- The world this week

- Leaders

- Letters

- By Invitation

- Briefing

- United States

- The Americas

- Asia

- China

- Middle East & Africa

- Europe

- Britain

- International

- Special report

- Business

- Finance & economics

- Science & technology

- Culture

- Economic & financial indicators

- Obituary

The world this week

- Politics

- Business

- KAL’s cartoon

- This week’s cover

The world this week

Politics

The world this week

Jul 11th 2024

NATO held a summit in Washington, marking its 75th anniversary. The main topic of discussion was support for Ukraine. The country is unlikely to be admitted as a NATO member soon. But “Make no mistake,” Joe Biden said, “Ukraine can and will stop Putin.” America, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Romania announced that they would provide five extra air-defence systems, including the Patriot system, to Ukraine. The summit started the day after Russia carried out its biggest wave of attacks in months, and struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv. At least 41 people were killed across Ukraine and 170 injured.

Mr Biden used the summit to try to put to rest questions about his mental acuity and ability to lead. Calls grew among some Democrats for the president to withdraw from the election. But other senior Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, in public at least, forcefully supported Mr Biden during party meetings in Congress. Mr Biden earlier insisted that “I am running and I am going to win again.”

The NATO summit was Sir Keir Starmer’s first foray on the international stage as Britain’s new prime minister. Sir Keir’s Labour Party won 411 seats in the general election, giving it a working majority of 181. The new government has made a busy start, scrapping a controversial scheme to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda, unveiling measures to liberalise the country’s planning regime and taking the first steps towards setting up a new national wealth fund.

The world this week

Business

The world this week

Jul 11th 2024

In a court filing, America’s Justice Department revealed that Boeing would plead guilty to misleading air-safety regulators about its 737 MAX aircraft ahead of two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. The agreement rips up a previous settlement from 2021 in which Boeing admitted that two employees had misled regulators. The government believes Boeing has failed to comply with that settlement. There have been a number of safety incidents this year, including a door plug that blew off a 737 MAX upon take-off. The families of the crash victims are not happy. By pleading guilty, Boeing avoids the glaring publicity of a trial.

Microsoft has reportedly given up its board seat at OpenAI amid scrutiny from competition regulators about the pair’s partnership. Microsoft holds a minority economic interest in the developer of ChatGPT. Apple has also decided not to join OpenAI’s board as an observer, according to reports. Apple recently struck a deal to incorporate ChatGPT into its new operating system.

In what both companies described as the largest deal of its kind, Occidental announced an agreement to sell 500,000 tonnes of carbon-dioxide removal credits to Microsoft over six years. The arrangement allows Microsoft to offset its emissions by paying Occidental to take carbon from the atmosphere and store it underground. The tech giant’s emissions have soared in recent years, mostly because of the huge amounts of power needed for artificial intelligence and data centres.

The world this week

KAL’s cartoon

The world this week

Jul 11th 2024

Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:

Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside

Anguish about Joe Biden’s candidacy is rational, polls suggest

A big donor says Joe Biden’s team has gone all Trumpian

KAL’s cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see last week’s here.

The Economist

This week’s cover

How we saw the world

Jul 11th 2024

THIS WEEK news about elections in Britain and France rumbled on, as did Joe Biden’s unsteady presidential campaign. But we decided to step back and focus on an issue in which a little effort could do a vast amount of good. This is the quest to help young brains reach their potential.

Around the world, 22% of under-fives—roughly 150m children—are malnourished to the point of stunting. Half the world’s children suffer from micronutrient deficiency, which can also impede brain development. Poor nutrition and a lack of stimulation can translate into a loss of as many as 15 IQ points. This can lower incomes by a quarter. Damage during the “golden window” of the first 1,000 days after conception is likely to be permanent. Demography adds urgency to appeals for action: fertility is highest in countries where malnutrition is most widespread.

Our first cover idea called to mind alphabetti spaghetti, a dish seemingly brought into existence by a rhyme. We drew a brainy version, in which a young Einstein is picking out the famous equation for mass-energy equivalence. It’s fun, but it’s Western. The ill-nourishment we are talking about is in poor and middle-income countries.

