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Catherine II served as empress of Russia for more than three decades in the late 18th century after overthrowing her husband, Peter III

was born in Prussia in 1729 and married into the Russian royal family in 1745

Catherine orchestrated a coup to become empress of Russia in 1762

virtual ruler of Sweden

Charles in 1568 was one of the leaders of a rebellion against the rule of his half brother Erik XIV that placed his other brother on the throne as John III.

The brothers were reunited in 1587, however, when both opposed the nobles’ state council, which promoted the candidacy of John’s son Sigismund (king of Poland as Sigismund III Vasa) for the Polish throne.

made it a major European power

Gustav was the eldest son of Charles IX and his second wife, Christina of Holstein.

Charles IX had usurped the throne, having ejected his nephew Sigismund III Vasa (who was also king of Poland) in 1599, and the resulting dynastic quarrel involved Sweden and Poland in a war that continued intermittently for 60 years.

Largely sympathetic to the Lithuanian desire for autonomy and determined to create a strong, central royal power, Casimir clashed with the Polish magnates, large landowners who had dominated the earlier Jagiellon reigns, by granting extensive and exclusive rights and privileges to the gentry in order to gain their political and financial support for his active foreign policy. As a result, Casimir was able not only to engage successfully in the Thirteen Years’ War (1454–66) against the Teutonic Knights, by which he acquired a large portion of their territory, but also to place his son Władysław on the thrones of Bohemia (as Vladislav II; 1471) and Hungary (as Ulászló II; 1490) and to fight the Turks (1485–89), who had disrupted his kingdom’s trade by seizing control of the mouths of the Dniester and Danube rivers.

When Sigismund I the Old succeeded his brother Alexander in 1506, the Polish–Lithuanian federation was seriously threatened by foreign invasion as well as by internal decay.

Sigismund’s nephew Louis II succeeded Władysław as king of Bohemia and Hungary in 1516, but his death at the Battle of Mohács (at which the Turks destroyed the Hungarian monarchy; 1526) brought an end to Jagiellon rule there. Sigismund, on the other hand, improved the political stability of Poland and Lithuania, incorporated Mazovia into his realm (1526), and also promoted the development of Renaissance culture in Poland.

The French Revolution led to much of Europe going to war in the mid-1790s

Some belligerents wanted to put Louis XVI back on a throne, many had other agendas like gaining territory or, in the case of some in France, creating a French Republic.

But for many months the other states of Europe refused to help. Austria, Prussia, Russia and the Ottoman Empires had been involved in a series of power struggles in Eastern Europe and had been less worried about the French king than their own jostling for positions until Poland, stuck in the middle, followed France by declaring a new constitution.

The “shock therapy” reforms that speedily pushed Poland and other countries in the region into capitalism have come in for criticism, but Leszek Balcerowicz, the architect of Poland’s reforms, still believes they were the best option for the country in the circumstances. “If you move fast from a bad system to a better one, you release new forces for growth,

While communism left the region an economic basket case, it did also provide some of the seeds for growth: well-educated societies with low levels of inequality

Particularly in Poland, the transition led to a class of entrepreneurs like Grabski, rather than a small group of oligarchs. “We had the Solidarity movement in the factories and they were like a watchdog. So directors couldn’t go into shabby deals like in Russia,”

It’s a war of one part of the elite against another part of the elite, she says. Brexit was an elite project. “The game was to get everyone to go along with it”. Were all the southern Tories who voted for it a part of the oppressed masses? “And who do you think funded the campaign?”

Their leaders weren’t from small towns full of abandoned shops and drug-ridden streets. They were metropolitans, with degrees from Oxford in the case of Johnson and Dominic Cummings. The men and women Applebaum knew were not loyal drones but filled with a dark restlessness. They may pose as the tribunes of the common people now but they were members of the intellectual and educated elite willing to launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite.

One of Applebaum’s closest Polish friends, the godmother of one of her children, and a guest at the 1999 party, provided her with the most striking example.

In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”

A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries

Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes

More than 4,000 people protested in Warsaw, which has seen the most Ukrainian refugees since the war began, according to the Ukrainian Volunteer Journalists Initiative. The rally, called “Stop promising, start acting!”, is expected to be repeated in other cities around the world and continue to grow as more people die in Ukraine.

The request of the Polish protesters is similar to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who asked the U.S. for a no-fly zone when speaking to Congress.The U.S. and NATO have been hesitant to do so as such a move could get the countries directly involved in the war

Warsaw, Poland (CNN)President Joe Biden declared forcefully Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin should no longer remain in power, an unabashed challenge that came at the very end of a swing through Europe meant to reinforce Western unity.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to Biden, saying, "This is not to be decided by Mr. Biden. It should only be a choice of the people of the Russian Federation."In his speech, which drew a sharp line between liberal democracies and the type of autocracy Putin oversees, Biden warned of a long fight ahead."In this battle we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days, or months, either," he said.

