prestige of an Olympics win remains unchanged since Sovie
2019 revealed few bright spots in the media landscape of Current Time’s broadcast zone. The Baltics still top the non-profit Reporters Without Borders’ annual ranking of press freedom in the region, but with concerns raised about Lithuanian security institutions’ newfound ability to shut down media outlets deemed to pose a national security threat. Hopes for independent media Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine have not yet been entirely met, the report found. Meanwhile, the environment for indepe
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned predicting the economic future into a dice roll, but data from the International Monetary Fund suggests some potential trends to watch. Their forecast: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all members of the European Union, will encounter the largest reduction in economic growth, but also the biggest rebound in 2021. Ukraine will suffer more than Russia, but likely experience the same level of comeback.
With the numbers of COVID-19 infections rising rapidly, countries within Current Time’s coverage zone are responding in a variety of ways: everything from school shutdowns to border closures for travelers from Italy and China, two of the worst affected states. But how do their overall response capabilities compare? To find out, Current Time turned to the 2019 Global Health Security Index, completed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Johns Hopkins University, and The Economist Intelligence Unit.
“Information sharing is power,” Internet pioneer Vint Cerf once said. And in Eurasia, it’s power that most states still want to control. The majority of countries in Current Time’s coverage zone received negative ratings in Freedom on the Net 2019, an annual, worldwide report from the Washington, DC-based rights watchdog Freedom House.
In 2019, the non-profit Reporters Without Borders ranked the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia as one of the world's worst regions for freedom of the press. From government-instigated Internet shutdowns in Central Asia to mass protests over the arrest of an investigative journalist in Russia, responses to this civil right provide constant cause for controversy.
