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The first was Isabella, eldest daughter of cosovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella and widow of John II’s heir.

Manuel and Isabella became heirs to the Spanish crowns on her brother’s death. They visited Toledo and Saragossa to receive oaths of allegiance in 1498, but the possibility of the union of the crowns ended when Isabella died in the same year while giving birth to their son Miguel, who died in infancy.

Manuel married Eleanor of Austria, sister of the emperor Charles V, in 1518, and had one daughter by this marriage. He died at Lisbon in 1521 and was buried in the Jerónimos monastery.

The victory of John I may be regarded as a triumph of the national spirit over the feudal attachment to established order. Because much of the older nobility sided with Castile, John rewarded his followers at their expense and the crown’s. Meanwhile, commerce prospered, and the marriage of John’s daughter Isabella to Philip III (the Good) of Burgundy was to be followed by the growth of close trading relations between Portugal and Philip’s county of Flanders.

In 1437, during the short reign of John’s eldest son, Edward (Duarte; 1433–38), an unsuccessful attempt to conquer Tangier was made by John’s third son, Prince Henry the Navigator, and his younger brother Ferdinand (who was captured by the Moors and died, still unransomed, in 1443). Edward’s son Afonso V (1438–81) was still a child when Edward died, and Edward’s brother Pedro, duke of Coimbra (Dom Pedro), had himself made regent (1440) instead of the widow, Leonor of Aragon.

Having married Joan, daughter of Henry IV of Castile, Afonso laid claim to the Castilian throne and became involved in a lengthy struggle with Ferdinand and Isabella in the region of Zamora and Toro, where he was defeated in 1476. He then sailed to France in a failed attempt to enlist the support of Louis XI, and on his return he concluded with Castile the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479), abandoning the claims of his wife. Afonso never recovered from his reverse, and during his last years his son John administered the kingdom.

John II (1481–95) was as cautious, firm, and jealous of royal power as his father had been openhanded and negligent.

his forces departed in June 1578 and on August 4 were utterly destroyed by the Moors in the Battle of the Three Kings near Alcazarquivir (Ksar el-Kebir). Sebastian and some 8,000 of his forces were killed, some 15,000 were captured, and only a handful escaped.

As a condition of his marriage to Isabella, Manuel was required to “purify” Portugal of Jews. After Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, John II had admitted many Jewish refugees; he had taxed the Jews heavily but was also to supply ships for them to leave Portugal.

If Manuel failed to realize his dream of ruling Spain, his son John III (1521–57) lacked the power to resist Castilian influence.

In 1529 the settlement by the Treaty of Zaragoza (Saragossa) of a dispute over the possession of the Moluccas (an island group part of present-day Indonesia) removed an obstacle to Portuguese-Spanish understanding, and the line dividing Portuguese and Spanish interests in the New World (established by the Treaty of Tordesillas) was matched by a similar line in the Pacific.

John III was succeeded by his grandson Sebastian (1557–78), then only three years old. As a child Sebastian became obsessed with the idea of a Crusade against Morocco.

Predeceased by his legitimate son, John II was succeeded by his cousin the duke of Beja, as Manuel I (1495–1521), known as “the Fortunate.” Manuel, who assumed the title of “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of India, Ethiopia, Arabia, and Persia,” inherited, because of the work of John II, a firmly established autocratic monarchy and a rapidly expanding overseas empire. Drawn toward Spain by the common need to defend their overseas interests as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Manuel nourished the hope that the whole peninsula could be united under the house of Aviz; to that end he married Isabella, eldest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. However, she died in 1498 while giving birth to a son, Miguel da Paz. This child, recognized as heir to Portugal, Castile, and Aragon, died in infancy. Manuel then married Isabella’s sister Maria (died 1517) and eventually Eleanor, sister of the emperor Charles V.

Sebastian was succeeded by his great-uncle, Cardinal Henry (1578–80), a brother of John III. His age and celibacy made it certain that the Portuguese throne would soon pass from the direct line of Aviz. Philip II of Spain, nephew of John III and husband (by his first marriage) of John’s daughter Maria

France has been under a state of emergency since IS attacks on Paris in November killed 130 people in what President Francois Hollande called an "act of war".

It questioned the deployment of between 6,000 and 7,000 soldiers to protect schools, synagogues, department stores and other sensitive sites.