Leaders

- How to raise the world’s IQ

- Faddish thinking is hobbling education in the rich world

- The French far right may not have peaked

- How to prevent strongmen from hijacking the fight against dodgy money

- Britain’s skewed election reinforces the case for voting reform. After 2029

Nutrition and cognition

How to raise the world’s IQ

Simple ways to make the next generation more intelligent

Jul 11th 2024

PEOPLE TODAY are much cleverer than they were in previous generations. A study of 72 countries found that average IQs rose by 2.2 points a decade between 1948 and 2020. This stunning change is known as the “Flynn effect” after James Flynn, the scientist who first noticed it. Flynn was initially baffled by his discovery. It took millions of years for the brain to evolve. How could it improve so rapidly over just a few decades?

The answer is largely that people were becoming better nourished and mentally stimulated. Just as muscles need food and exercise to grow strong, so the brain needs the right nutrients and activity to develop. Kids today are much less likely to be malnourished than they were in past decades, and more likely to go to school. Yet there is no room for complacency.

This week we look at two ways in which young minds are being squandered. In rich countries, the Flynn effect has largely run its course. Our special report and leader examine why educational attainment there has levelled off, and what can be done about it. In a separate briefing, we examine an even graver problem. In poor and middle-income countries, many children are still too ill-fed to reach their cognitive potential.

School scandal

Faddish thinking is hobbling education in the rich world

Test scores have been stagnant or worse for more than a decade

Jul 11th 2024

THAT THE pandemic messed up schooling is well known. Between 2018 and 2022 an average teenager in a rich country fell some six months behind their expected progress in reading and nine months behind in maths, according to the OECD. What is less widely understood is that the trouble began long before covid-19 struck. A typical pupil in an OECD country was no more literate or numerate when the coronavirus first ran amok than children tested 15 years earlier. As our special report argues, education in the rich world is stagnating. This should worry parents and policymakers alike.

In America long-running tests of maths and reading find that attainment peaked in the early 2010s. Since then, average performance there has gone sideways or backwards. In Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, among other places, scores in some international tests have been falling for years. What has gone wrong?

France’s shotgun election

The French far right may not have peaked

After winning 32% of the vote in parliamentary elections it will eye the presidency

Jul 10th 2024

FRANCE’S FOURTH REPUBLIC lasted from 1946 to 1958. In those 12 years it had 26 governments, two of which were in power for only two days. The Fifth Republic created by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 was meant to provide greater stability, thanks to a new electoral system and a strengthening of the powers of the president. It has worked pretty well. Until now.

The good news from the snap elections on July 7th is that tactical voting has dashed Marine Le Pen’s hopes that her hard-right National Rally (RN) would lead France’s next government. Squeezed by the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble bloc, the RN was pushed into an inglorious third place. The bad news is that nobody has a clue what will happen next. Mr Macron can stay in the Elysée Palace until 2027. But to run the country, and get legislation through parliament, he needs a prime minister and a government, and that looks tricky. A return to the Fourth Republic’s drift looms.

As none of the three big groups is close to holding a majority, you might think a coalition would be the way forward. But obstacles abound. The biggest is that the NFP bloc, the largest and the presumptive leader of the new government, is in confusion. It was hastily put together for the election, and uneasily yokes the hard-left anti-capitalists of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI) to the Socialists, the Greens and the remnants of France’s once-powerful Communist Party. These four cannot even agree on who should be their leader. Working out their policies will be still harder.

Credit-crushed

How to prevent strongmen from hijacking the fight against dodgy money

Egypt, India and Turkey are regular abusers

Jul 11th 2024

CATCHING CRIMINALS across borders is hard. Court decisions made in one place may not be enforceable in another. Police powers are usually local, and information-sharing and extradition treaties are rare. To remedy this the world’s major powers have created institutions with mandates that cover much of the globe. The International Criminal Court (ICC) investigates suspects for genocide, war crimes and other grave offences. Interpol issues “red notices”, which are akin to international arrest warrants. Perhaps the most obscure is the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which also has the hardest job: stopping globe-trotting villains from moving money around the world.

Unfortunately these institutions are increasingly abused, and the FATF is no exception. Just as the ICC has become a venue for political “lawfare” and Interpol has made it easier for autocrats to have dissidents-in-exile arrested, so the FATF’s mighty powers are being hijacked by strongmen looking for another way to crack down on their opponents, as we report this week. It is a sorry trajectory for an organisation with an important mission. The FATF must be reformed—or the global fight against dirty money will itself be corrupted.

