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Pedro de Toledo (viceroy 1532–53) reorganized the Kingdom of Naples and placed it firmly within the Spanish monarchical orbit dominated by Castile.

The most important ruling body in the kingdom was the Collateral Council, comprising five regents presided over by the viceroy, with a judicial council and a financial council exercising their respective competencies at its side.

Sicily’s administration had existed apart from that of the mainland since 1282, when the island had revolted against Angevin rule and come under the Aragonese crown. In the 16th century Sicily remained the cornerstone of the Spanish Mediterranean policy against the Ottomans,

because of the looming possibility of extinction, and in response to it from the emerging leadership among young people, we have reached a “climate moment” with real momentum, and our challenge as we go forward is to dramatically change the zeitgeist—“to lock in and consolidate public opinion that’s finally beginning to come into focus.”

It was 54 years ago, early in 1965, at the White House. Before I became President Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary (“over my dead body,” I might add), I was his special assistant coordinating domestic policy. One day, two members of the president’s science-advisory committee came by the offic

he had shaken up the prevailing consensus that the oceans were massive enough to soak up any amount of excess of carbon released on earth. Not so, Revelle discovered; the peculiar chemistry of sea water actually prevents this from happening. Now, he said, humans have begun a “vast geophysical experiment.” We were about to burn, within a few generations, the fossil fuels that had slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. Burning so much oil, gas, and coal would release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it would trap heat that otherwise would escape into space. Earth’s temperature could rise, causing polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise, flooding the earth’s coastal regions.

As coronavirus cases and deaths mount in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has remained defiant, the last notable holdout among major world leaders in denying the severity of the coronavirus.

Brazilians, he declared last week, are uniquely suited to weather the pandemic because they can be dunked in raw sewage and “don’t catch a thing.”

Then he insisted that an anti-malaria pill of unproved efficacy would cure those who fall ill with the virus that has killed more than 43,000 people worldwide.

This is a big problem: An enormous amount of global financial activity depends on the use of the dollar. If we are to contain the fallout from the crisis, America’s central bank must act as a lender of last resort not just to America’s financial system but also to the entire world’s.

The good news is that the Federal Reserve is taking its responsibility seriously: It is funneling dollars to central banks around the world. But is the Fed fighting the last war?

The question turns on what we mean by global finance. In 2008 the dollar shortage was confined largely to the banks of Europe and America

What’s clear is that he has spent his life seeking to dominate others, whatever that requires, and whatever collateral damage it creates along the way.

I never sensed from Trump any guilt or contrition about anything he’d done, and he certainly never shared any misgivings publicly. From his perspective, he operated in a jungle full of predators who were forever out to get him, and he did what he must to survive.

Trump was equally clear with me that he didn’t value — nor even necessarily recognize — the qualities that tend to emerge as people grow more secure, such as empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification or, above all, a conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong

Did the summer’s protests reflect a racial reckoning or seasonal solidarity?

Millions of Americans — many of them white — poured into the streets to demand justice and assert that Black Lives Matter. It’s clear now that the summer protests, which took place during a pandemic during which congregation was discouraged, were for some participants less a sincere demand for justice than they were a social outlet.

About 49 percent of registered voters said they supported the movement, compared with around 38 percent in opposition — similar to BLM’s net approval before Floyd’s death. That drop in popularity has largely been driven by increased opposition among white Republicans (80 percent of whom oppose the movement, higher than before Floyd’s death) and white independents (who now support BLM at similar levels as before Floyd’s death).”

In 22 of Brazil's 26 states, ICU occupancy has surpassed 80%. In the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, hospital patients must line up to wait for beds as occupancy rates in intensive care units soar past 103%. The neighboring state of Santa Catarina has already surpassed 99% occupancy and is on the verge of collapsing, as cases surge throughout the state.

"I was here during the first wave and it wasn't like this. We are completely overwhelmed, with our occupancy rate at over 100%. Many of those patients who are waiting for an ICU don't make it," Molina told CNN during a telephone interview.

