THE NATIONS: Who’s Free

Freedom House, a nonpartisan political-education organization based in Manhattan, last week issued a year-end summary of the political state of the world’s 3.3 billion people. As measured by the health of their courts, press and other institutions, 1,029,910,000 people are “free” (in the Western states, India and Japan, among others), while another 720,630,000 are “partly free” (among them: the South Vietnamese). But fully 1,583,551,000 people—nearly one-half the world’s population—”suffer severe political and civil deprivations.” The year’s big loser was Africa, which showed “an almost irreversible trend toward more military and one-party states.”