Though U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the U.K. this week has sparked protests, with hundreds of thousands planning to demonstrate in London on Friday, the relationship between those nations and their leaders is typically a close and friendly one. In fact, it’s so friendly — and, experts say, so unusual in its specifics — that it has its own name: the “special relationship.”

But why do we call it that? Why not just call it an alliance?

The phrase can be traced back to Mar. 5, 1946, when Winston Churchill addressed Westminster College in Fulton, Miss., where he and President Harry S. Truman received honorary degrees. (This is the same speech in which he famously used the metaphor of the “Iron Curtain” dividing capitalism in Western Europe and Communism in Eastern Europe — though he didn’t invent the term.)

Here’s what he said about the “special relationship”:

Churchill emphasized the need for the two powers to band together against the Soviet Union, rebuilding the ravaged Europe so that it didn’t become one big Soviet satellite.

“The real purpose of the speech, more than anything else in my opinion, was to try to talk about the appalling economic problems that western Europe was suffering in ’46 [between the] terrible winter in Germany, people dying of starvation, Berlin devastated, flattened by bombing,” says historian Warren Kimball, author of Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War. “He’s there to ask the U.S. for economic help but never asks the question in a straightforward way, so he refers to the special relationship that U.S. and Britain had. We demonstrated how well we could work together during the war, so we could work together for the peace, and the peace can include economics.”

Indeed, President Truman would sign into law the Marshall Plan, providing U.S. aid to rebuild Europe, about two years later on April 3, 1948.

Though it wasn’t the beginning of that relationship — after all, Churchill was pointing to something that already existed — that moment started a new way of looking at the relationship between the two countries. It’s come to represent a certain closeness and more than seven decades of sharing intelligence and nuclear relations.

But obviously the history between the two countries is even deeper than that, and it arguably makes the alliance unlike any other in the world.

“There was no special relationship before [World War II]. There was friendly relationship,” according to historian Kathleen Burk, author of Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning. Before the term ‘special relationship’ was coined, “the U.S. and British fought each other as often as they were allies.” Here’s a look at key moments in the evolution of the special relationship throughout history:

In the Beginning…

Of course, the United States of America has always had a unique relationship with Britain, even if it wasn’t called a “special relationship.” The early colonial connection between the two meant a shared language and certain shared cultural elements, but it was also the source of great tension.

Obvious examples of the fighting Burk mentions are the American Revolution — the war against Britain that first established the U.S. as its own country — and the War of 1812. During the Civil War, the British supported the Confederacy rather than the Union, because the South was its connection to cotton.

“During most of the 19th century, a lot of the European powers waited for the U.S. to break apart, and it seemed like that would happen until Gettysburg,” says Burk. “The fact that the U.S. remained a unified power after the Civil War made it clear, [America] was a unified country and [it] wasn’t going to fall apart and [it was] a country you have to pay attention to.”

It’s after the Civil War, she says, that the two nations stopped working against one another, even if they weren’t yet working together. The special relationship was then able to develop “little by little, step by step,” as she puts it, from that period through World War II.

The British supported the Americans during the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the U.S. government — unlike most European nations — supported the British in the second Boer War (1899-1902). The U.S. waded into World War I in the early 20th century, but became more closed off after. “American leaders were disappointed in how [the war] turned out and didn’t see themselves as involved in Europe, so they turned back inside,” as Burk puts it.

The “Special Relationship” During World War II

The “special relationship” that Churchill spoke about continuing is the one that blossomed in a specific context: his alliance with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II.

They didn’t have much of a choice but to work together; as Jon Meacham wrote in TIME, “it was a matter…of life and death.” But they also found out they had the same interests. As he wrote in Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, “They loved tobacco, strong drink, history, the sea, battleships, hymns, pageantry, patriotic poetry, high office, and hearing themselves talk.”

The Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration from the two, spelled out guiding principles for defeating Hitler in August of 1941. After Pearl Harbor, they became even closer, as Churchill literally moved into the White House and stayed through Christmas so that he and Roosevelt could plot strategy in person. “Never before had a wartime Prime Minister of Great Britain visited the U.S.,” TIME reported in Jan. 5, 1942. “This meeting might possibly be the first broad hint that some day the two nations might draw together.” Later that year, FDR did not to hesitate to offer reinforcements when the British troops in Tobruk, Libya, were forced to surrender to German and Italian troops in June 1942. “Churchill is talking to Roosevelt in the White House when they learn the news, and [Roosevelt] basically told Marshall to do what Churchill wanted,” says Kimball.

Their friendship is enshrined in Westminster Abbey. Unveiled on Nov. 12, 1948, a stone tablet dedicated to FDR reads: “To the honoured memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882 – 1945 a faithful friend of freedom and of Britain. Four times President of the United States. Erected by the Government of the United Kingdom.” It was the first memorial to a foreign head of state in “Britain’s most hallowed shrine,” as TIME reported. In a brief speech, Churchill, “in a voice he could hardly control,” said the tablet “proclaims a growth of enduring friendship and a rebirth of brotherhood between two great nations upon whose wisdom, valor and fortitude the future of humanity in no small degree depends.”

The “Special Relationship” After World War II

What Churchill and FDR began, their successors have largely continued.

American diplomats have long echoed the importance of maintaining the “special relationship” with Britain. “No other country has the same qualifications for being our principal ally and partner as the U.K.,” declared a U.S. State Department policy paper written in 1950, right before the Korean War. “The British and with them the rest of the Commonwealth, particularly the older dominions, are our most reliable and useful allies, with whom a special relationship should exist… We cannot afford to permit a deterioration in our relationship with the British.”

As Walter Annenberg, Nixon’s Ambassador to the U.K., once put it more bluntly, “I have always maintained that England and America belong in bed together.”

Of course, as with any alliance, the “special relationship” has had its ups and downs. Militarily speaking, it doesn’t mean that Britain will always jump when America calls, and vice-versa. The Suez Canal crisis tested the relationship between President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan after Britain and France invaded Egypt in 1956, after Cairo nationalized the Suez Canal. “The British soon withdrew, confronted by the Eisenhower Administration’s objections to the operation and a rising tide of criticism at home,” TIME later reported. “In so doing, they also had to face a fact that they had resisted until then: the sun had set on the British Empire.” John F. Kennedy is crediting with salvaging the “special relationship,” actually becoming friends with Macmillan.

Later, when President Lyndon B. Johnson asked U.K. Prime Minister Harold Wilson to send combat troops to Vietnam in the mid-’60s, Wilson refused. When Britain’s economy hit hard times after “it liquidated its imperial holdings,” TIME’s Feb. 2, 1970, issue reported that the “special relationship” had “grown steadily less special” as well “unbalanced” and “unproductive.”

President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are credited with “reinvigorating the special relationship,” forging arguably the strongest special relationship since the bond between FDR and Churchill. She became “Reagan’s closest ally in placing new nuclear missiles in Europe to counter Soviet deployments in the early 1980s,” as TIME put it in 1990. Robin Renwick, former senior diplomat in the British Embassy during the Falklands crisis, said that if the U.S. Secretary of Defense hadn’t agreed to provide Sidewinder missiles to Britain, “we wouldn’t have been able to re-take the Falkland Islands.” Renwick has recalled that Joe Biden assured him and the British Ambassador to the U.S. Nicholas Henderson, “Forget all this crap about self-determination, we’re going to support you because you are British!”

Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush also seemed particularly close when both troops invaded Iraq, though a 2016 review of documents suggests Blair was fighting back more behind the scenes than people thought. (The best known pop-culture take on the idea of a British PM being pushed around by a bossy American President is the scene in the 2003 film Love Actually in which Hugh Grant, whose character appears to be modeled after Blair, gives a rousing speech resisting an attempt by a Clinton-Bush hybrid president to steamroll him.)

And the special relationship is more consistent than we realize; a common language facilitates common pop-cultural references, and when the special relationship is talked about, it’s usually in a positive way. A February 2017 Times of London poll expressed that nine out of ten Americans believed that the transatlantic tie was “very important” or “somewhat important.” Perhaps if the above examples throughout history prove anything, it’s that leaders will come and go, but the two nations’ ties and a shared history have withstood the test of time.

As both Kimball and Burk both coincidentally described it to TIME, it’s not just a relationship, but an inclination.

After the recent revelation that political analysis firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the data of 50 million Facebook accounts, many internet users are exploring ways to better protect their digital privacy.

You’re probably aware that tech giants like Facebook, Google and others are consistently gathering valuable information about you as you travel around the web.

But the depth and breadth of the data that tech firms collect can surprise even the most savvy internet users.

They look at information like your browsing history, your search queries and, sometimes, even your day-to-day movements in the real world to learn about you and serve you targeted advertisements. (Advertising dollars, after all, make up the bulk of many of these companies’ revenue.)

How secure is your personal information on the internet, and how can you take steps to bolster your privacy in the wake of the Facebook data breach? Take the quiz below to get your internet privacy report card, and learn about some easy steps that can improve your score.

Depending on who you ask, so-called “Hurricane Hunters” are either some of the bravest or craziest aircrews around.

After all, in no other line of work do you purposefully fly directly into one of mother nature’s fiercest phenomena. But their work is more than mere aeronautical bravado — these Air Force Reserve and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) missions collect valuable data about hurricanes as they fly through them, helping meteorologists better predict each storm’s path and hopefully save lives in the process.

Still, don’t let the important work done by the Hurricane Hunters completely overshadow another fact of their missions: the images and video they record while piercing into these mighty storms can be very, very cool.

Take, for example, this time-lapse footage of Hurricane Florence recorded Monday by the NOAA’s Nick Underwood. It’s tough to see in this sped-up recording, but these missions can be incredibly turbulent — the Lockheed WP-3D Orion seen here is likely getting tossed around enough that anyone on board could be forgiven for losing their lunch. Until, of course, the aircraft finally pierces Hurricane Florence’s eyewall, entering the always-freakishly-calm center. But the smooth flying doesn’t last, because there’s only one way out, and you’ll want to buckle up.

Hurricane Florence is currently a Category 4 hurricane, and could strengthen further before it makes landfall, likely somewhere in the Carolinas, on Thursday night or early Friday. More than a million people are under evacuation orders ahead of what could be a catastrophically strong storm.

iPhones will soon automatically share your location with first responders when you call 911, thanks to a new partnership between Apple and startup RapidSOS.

Under the new system, iPhones will send their exact location to a RapidSOS dispatcher, which will then forward the coordinates to local emergency response centers. That should make it easier for ambulances and paramedics to reach callers and shave precious minutes off response times, potentially saving 10,000 lives per year, according to federal regulator estimates.

The new feature will be packaged as part of iOS 12, an iPhone software update due later this year.

The existing 911 system was designed for a time when everyone used landlines and call operators could easily pinpoint phones’ locations. Now, though, more than 80% of 911 calls are made on cell phones in many parts of the country, according to the National Emergency Number Association. Cellphone carriers currently share location estimates with emergency dispatchers, but these can be off by as much as a few hundred yards.

Apple says the location data cannot be shared if 911 has not been called, and that RapidSOS’ data will be separate from that held by cellphone carriers.

RapidSOS is free for emergency response centers, but is currently used by less than half nationwide. The company expects this to increase to a majority of centers by the end of the year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Author P.L. Travers was notoriously wary of signing over the rights to her famous children’s character, Mary Poppins, to Walt Disney. In fact, an entire movie—2013’s Saving Mr. Banks—was made about Disney’s overtures to the author. But eventually, as we now know, Travers caved.

Her trepidations were founded: Disney’s 1964 movie added a dose of sweetness to Mary Poppins to make her more palatable to children. But the rewrite proved popular: Mary Poppins became one of the most successful and beloved musicals in cinematic history.

Fifty-four years later, Mary Poppins is returning to Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane and to theaters. Emily Blunt takes up the mantle from the beloved Julie Andrews and makes the character her own. And Blunt’s version hues a bit closer to the original Mary: She’s a bit more caustic, though no less delightful.

Here’s how the enduring character has changed throughout her various reinventions.

P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins Books, 1934-1988

All versions of Mary Poppins have this one thing in common: Mary is a mysterious nanny who emerges from the sky to implement some rules in an unruly household and, in the process, remind overburdened kids to just be kids.

The original Mary is plain, proper and somewhat vain. Travers described Mary Poppins as a woman who “never wastes time being nice.” Sometimes she could be so short with the children that they become confused and concerned when the nanny treats them with kindness.

The original Mary Poppins’ stern glances are not a cover for a bubbly interior. They are the point. Travers seemed to believe that a disciplined child was a happy child, and it was only under Mary Poppins’ rule that the children could learn to delight and indulge in fantasy. And the children do love Mary Poppins. She takes them on adventures, and they learn a new lesson in each chapter.

Those lessons were often borrowed from ancient myths. (Travers studied Zen Buddhism and often stuffed ancient fables inside stories about Depression-era children.) In the first book, for example, Mary Poppins takes the Banks children to the zoo, where the animals leave their cages and dance together, while the zookeepers are trapped behind bars. There, a snake speaks to the children about how all life is connected.

Disney’s Mary Poppins, 1964

The first movie adheres to the basic format of the Mary Poppins story—a nanny is sent from above to care for the Banks children during the Depression era—but adds a dose of sugar to its protagonist. She is sunnier and has fewer flaws: She even tells Mr. Banks in her initial introduction that she is “never cross,” and when she measures herself, the measuring tape reads: “perfect in every single way.”

The musical numbers also brighten up the story. The Disney writers replace the talking snake parroting myths and morals with a dance number involving cartoon penguins. And where Mary Poppins’ adventures were more episodic in the books, the movie hues to a more coherent plot: Mary arrives on a mission to reconnect the Banks family and leaves when that job is complete.

Travers hated the Disney adaptation of her book series. She called it sentimental. She objected to changes in the plot, like turning Mrs. Banks into a suffragette or hinting at romantic feelings between Mary and Burt the chimney sweep.

But Travers’ biggest complaint was that Disney had fundamentally altered her main character from a harsh but fair ruler to a treacly caretaker. Travers’ Mary Poppins makes her entree into the story upon a harsh gust of wind that throws her into the house; Disney’s version floats down like an angel from heaven. Travers’ Mary suggests that the birds at St. Paul’s Cathedral should be cooked in a pie; Disney’s version sings about empathizing with the animals and feeding them.

Julie Andrews’ more maternal version of the character—and her impressive voice—won over the American public. Mary Poppins proved to be the biggest hit Walt Disney made during his lifetime—which is saying something, in a career as prolific as Disney’s. The film was a box-office smash and won four Oscars, including Best Actress for Andrews.

Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns, 2018

Mary Poppins Returns takes place some 20 years after the original film is set. Michael and Jane Banks are grown, and Michael has three kids of his own. His wife has died, and the bank is threatening to foreclose on the home Michael inherited from his own parents. None of the Banks pray for Mary Poppins, but in she blows anyway, ready to heal this grieving family. She hasn’t aged a day since they last saw her.

Blunt has said that she did not watch the original movie in preparation for the film, as she was determined to make the character her own. She does believe, however, that her version of Mary hues closer to Travers’ original character than to Andrews’ version. This new Mary is more sardonic and acerbic than her onscreen predecessor, especially when it comes to dealing with the children. In one scene, she scolds the children for their overactive imaginations in the bathtub before grinning widely and diving in with them to meet sea creatures below.

She is still a Disney character, of course: Blunt’s Mary flies, dances and sings the children a sweet lullaby about grieving for their mother. But she also rolls her eyes and unleashes sarcastic barbs at the Banks family if they fail to keep up with her wit. That attitude fits neatly into an age when irony rules and earnestness can seem disingenuous or outright cheesy. If the new Mary Poppins had been crafted to be too naive, she would hardly have been a fit for the moment. Her spoonful of sugar is all the sweeter exactly because Blunt acknowledges the bitter year that preceded her return.

Toyota Motor Corp. is expanding an alliance with Uber Technologies Inc. through a new investment and a plan to get self-driving cars on the road.

The Japanese automaker is investing $500 million in Uber, the companies said on Monday. The deal values the ride-hailing giant at $72 billion, said a person familiar with the matter.

As part of the pact, Toyota will manufacture Sienna minivans equipped with Uber’s self-driving technology, and another company will operate the fleet. They have yet to identify the third partner, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.

Spokesmen for Uber and Toyota initially declined to comment but later confirmed the news. The Wall Street Journal reported the investment earlier Monday, and details of the driverless-car partnership hadn’t been previously reported.