Last week, Rio de Janeiro's Mayor Eduardo Paes announced a new curfew for bars and restaurants throughout the city, limiting hours of operation from 6:00 am to 5:00 pm. But hundreds of people stayed out anyway -- 230 curfew-related fines and closures were issued from Friday to Saturday alone, according to the city government. At one bar, more than 200 mostly-maskless partygoers were found at a party that had been going for seven hours, reported CNN affiliate CNN Brasil.

in a much-needed and well-timed satire of snowflake hand-wringing over the Australian bush fires, the Sun’s politically incorrect columnist Jeremy Clarkson declared the continent unfit for human habitation and welcomed scorched whiteys back to the motherland, unaccompanied minors and all.

Clarkson’s suggestion that Australians needed to “come home”, while unconsciously prefiguring the mass migrations the climate crisis will cause in this decade, could read as a slap in the face to indigenous Australians, for whom the continent has always been “home”

Both Clarkson’s and Turd’s careers have flourished by exploiting the notion that they are lone voices of sanity against a politically correct snowflake cabal intent on silencing normal blokes like them

Residents and caregivers at senior living facilities write about life during the pandemic — and trying to stay safe while facing the challenges of long-term isolation.

A former special education teacher, she told me she found the isolation and loneliness of lockdown “so heartbreaking.”

My mom isn’t able to write or read after suffering from two strokes. In addition to early-stage dementia, she has expressive aphasia, which means she has difficulty talking. In early November, we received an email from her residential care facility saying that four staff members had tested positive. Mom tested negative. But soon after, she called telling me her next-door neighbor was sick with the virus. I started planning how I could remove my mom from the facility.

Despite new pandemic aid, he confronts an economic crisis unlike any since he last entered office in 2009. And political headwinds have only stiffened.

With his presidential inauguration just weeks away, Joseph R. Biden Jr. is confronting an economic crisis that is utterly unparalleled and yet eerily familiar.

While this pandemic-related recession was larger in terms of initial job losses and closures, it is collateral damage from a health emergency and not a crack in the global financial system.

It must be clear to almost everyone by now that the sudden and sharp economic downturn that began in late March is something more than a severe recession

“This situation is so dire that it deserves to be called a ‘depression’ — a pandemic depression,” write economists Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. “The memory of the Great Depression has prevented economists and others from using that word.”

People don’t want to be accused of alarmism and making a bad situation worse. But this reticence is self-defeating and ahistoric. It minimizes the gravity of the crisis and ignores comparisons with the 1930s and the 19th century. That matters. If the hordes of party-goers had understood the pandemic’s true dangers, perhaps they would have been more responsible in practicing social distancing.

Amid a flurry of press conferences delivering upbeat news, President Trump’s doctors have administered an array of experimental therapies that are typically reserved for the most severe cases of Covid-19. Outside observers were left to puzzle through conflicting messages to determine the seriousness of his condition and how it might inform his treatment plan.

From the moment the coronavirus enters the body, the immune system mounts a defense, launching a battalion of cells and molecules against the invader.

The viral load may even peak before symptoms appear, if they appear at all.

Rosenstein’s complicity in this machine was ugly, but it was by no means unique. Top officials at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services all played a role. They were all sowing chaos, inflicting cruelty and causing unfathomable trauma at the behest of a small, vicious cadre up top

his argument was this: The jail time for these misdemeanors was usually a matter of days. So why were these parents not being reunited with their children afterward? “What became clear,” he told me, “is that they never had any intention of reuniting them until the parent gave up and was deported, if ever.”

The federal judge in San Diego agreed, saying the government’s behavior “shocks the conscience,” that the separation policy violated due process and that all separated families had to be reunited within 30 days.

Keith Raniere, the leader of a self-help organization called Nxivm, had been revered by throngs of loyal followers who promoted him as the smartest man in the world. They called him “Vanguard,” believing that his teachings would bring about peace and even influence elections.

