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His religious devotion was accompanied by a blameless personal life and a chaste loyalty to the memory of his wife, Maria Amalia of Saxony, who died in 1760. On the other hand, he was so highly conscious of royal authority that he sometimes appeared more like a tyrant than an absolute monarch

Charles III improved the agencies of government through which the will of the crown could be imposed. He completed the process whereby individual ministers replaced the royal councils in the direction of affairs

Fearing that a British victory over France in the Seven Years’ War would upset the balance of colonial power, he signed the Family Compact with France—both countries were ruled by branches of the Bourbon family—in August 1761

But Charles’s opposition to papal jurisdiction in Spain also led him to curb the arbitrary powers of the Inquisition, while his desire for reform within the church caused him to appoint inquisitors general who preferred persuasion to force in ensuring religious conformity

He particularly resented the Jesuits, whose international organization and attachment to the papacy he regarded as an affront to his absolutism

By the end of his reign, Spain had abandoned its old commercial restrictions and, while still excluding foreigners, had opened up the entire empire to a commerce in which all its subjects and all its main ports could partake

Within these limits he led his country in a cultural and economic revival, and, when he died, he left Spain more prosperous than he had found it

Just hours before his party announced it would be forming a coalition government, League leader Matteo Salvini posted a video on Facebook appearing to show a man of African origin plucking a pigeon, with the words, "Go home!!!"

On Thursday's visit to the presidential palace, Conte instead proposed Giovanna Tria as finance minister. Tria has been critical of Germany's role in Europe but, unlike Savona, has never expressed the desire to leave the single currency. Savona will enter the government as minister for European affairs.

During the negotiations, the populists ditched some of their most incendiary campaign vows, such as calling for a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro or leave the European Union.

Tensions have also risen between the two parties and the President, peaking as Di Maio called for Mattarella's impeachment earlier this week following his rejection of Conte's choice of finance minister.

His choice for prime minister, Mr Cottarelli, an ex-IMF economist, appears to have failed to secure support from major political parties and may not even bother to be sworn in.

He appears to have suspended his own efforts to form an interim administration and could instead be giving Five Star and The League a second chance, says BBC Rome Correspondent James Reynolds.

Investors are once again worried about the stability of the eurozone should Eurosceptic parties form the next government.

The costs of servicing Italy's debt have risen, but the BBC World Service economics correspondent, Andrew Walker, says we are not yet near the levels of financial stress that were evident in the peak of the eurozone financial crisis in 2011-12.

Venezuela is undergoing economic collapse, social upheaval, and a humanitarian crisis unprecedented in Latin American history. The failure of both regimes should have put an end to the Fidel era, especially when he is no longer alive, but the Commander lives on

Six years before his triumph, after the assault on the Moncada barracks in July 1953, Castro famously declared: “History will absolve me.” That’s no longer a sure thing. An awareness of freedom awakens sooner or later when faced with the obvious excesses of authoritarian rulers. If history examines his regretful legacy through that lens, it may not absolve him.

Latin American historians and intellectuals have the floor. With few exceptions, they have refused to see the historical failure of the Cuban Revolution and the oppressive and impoverishing domination of their patriarch. But the parlous situation in Venezuela — with Cuba as a crutch — is undeniable, and the Cuban reality will be increasingly hard to bear

Since then, Bolsonaro has come under heavy fire from Brazilian media and political opponents for what they call his reckless and inept behaviour.

The news magazine Istoé labelled Bolsonaro an “irresponsible ignoramus”. Writing in the same magazine, Carlos José Marques lamented how Brazil’s presidency was now defined by “moral, intellectual and administrative delinquency”.

“Even if he suddenly says: ‘OK guys – I get it,’ it will be very hard for people not to blame him directly for what will happen – and I think it’s very hard to imagine that this will not be terrible for Brazil.”

“But I think damage has already been done because people will remember – now and forever – how the president behaved as the seriousness of this [pandemic] became clear in Brazil.”

Boghossian said Bolsonaro had long believed his presidency was “bullet-proofed” by expectations that Brazil’s economy would improve under his administration. “The problem is that economic meltdown is [now] inevitable,” he said.

Across the globe as a whole, 2019 was the second hottest on record for the planet’s surface and both the past five years and the past decade were the hottest in 150 years. The previous hottest year was in 2016, but temperatures were boosted that year by a natural El Niño event. The heat in the world’s oceans reached a new record level in 2019, showing “irrefutable and accelerating” heating of the planet, according to scientists.

the publicity-obsessed president is unlikely to relinquish his grip on the evening sessions: Mr. Trump has told aides he relishes the free television time and boffo ratings that come with his appearances, administration officials say.

At Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, staff members have closely monitored internal polling data showing an erosion of the gains Mr. Trump made immediately after he put social distancing guidelines in place. Advisers are torn between knowing that a less abrasive approach would help Mr. Trump and their awareness that he can’t tolerate criticism, regardless of the setting.

“He can’t escape his instincts, his desire to put people down, like Mitt Romney, or to talk about his ratings,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. “That’s why he’s not getting the George W. Bush post-9/11 treatment. A leader in this sort of crisis should have a 75-to-80-percent approval rating.”

Mr. Haslam and other Republicans believe Mr. Trump needs to go much further. Mr. Haslam called for creating a recovery team and installing “the economic equivalent of Dr. Fauci” as its leader. Asked whom he had in mind, Mr. Haslam suggested Mitch Daniels, who previously served as the governor of Indiana, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and as chief executive of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.

In the new study, Dr. López-Medina and his colleagues randomly assigned more than 400 people who had recently developed mild Covid-19 symptoms to receive a five-day course of either ivermectin or a placebo.

“There’s been a lot of conflicting views on this, sometimes extreme conflicting views,” said Dr. Carlos Chaccour, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health who was not involved in the new study.

They found that Covid-19 symptoms lasted about 10 days, on average, among people who received the drug, compared with 12 days among those who received the placebo, a statistically insignificant difference.

The researchers did find that seven patients in the placebo group deteriorated after enrolling in the trial, compared to four in the ivermectin group, but the numbers were too small to draw a meaningful conclusion.

Bigger trials, which are currently underway, could provide more definitive answers, said Dr. Rabinovich, who noted that she was “totally neutral” on ivermectin’s potential usefulness.

“The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.

It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.

Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden.

And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.

“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,”

It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.

Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.

I discovered that Asian Americans had been writing and fighting in English since the late 19th century: the sisters Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston and many more.

I didn’t learn about them before because racism isolates us, disempowers us and erases our history.

Against this racist and sexist fiction of the Oriental, we built the anti-racist, anti-sexist fiction of the Asian American. We willed ourselves into being, but as with every other act of American self-conjuring, we became marked by a contradiction between American aspiration and American reality.

On the one hand, Asian Americans have long insisted that we are patriotic and productive Americans. This self-defense often leans on the model minority myth and the idea that Asian Americans have succeeded in fields such as medicine and technology because we immigrated with educational credentials and we raise our children to work hard. But Asian Americans are also haunting reminders of wars that killed millions of people and generated many refugees. And Asian Americans have come to satisfy the American need for cheap, exploitable labor — from working on railroads to giving pedicures. We were and are perceived to be competitors in a capitalist economy fractured by divisions of race, gender and class and the ever-widening gap of inequality that affects all Americans.

As long as the United States remains committed to aggressive capitalism domestically and aggressive militarism internationally, Asians and Asian Americans will continue to be scapegoats who embody threat and aspiration, an inhuman “yellow peril” and a superhuman model minority.

“Asian American” has now morphed into a newer fiction: the “Asian American and Pacific Islander” community, or A.A.P.I. But again, there are contradictions inherent in this identity

But in 2020, more than 2.1 million Democrats cast mail ballots, compared with roughly 1.4 million Republicans, largely because of a Democratic push to vote remotely amid the pandemic and Mr. Trump’s false attacks on the practice. (The former president and his family, however, voted by mail in Florida in the June 2020 primary.)

And the G.O.P. effort carries risks: Was the Democratic surge in mail balloting a sign of a new normal for the previously Republican-dominated voting method, or a blip caused by the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic?

“So what’s the problem that we’re trying to fix?” Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic representative from Orlando, asked rhetorically. “Oh, here’s the problem: Florida Democrats cast 600,000 more vote-by-mail ballots.”