Biden, standing along NATO's eastern edge, in Poland, issued a stern warning during his speech, telling Putin: "Don't even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory." He said the US was committed to the collective protection obligations laid out in NATO's charter "with the full force of our collective power."

the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on March 30th had passed 4m. That does not count the 6.5m people displaced within Ukraine by Russia’s invasion.

Nearly a quarter of the population has been forced to move.

So far, the western response has been enlightened and generous. But that could change if governments mismanage the reception and integration of refugees, and disillusionment and fatigue set in.

Poland’s central bank slashed its main interest rate by 50 basis points to 1.50%, the lowest on record, in response to persistent declines in consumer prices.

The Polish rate cut is the latest in a series of easing measures by central banks across Europe, following the European Central Bank’s decision in late January to launch a program of quantitative easing, under which it will buy more than €1 trillion ($1.12 trillion) of mostly government bonds by September 2016.

. The central bank’s target is an inflation rate of 2.5%.

If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the European Plain would not have been such inviting territory for the invaders who have attacked Russia from there repeatedly through history. As things stand, Putin, like Russian leaders before him, likely feels he has no choice but to at least try to control the flatlands to Russia’s west.

rules of geography are especially clear in Russia, where power is hard to defend, and where for centuries leaders have compensated by pushing outward.

t it’s helpful to look at Putin’s military interventions abroad in the context of Russian leaders’ longstanding attempts to deal with geography.

Global investors managing $32tn issued a stark warning to governments at the UN climate summit on Monday, demanding urgent cuts in carbon emissions and the phasing out of all coal burning. Without these, the world faces a financial crash several times worse than the 2008 crisis, they said.

The investors include some of the world’s biggest pension funds, insurers and asset managers and marks the largest such intervention to date. They say fossil fuel subsidies must end and substantial taxes on carbon be introduced.

“The long-term nature of the challenge has, in our view, met a zombie-like response by many,” said Chris Newton, of IFM Investors which manages $80bn and is one of the 415 groups that has signed the Global Investor Statement. “This is a recipe for disaster as the impacts of climate change can be sudden, severe and catastrophic.”

Shortly after their marriage in 1924 (when Iris was 22), the Origos bought a large, rundown estate of some 7,000 acres in the Val d’Orcia; it included numerous old ruined buildings and some 57 farms. As the fighting approached their area, the plucky Marchesa Origo took in war orphans, hid fleeing Italian partisans and Allied paratroopers, and negotiated with the German military units that patrolled the area.

One of the great values of this brief but highly readable earlier diary is that it was written when the direction of history — whether there would be a war and how it would turn out — was far less clear. As a result, it more accurately represents the moral and political complexity of Italian life under Fascism. The people Origo encounters represent a much broader range of views: from convinced anti-Fascists to unquestioning Fascists who repeat phrases like “A good Italian’s duty now is to have no opinions.” Most occupy a swampy middle ground: They are uneasy about the slide into war but accept the regime’s argument that Italy has little choice but to fight.

A journal kept in the middle of tumultuous events makes us realize how wrong most people, including many intelligent and well-informed people, can be about the import of events that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seems obvious. “It is curious — the unanimity with which everyone here refuses to believe in the possibility of war,” Origo writes in mid-July 1939, six weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

A Polish law banning almost all trade on Sundays has taken effect, with large supermarkets and most other retailers closed for the first time since liberal shopping laws were introduced in the 1990s after the collapse of communism.

The new law at first bans trade on two Sundays per month, rising to three Sundays a month from 2019 and finally all Sundays from 2020, except for seven exceptions before the Easter and Christmas holidays.

Anyone infringing the new rules faces a fine of up to 100,000 zlotys (£21,180), while repeat offenders may face a prison sentence. Solidarity appealed to people to report any violators to the National Labour Inspectorate, a state body.

Some parts of Prussia can be found in eastern Poland. Before 1918, a lot of western Poland was also in Prussia. Between 1795 and 1807, Prussia also controlled Warsaw and most of central Polan

Yet, addressing the European Parliament, the French president — barely 40 and not yet a year in office — sounded almost like a biblical prophet, warning of the rising fascination with antidemocratic and “illiberal” ideas, “the deadly tendency which might lead our continent to the abyss, nationalism, giving up of freedom.”

Mr. Macron did not mention anyone by name — not Viktor Orban of Hungary, not Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, not the populists who won in Italy’s national election, not the far-right parties that have spread across Europe on hatred of immigrants, xenophobia, disdain for the rule of law, intolerance of dissent and suspiciousness of international cooperation. Nor did he name Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, though they are clearly an inspiration and model for the European far right.

The struggle between the traditional values of Western liberal democracy and the new forces of authoritarianism, intolerance and nationalism has become a defining challenge of the times.