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A three-day trip to the U.K. that began Wednesday is the young royal’s first visit to a Western country since he ousted a powerful cousin to become heir to the throne in June, a bumpy political transition that led to the arrests of critical clerics, princes and journalists.

For British Prime Minister Theresa May, who is hosting the Saudi prince at her country house, the visit is a chance to burnish commercial ties. Expanding economic links with countries outside the EU is a critical goal as Britain prepares to exit from the bloc in March next year. Saudi Arabia is already its biggest trading partner in the Middle East, with companies from the U.K. investing more in Saudi Arabia than from any other country after the U.S.

To draw foreign firms to the kingdom, the Saudi government is also trying to project a softer image of the ultraconservative country.

I have been reading the end-is-nigh books that the publishing industry has been pumping out recently like so many donuts. There’s How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt; How Democracy Ends, by David Runciman; The People vs. Democracy, by Yascha Mounk; and On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder.

You’d have to go back more than a century, to the 15 years before World War I, to find another moment when so many leading thinkers — Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, Nicholas Murray Butler, and others — questioned democracy’s future. But at the time, nations had not yet surrendered to ideological totalitarianism. Whatever America and the West might have been plunging toward then was much less terrifying than it is today.

The most obvious and dismal analogy to our current moment is 1933. That is the premise of Snyder’s book

Spain thus established complete hegemony over all the Italian states except Venice, which alone maintained its independence.

Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia (which had all been dependencies of Aragon), as well as Milan, came under direct Spanish rule and owed their allegiance to the sovereign according to their own laws and traditions.

From the beginning of Philip II’s reign, Italian affairs, which had originally been administered by the Council of Aragon, were coordinated by a Council of Italy in Madrid. At this council, the three major states—Naples, Sicily, and Milan—were each represented by two regents, one Castilian and one native. Sardinia remained a dependency of Aragon.

(CNN)Congress is gearing up to vote on its largest emergency aid package in US history in order to respond to the coronavirus outbreak and its economic fallout. But the legislation has raised plenty of questions as lawmakers race to nail down specific language. Here are at least a few answers based on CNN's reporting:

There's a lot of focus on the individual checks, but I'm firmly of the mind the small business loan piece of this is far and away the most important given what's happening right now.

The bill directs $350 billion for loans to small businesses and nonprofits with under 500 employees. The loans would be guaranteed by the Small Business Administration but the actual lender would be approved banks and financial institutions, which should get the money out the door faster. Businesses could receive up to $10 million in loans to float employee salaries, payroll expenses, mortgage and other debt payments. If used for those purposes, the loans would be forgiven in the future. It's a huge deal if it works properly.

what stood out for me was how much of the use is concentrated among us daily stoners. In 2002, we were only 12 percent of users; now we’re over 18 percent. Of the total amount of weed consumed, we comprise a much bigger percentage than anyone else.

daily use of weed is around three times as common as daily use of booze. So what? Well, the question is really something called “dependence.

Impeding my productivity? A couple years later, as a daily stoner, I was writing a blog round-the-clock along wth a weekly column. In many ways, it helped my productivity by finally ending my insomnia. It’s always been hard for me to turn my brain off, and linear, analytical thoughts crowd my mind often to the point of mania. But now, with a mere joint, I unwind quickly after every day’s work and fall asleep within minutes of lying down.

JBS USA, the country's top beef producer and its second largest producer of pork, suffered a cyberattack this weekend, prompting reported shutdowns at company plants in the United States and globally.

Does fallout from the attack mean a tighter meat supply ahead, and as a result, higher prices? That depends on how quickly the issue is resolved, according to experts.

"Retailers and beef processors are coming from a long weekend and need to catch up with orders and make sure to fill the meat case. If they suddenly get a call saying that product may not deliver tomorrow or this week, it will create very significant challenges," Steiner explained.