Other Republican legislators echoed language used by Mr. Trump and his allies during their challenges to the 2020 election.“I believe that every legal vote should count,” said Travis Hutson, a Republican senator from Northeast Florida. “I believe one fraudulent vote is one too many. And I’m trying to protect the sanctity of our elections.”

The bill was not without criticism from notable Republicans inside and outside the Legislature. D. Alan Hays, a conservative Republican who had previously served in the State Senate for 12 years and is now the election supervisor in Lake County, told his former colleagues at a legislative hearing last month that their bill was a “travesty.”

“Members, I’ve got no evidence for you on the chupacabra, and I got no evidence for you about ballot harvesting,” Ms. Driskell said. “But what I can tell you is this: that our system worked well in 2020, by all accounts, and everyone agreed. And that for so many reasons, we don’t need this bad bill.”

The U.S. government had more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in its custody as of Sunday, according to a Department of Homeland Security document obtained by NPR.

The children are spending an average of 117 hours in detention facilities before being moved to more hospitable shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services — far longer than the 72 hours allowed by law.

Hernandez died of complications from the flu. So did Felipe Gomez Alonzo, 8, another child whom Sanders thinks about a lot. Jakelin Caal, 7, died of a bacterial infection.Sanders said kids who arrive at the border facilities are already physically and emotionally strained after weeks — if not months — of traveling under very difficult conditions.

Back in 2019, Long served as a detention monitor for the legal team that advocated for the children in court. She testified to Congress at the time about sick kids sleeping in cells and older children caring for younger ones.

She largely blames the Trump administration for hollowing out what little infrastructure existed to handle these cyclical flows of unaccompanied minors.But Long also raises concerns about transparency in President Biden's administration and questions why detention monitors like herself have been blocked from seeing certain areas of concerning facilities.

David Lapan, a former senior official in Trump's Department of Homeland Security, said the former president was more focused on sending a message about enforcement than caring for the children.

Sanders, the former acting CBP commissioner, quit the Trump administration in the midst of the last border crisis.He described the deaths of children on his watch as a transformational experience and now works with an organization, Glasswing International, that works to address the root causes of migration in Central America.

In September, the world entered La Niña, a phase of the climate pattern that also brings El Niño and affects weather across the world. La Niña is marked by cooler-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean.

2020 was on track to be one of the three warmest years ever, the organization’s secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, said that La Niña’s cooling effect “has not been sufficient to put a brake on this year’s heat.”

“Something to keep in mind is that the average global temperature is increasing at an unprecedented rate due to human influences,” she said. “That’s the main factor here.”

The Copernicus service scientists said the warm conditions in the Arctic last month had slowed the freeze-up of ice in the Arctic Ocean. The extent of sea-ice coverage was the second lowest for a November since satellites began observing the region in 1979. A slower freeze-up could lead to thinner ice and thus more melting in the late spring and summer.

irchner, currently a senator, is back to capitalize on Argentina’s dissatisfaction, this time as a vice-presidential candidate to Alberto Fernández (no relation), a little-known former adviser from the moderate wing of her Peronist Justicialist party. The pair promise to reverse Macri’s economic overhaul and restore standards of living for a suffering working class.

Macri says the solution to the country’s current economic crisis is not a return to protectionism, but more jobs. He wants to create a million and a half of them in the private sector by stimulating tourism, agriculture and the creative industries, as well as cutting taxes for younger workers and regulating more of the informal sector

Macri’s rival Alberto Fernández served as cabinet chief to his running mate’s husband, Néstor Kirchner (president from 2003 to 2007) and then in the early months of Cristina’s first term. Like the Kirchners, Fernández belongs to the Justicialist Party, the formal home of the ideologically complex Peronist movement.

Former President Juan Domingo Perón initiated the Peronist movement in the 1940’s. A populist, he built his support base among trade unions and the working class, advocating state intervention in the economy, strong labor rights and generous public welfare schemes for the poor. But his politics also incorporated elements like nationalism, and an authoritarian strain.

But just what Peronism stands for ideologically is extremely complicated. The movement today is sprawling and diverse, containing politicians on both the left and the right. During her two terms from 2008 to 2015, Kirchner pursued welfare programs and subsidies on services. But another nominally Peronist president, Carlos Menem, carried out large-scale privatizations of public assets and reduced budgetary spending during the 1990’s.