Security is a central issue in the run-up to next year's presidential election but Mr Valls said proposals by the former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to set up special courts and detention centres were not the answer.

"Every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must by preventively placed in a detention centre,"

Meanwhile, prosecutors charged one of the women arrested over a foiled attack near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said on Friday that Ornella G's fingerprints had been found inside the car. She was known to intelligence agents as someone who was considering going to Syria.

The Roman Catholics, however, condemned the Augsburg Confession—the basic confession of the Lutheran doctrine faith presented to Charles at the Diet of Augsburg—and responded with the Confutation, which met with Charles’s approval.

In 1526 Charles married Isabella, the daughter of the late king Manuel I of Portugal.

In 1522 his teacher Adrian of Utrecht became pope, as Adrian VI. His efforts to reconcile Francis I and the emperor failed, and three years later Charles’s army defeated Francis I at the Battle of Pavia, taking prisoner the king himself.

Although Ferdinand, having lost his Hungarian capital in August 1541, pleaded for a land campaign against Süleyman I, Charles again decided on a naval venture, which failed dismally after an unsuccessful attack on Algiers.

North Germany was now on the brink of revolt. The new king of France, Henry II, was eagerly awaiting an opportunity to renew the old rivalry between the houses of Valois and Burgundy, while the German princes believed that the moment was at hand to repay Charles for Mühlberg.

In order to save what he could of that hegemony, Charles, already severely racked by gout, tried new paths by preparing the ground for his widowed son’s marriage with Mary I of England.

There he laid the groundwork for the eventual bequest of Portugal to the Habsburgs after the eventual death of King Sebastian (who was then still a child) with the help of his sister Catherine, grandmother of Sebastian and regent of Portugal. He aided his son in procuring funds in Spain for the continuation of the war against France, and he helped his daughter Joan, regent of Spain during Philip’s absence in the Netherlands, in persecuting Spanish heretics.

He was a man that believed in Mexico,” said Jesse, who left Mexico as an undocumented migrant aged 14 and is now a US citizen. “He chose to stay here because he thought that he could change things, you know?

The disappeared are perhaps the dirtiest secret of Mexico’s drug conflict, which has shown no sign of easing since leftist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power last December promising a new era of peace.

In August Mexican authorities, who after years of public pressure are beginning to demonstrate greater interest in investigating such crimes, acknowledged over 3,000 clandestine burial sites. More than 500 had been discovered since López Obrador took power.

As Jesse marched on – shadowed by a rifle-toting police agent – the hidden perils that lay behind his brother’s disappearance became clear. Pickup trucks, apparently sent by cartel bosses to monitor the search party, rattled past on the country lane down which José’s abductors fled. “These assholes are halcones,” Jesse complained, using the Spanish slang word for lookouts.

This kind of activism is about patience, not speed

“We all have the same goal, which is finding our missing ones,” said Ocegueda who became a campaigner after his own son was taken, in 2007, and has recovered more than 120 bodies since.

Some experts believe there is still far more to come, the result in Spain of a political structure that puts huge power in the hands of local officials. Many of them can grant procurement contracts or rezone land with little or no consultation.

experts say that the concentration of power in the hands of regional and municipal officials and their ties to the local savings banks created ideal conditions for corruption in the construction boom years.

“Over a lunch, they can decide that you are going to make 100 million euros,” around $131 million, said Manuel Villoria, a professor of political science at the University of Juan Carlos in Madrid, who is writing a report on Spanish corruption for the European Union. “So, they could ask for what they wanted. It often wasn’t for them. It was an apartment for a daughter or for a sister’s children.

Unlike in Greece, corruption is not a way of life in Spain. Most Spaniards go about their daily business without ever paying a bribe.

There are so many scandals that some newspapers have taken to organizing all but the biggest developments in a quick-list format, rather than writing whole articles.

Already there is talk of overhauling the country’s party financing and transparency laws, increasing sentences for corruption and strengthening the independence of auditors. At the same time, many experts say more needs to be done to bolster an underfinanced judicial system, which allows many corruption cases to go unresolved for years.

The exclusion happens by omission, in the course of telling a story about America that’s powerful but incomplete.

In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions

Given this story’s premises, saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended.

But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built their a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.

Then for a variety of reasons — a necessary reckoning with white supremacism, a new and diverse wave of immigration, the pull of a more globalist ethos, the waning of institutional religion — that mid-century story stopped making as much sense.