The FATF works by setting out 40 broad “recommendations”, covering everything from the monitoring of suspects to the blocking of dodgy funds. The idea is that states translate this into legislation and countries are then regularly assessed—by peers and experts—on how well they comply. As a result, the FATF has a longer arm than almost any other international organisation. Its invasive evaluations apply not just to its members but to all states that agree to meet its standards—which means nearly every country in the world. Any that gets poor marks risks being cut off from the global banking system, hampering aid, trade and investment.

Lord, make us proportional—but not yet

Britain’s skewed election reinforces the case for voting reform. After 2029

The new government has more important things to deal with first

Jul 11th 2024

AMONG THE questions prompted by Labour’s huge victory on July 4th is whether Britain’s electoral system needs overhauling. The party won 63% of the seats on only a third of the vote, prompting complaints from some smaller parties, and a few smarting Conservatives, that the result was unfair. The case for reforming the country’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in a constituency takes that seat, is becoming ever stronger. But it should not be a priority.

Measured by the difference between share of the votes and share of the seats in Parliament, this election was the most skewed result in British history, and second in Western democracies only to a French parliamentary election in 1993. Because its voters were efficiently distributed around the country, Labour needed fewer than 24,000 votes for each of its seats. Reform UK, in contrast, needed well over 800,000. Under the Scottish system of proportional representation (PR), Labour would have won 236 seats, not 411; Reform UK would have had 94 MPs instead of five.

Letters

- Letters to the editor

On Joe Biden, a Palestinian state, rising seas, Willie Mays, working late

Letters to the editor

A selection of correspondence

Jul 11th 2024

Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.com

Backing Joe Biden

Presidential effectiveness is not measured by televised debates. Presidents govern by making decisions after thorough preparation and detailed consultations with their advisers. In questioning Joe Biden’s candidacy, you offer no reason for doubting his ability to make good decisions (“No way to run a country”, July 6th). You do think, however, that political infighting among Democrats over a potential replacement would somehow settle on a better candidate, who would have a stronger chance of defeating Donald Trump, and who would make better decisions than Mr Biden.

By Invitation

- A big donor says Joe Biden’s team has gone all Trumpian

- Justice Sotomayor was right for the wrong reasons

The American election

A big donor says Joe Biden’s team has gone all Trumpian

The president is deluding himself. Democrats are better than that, says Ari Emanuel

Jul 8th 2024

STOP ME IF this sounds familiar. A president warns of an existential threat and says he alone can fix it. His advisers blithely deny facts that everyone can see with their own eyes and cover up health scares. His supporters reject all criticism and instead demand his opponents be imprisoned.

I’m not talking about Donald Trump. After a catastrophic debate, Joe Biden and his team are in danger of emulating the very movement they oppose.

If Mr Biden is right to say there’s nothing more important than stopping Mr Trump from returning to the White House, then he’s wrong when he says the best—or only—way to do that is by keeping his own name on the ballot. The idea that Mr Biden “alone can fix it” is a self-aggrandising delusion on a Trumpian scale. No wonder the audience at the president’s post-debate rally sounded just like a MAGA crowd from 2016. “Lock him up!” they chanted. It was a true through-the-looking-glass moment.

SCOTUS and presidential immunity

Justice Sotomayor was right for the wrong reasons

The Supreme Court’s ruling on prosecuting presidents is mistaken, says Eric Nelson, but not because the founding fathers were anti-monarchists

Jul 9th 2024

IN HER DISSENT in Trump v United States, Justice Sonia Sotomayor correctly observes that historical evidence from the early republic “cuts decisively against” the sweeping new doctrine of executive immunity adopted by the Supreme Court majority. But is this, as she goes on to claim, because the decision converts the president into “a king above the law”?

The force of her charge rests on a traditional understanding of the American founding, ritualistically repeated in classrooms across the country—and endorsed in a brief filed with the court by prominent historians, on which Justice Sotomayor relies. According to this view, the patriots in 1776 rebelled against royal power and, as a result, uniformly approached the design of their new executive in the 1780s “with a deep-seated, anti-monarchical sentiment”. It follows that the last thing the framers of the constitution could have intended was to create a president “with the powers and privileges of a king”.