The pitfalls of Macri’s reform program has proved a defining factor in this election. In an effort to reduce public debt and make the country more appealing to foreign investors, the president has scrapped protectionist policies on industry, cut public spending and cancelled subsidies on gas, electricity and public transport.

He also floated the peso, which had been artificially over-valued during the Kirchner era, and removed currency controls that limited the amount of U.S. dollars and other foreign exchange businesses and individuals could buy.

Economic hardship under Macri has made it easy for Kirchner and Fernández to promise a return to the good days under Peronism. They did far better than predicted at a king of primary election in August, winning a 15 point lead over Macri.

The pair’s success, indicating a possible return to protectionist Peronist economics in Argentina, has spooked financial markets, accelerating the peso’s fall.

The Cuban government slammed the US just hours after the announcement. Read MoreIn a tweet, Cuban Foreign Ministry General Director Carlos Fernández de Cossio criticized the US, accusing it of not caring about the consequences of its actions. He asserted that his country's "response will not vary."

"In an effort to punish Cuba's unbreakable rebelliousness, imperialism takes aim at regular flight service to various Cuban cities," de Cossio tweeted. "They don't care if they impact family contacts, the limited means of Cubans in both countries or unjust inconveniences."

Since the 1980s, the government recognized that nature is Costa Rica’s strongest asset and has therefore made every effort to protect it: including, among other things, zoo closures, reforestation, and establishing protected areas (25% of the total surface area of the country). “With its rich biodiversity, Costa Rica has also demonstrated far-sighted environmental leadership by pursuing reforestation, designating a third of the country protected natural reserves, and deriving almost all of its electricity from clean hydro power.” – Joseph Stiglitz

“Decarbonization is the great task of our generation and Costa Rica must be one of the first countries in the world to accomplish it, if not the first.”

it is also conscious of the well-being of its citizens. It is part of the Wellbeing Economies Alliance—a coalition that includes Scotland, New Zealand, and Slovenia—which instead of emphasizing countries’ GDP, “seeks to ensure that public policy advances citizens’ wellbeing in the broadest sense, by promoting democracy, sustainability, and inclusive growth,” according to a recent column by economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Ponce is one of several cities in the island’s southern region hit by the recent 6.4 magnitude earthquake that killed one person and caused more than an estimated $200 million in damage. More than 7,000 people remain in shelters since the quake.

Llompart said she'll split her ballot. For governor, she's supporting the candidate who supports Puerto Rico's independence from the United States, and for downticket offices she'll support candidates from a new party, Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana — or Citizens' Victory Movement — that's emerging as the first substantial challenge in decades to the island's two-party system.

Though polling indicates that one of the two traditional party candidates will win, the numbers also suggest it could be with support from less than 40% of the electorate, the smallest vote share ever to propel a Puerto Rican governor to office.

The island's youngest voters have come of age during a recession that has driven an exodus of half-a-million people — largely young adults — to the mainland United States. The past four years alone have arguably been the most tumultuous in Puerto Rico's modern history. It has declared bankruptcy, lost control of its own finances to a federal board appointed to resolve its debt, faced massive cuts to education and pensions, muddled through the recovery from two major hurricanes, faced earthquakes, corruption scandals, and a pandemic.

Both parties' candidates are polling around 10 to 12%, and have similar policy priorities, though the pro-independence party has historically made the island's independence from the United States a central tenet of its platform.

Lebrón said it's that same energy driving the unprecedented political realignment that appears to be taking hold this year, as more voters demand a move away from the two-party system they believe has prioritized the statehood question while sidelining the needs of everyday Puerto Ricans.

"Not in this election, but maybe in 2024, or 2028, because the numbers in the younger demographic with these two old parties are very, very weak."

Alexandra Lúgaro, the Citizens' Victory gubernatorial candidate – is considered a longshot to win, but if candidates from her party earn seats in the legislature or at the municipal level, it could build momentum that carries the party to stronger showings in future elections.

"We're exhausted," Lebrón said.

Tuesday's election will also include a non-binding referendum asking Puerto Ricans whether they support statehood, and two additional minor candidates for the governorship.

DeLeón believes Victoria Ciudadana has a better chance of siphoning support away from the traditional pro- and anti-statehood parties that he feels have driven Puerto Rico's economy into the ground.