Mr. Raniere, 60, is now sitting in jail, convicted at trial as a con man who was exploiting Nxivm to enrich himself financially and recruit sexual partners, leading to its current reputation as a “sex cult.

He has accused the judge of corruption and demanded a new trial.

Democrats, beware: Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for governor of Virginia will serve as a template for Republican candidates eager to exploit fears of critical race theory by demanding “parental control” of education.

The absolute worst thing you can say is what McAuliffe said: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” At some level, he was right; there would be chaos if every teacher had to run every lesson plan by the parents of every student. But his comment came across as tone-deaf after parents had spent 18 months supervising their kids’ education at home — and stewing about shuttered classrooms. McAuliffe paid the price for not feeling parents’ pain.

It’s also not productive to argue, as many on the left have, that critical race theory, or CRT, isn’t being taught and that raising the issue is nothing but a dog whistle to racists.

Hackers brought down dozens of Ukrainian government websites on Friday and posted a message on one saying, “Be afraid and expect the worst,” a day after a breakdown in diplomatic talks between Russia and the West intended to forestall a threatened Russian invasion of the country.

Diplomats and analysts have been anticipating a cyberattack on Ukraine, but proving the source of such actions is notoriously difficult.

A Ukrainian government agency, the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, which was established to counter Russian disinformation, later issued a statement more directly blaming Russia for the hack.

Putin on Thursday opened the door to nationalizing the assets of Western companies pulling out of Russia and exhorted senior officials to “act decisively” to preserve jobs.

“I have no doubt that these sanctions would have been implemented no matter what,” Mr. Putin said in televised remarks on Thursday, arguing that his intervention in Ukraine served merely as a pretext for the West to try to wreck Russia’s economy.

“This will be a gigantic, transformational downturn,”

What makes history so hard to predict — the reason there is no neat “cycle” of history enabling us to prophesy the future — is that most disasters come out of left field.

Unlike hurricanes and auto accidents, to which we can at least attach probabilities, the biggest disasters (pandemics and wars) follow power-law or random distributions. They belong in the realm of uncertainty, or what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book “The Black Swan,” calls  “Extremistan.”

What’s more, as I argued in my book “Doom,” disasters don’t come in any predictable sequence.

As inflation has plummeted while unemployment remains low, the president’s allies see not just a strong run of economic data but a new model for policymakers — proof of what is possible if the government is willing to be aggressive in fighting downturns.

Summers is the most prominent expert who disagrees. He blasted the administration’s $1.9 trillion 2021 stimulus law, the American Rescue Plan, for exacerbating inflation, arguing through 2022 that the U.S. economy would probably need a spike in unemployment for price hikes to fully abate and accusing President Biden’s team of the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in 40 years. Biden’s economic policies had overstimulated the economy, Summers said on cable TV, in op-eds and in interviews, as well as in private talks. And he maintained it would almost certainly take a major slowdown — and millions of lost jobs — for inflation to return to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.

Biden last year instinctively rejected the notion pushed by Summers that taming inflation would require policies that would throw millions of people out of work, according to five people familiar with the president’s private remarks

The only reason we do not currently have a financial crisis, with a crash and with bailouts, is because regulators have withstood enormous pressure to allow interconnection and linkages between the crypto activities and the core of the financial and banking system,” he said. Because of their regulators’ stance, American banks are not collateralizing loans with cryptocurrencies, for instance. They are not freely trading crypto derivatives.

Meanwhile, an aversion to U.S. regulation has kept crypto businesses, many of which are based offshore, from getting more deeply involved in American finance. “If you are registered with the SEC and regulated by the SEC, you are required to have segregation of customer accounts,” Kelleher explained. “You’re required to have books and records. You’re required to have codes of conduct that include prohibitions on or identification of conflicts of interest. You’re prohibited from commingling funds. You’re required to have margin capital, and you have liquidity requirements.” Crypto companies “did not want that,”

It’s a Ponzi scheme. When there was tulip mania, at least when you lost all your money, you still had a tulip.”