As late as the 1960s, liberalism as well as conservatism identified with these particularisms, and with a national narrative that honored and included them. The exhortations of civil rights activists assumed a Christian moral consensus.

Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

n its place emerged a left-wing narrative that stands in judgment on the racist-misogynist-robber baron past, and a mainstream liberal narrative that has room for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton (as opposed to the slightly more Trumpish genuine article) and Emma Lazarus, but feels unsure about the rest.

meanwhile for a great many Americans the older narrative still feels like the real history. They still see themselves more as settlers than as immigrants, identifying with the Pilgrims and the Founders, with Lewis and Clark and Davy Crockett and Laura Ingalls Wilder. They still embrace the Iliadic mythos that grew up around the Civil War, prefer the melting pot to multiculturalism, assume a Judeo-Christian civil religion rather the “spiritual but not religious” version.

Trump’s ascent is, in part, an attempt to restore their story to pre-eminence. It’s a restoration attempt that can’t succeed, because the country has changed too much, and because that national narrative required correction.

But so far we haven’t found a way to correct the story while honoring its full sweep — including all the white-male-Protestant-European protagonists to whom, for all their sins, we owe so much of our inheritance.

Instead liberalism, under pressure from the left, has become steadily more anxious about its political and cultural progenitors, with Woodrow Wilson joining Jackson and Jefferson in the dock

Meanwhile the right’s narrative has become steadily more exclusionary — religious-conservative outreach to Muslims has given way to Islamophobia, racial optimism has been replaced by white resentment.

Maybe no unifying story is really possible. Maybe the gap between a heroic founders-and-settlers narrative and the truth about what befell blacks and Indians and others cannot be adequately bridged.

But any leader who wants to bury Trumpism (as opposed to just beating Trump) would need to reach for one — for a story about who we are and were, not just what we’re not, that the people who still believe in yesterday’s American story can recognize as their own.

right, including traditional bastions like Limoges, which the left had held since 1912, and several other midsize cities.

In the elections on Sunday, the Socialist Party lost 155 cities to parties on the

“This vote, as much on a local level as on the national level, is a defeat for the government and the majority,” Mr. Ayrault said in an uncharacteristically frank statement on Sunday. “I think we have not done enough to explain that the recovery efforts undertaken since 2012 were essential for the future of our country.”

Voter abstention, at close to 40 percent, reached the highest rate on record. Opinion polling suggested a broad rejection of the French ruling elite, which is increasingly viewed as detached from the concerns of the population it governs.

One bright spot for the Socialist Party was in Paris, where its candidate, Anne Hidalgo, was elected the first female mayor.

speedy return to economic prosperity and reinforced social protections. But he quickly lowered his ambitions and said he had underestimated the dire state of France’s public finances. More recently, he was unable to make good on a pledge to stop the rise in unemployment by the end of 2013.

Mr. Ayrault, the outgoing prime minister, was viewed by voters and commentators alike as a bit bland and lacking energy. By contrast, Mr. Valls is intense and sometimes fiery. There has been little indication, however, that the change in leadership will be much more than cosmetic, and most policies are expected to remain the same, with the exception of the future tax cuts announced Monday. Other members of the new government have yet to be announced.

The crisis and its aftermath presented a major challenge to President François Hollande and his government, which are facing deep religious and cultural rifts in a nation with a rapidly growing Muslim population while simultaneously coping with the security threats stemming from Islamic extremists. Large numbers of French citizens have been traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Mr. Hollande, appealing for unity, has warned against seeing Muslims as the enemy, and Mr. Valls called again on Saturday for citizens to join the rally planned for Sunday.

“The world is concerned over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and as a member of the U.N., the Philippines has to do its part to enforce the sanctions,” Manuel L. Quezon III, a member of the president’s communications team, told a government-run radio station on Saturday.

The Philippine Coast Guard searched the vessel on Friday and found no prohibited items. Only minor safety violations, including missing fire hoses and exposed wiring, were discovered.

In 2008, the police seized 700 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, with an estimated value of more than $100 million, in Subic Bay that drug enforcement officials at the time said was produced in North Korea.

Trump is a man repeatedly underestimated by the very elites who made Trumpism possible. He’s smarter than most of his belittlers, and quicker on his feet, which makes him only more dangerous.

