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Thousands of refugee children like him find ways to pass the time as they wait to cross the border from Greece into Macedonia.

More than 12,000 people are stranded here in Idomeni, as borders across Europe have slowly been shutting in the face of those most vulnerable and fleeing from atrocities.

They sleep in hundreds of little brightly colored tents that have popped up on fields along the border, now demarcated by a double concertina wire fence.

A Swedish Girl, ISIS and a Cautionary Tale of Global Terrorism

Europe has been troubled for several years by the number of its young people who have run off to join the Islamic State, and is increasingly concerned about the potential for them to come home to carry out terrorist acts in their native countries

Senior Kurdish officials say she was rescued on Feb. 17 by Kurdish special forces without a shot being fired. The officials said they were able to locate her using information derived from her occasional use of the Internet, but they offered no details.

Danish children’s rights activist stands trial for people trafficking

The trial on Friday of a high-profile Danish campaigner for children’s rights under people trafficking laws promises to shine a spotlight once more on the country’s crackdown on asylum, as Scandinavian countries compete to make themselves unattractive destinations for refugees.

The trial is one of the first of hundreds of Danes who responded in early September to the thousands of refugees who walked from Germany into Denmark, many of them on their way to Sweden where the asylum regime at the time was more relaxed.

The largest group of world leaders ever to stand together kicked off two weeks of high-stakes climate talks outside Paris on Monday, saying that striking an ambitious deal to curb global warming can show terrorists what countries can achieve when they are united.

The U.N.-organized gathering of 151 heads of state and government comes at a somber time for France, two weeks after militants linked to the Islamic State group killed 130 people around Paris. Fears of more attacks prompted extra-high security and a crackdown on environmental protests.

The conference is aimed at the most far-reaching deal ever to tackle global warming. The last major agreement, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, required only rich countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions, and the U.S. never signed on. Since then, global temperatures and sea levels have continued to rise, and the Earth has seen an extraordinary run of extreme weather.

At a moment when France, in cooperatin with Britain, is negotiating with Germany with a view to lessening the restrictions which the treaty of Versailles placed upon her aviation-activities. French officials are concerned to learn of a further effort on the part of the Reich to build up just outside the borders of the country a formidable chain of German aviation factories.

But Europe never joined. The task of absorbing the migrants has been left to Germany and Sweden

so far identified are mostly Moroccan or Algerian, not Syrian. There really is a cultural gulf between rich, liberal, secular

Europe and some of the countries from which recent migrants come

Nordic nations have produced what is, by any metric, an impressive output of successful entrepreneurs, international businesses, and brands. Sweden has Ikea, H&M, Spotify, and Volvo, to name a few. From Denmark have come Lego, Carlsberg, and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Novo Nordisk. A Swede and a Dane co-founded the video calling service Skype. The core programming code of Linux—the leading operating system running on the world’s servers and supercomputers—was developed by a Finn. The Finnish company Nokia was the world’s largest mobile phone maker for more than a decade. And newer players like Finland’s Supercell and Rovio, creators of the ubiquitous video games Clash of Clans and Angry Birds, or Sweden’s Mojang, the publisher of the equally popular video game Minecraft, are changing the face of online gaming.

Nordic countries are well-ranked when it comes to helping facilitate starting a business. At the most basic level, what the Nordic approach does is reduce the risk of starting a company, since basic services such as education and health care are covered for regardless of the fledgling company’s fate. In addition, companies themselves are freed from the burdens of having to offer such services for their employees at the scale American companies do. And if the entrepreneur succeeds, they are rewarded by tax rates on capital gains that are lower than the rate on wages.

as capitalist economies the Nordic countries have proven that capitalism works better when it’s accompanied by smart, universal social policies that are in everyone’s self-interest.

the biggest story in the Swedish election, as in so many other Western elections lately, was fragmentation and its daughter stalemate — with declining or discredited parties of the center facing off against forces on the right and left that create majorities or near-majorities of opposition, but not of governance.

Meanwhile the left is energized as never in my lifetime, while the center-left seems bankrupt, dazed and paranoid. But the thesis that a populist left can win elections consistently, let alone govern a country that has so far responded to a more ideologically liberal Democratic Party by voting more often for Republicans, has been confirmed only in the imaginations of Jacobin subscribers

The question is how long this situation can last. It might be that the current stalemate is just a transitional phase, a necessary step on the path from one order to another, and that at some point a group of politicians will figure out how to channel populist energy into a program or coalition that can make Western countries governable again.

e has persisted and produced an intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it. We continue to live with the consequences of both today.

By 2007, many were warning about a dangerous fragility in the system. But they worried about America’s gargantuan government deficits and debt

it was not a Chinese sell-off of American debt that triggered the crash, but rather, as Tooze writes, a problem “fully native to Western capitalism — a meltdown on Wall Street driven by toxic securitized subprime mortgages.”