After an all-night negotiating session, European Union leaders agreed on Friday morning to cut net carbon emissions by 55 percent in the next decade from levels measured in 1990

European leaders, who are keen to position themselves as at the forefront of the global fight against climate change, had failed in October to reach a deal on an even less ambitious target of 40 percent.

“Europe is the leader in the fight against climate change,”

Twice in an interview, McChrystal raised fears of existential threats—from a new pandemic, and in comparing the proliferation of social-media influence to the unchecked spread of nuclear weapons.

He also believes the United States needs to take its relationship with China more seriously. U.S. ambiguity over Taiwan is becoming increasingly problematic, he says. 

MarketWatch: You’ve advised state governments on the pandemic. What lessons can we take away from America’s federal response to Covid-19? 

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion

Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s

A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms.

On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion “very nearly destroy[ed] the republic.”

By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark, most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson, many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom. In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working class; by contrast, in the United States, the western frontier offered the possibility of independence and upward mobility for all. In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the “Great Emigration.”

Given that reactionaries can come from across the political continuum, each of us—particularly those of us on the left who have assumed that reactionaries always originate from the right—needs to take seriously the fact that we are vulnerable to the pitfalls of reactionary politics.

A reactionary is someone with extreme opposition to dramatic social or political change

What distinguishes the reactionary is that they end up making two key intellectual mistakes:

A few weeks before Russia launched its war, Putin and Xi met at a summit and declared a partnership with “no limits.” Now, after a summer of spiraling tensions, their governments are locked in a tighter embrace, voicing their shared animus toward the American hegemon that looms over their own perceived spheres of influence.

This week, Zhang Hanhui, China’s ambassador to Moscow, attacked the United States for supposedly stoking the conflict in Ukraine. “As the initiator and main instigator of the Ukrainian crisis, Washington, while imposing unprecedented comprehensive sanctions on Russia, continues to supply arms and military equipment to Ukraine,” Zhang told Russian state news agency Tass. “Their ultimate goal is to exhaust and crush Russia with a protracted war and the cudgel of sanctions.”

Earlier, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, had lambasted Washington for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan. “This is not a line aimed at supporting freedom and democracy,” Peskov said. “This is pure provocation. It’s necessary to call such steps what they really are.”

stranded assets. That's how business people refer to these vast, idling industrial infrastructures. It's abandoned property that will have to be written off in a company's balance sheets before the end of its planned lifetime.

Germany has been twisting and turning over its phaseout of coal and lignite power plants over the past five years. Originally, it planned to stop using coal in its energy mix in 2038. Then the current government accelerated that goal by eight years to 2030. Recently, some politicians have called that decision into question.

The earlier phaseout plan could lose operating companies €11.6 billion ($12.5 billion), according to a 2022 study by Dresden University.

Energy experts said that Mr. Biden missed an opportunity to connect the war in Ukraine to the need to more swiftly sever an economic reliance on fossil fuels. “The president did not articulate the long-term opportunity for the U.S. to lead the world in breaking free of the geopolitical nightmare that is oil dependency,” said Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser to the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

In exposing the enormous leverage that Russia has enjoyed with its energy exports, the Ukraine conflict is forcing European leaders to make some urgent choices: Should it build new fossil fuel infrastructure so that it can replace Russian fuel with liquefied natural gas from elsewhere, chiefly the United States? Or should it shift away from fossil fuels faster?

A draft of the report, reviewed by The New York Times, suggests that the new strategy will propose speeding up energy efficiency measures and renewable energy installations. It views imports of liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., from the United States and elsewhere as a short term measure to offset Russian piped gas.

China’s investment-driven, debt-heavy development model needs replacement. Its geopolitical and economic position will become more precarious if the globe’s authoritarian and liberal democratic blocs decouple, a threat made vivid by the war in Ukraine. Its demographics will be a drag on growth

Adam sees reasons for hope:

Similarly, the Chinese state’s recent intervention in the tech sector, while it has led to market volatility, is aimed at doing exactly what western regulators want to do, but can’t seem to do: stop huge companies from extracting monopoly rents from the economy.