He’s the anti-Obama, all theater where the president is all prudence, the mouth-that-spews to the presidential teleprompter, rage against reason, the backslapper against the maestro of aloofness, the rabble-rouser to the cerebral law professor, the deal maker to the diligent observer.

The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has tweeted that Trump “fuels hatred.” In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has attacked Trump’s proposed ban on non-American Muslims entering the United States, and more than half a million people have signed a petition urging that he be kept out of Britain. This weekend Britain's Sunday Times ran a page-size photo of Trump in Lord Kitchener pose with a blaring headline:

As Europe knows, democracies do die. Often, they are the midwives of their own demise. Once lost, the cost of recovery is high.

Oil prices dropped from over $100 a barrel in 2014 to just about $35 a barrel today. That's about the same amount it costs to produce a barrel, meaning right now oil producers are making nothing. Natural gas prices are down to their lowest levels in 16 years.

Thanks to new technologies, mostly fracking, which allows producers to extract gas and oil from rocks thousands of feet below the surface of the earth with a mix of high-pressured water and chemicals, production of oil skyrocketed from about 5,000 barrels a day in 2008 to 8,700 in 2014.

On New Year's Eve a Bahamian tanker called the "Theo T" cruised out of Corpus Christi, Texas with the first batch of crude oil to leave US shores in four decades, thanks to the budget bill that enabled it.

The short answer: politics. Without throwing a bone to oil-backed Congresspeople, the budget bill last month would have likely been blocked.

The other problem is leakage: Natural gas has been touted by Obama as a "bridge fuel" to get the world off of coal and other dirtier fuels. But it's only better than coal if the vast majority of it doesn't leak into the atmosphere before being burned.

negate any of its climate benefits,

But it's slightly more clear what oil exports will do: one analysis found exports will allow for 3.3 million more barrels a day of oil to be produced in the US between 2015 and 2035.

"We're already on the frontlines of oil and gas production," Raleigh Hoke, an activist with the Gulf Restoration Network, which works with communities affected by oil and gas in Louisiana, told VICE over the phone. "There are already 28 export facilities being constructed along the coast, so that means countless new pipelines through people's backyards, new trains carrying oil which are dangerous, and it hinders our efforts to restore our wetlands."

"Frankly we just have to wait until November," Athan Manuel, an organizer at the Sierra Club, told VICE. "And then hope we have an anti-fossil fuel Senate and an anti-fossil fuel President."

His insistence on continuing the reconquista (the Christian reconquest of Iberia from its Islamic rulers) into Morocco led not only to his death but ultimately to the end of the House of Aviz

There were several claimants to the throne, all with equally legitimate claims

When King D. Henrique ruled following the death of King D. Sebastião, his [great] nephew

All were grandchildren of King D. Manuel I

The person in the strongest position (geographically, financially and strategically) to inherit was Philip II of Castile

invade Portugal

I inherited it, I bought it, and I conquered it

one individual and his bold attacks caught the attention of the king and his ministers. Sir Francis Drake, hero to the English and infamous pirate to the Spanish

Drake had exposed the Spanish Pacific ports to attack – a major flaw in Spanish defences

The way to stop future Drakes from entering the Pacific was to fortify the Strait of Magellan, which is what Philip II and his advisers decided to do

Philip dispatched Diego Flores de Valdés as the Captain-General of a fleet that would fortify and settle the strait

The expulsion of Imam Doudi was recommended by the Marseille authorities under a French law regarding “deliberate acts tending to provoke discrimination, hatred and violence toward an individual or a group.”

Here and elsewhere in France, Salafism is increasingly seen as the enemy, a menacing way-station to terrorism. Five members of Imam Doudi’s flock left to fight jihad in Syria, the police say, though the imam denies knowing them.

His sermons are “exactly contrary to the values of the Republic,” said Marseille’s prefect of police, Olivier de Mazières, a terrorism specialist who has led the case against the cleric, in an interview in his office. “We think he’s preaching hatred, discrimination, violence.”

Mr. Geisser, the Islam expert, is among those who say that, if anything, Imam Doudi was known as a government stooge.“He was best known for having good relations with the security services,” Mr. Geisser said.“He thought that to collaborate was to be protected,” Mr. Geisser added. “He’s someone who stuck out his hand, and it ended up getting burned.”