In a book published a decade ago, I offered a critique of this standard narrative. In truth, I argued, by the early 1770s the patriot movement had come to blame the imperial crisis on an overweening parliament that had usurped the powers of the Crown. The patriots, in other words, wanted more monarchy, not less. They were urging George III to revive long-defunct royal prerogatives (such as the veto, which had not been used in Britain for generations) in order to re-establish a lost constitutional balance. I showed further that this royalist turn profoundly shaped the subsequent constitutional ideas of leading American theorists, including architects of the presidency such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson. These figures aimed to create a chief executive in crucial respects more powerful than the British monarch of their day.

Briefing

- Small investments in nutrition could make the world brainier

Food for thought

Small investments in nutrition could make the world brainier

Many pregnant women and babies are malnourished—and not just in poor countries

Jul 11th 2024 | Bugasan Norte, Dhaka and Lobule

KEBITA NAIMA was a month pregnant when men with guns burned her home and stole everything she had. Terrified, she fled her village in eastern Congo. With a dozen relatives she walked for a week, hoping to reach Uganda, the calmer country next door. “We had nothing, no food at all,” she recalls—only water from streams and wild fruit. When she crossed the border she was “so weak and so hungry”.

That journey, and the months of deprivation that followed, affected her unborn daughter, Ms Kebita suspects. Sitting outside her home in Lobule, a village in northern Uganda, she notes how the girl, Amina, now 11, is noticeably slower than her younger brother, Mubaraka, who was better nourished both in the womb and in infancy. He started to talk a year earlier than his sister, and to walk nearly two years earlier. “He always wants to know things. He sees older kids climbing trees, and he wants to join in,” says his mother.

Just as muscles need food and exercise to grow strong, the brain needs good food and stimulation to develop properly. The first 1,000 days after conception, known as the “golden window”, are crucial. From the third trimester to the second birthday, a million synapses a second are formed in a well-nourished brain, creating the foundation on which “all learning, behaviour and health depend”, notes Meera Shekar of the World Bank. In a malnourished one, fewer connections are created. And if the brain is chronically deprived during this period, the damage is irreversible.

United States

- Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside

- Anguish about Joe Biden’s candidacy is rational, polls suggest

- The Republicans’ policy platform previews the coming campaign

- Meet a leading Trump vice-presidential contender

- Las Vegas’s power couple says goodbye to power

- How do you solve a problem like Joe Biden?

The comeback kidder

Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside

And some senior Democrats may merely be holding their fire

Jul 10th 2024 | WASHINGTON, DC

FEEL FOR Joe Biden. If you too had spent half a century coveting a job, you might be reluctant to give it up. When the octogenarian turned in the most disastrous debate performance in modern times on June 27th, alarmed fellow Democrats began agitating for him to gracefully withdraw from his re-election campaign. The confused guy who appeared on stage seemed in no state to defeat Donald Trump in November, let alone govern the country into 2029.

But Mr Biden is nothing if not stubborn. His campaign staff spent the week following the debacle trying to contain the fallout, urging elected Democrats not to go public with their calls for the president to stand aside. The Biden campaign then mounted a counteroffensive against those critics. “I’m not going anywhere,” the candidate announced.

Marginal revolution

Anguish about Joe Biden’s candidacy is rational, polls suggest

Would Kamala Harris fare better?

Jul 9th 2024 | WASHINGTON, DC

IF JOE BIDEN and Donald Trump have one thing in common, it is that they don’t trust the polls. During the Republican primaries, Mr Trump referred to polls that showed his opponent Nikki Haley too close for comfort as “just another scam”. Now Mr Biden has cast doubt on polls that show him trailing Mr Trump in swing states or plagued by historically low approval ratings. “I don’t believe that’s my approval rating,” he shot back at George Stephanopoulos in a prime-time interview on ABC, which was meant to assuage Democrats’ anxieties after his terrible debate performance against Mr Trump. “That’s not what our polls show,” he added, referring to his campaign’s internal polling.

