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Europe's populist movements are on the cusp of sweeping far-right, nationalist and euroskeptic parties into power across the continent in a series of upcoming elections

he revolving door swung against current Prime Minister Matteo Renzi Sunday, when voters rejected his proposed changes to the country's constitution

Experts say that if Grillo comes to power, he'll likely follow through on promises to call a referendum to scrap the euro, reintroduce the Italian lira, and perhaps even follow Britain out of the European Union

BAGHDAD Iraqi special forces swept through the campus of Mosul University on Sunday to clear it of any remaining Islamic State militants after taking full control of the area, a spokesman said.

"The university is completely liberated and forces are sweeping the complex for any hiding militants," CTS spokesman Sabah al-Numan told Reuters by phone on Sunday. "Most buildings are booby-trapped so we're being cautious."

Loss of Mosul could spell the end of the Iraqi side of IS's self-styled caliphate, which it declared from the city after sweeping through vast areas of Iraq and Syria.

Canada election: Liberals sweep to power

The centrist Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, started the campaign in third place but in a stunning turnaround now command a majority.

During the 11-week election campaign, the Liberal Party said it would:

You could say that Hungary was already “immunocompromised.” A decade under the nation’s illiberal nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has corroded the state’s checks and balances, cowed the judiciary, enfeebled civil society and the free press, and reconfigured electoral politics to the advantage of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Budapest’s ailing democracy proved all too vulnerable.

On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a controversial bill that gave Orban sweeping emergency powers for an indefinite period of time. Parliament is closed, future elections were called off, existing laws can be suspended and the prime minister is now entitled to rule by decree. Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.

The measures were invoked as part of the government’s response to the global pandemic. Hungary had reported close to 450 cases as of Monday evening, and Orban has already cast the threat of the virus in politically convenient terms, labeling it a menace carried by unwelcome foreign migrants and yet more justification for his aggressive efforts to police the country’s borders.

Senate Republicans, under pressure to pass a sweeping tax rewrite before year’s end, are expected to unveil legislation on Thursday that would eliminate the ability of people to deduct state and local taxes but would stop short of fully repealing the estate tax, according to lobbyists and other people familiar with the bill.

The Senate plan is taking shape as Republicans digest the drubbing they suffered on Tuesday night in affluent suburbs across the country, many of them represented by Republicans in the House.

Those areas are stocked with well-off voters who would be disproportionately hit by the elimination of state and local tax deductions.

Georgia's state Senate on Monday passed an election bill that would repeal no-excuse absentee voting, among other sweeping changes in the critical swing state.

The legislation, which has been championed by state Republican lawmakers, passed in 29-20. It now heads to the Georgia House of Representatives

Under SB 241, voters would need to be 65 years old or older, absent from their precinct, observing a religious holiday, be required to provide constant care for someone with a physical disability, or required to work "for the protection of the health, life, or safety of the public during the entire time the polls are open," or be an overseas or military voter to qualify for an absentee ballot.

Senate Republicans made a $928 billion counteroffer to President Joe Biden's sweeping infrastructure proposal Thursday morning as one of the President's closest advisers rallies allies to embrace the White House's proposals.

The group of Senate Republicans negotiating with Biden on infrastructure unveiled their latest infrastructure counter-proposal Thursday morning, just ahead of the latest effort from the President to put the spotlight back on his sweeping economic agenda. The offer falls short of the $1 trillion that Senate Republicans had said Biden was open to during their White House negotiations.

The President said Thursday that he plans to meet with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican who's leading the Senate GOP's negotiating team, next week about the counteroffer.

Democrats pulled off a dramatic, last-ditch walkout in the Texas House of Representatives on Sunday night to block one of the most restrictive voting laws in the United States from passing before a midnight deadline.

The sudden revolt torpedoed the sweeping measure known as Senate Bill 7, which would have reduced polling hours, empowered poll watchers and scaled back ways to vote in Texas, which already has some of the nation's strictest voting laws.

For Democrats, the victory may be fleeting: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who had declared new voting laws in Texas a priority, quickly announced that he would order lawmakers back to the state Capitol for a special session. He did not, however, say when that would happen.

a pandemic that may be approaching its peak, an economic catastrophe that’s nowhere near its end, a nation more nastily divided than at any point in his career, a Democratic Party whose lidded tensions could boil over at any moment, and an opponent who, if defeated, would not go gently and would command his conspiracy-minded followers to rage in concert with him.

“Biden may see the most complicated set of problems in several generations,”

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the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.

an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies.

Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.

Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

For almost all of the past 60 years, liberals have been in a near-constant emotional state of despair, punctuated only by brief moments of euphoria and occasional rage. When they’re not in charge, things are so bleak they threaten to move to Canada; it’s almost more excruciating when they do win elections, and their presidents fail in essentially the same ways: He is too accommodating, too timid, too unwilling or unable to inspire the populace.

Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it. By that standard, Obama’s first term would indeed seem to qualify as gangsta shit.

Candidate Kennedy’s purpose was simply to express sympathy to Coretta Scott King over her husband’s plight. Many of his aides opposed the call as likely to lose votes in the South. But King was released from jail shortly afterwards, and reports of Kennedy’s concern energized African-Americans. Many historians feel it shifted crucial votes in Northern states away from Richard Nixon to give JFK his razor-thin victory.

They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences.Early in his administration, President Kennedy did not want to be seen as too eager to press for such moves as equal housing and voting protection for minorities, even though he saw such changes as inevitable. King was not invited to his inauguration or to an initial meeting of civil rights figures in the Oval Office

In June 1963, Kennedy unveiled sweeping civil rights legislation. Among other things, it promised the right to vote to all citizens with a grade-school education, and eliminated legal discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels and restaurants.Kennedy remained hesitant to embrace the nation’s most prominent civil rights figure, however. In part this was due to allegations that a key King aide had communist ties, as well as the FBI’s notorious surveillance of King, which produced evidence of womanizing.The FBI’s file on King’s sex life was dauntingly thick, Berl L. Bernhard, staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights from 1958 to 1963, said in an oral history at the Kennedy Library.“I do think the president was aware of it, and I know [darn] well some people in the administration were aware of it,” Mr. Bernhard said.Kennedy himself had numerous affairs, of course. It’s unknown how he felt about the juxtaposition of his own recklessness with the King allegations.In the summer of 1963 the administration was worried about the upcoming March on Washington to highlight civil rights. Unable to stop the planning, the White House recruited white union and labor groups to participate, to counter criticism that whites were not interested in sweeping civil rights changes.

Pope Francis on Thursday called for a radical transformation of politics, economics and individual lifestyles to confront environmental degradation and climate change, blending a biting critique of consumerism and irresponsible development with a plea for swift and unified global action.

He describes relentless exploitation and destruction of the environment and says apathy, the reckless pursuit of profits, excessive faith in technology and political shortsightedness are to blame.

He places most of the blame on fossil fuels and human activity, while warning of an “unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequence for all of us” if corrective action is not taken swiftly. Developed, industrialized countries were mostly responsible, he says, and are obligated to help poorer nations confront the crisis.

YANGON, Myanmar — The opposition party of the Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said on Monday that it was confident of a sweeping victory in the country’s landmark nationwide elections, while the ruling military-backed party acknowledged its poor showing.

“Nationwide, we got over 70 percent,” said U Win Htein, a senior member of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, cautioning that the results were not yet official. But, he added, “We can call this a landslide victory.”

The first official results released on Monday afternoon showed the opposition nearly sweeping seats in Yangon, the country’s largest city. Even a torrential downpour could not bring down the spirits of a crowd of opposition supporters, who cheered and sang as they watched the results on a giant TV screen outside the party’s headquarters here.

Jeremy Corbyn is expected to bolster his dominance of Labour’s key decision-making body on Monday with the election of three leftwing candidates, paving the way for party changes that may include the reselection of MPs.

The balance of the NEC has been in Corbyn’s favour since the unexpectedly positive result in last June’s election but the changes should give him a large majority on the body

“They are in the strongest position possible if they go out and engage with members regularly. They can sign up people who support them. Often the agitators are only a handful of individuals.”

there is one man who stands out from the general level of mediocrity, a King who tried with some success to arrest the decadence—Charles III, King of Spain, 1759-1788

This zeal for the general welfare of his people brought him into rough conflict with the two main powers in the land; the nobility and the clergy

Philip had to withdraw his abdication; but the bouts of insanity continued, and Isabella Farnese became de facto ruler of the country

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed into law a sweeping voting measure that proponents said is necessary to shore up confidence in the state’s elections but that critics countered will lead to longer lines, partisan control of elections and more difficult procedures for voters trying to cast their ballots by mail.

President Donald Trump attacked without evidence the integrity of election results in six states he lost, including Georgia.

The 95-page law also strips authority from the secretary of state, making him a nonvoting member of the State Election Board, and allows lawmakers to initiate takeovers of local election boards — measures that critics said could allow partisan appointees to slow down or block election certification or target heavily Democratic jurisdictions, many of which are in the Atlanta area and are home to the state’s highest concentrations of Black and Brown voters.

Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.

The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.

"What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.

Republicans in Georgia sped a sweeping elections bill into law Thursday, making it the first presidential battleground to impose new voting restrictions following President Joe Biden's victory in the state.

The bill passed both chambers of the legislature in the span of a few hours

Kemp, who is up for reelection next year, had refused to give in to former President Donald Trump's demands last year that he overturn Biden's victory -- earning Trump's public condemnation.