“Since 2015, we’ve been working to bring safe, reliable self-driving technology to the Uber network,” Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, wrote in a blog post Monday afternoon. “We knew we couldn’t do it alone, which is why we continue to partner with world-class vehicle manufacturers to make our vision a reality.”

Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive officer, is looking to stabilize the company after a rocky year of corporate scandals and the death of a pedestrian struck by an Uber self-driving car. Over that time, the company’s share price has seen more ups and downs than a typical privately held company.

The deal with Toyota raises Uber’s paper valuation by 15 percent from the last investment and matches the value of shares given to Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo after Uber settled a lawsuit over self-driving cars. A group of investors valued Uber at $62 billion earlier this year.

Uber has developed a three-pronged self-driving strategy. For one, Uber purchased Volvos, retrofitted the cars with its self-driving technology and operates the fleet on its own. In another, Daimler AG will own and operate its own self-driving cars on Uber’s network. And the deal with Toyota becomes a third pillar, where Uber licenses its technology.

Public road testing with Uber’s self-driving Volvos is still on hold after one of its vehicles killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in March. Uber had deactivated Volvo’s automatic braking system in that vehicle, which raised questions about safety. The incident tainted the company’s expensive self-driving car program, giving automakers another reason to worry about working with Uber.

Nonetheless, Toyota has continued to stick with Uber since its initial investment in 2016. Toyota Financial Services Corp. has been providing incentives to Uber drivers to purchase the company’s vehicles. As with traditional rental companies like Avis Budget Group Inc., Toyota is also trying to sell Uber fleet-management services based on the rapidly expanding volume of data it’s collecting from connected cars. These services include being able to monitor whether a car is being properly maintained or driven too aggressively.

In a separate partnership around self-driving vehicle development outlined in January, a Toyota spokesman said Uber wouldn’t turn off the automaker’s built-in safety features, including radar and other sensors that help to anticipate what other vehicles and pedestrians are doing in a wide space around the vehicle.

Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai sought to reassure employees of the internet giant after a newspaper report said a former top executive was paid millions of dollars when he left following allegations of harassment and sexual misconduct.

In the past two years, 48 people have been terminated for sexual harassment, including 13 who were senior managers and above, Pichai and Eileen Naughton, vice president of people operations, wrote in an email to staff. None of these individuals received an exit package, they added. A Google spokeswoman sent a copy of the email to Bloomberg.

A Google employee accused Android chief Andy Rubin of coercing her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, the New York Times reported on Thursday. Google investigated, concluded her claim was credible, and asked Rubin to resign. The company could have fired Rubin and paid him little to nothing, but instead, it paid him a $90 million exit package and didn’t say anything publicly, the newspaper reported, citing unidentified people with knowledge of the episode.

Rubin’s representative, Sam Singer, told Bloomberg that Rubin left of his own accord in 2014. “He did not engage, nor has he ever been told of any misconduct at Google or anywhere else,” Singer wrote in an emailed statement. “Any relationship that Mr. Rubin had while at Google was consensual and did not involve any person who reported directly to him. He did have a consensual relationship that occurred in 2012. To his knowledge, at that time there were no policies in place that prohibited relationships between employees.”

Google has updated its policy to require all vice presidents and senior vice presidents to disclose any relationship with a co-worker regardless of reporting line or presence of conflict, Pichai and Naughton wrote on Thursday.

“We want to assure you that we review every single complaint about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct, we investigate and we take action,” they added. “In recent years, we’ve made a number of changes, including taking an increasingly hard line on inappropriate conduct by people in positions of authority.”

Rubin’s misconduct was reported by Bloomberg News and other publications in late 2017 and he took a brief leave of absence from his startup, Essential Products, soon after.

However, the New York Times provided new details of Rubin’s actions on Thursday. The paper also reported other instances when Google protected executives who had been accused of sexual misconduct, or ousted alleged offenders but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed.

The report suggests Google had a permissive culture when it came to executive conduct and relationships with co-workers. At least one Google employee spoke out further following the report, saying the company’s moves to protect executives makes it harder for victims to report abuse.

“The culture of stigmatization and silence *enables* the abuse by making it harder to speak up and harder to be believed,” Liz Fong-Jones, who is quoted in the Times’s story, wrote on Twitter. “It’s the abuse of power relationships in situations where there was no consent, or consent was impossible.”

When Benito Mussolini debuted the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the precursor to his fascist party, on Mar. 23, 1919, in Milan, he wasn’t inventing the idea of violent authoritarianism. But he put a name on a new and terrible breed of it. Under his leadership, squads of militants attacked, beat and killed fellow Italians; later, once he had become the authoritarian ruler of Italy, he oversaw brutality in Ethiopia, an alliance with Hitler and the persecution of Italy’s Jewish population and others, among other crimes.

Yet even a century later, during a new era of strongmen, his idea remains sadly powerful. “Fascism is a disease,” former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told TIME last year, “and there are symptoms. So I think it’s important to warn about that.”

To better understand the rise and fall — and rise again — of fascism, TIME spoke to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on first fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and a professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University.

What is fascism?

Fascism is a movement that promotes the idea of a forcibly monolithic, regimented nation under the control of an autocratic ruler. The word fascism comes from fascio, the Italian word for bundle, which in this case represents bundles of people. Its origins go back to Ancient Rome, when the fasces was a bundle of wood with an ax head, carried by leaders.

On March 23, 1919, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento — a group that grew out of a number of earlier movements that had also used the image of the fascio in their names — met for the first time in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan. At this rally, Mussolini said that membership in the new group “commits all fascists to sabotaging the candidacies of the neutralists of all parties by any means necessary.”

“Mussolini thought that democracy was a failed system. He thought that liberty of expression and liberty of parties was a sham, and that fascism would organize people under state power,” Ben-Ghiat says. “Their idea was you would be freer because you wouldn’t have any class consciousness. You’re just supposed to worship the nation. It’s nation over class.”

The corollary of that belief was the idea that anything that might impede national unity had to be gotten rid of, and violently. In fact, violence was seen as beneficial to society.

And “society” was not a loosely defined idea. Rather, Mussolini and those who came after him had very specific ideas about who got to be part of the nation. It followed that those who did not fit the mold were seen as disruptive to that unity, and thus subject to violence.

“You can look up definitions of fascism and often, if they’re not about Hitler, race won’t be in there,” Ben-Ghiat says. “That’s something that often gets left out, especially [when talking about] fascist Italy. There was this idea that Hitler was anti-Semitic and Mussolini wasn’t, but it’s about a larger concept of race. Mussolini was an imperialist, so he used colonialism to [abuse] people of color. The fear of white decline was a huge part of it. Women were supposed to go have a lot of babies to increase the white race. A lot of old-fashioned explanations of fascism don’t talk about that.”

Who created fascism?

Mussolini was a journalist who founded the Milan-based newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. Originally a socialist party member, he left the group when he fought in World War I. After the war, fascists declared the socialists public enemy number one over their anti-war positions. He became Italy’s prime minister in 1922 and over the next few years turned that position into one of dictatorial power.

“Benito Mussolini came up with the term fascism, he created the first one-party fascist state and he set the playbook and template for everything that came after,” Ben-Ghiat says.

An important part of that was the cult of personality that emerged around the Italian leader. “[Mussolini] was in newsreels, and he would strip his shirt off,” she says. Though others, like Lenin and Stalin, may be more associated with the idea of such a cult of personality, “of these cheering fans idolizing a leader,” she gives Mussolini credit for creating the mold.

“In the past, there was this idea that Mussolini copied Hitler, but it was actually the other way around for a very long time,” she adds. “Mussolini was in power 11 years before Hitler. He had things all worked out by the time Hitler came to power. Hitler was [initially seen as] a total loser. No one wanted to buy Mein Kampf. No one was interested in him. Then the Great Depression came, and he boomed. [Fascism] is a very important part of Nazism. It began with Hitler wanting to adapt what Mussolini had created. Hitler was such a fan of Mussolini; he was writing him, trying to get an autographed picture, trying to meet him.”

What contributed to the rise of fascism?

Mussolini’s establishment of the proto-Fascist Party took place not too long after the Russian Revolution, and the fear of communism’s spread played a key role.