“Scholars will tell you that Salafism does not lead to jihadism, sociologically,” he said. “You can get to jihadism without having passed through a Salafist mosque.”Those distinctions are being lost in a renewed wave of public anxiety in France, however.“We must forbid the spread of Salafism, because it’s the enemy,” the former prime minister Manuel Valls said in a radio interview last week.The newspaper Le Figaro said in a front-page editorial that “our country must launch a vast operation to eradicate Salafism.

While Imam Doudi acknowledges having once been a follower of Osama bin Laden and the radical Algerian leader Ali Belhadj, the preacher denied that he, or Salafism, was extremist.“Salafism is merely the reasonable middle ground between extremism and negligence. There are sects that pretend to be Salafist — Al Qaeda, Daesh — but are not,” Imam Doudi said. “These are extremists, and in our preaching we are opposed to them.”

“In the Quran, you’ll find verses justifying lapidation” — death by stoning — “and jihad,” Imam Doudi said. “Sooner or later, I’ll read them.”His lawyer, Nabil Boudi, supported the assertion. “It’s a formula you’ll hear in every sermon,” Mr. Boudi said. None of the phrases cited by the government explicitly justify terrorist attacks. Imam Doudi said he is resolutely against such assaults.

Scholars see a more ambiguous relationship between Salafism and jihad than the police do. “The source of radicalization is not Salafism,” Olivier Roy writes in the book “Jihad and Death. “There is a common matrix, but not a causal relationship.

“It could be dangerous for France,” said Fayçal Mansari, a mason, who called Imam Doudi “ a barrier” against Islamic radicals.“Very few people truly know Islam,” Mr. Mansari said. “If they get rid of a truly learned professor, people will find themselves disarmed.”

In the decades after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, about 1.4 million Cubans fled the island, many heading for the United States, where they transformed the social and ethnic fabric of Miami. During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 1 million people — more than a quarter of the population — were displaced during El Salvador’s civil war.

y, the growing Venezuelan diaspora is reshaping cities from Miami to Buenos Aires to Madrid. But most Venezuelan migrants are staying in Latin America, where countries are handling a dire situation in different ways.

Chávez’s handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.

Our migration levels are now comparable to Syria or to [the Rohingya going to] Bangladesh,”

leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, thousands of Venezuelans — especially from the upper classes — moved out of the country

Facing severe food and medical shortages at home, most have stocked up on supplies, or visited hospitals, before returning across the border.

Venezuelans have enjoyed access to special permits good for two years in Colombia’s border region, allowing them to stay up to seven days at a time.

bringing a dramatic surge across the border that reached a peak of 90,000 people a day in December. In early February, President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the issuing of new temporary visas and declared a massive militarization of the border.

The moves cut the daily flow almost in half — though critics say it has only motivated migrants to cross at dozens of illegal entry points along the border, putting them at risk of harm from guerrillas and criminal bands

Locals, meanwhile, are accusing the Venezuelans already here of harming the economy and driving up crime.

They come with fruit they buy for nothing in Venezuela and sell for prices here that I can’t compete with. They come here, killing and robbing Colombians. We need take our city back.”

The family had recently arrived from Venezuela. The little girl was malnourished and also had developed a life-threatening heart blockage. The hospital was petitioning national authorities for funds before proceeding with the costly operation.

Instead, he said, it was carrying out special operations designed to limit the number of Venezuelans without valid visas.

“Like any country, we need to have a safe and secure border,” Martinez said. But many Venezuelans weren’t able to get passports in their homeland because of the cost and long wait.

The operations are sending as many as 100 migrants a day back to Venezuela.

You have to go,” said a female officer. More than a dozen Colombian officers surrounded the thin Venezuelan. “I can’t,” Andie said, her voice breaking. “Please. I’m pregnant, and we won’t survive there.”

while casting aspersions on his uncle’s illegitimate birth, often to his face, Carlos must at times have envied Don Juan’s bastard lineage and sound health

Don Juan of Austria

Another promising candidate was the widowed Mary Stuart, who escaped only to marry the despicable Darnley

Due to the possibility of armed insurrection in the north, Philip decided to visit his rebellious provinces in person

He now became openly vindictive, unstable and sullen, given to insults and unprovoked attacks on imaginary enemies