Finland has topped an index of the happiest nations for the second consecutive year, with researchers saying the small Nordic country of 5.5 million has succeeded in generating a happiness recipe for a balanced life not simply dependent on economic and material wealth.

The index, published Wednesday, showed the other Nordic countries did well again this year, with Denmark, Norway and Iceland taking the next spots. The remaining top ten nations were The Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada and Austria.

The United States dropped from the 18th to 19th plac

the stage is set for a clash between a protectionist America and a free-trading Germany.

demanded the renegotiation of another, the North American Free-Trade Agreement.

He is weighing whether to impose tariffs on steel imports into America, a move that would almost certainly provoke retaliation.

“We socialists are trying to save capitalism, and the damned capitalists won’t let us.” Political scientist Mason B. Williams cited this cheeky but accurate comment by New Deal lawyer Jerome Frank to make a point easily lost in the new war on socialism that President Trump has launched: Socialism goes back a long way in the United States, and it has taken doses of it to keep the market system alive.

there would be no social reform, ever, if those seeking change were too timid to go big and allowed cries of “socialism” to intimidate them.

Young Americans especially are far more likely to associate “socialism” with generous social insurance states than with jackboots and gulags. Sweden, Norway and Denmark are anything but frightening places.

the third major war of Louis XIV of France, in which his expansionist plans were blocked by an alliance led by England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Austrian Habsburgs

the epileptic and partly insane king Charles II, was unable to produce heirs

the Austrian Habsburgs, headed by the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I

Children and teens are generally more likely to accept the scientific consensus — widespread agreement — about humanity’s role in climate change

Many kids also worry about how the impacts of climate change are expected to only worsen.

For example, 14 year-old Milou Albrecht is an activist. Since last year, she has been one of the leaders of Australia’s school strikes for climate change. The movement began with activist Greta Thunberg, a teen in Sweden. Milou says taking part feels “empowering.”

glories of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), ‘that short period of our History, which contains so many illustrious Actions

The most significant of these actions were in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13, Britain not involved until 1702), as the European powers jostled for control of the Spanish empire following the death of the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II, in 1700. On July 23rd, 1704, British naval forces captured Gibraltar and held out against Franco-Spanish attempts to regain it, while a few weeks later on August 13th, John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, heavily defeated a Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in Bavaria

The Blenheim campaign was crucial in preventing French hegemony in western Europe. Allied with Britain and the Dutch against France, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (r.1658-1705) was central to the struggle on the European mainland as his defeat would have allowed the French to dominate both Germany and northern Italy and to concentrate against the Anglo-Dutch efforts in the Low Countries and the lower Rhineland

The Habsburgs, a family of aristocrats originating in modern Switzerland, ruled the Holy Roman Empire and then the Austrian Empire for over 600 years

The first true collector among the Habsburgs was Ferdinand I (1503-64)

Rudolf II (1552-1612), the grandson of Ferdinand I, made the Kunstkammer internationally famous

James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, fades out of history after their confrontation with the Scottish rebels at Carberry Hill.

So long as she was alive, whether at liberty or in close custody, she was a political force of great danger to Elizabeth

The Catholics supported Mary; the Protestants were mostly against her.

One of the most extraordinary events of the 16th century was the election in 1573 of a French prince to the throne of Poland. The prince was Henri, the third son of Henry II of France.

Catherine’s two eldest sons, François and Charles, were kings of France successively. Henri also succeeded to that throne in 1574. Their sister, Marguerite, became queen of Navarre by marrying the future Henri IV of France in 1572

The Polish throne, unusually, was elective. Since 1386 the election had been in practice limited to members of the Jagiellon dynasty, but now, for the first time, it was to be free. Five candidates offered themselves including John III of Sweden, Ivan IV, Tsar of Muscovy, the Archduke Ernest, son of the Emperor Maximilian II, and Henri, Duke of Anjou

Their reigns were crucial for the solid establishment of the constitutional and political conventions and practices known as the Revolution Settlement after James II and VII’s replacement by William III in 1689. The legislation that made it up (which included the 1701 Act of Settlement enshrining the claim to the British throne of Sophia of Hanover, mother of the future George I was passed from 1689, but much of the political settlement was not solidified until after 1714

Although the consequences of this new polity were less dramatic than those stemming from the personal union of England and Scotland under James VI and I in 1603, this had been by no means clear when the new dynastic personal union was created

Both George I and George II sought to use British resources to help secure gains for Hanover. George I sought to win territories  from the partition of the Swedish empire and to place a westward limit on the expansion of Russian power under Peter the Great. George II pursued Hanoverian territorial interests in neighbouring principalities, especially in Mecklenburg, East Friesland and Osnabrück