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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.

n a decision that marked an important victory for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate change agenda, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that the federal government’s imposition of carbon taxes in provinces that oppose them was constitutional.

“This matter is critical to our response to an existential threat to human life in Canada and around the world,” the court wrote in a 6-to-3 decision. “Climate change is real. It is caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities and it poses a grave threat to humanity’s future.”

The concept of carbon pricing has been widely endorsed by economists, and according to the World Bank, some form of it has been carried out or is in development in 64 countries, either through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through cap-and-trade programs.

The leaders of Australia, Japan, India, and the United States will meet on Friday in a virtual summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, otherwise known as the Quad—the informal forum largely directed at possible Chinese threats.

portrayals of China’s overwhelming force are misleading—at least if you’re in Washington rather than New Delhi, which is genuinely outmatched. Even using outside estimates of China’s military budget, its spending—roughly $200 billion—is less than one-quarter of the annual U.S. defense budget of around $934 billion.

What makes the PLA a challenge for the United States isn’t its size or capabilities in absolute terms, but its concentration in a relatively narrow field: anti-access/area denial, or missile and electronic technology designed to raise the costs of military intervention anywhere close to China itself. For example, Chinese missiles, launched from bases along the coastline, could make it nearly impossible for the United States to move ships through local waters. This presents a serious problem for U.S. strategists, especially given growing Chinese aggression toward Taiwan.

Three years ago, not long after Hurricane Irma left parts of Miami underwater, the federal government embarked on a study to find a way to protect the vulnerable South Florida coast from deadly and destructive storm surge.

The state could help, to a point. Republican lawmakers, who have controlled the Florida Legislature for more than 20 years, acknowledged in late 2019 that they had ignored climate change for so long that the state had “lost a decade.”

“You need to have a conversation about, culturally, what are our priorities?” said Benjamin Kirtman, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami. “Where do we want to invest? Where does it make sense?”

Prince Turki Al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and an influential royal family member, told U.S. lawmakers to get off their “high moralistic horses” as ties between the historical allies remain frayed a year after the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Prince Turki criticized congressional representatives on Wednesday for the “horror” and “disdain” they express for Saudi Arabia, saying U.S. lawmakers are unable to perform their jobs to address “issues of racism and racial inequality” and to reform gun ownership laws.

The murder last year of Khashoggi, a U.S resident and Washington Post columnist, as well as the long-running war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the detention of Saudi female activists have all strained the kingdom’s relations with much of the Washington establishment outside the White House.

An underwater volcano erupted on Saturday near the remote Pacific nation of Tonga, triggering tsunami warnings across the Pacific and for the West Coast of the United States, and causing strong waves and currents in many coastal areas.

A four-foot tsunami wave was reported to have hit Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, sending people rushing to higher ground, and witnesses said ash had fallen from the sky. There were no immediate official reports on the extent of injuries or damages, but internet service in the country was disrupted, according to The Associated Press, making it difficult to assess.

Despite Tonga’s geographical isolation, a booming sound after the initial eruption was heard as far away as New Zealand, 1,100 miles northeast of the archipelago’s main island of Tongatapu.

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.

That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.

A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

Zoning, NIMBYism and regulations — “all those things matter” when you’re trying to build housing, Herbert said. But land scarcity is the most important.

So what’s happening now “is a lot more infill of single-family housing in closer-in communities, where you’re not going to have room for large-scale developments and where the land is going to be worth a lot more,” Herbert said. Single-family land scarcity, he said, “has been a big factor keeping the supply down.”

In a blockbuster 2010 paper, Albert Saiz, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzed satellite data to estimate how much land was actually available for development within a 50-kilometer (31-mile) radius of each major U.S. city. He found that available land, when combined with measures of land-use regulation, could go “very far to explain the evolution of prices” from 1970 to 2000.

For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players

Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.

If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade