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The days of Bourbon rule in Spain seemed to be at an end when King Alfonso XIII left the country in 1931

abdicating in favour of his third son Don Juan, Count of Barcelona

The Civil War of 1936-39 left Spain a fascist dictatorship run by General Franco as El Caudillo (the Leader)

Trump Lashes Out at Puerto Rico Mayor Who Criticized Storm Response

President Trump lashed out at the mayor of San Juan on Saturday for criticizing his administration’s efforts to help Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, accusing her of “poor leadership” and implying that the people of the devastated island were not doing enough to help themselves.

As emergency workers and troops struggled to restore basic services in a commonwealth with no electricity and limited fuel and water, Mr. Trump spent the day at his New Jersey golf club, blasting out Twitter messages defending his response to the storm and repeatedly assailing the capital’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, and the news media.

In 1669 Nithard was overthrown by Juan José de Austria, an illegitimate son of Philip IV, but the regent still managed to keep him out of the central government. In 1677 Juan José led an army against Madrid and made himself Charles II’s principal minister.

Until the mid-1680s the Castilian economy declined

the reign of Charles II as “an uninterrupted series of calamities.” The population of Castile declined from about 6.5 million at the end of the 16th century to under 5 million about 1680

History may not repeat itself, but there is no gainsaying its fondness for close affinities

When in 1807 Ferdinand, heir to the throne, stood accused by his father, Charles IV of Spain, of sedition and seeking to usurp the royal title, the young prince fearfully recalled the analogous events two hundred and forty years previously

In 1568 Philip II had similarly confronted his recalcitrant son Carlos, resulting in the latter’s imprisonment and mysterious death seven months later

Colonial expansion under the crown of Castile was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores

The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Catholic faith through indigenous conversions.

The Spanish conquest of Mexico is generally understood to be the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–21) which was the base for later conquests of other regions.

"I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity." freddie7 AT gmail DOT com My brother is a tailor and dressmaker. Check him out. Blog Archive ▼  2011 (81) ▼  April (6) seriousness and honesty are only conditionally vir... all by yourself straight fire failing students drop classes reason for optimism today in unfortunate yet amazing errors, Freddie e... ►  March (30) winning is fast, humanitarianism is slow we don't have a worker shortage quote for the day "you see an old woman...." amen sympathy for the juice box set first principles an open letter to Juan Cole on Libya they should have done a miniseries about Benjamin ... next big thing anniversary note the more things change ad hominems left-wing non-interventionism sorry about comments system how perfect is your knowledge? here they come France and the UK Libya gentrification involves more than the gentry the profession that wants to destroy itself they're bringing back all the classics marijuana legalization is a human rights issue Bobby Sands was an MP damn you, DVD clearance fees links and such a man from somewhere today in insanity the incredible naivete of the incredibly savvy ►  February (33) marked bodies What does it mean for a movie to be experimental a... subversion and containment IOZ on Reason's absurdity Reihan and progressivism/neoliberalism/leftism California good people are everywhere what I want submitted without comment welcome to lottery ticket America another perfect opportunity what's before us by the way the Atlantic and the working class ►  January (12) archivedate collaps

Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.

The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.

President Donald Trump launched a Twitter attack Saturday morning on San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz for "poor leadership ability," saying she and others in Puerto Rico "want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."

The President again praised the federal government's response on the island, which is grappling with the devastating impact of Hurricane Maria, saying the 10,000 federal workers there were doing a "fantastic job."

"This is the time to show our 'true colors,'" she wrote. "We cannot be distracted by anything else."

Biden Gives Venezuelans Reprieve to Remain in U.S. Trump Had RejectedHundreds of thousands of Venezuelans can temporarily continue to live and work in the United States as the administration considers its next steps in the effort to force out Venezuela’s president.

WASHINGTON — As many as 320,000 Venezuelans living in the United States were given an 18-month reprieve on Monday from the threat of being deported, as the Biden administration sought to highlight how dangerous that country has become under President Nicolás Maduro.

Two senior Biden administration officials said the new protections would be offered to those who can prove they are living in the United States as of Monday. The cutoff date aimed to discourage smugglers from enticing other Venezuelans to make the arduous journey to the United States at a time the Biden administration is already struggling with how to accommodate thousands of Central American migrants headed to the southern border.

In the years since, over four million Venezuelans have fled their country amid the economic and humanitarian crisis wrought by Mr. Maduro’s policies.

While the Obama-Biden administration was largely inattentive to the deteriorating situation in Venezuela, Mr. Trump has the support of many Venezuelan-Americans in part because of the economic embargo his administration imposed. He sealed the deal when he formally recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela, and invited him to the State of the Union address.

Mr. Biden visited Florida for the first time as Democratic nominee in September. He made the case that would be a better president for Latinos, highlighting his commitment to immigration reform and a new plan to support Puerto Rico’s economy. He has also poured $23 million into local TV ads.

Justice Breyer joins a very small line of American members dating to Thomas Jefferson. Other foreign members include the former Pope Benedict XVI, Prince Charles of Britain, King Juan Carlos of Spain and the novelist Ismail Kadare. Vaclav Havel was a member until his death, as was Ronald Reagan.

For decades, corruption was accepted in Southern Europe as a fact of life, a way to distribute the spoils, and few people — including, in many cases, prosecutors — gave it a second thought. But the grinding economic crisis, which stalled projects and ended the flow of cash, has helped lift the veil on corrupt officials, exposing graft, bribery, payoffs, secret favors and other misdeeds on a scale that few imagined.

