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When King Salman became Saudi Arabia’s ruler this year, few people expected much change. He was 79 and reputedly in ill health

But since taking the throne in January, Salman has shaken up Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy and the royal family’s succession plans.

He has launched a bombing campaign against Shiite rebels in Yemen and increased support for rebels in Syria, signaling a more assertive role for an oil-rich kingdom that traditionally relied on the United States for security. Salman’s goal, analysts say, is to guard Sunni Muslims against what he sees as the growing influence of Shiite Iran.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC says it's ceasing exploration in offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future.

an exploratory well drilled to 6,800 feet found oil and gas but not in sufficient quantities.

Shell drilled in 150 feet of water about 80 miles off Alaska's northwest coast.

Colonial expansion under the crown of Castile was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores

The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Catholic faith through indigenous conversions.

The Spanish conquest of Mexico is generally understood to be the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–21) which was the base for later conquests of other regions.

Why now? Why did the crowd decide to storm the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and not any other day? The bread famine going on in France that year and the rising cost of food had something to do with it, as hunger and poverty does with many of the Middle Eastern uprisings today, but part of the explanation remains mysterious. Why this day and not a month earlier or a decade later? Or never instead of now?

The revolution was called by a young woman with nothing more than a Facebook account and passionate conviction. They were enough. Often, revolution has had such modest starts.  On October 5, 1789, a girl took a drum to the central markets of Paris. The storming of the Bastille a few months before had started, but hardly completed, a revolution.  That drummer girl helped gather a mostly female crowd of thousands who marched to Versailles and seized the royal family. It was the end of the Bourbon monarchy.

Why does one gesture matter more than another? Why this Facebook post, this girl with a drum? Even to try to answer this you’d have to say that the butterfly is born aloft by a particular breeze that was shaped by the flap of the wing of, say, a sparrow, and so behind causes are causes, behind small agents are other small agents, inspirations, and role models, as well as outrages to react against. The point is not that causation is unpredictable and erratic. The point is that butterflies and sparrows and young women in veils and an unknown 20-year-old rapping in Arabic and you yourself, if you wanted it, sometimes have tremendous power, enough to bring down a dictator, enough to change the world.

In truth, though, none of these elections had all that much to do with the orthodoxies of liberalism or conservatism; they were, rather, the manifestations of long-building frustration with the status quo, and with whatever party happened to embody it at the moment.

One of the first things that struck me about Mr. Christie’s strategy when I spent time with him last winter was the royal blue banner that seemed to hover behind him wherever he spoke. “Christie Reform Agenda,” it said. “Rethink, Reform, Rebuild New Jersey.”

By constantly harping on this theme of reform, Mr. Christie has been able, to a large extent, to reshuffle traditional alliances in the legislature. The dynamic is no longer simply about Democrats on one side and Republicans on the other, but rather about forcing lawmakers of both parties to choose between Mr. Christie’s agenda and the large public unions he viciously excoriates.

The actual playing area is modeled after the 19th-century deconsecrated church in Manchester, England, where I first saw this “Macbeth” (as part of the Manchester International Festival) last summer. Once again, there is a central aisle between tiers of benches that turn the audience into a cross between guilty churchgoers and prurient spectators at a bullfight. And once again, there is a chancel at one end, with an altar ablaze with devotional candles

But Mr. Oram has scaled up his original designs and, free of the constraints of working in an existing church, has shifted the emphasis from the ecclesiastic to the chthonic. Theatergoers herded into the Armory’s main hall (and herded they are, having been divided into seating groups with names of Scottish clans) walk a stone path toward an ominous, Stonehenge-like structure.

The production begins in medias res: a full-throttle battle fought in the aisle between the seating areas. The floor is dark dirt, soon to be moistened by rain and blood. And throughout the show, people will grab handfuls of it, flinging it in wide arcs, as if to further besmirch the always crepuscular skies.

Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of collective revenge, a gangster whose greatest insight lay in changing not his ways, but his targets. The layers, the contradictions, the sheer profusion of Malcolm X’s public pronouncements have been a gift to seemingly every contemporary black artist and intellectual from Kanye to Cornel West.

For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective.

I thought back on the debate running from Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I knew a final verdict had been reached. Who could look on a black family that had won the votes, if not the hearts, of Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina, waving to their country and bounding for the White House, and seriously claim, as Malcolm once did, that blacks were not American?

For people like me, who have got their flags and wars mixed up, I think it should be pointed out that there may have been only one War of 1812, but there are four distinct versions of it—the American, the British, the Canadian and the Native American.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, American commentators painted the battles of 1812-15 as part of a glorious “second war for independence.”