Mr Biden did not elaborate on what exactly those more sympathetic polls show. But the public ones suggest that, on average, his polling deficit has increased by 1.7 points since the debate. Mr Trump’s lead now equals the largest he has had in any of his three presidential campaigns. Even a small change is possible to detect because pollsters have consistently asked the public for their views on Messrs Trump and Biden, who have both campaigned as the presumptive presidential nominee for about four months. Unfortunately for Democrats who would like to identify the most electable alternative to Mr Biden, recent polls offer few clear answers.

The party line

The Republicans’ policy platform previews the coming campaign

Social conservatives and fiscal hawks will be disappointed. Opponents of immigration will not

Jul 11th 2024 | Washington, DC

WHILE DONALD TRUMP was relatively quiet in the days after his debate with Joe Biden—preferring to let the president’s troubles fill the headlines—he still posted steadily on Truth Social. Amid notes criticising the media and sharing favourable polling, Mr Trump made some noticeable attempts to soften his message for a general-election audience. He distanced himself from a controversial group of former staffers preparing an agenda for his second term and emphasised the official 2024 Republican platform.

“Ours is a forward-looking Agenda with strong promises that we will accomplish very quickly,” Mr Trump wrote on July 8th, after the Republican National Committee’s rules body approved the party platform with an 84-18 vote. “We are, quite simply, the Party of Common Sense!”

North Dakota rising

Meet a leading Trump vice-presidential contender

How Doug Burgum went from dark horse to favourite

Jul 8th 2024 | BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA

FEW CONSIDER North Dakota, home to just under 800,000 people, to be a political laboratory. Though a beautiful and pleasant place to raise a family, North Dakota lacks a tourist draw like South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore. And it was the only state that saw its population decline between 1930 and 2000, while America’s more than doubled in size. Yet the Peace Garden State has produced plenty of notable Americans. North Dakota’s hall of fame, a collection of portraits on the ground floor of the state’s 19-storey Art Deco capitol, honours authors, generals, Olympians, entertainers—and even some journalists. It also features the former CEO of Great Plains Software, Doug Burgum.

The 67-year-old from Arthur, a town of about 325 near the Minnesota border, was already famous by North Dakotan standards when he ran for governor in 2016. He has been the dominant figure in the state’s politics ever since. Few Americans, however, had heard of him when he announced a long-shot Republican presidential candidacy in June 2023. His campaign focused on economic growth, energy production and national security—standard Republican fare. Yet to the surprise of many in Washington, Mr Burgum has emerged as one of the favourites (alongside Senators J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio) to be selected as Mr Trump’s running-mate. Mr Trump has been teasing about the identity of his pick for months, but must end the sort-of-suspense when he accepts his party’s nomination next week in Milwaukee.

From mafia town to metropolis

Las Vegas’s power couple says goodbye to power

The Goodmans were mayors for 25 years. Their evolution mirrors that of Sin City

Jul 9th 2024 | Las Vegas

CAROLYN GOODMAN had a big decision to make. Her husband, Oscar, a former defence attorney for reputed mobsters, was going to be term-limited after serving 12 years as mayor of Las Vegas. He wanted her to succeed him. It was 2011, and there were already more than a dozen candidates vying for the job. “I said, ‘All right, I’ll file. But under one condition,’” she recalls. She coveted the black and white $100 poker chips with Mr Goodman’s likeness that he used as a business card. “I want my own chip if I win,” she demanded, “and I want it to be $1,000.”

Thirteen years later, Mrs Goodman finds herself in a similar position to her husband. She will leave office this year after serving three terms as mayor (plus an extra year when the city juggled its electoral calendar). But no other Goodman is waiting in the wings. When a new mayor is elected in November, it will mark the end of a quarter-century of Goodman rule in Las Vegas. The couple’s time in office, and their lives, are worth considering. Now in their mid-80s, they are a bridge between the old Las Vegas—a sparsely populated playground for mobsters—and the modern desert metropolis.

When the couple arrived in Las Vegas in 1964—at the time just “a watering hole for cattle”, in Mr Goodman’s estimation—they had $87 between them. But Mr Goodman became America’s most notorious lawyer, representing the likes of Meyer Lansky, the Syndicate’s “chairman”, and Tony Spilotro and Frank Rosenthal, who ran the Chicago mafia’s racket at the Stardust hotel. He even played himself in “Casino”, Martin Scorsese’s film based on the lives of Spilotro and Rosenthal.