Corruption did not cause the euro zone crisis. But the economic problems will persist, regional experts say, until these countries remake themselves into modern societies with efficient, competitive economies.

“The political class has no respect in Southern Europe. The public institutions need to be rebuilt, step by step, so the government can be a credible actor.”

Donald Trump? Yes, but these traits come straight from the manual of Latin American populist nationalism, a tradition that stretches from Argentina’s Juan Perón to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez

many Latin American liberal democrats think they’ve seen this movie before. And they know it usually ends badly.

The bigger question for the region is what Mr Trump represents in the battle of political ideas. The risk is that he may re-legitimise populist nationalism just when it was waning south of the border.

MEXICO CITY — Juan García relinquished his cellphone, walked through two metal detectors, registered with a uniformed soldier — and then finally entered Mexico’s only legal gun store.

To anyone familiar with the 49,762 licensed gun dealers in the United States, or the 7,261 gun-selling pawn shops, the place looked less like a store than a government office. Customers waited on metal chairs near a fish tank to be called up to a window to submit piles of paperwork. The guns hung in drab display cases as if for decoration, with not a single sales clerk offering assistance.

Why, Mexicans ask, don’t Americans tighten their gun laws? Doing so, they say, would stanch the violence both in the United States and in Mexico, where criminal groups wreak havoc with military-grade weapons smuggled in from the United States.

Trump has faced consistent criticism for his response to the crisis, including from Cruz, who accused the administration of not doing enough.

Cruz added: “I think the president lives in an alternative reality world, that only he believes the things he is saying. But certainly people are still without electricity. We knew it was going to take a long time for that to happen. But the basic services are still not there yet, and there doesn’t seem to be any [sign] of how it’s supposed to go.”

Cruz said: “Listen, people have different styles and different ways of doing things. I’m always looking injustice in the face. Of course the response got here, but was it enough? No. And people from this administration have admitted to it.”

From a $15 national minimum wage to Medicare for all to free college tuition, Sanders’s opponents have embraced policies that were considered radical when he first proposed them during the 2016 campaign

there’s another policy realm where Sanders may find it easier to carve out a distinctly lefty niche: America’s relationship to the rest of the world.

In 2016, foreign policy was the area where Sanders distinguished himself least.

“Gürtel was the ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment for Spain,” said Carlos Delclós, a former indignados activist and author of a book on the movement and its political inheritor, Podemos. “Gürtel made it clear that it was not specific cases of corruption but that it was systemic. That corruption was the system.”

Even the royal family, it seemed, were at it: a corruption scandal centred on the then king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, threw the monarchy into disrepute. In 2014, the once popular King Juan Carlos abdicated, citing health reasons, amid a sharp decline in popularity. (Last year, Urdangarin was sentenced to six years in jail for tax fraud and embezzlement.)

Voters were shocked by just how brazen politicians and businessmen seemed to have been. Before being jailed in 2013 for tax fraud, one PP politician in Valencia won the lottery five times. (He denies wrongdoing, claiming he was merely very lucky.)

Polls have closed in Colombia's congressional elections that saw former members of the Farc guerilla group take part for the first time.The ex-rebels, now known as the Revolutionary Alternative Common Force (also Farc), were given 10 congressional seats as part of a historic peace deal signed in 2016.But opinion polls give the left-wing group little chance of making gains.The vote is being viewed as a test ahead of May's presidential elections.

The BBC's Katy Watson, who is in Bogotá, says that many Colombians feel it is too soon to see former rebels in positions of power and say they should have been punished for their crimes.They have faced hostility on the campaign trial, and the group's leader Rodrigo Londoño was pelted with eggs and tomatoes while out campaigning last month.Farc's candidates have acknowledged that they need to convince voters they have changed, but say their involvement in elections represents a fresh start for the country.

President Juan Manuel Santos won re-election in June 2014, gaining what he presented as an endorsement of his efforts to end the rebel insurgency.He staked his reputation on securing a peace deal with the Farc and launched peace talks with the group two years after taking office in 2010.

Thousands of Venezuelans are pouring out of their crippled nation in one of the biggest migration crises in Latin American history, causing growing alarm in the region and prompting neighboring countries to rush thousands of soldiers to the border.

In Venezuela, children are dying. People are starving and being persecuted. What they’re getting from us is a door in the face.

Nowhere is the crisis more acute than here in Colombia, where 3,000 troops are fanning out across the 1,400-mile border to contain an influx of Venezuelans fleeing a collapsing economy and an increasingly repressive socialist regime.

Philip, the only legitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1530-56), and known to history as Philip II of Spain (r.1556-98), was King of England for rather more than four years. He achieved that dignity when he married Queen Mary (‘Bloody Mary’, r.1553-58) in July 1554, and surrendered it when she died in November 1558

Philip of Spain, he was the bitter enemy of Elizabethan England, against whom a twenty-year war was fought

potentially his reign was one of huge significance. Had Mary borne him children, particularly a healthy son, the entire subsequent history of England could have been different

the diplomatic nightmare of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

the French crown maintained the only permanent embassy of Elizabeth’s reign

The Spanish embassy was a stormy one, suspended between 1572 and 1578 and permanently terminated in 1584