As the 19th century progressed, this view changed into a more general story about the “birth of American freedom” and the founding of the Union.

Harvard Law School is poised to abandon an 80-year-old shield based on the crest of a slaveholding family that helped endow the institution, as campuses across the country debate the use of historic names and symbols that some consider offensive.

s. Gordon-Reed said sheaves of wheat had also appeared on American pennies and did not have the visceral associations of a Confederate or Nazi flag. Besides, she said, since it was designed in 1936, the shield had taken on its own meaning, separate from the Royall family, honoring the law school graduates. Her opinion acknowledged the complexities that universities confront in dealing with these issues and was a rare departure from the cautious approach of many campuses.

In the letter of apology, the deans, Stephen Lassonde and Thomas Dingman, said the place mat “failed to account for the many viewpoints that exist on our campus.

We are not the first – or the last – to feel that markets beyond our ken and beyond our control shape the realities of our lives, draw in the horizons of our aspirations.

We live in an impoverished age. Not a poverty of money, but a poverty of ideas, a poverty of possibilities. A century ago, anything was possible, but today we have convinced ourselves that nothing can be done.

A generation has come of age, and come to power, which can hardly remember when government was not the problem. We need new policies, based on new values if we hope to exert democratic control over the complex economic activity that governs our lives.

Tragedy ForgesAlliance for Change After a young rugby player died in Northern Ireland, his family anda brain expert set about to establish concussion guidelines in Britain.

As a heartbroken Mr. Robinson and his family left the Old Townhall Courthouse in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that day in September 2013, they were told they could slip out the back to avoid the news media. But Mr. Robinson was determined that his son should not die in vain, so he, along with his ex-wife, Karen Walton, and their families, exited through the front, spoke to a scrum of reporters and instantly landed among the most vocal advocates for concussion safety standards in Britain.

Within months, Mr. Robinson was meeting with politicians, sports executives, professional athletes and, most important, Dr. Willie Stewart, the foremost scientist on the subject in Britain who formed a bond with Mr. Robinson that has helped produce some of the most comprehensive concussion guidelines in the world.

A Cookstown woman who found a WWI medal as she walked to school as a child, is now trying to reunite it with its rightful owner. Gillian Henry was about seven-years-old when she found the award on a pathway alongside the old court house as she made her way to Cookstown Primary School.

Now a mum-of-three, Occupational Therapist Gillian said she had forgotten all about it until her son Shane started on a school project about WWII and found the medal at his Granny’s - Gillian’s mother’s house.

Explaining how she came across the now almost 100-year-old decoration, Gillian said: “It was on the ground, down near enough at the bottom of the avenue. That was year’s ago and I took it home and never looked about it.”

A decorated British soldier killed in the first world war has finally been laid to rest with full military honours almost 100 years after he died.

Sgt David Harkness Blakey, of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, was killed aged 26 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. His remains were found in November 2013 – 97 years after he died – during roadworks near the Connaught cemetery in Thiepval, northern France.

Identifying fallen first world war soldiers is difficult as tags were commonly made from paper or compressed fibres, which rapidly decomposed. But a home-made metal identity tag believed to have been created by his wife with “18634 Sgt David Harkness Blakey MM of the R Innis Fus” etched on it helped to confirm his identity, along with the discovery of an “R Innis Fus” cap badge.

Bosnian Serbs unveiled a bronze statue Friday in Sarajevo of Gavrilo Princip, the nationalist who assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand a century ago and set in motion the First World War, which took 10 million lives and shattered empires

Princip was a 19-year-old radical whose assassination of the Austro-Hungarian royal in line for the Hapsburg throne is considered by most historians to have been an act of terrorism, although he is revered by Serb nationalists who credit him with freeing Bosnia and Serbia from respective occupation by the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires

Jovan Mojsilovic, the actor who played Princip in the theatrical presentation during the statue-unveiling ceremony, called the Vienna orchestra's visit to Sarajevo a "pure provocation," the Reuters news agency reported.

In “Dreadnought,” the reader is reminded that the author is a biographer at heart: His portraits of the young Winston Churchill; of the intense, eccentric Adm. Sir John “Jacky” Fisher; and of Germany’s ambitious Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz make for a riveting narrative.

The two great fleets had vastly different origins. The German fleet was the creation of an unstable monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who chose to compete for naval supremacy with the Royal Navy.

At sea as on land, World War I confounded the planners on both sides. The Germans anticipated a sea blockade, but thought that an enemy blockade close to their own coast would be vulnerable to sorties by their own warships.

“I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter,”

“to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”

“No nation — large or small, wealthy or poor — is immune,” he said.