The threat of a divided royal house, with a maleficent Carlos rallying rebel support to his cause, was totally unacceptable to Philip

his father obviously had every intention of supplanting his rancorous heir-apparent should God give him another son

he intended to leave for Germany and the Netherlands, with or without his father’s permission

he stumbled down a decrepit flight of stairs in the dark, fracturing his skull

The strained relationship between Philip and his only son continued to deteriorate, but despite disturbing signs of the young man’s mental instability, the King remained phlegmatic

The King’s extended absences gave Carlos considerable latitude to prepare his escape

His inability to hold his tongue proved to be Philip’s salvation though at dreadful cost

Carlos rashly confided to Don Juan of Austria that he intended to leave Spain within the next few days. After some initial hesitation, Don Juan rode out to the Escorial on Christmas Day and informed Philip of the Prince’s decision

Meanwhile, Philip had returned to Madrid and was kept fully informed of his son’s designs; incredibly, he still hesitated to act

King Philip and five members of the Council of State made their way to the Prince’s bedchamber. The ingenious system of bolts and locks, which could be operated from his bed, had secretly been dismantled; and the startled Carlos was quickly disarmed. He guiltily assumed they had come to assassinate him, especially when his father seized a document listing the Prince’s enemies, with the King’s name at the head

The King was soon inured to suffering and private tragedies, and came to regard the unfounded attacks of his enemies as part of the burden he had been called upon to bear

Carlos’ mental equilibrium had always been precarious; and now he began to experience hallucinations. No visitors were allowed, and the Prince was kept under close surveillance, though the conditions of his detention were not too onerous

His fragile health was unable to withstand such sustained abuse, and an early death soon became inevitable. Philip resigned himself to his loss, and found spiritual comfort in blessing his dying

The death of the successor to the throne under such mysterious circumstances naturally gave rise to the wildest conjecture

Reasons of state were hinted at, which were assumed to involve a far-flung conspiracy of the son against his obdurate father

Ferdinand’s upbringing was similar to that of the ill-fated Carlos. Born on October 14th, 1784 at the Escorial, the young prince received scant affection from his parents, Charles IV and Maria Luisa, who finally ascended the throne in 1788 after a frustrating wait of twenty-three years

his suspicious nature and resentment towards his parents being evident from an early age

did not deter the calculating priest from further poisoning his charge’s distrustful mind. Ferdinand’s hatred was especially directed against his mother, Queen Maria Luisa

Ferdinand’s fears were not imaginary. In 1795, at the conclusion of an unsuccessful war against revolutionary France, Godoy - the monarchs’ ‘querido Manuel’ - had incredibly been granted the vainglorious title of ‘Prince of the Peace’

Ferdinand justifiably suspected that some machination on the part of his mother and Godoy might prevent his succession to the throne. By late 1807 his situation had become desperate

If the men who surround (Charles IV) here would let him know the character of Your Majesty as I know it, with what desire would not my father seek to tighten the bonds which should unite our two nations

Having already removed Charles’ brother from the throne of Naples, the French Emperor watched the unseemly squabbling among the Spanish Bourbons with a calculating eye to the future

unilateral commitment to refuse to marry ‘whoever she may be, without the consent of Your Majesty from whom alone I await the selection of my bride

Ferdinand’s enthusiasm at being related to the French Emperor was such that Beauharnais suggested that the Prince approach Napoleon directly in writing. Not only is it incredible that the heir-apparent would dare to discuss marriage plans with a foreign head of state; but equally so is the abject tone of the letter

The state in which I have found myself for some time, and which could not be hidden from the great penetration of Your Majesty

But full of hope in finding in Your Majesty’s magnanimity the most powerful protection

persistent rumours that he might appoint himself Regent on the King’s death, spurred the Prince of Asturias to frantic measures

august

The subsequent crisis, though outwardly similar to the events of 1568, was wider in scope and more tragic in its consequences. King Philip, criticized by many for his dispassionate attitude, never forfeited the esteem or the sympathy of the nation. In 1807 the position was the exact reverse; Charles IV at best was pitied as a dupe, while Maria Luisa and her paramour were held responsible for reducing Spain to the role of Napoleon’s subservient ally

Did Napoleon instigate the scheme to sow further dissension within the Spanish royal family, or did Beauharnais initiate it on his own account

Napoleon was delighted to receive Ferdinand’s letter and immediately grasped its mischief-making potential