“The main way the fascists got to power was by killing off and intimidating what was the largest and most popular party, the Socialist Party,” Ben-Ghiat explains. “Squadrists — terrorists who would descend upon towns in trucks, uniformed in black shirts — had knives and they killed thousands of people in the years 1919 to 1922. The killing went on after Mussolini became prime minister.”

Landowners and businessmen in particular supported the suppression of socialism, and their support allowed Mussolini to come to power. Afraid of the might of labor, they “cast their lot with Mussolini” instead. And that group included none other than King Victor Emmanuel III, whose authority would be considerably diminished under Mussolini’s dictatorship.

“Without that early support,” Ben-Ghiat says, “Mussolini wouldn’t have gone anywhere and wouldn’t have had the first fascist dictatorship.”

When did fascism end?

The defeat of the Axis powers in World War II meant the end of one phase of fascism — with some exceptions, like Franco’s Spain, the original fascist regimes had been defeated. But while Mussolini died in 1945, the ideas he put a name on did not.

“It’s really not understood how influential Italian fascism was, because you had Nazism early on, but there were fascist movements in America, in Switzerland, in France, in Spain, and then fascism spread in Argentina,” Ben-Ghiat says. “It’s a transnational movement. That’s how it stayed alive after 1945.”

And that “after” extends all the way to today. Though there was a taboo against the idea, at least in theory, after World War II, she has seen its return since the 1990s as a new wave of strongmen have come to power. With the help of coded language, the old ideas are returning. “We’re living in a time when fascism is getting rehabilitated, in Italy and in other places,” she says. “The fact that this is coming back now is disturbing. Fascism is becoming rehabbed for a new generation. Mussolini and Hitler are being idealized again.”

And some of the language isn’t even coded. “Berlusconi in Italy, when he was in power briefly in the 1990s, he brought the neo-fascists back into the government,” Ben-Ghiat points out. There have been spikes in hate crimes in many places; the President of the E.U. Parliament was forced this month to explain why he had hailed Mussolini; and the man charged with the massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, appears to have declared himself a fascist, according to a manifesto attributed to him.

So, Ben-Ghiat says, asking how fascism has changed during its century of existence is perhaps the wrong question.

“It’s more striking what hasn’t changed —the hyper-nationalism, the leader cult, the idea that this is a leader who is going to save us, the fear of white population decline, anti-feminism, anti-left, things like that,” she says. “None of those things have changed.”

(Bloomberg)—Elon Musk’s SpaceX won permission to deploy more than 7,000 satellites, far more than all operating spacecraft currently aloft, from U.S. regulators who also moved to reduce a growing risk from space debris as skies grow more crowded.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has two test satellites aloft, and it earlier won permission for a separate set of 4,425 satellites — which like the 7,518 satellites authorized Thursday are designed to provide broadband communications. It has said it plans to begin launches next year.

Space companies riding innovations that include smaller and cheaper satellites — with some just 4 inches long and weighing only 3 pounds — are planning fleets that will fly fast and low, offering communications now commonly handled by larger, more expensive satellites.

Right now there are fewer than 2,000 operating satellites, and the planned additional space traffic demands vigilance, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said before the agency voted Thursday on a variety of space-related matters including SpaceX’s application, debris rules, and other space matters.

“Even a centimeter-wide object can wreak devastating damage to satellites,” Pai said. He pointed to the 2013 film “Gravity” that portrayed devastating consequences including a spacecraft’s destruction from a debris strike.

The agency on a 4-0 vote advanced rules to require more calculations to demonstrate a planned spacecraft poses a minimal risk of collisions, and to minimize new orbiting debris — for instance, from devices that remain aloft after releasing a satellite.

Read more: Musk Dares to Go Where Others Failed With Space-Based Web

About 500,000 small pieces of debris were estimated to be in orbit in 2012, roughly five times the total in 2004, the FCC said in a notice.

The number of satellites orbiting Earth from all nations stood at 1,886 in August, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists policy group.

“Certain orbits are getting crowded,” Henry Hertzfeld, director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an interview. “It is a problem that’s getting magnified in low Earth orbit by the proliferation” of small satellites.

The FCC gets involved with satellites as part of its role regulating the airwaves that spacecraft use to communicate.

The FCC also approved access to the U.S. market for satellites from Kepler Communications Inc., Telesat Canada and LeoSat MA.