Charles IV discovered his son’s treasonous correspondence

Godoy whose spies were everywhere

The ensuing scenes are reminiscent of those of 1568. The King angrily entered his son’s room, and was soon in possession not only of the damaging correspondence - apparently the Prince’s terrified gaze betrayed its hiding place - but also of the cipher needed to transcribe the coded letters

The Queen was distraught that Godoy was ill with a fever in Madrid at such a critical moment

The following day Ferdinand was formally placed under arrest with a guard of twenty-four elite soldiers

warning him of Godoy’s boundless ambitions and greed, enumerating his supposed crimes, his abuse of power and the royal confidence, his corruption and immorality

The most damning assertion was that Godoy had besmirched the King’s name and delivered Spain to her enemies

patriots anxious to ensure the orderly succession to the throne in the event of the King’s death

who imagined they had come to deliver their beloved prince from the pernicious influence of the royal favourite

Godoy pointed out to the King that a family reconciliation was imperative to prevent Napoleon from dividing the Spanish royal family. The King stubbornly refused to pardon his son, but finally agreed to let Godoy act as intermediary

Godoy saw his opportunity, and easily prevailed upon the terrified Prince to pen contrite letters to his parents, fully admitting his guilt

The King, moved by paternal compassion, granted his son a royal pardon, but insisted nevertheless that the other ‘conspirators’ be brought to trial and a full enquiry be convened

As Godoy had foreseen, Ferdinand’s immense popularity throughout the nation and the patriotic motives of the accused could only work to the detriment of the Santa Trinidad, as the reigning monarchs and the favourite were caustically referred to by the common people

On January 25th, 1808, to the acclaim of the public and the barely contained fury of the royal couple, the defendants were declared innocent

From the outset Godoy had been opposed to the trial; but this was one of the rare occasions on which both monarchs disregarded his counsel. To compound the initial error

Ferdinand’s defence, based on his right of legitimate succession to the throne, is persuasive as offered by Escoiquiz and the others at their trial. But whatever the provocation and dangers -real or imagined-one cannot forgive Ferdinand’s clandestine appeal to the French Emperor at such a critical moment, when Spain was threatened from outside

Being a King, you know how sacred are the rights of the throne; any approach of an heir apparent to a foreign sovereign is criminal

Napoleon assumed that the conduct and moral fibre of the Spanish royal family was representative of the entire nation

In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived.

For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.

More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems. Today, dozens of states still have little to no legislation prohibiting juvenile solitary confinement.

But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.

Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive. Nearly two decades caged in a roughly 7-by-10-foot room passed before I was rotated between the general population area and solitary for six more years.

Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.

Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty

I was thrown into solitary confinement the day I arrived at the Reception and Medical Center, a state prison in Lake Butler, Fla., because of my young age.

I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television.

I served 18 consecutive years in isolation because each minor disciplinary infraction — like having a magazine that had another prisoner’s name on the mailing label — added an additional six months to my time in solitary confinement.

It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017.

No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity.

Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.

When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards.

In the meantime, prisoners in Florida like Darryl Streeter, inmate No. 514988, are forced to spend their lives in long-term isolation. He recently told me by phone that he’s been in solitary confinement for 24 consecutive years.

As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining.

I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to. Some things I’ve grown accustomed to. Some things I haven’t. And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.

has faced almost universal criticism from opposition legislators, environmentalists, industry analysts, Mexican and international business groups and even Mexico’s antitrust watchdog.

But the new legislation effectively restores preferences for state-run, fossil-fuel-driven plants that generate power at higher costs and produce greater carbon emissions.

“I think the impact of this reform is a major reversal,” said Lourdes Melgar, who was a top energy official in the administration of Mr. López Obrador’s predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. The Mexican president, she said, “has had a very nationalistic view of how to utilize resources.”

Gas-fired plants generate more than half of Mexico’s power; the vast majority of the natural gas is imported, with most of it coming from the United States, according to the Mexican government.

“This doesn’t have any economic logic,” said Víctor Ramírez Cabrera, spokesman for the Mexico, Climate and Energy Platform, a research group in Mexico City. He called the new model for power sourcing “absurd.”

“There is no way to comply with the Paris Agreement under these conditions,” Mr. Ramírez said. “Just give it up for dead.”

“Investment levels are dropping, and nobody wants to invest here,” said Israel Tello, a legal analyst at Integralia, a Mexico City-based consultancy group. “Legal uncertainty is the most lethal weapon against investment.”