Lexington

How do you solve a problem like Joe Biden?

The uproar over his candidacy reveals dysfunction afflicting both major parties

Jul 11th 2024

IT IS AS though a giant trap has sprung: Democrats suddenly find themselves faced with the prospect of losing the White House and both houses of Congress just as the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has further empowered the presidency and hobbled the administrative state. Democrats’ scorn for Republicans at choosing an unpopular nominee for president, a candidate compromised by criminality and extremism, has turned to panic as they realise they may have committed to a nominee even more compromised in the eyes of voters, by infirmity. How did the party get itself into this mess? How can it fix things?

The answers are it didn’t and it can’t—at least not in the short term. Indeed, these are trick questions, because they imply that a major party is capable of making independent decisions. Leaders of both parties long ago surrendered any decisive role in choosing nominees, which is why Donald Trump could conduct what his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, called “a full hostile takeover of the Republican Party”. Since President Joe Biden sabotaged his candidacy in a fateful debate, the Democrats have revealed a comparable vulnerability: they cannot co-ordinate their various power centres in Congress and state governments to provide a clear vote of confidence, or no-confidence, in their candidate. “The signals are way way way more inefficient than most of us thought, and I thought they were pretty inefficient to start with,” says Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist and the author, with Sam Rosenfeld, of “The Hollow Parties”, a new book on the parties’ decline.

The Americas

- A new danger for Venezuela’s autocrat

- In Catholic Argentina, Javier Milei embraces Judaism

- The irrelevance of Mercosur

Voting against Maduro

A new danger for Venezuela’s autocrat

The regime’s dilemma is rig or lose the election on July 28th

Jul 11th 2024 | CARACAS

A CACOPHANY OF revving motorcycle engines, vuvuzela trumpets, salsa music and chants of “this government is going to fall” filled the streets of Caracas on July 4th at an opposition rally in the capital to mark the start of 24 days of official campaigning before the presidential election. Most in the crowd of several thousand were there to see María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s popular opposition leader, who has become a symbol of resistance to the authoritarian regime of President Nicolás Maduro. Perched atop a lorry and dressed in jeans, she blew kisses of appreciation to her giddy supporters. “We are counting the days until we will be free,” cried one woman, as the convoy passed.

At the last presidential election in 2018 Mr Maduro secured re-election by disqualifying the main opposition candidates and parties and by discouraging voting (turnout was 46%). This election looks trickier for the regime: stealing it against a united and seemingly mobilised opposition, and with palpable disillusion among many government supporters, might not be easy.

Last October the government and the opposition met in Barbados and agreed on rules aimed at guaranteeing a fairer election, with international observers. In return the United States lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s oil and mining industries imposed by Donald Trump. But the government partially resiled from this. After Ms Machado overwhelmingly won a well-supported opposition primary, authorities confirmed her disqualification from office, for 15 years, on trumped-up grounds. It later withdrew an invitation to the European Union to send election observers, citing its sanctions against people in the regime.

Of Milei and Moses

In Catholic Argentina, Javier Milei embraces Judaism

That is not universally welcomed by Argentine Jews

Jul 11th 2024 | Buenos Aires

ARMS SPREAD with a black kippah on his head, Javier Milei, the Argentine president, presses his forehead against the Western Wall in Jerusalem (see picture) and begins to weep. Overwhelmed, he hugs his Orthodox rabbi, Shimon Axel Wahnish. Mr Milei’s visit in February to one of Judaism’s holiest sites was the most public moment yet in his embrace of the religion. At a rally last year in a Jewish part of Buenos Aires, the capital, the word shofar and an illustration of a man with the traditional Jewish ram’s horn were projected onto screens as the sound of the horn blared. In April Mr Milei was made an “ambassador of light” in a ceremony conducted at The Shul, a Hasidic synagogue in Surfside, Florida.

Mr Milei, who calls himself an “anarcho-capitalist”, has not officially converted to Judaism, but says he goes to synagogue and studies the Torah. His embrace of Orthodox Judaism is unusual for a global leader, and even more so in Argentina, where until 1994 the constitution required a president to be Catholic. The country’s Jewish community, 171,000-strong, is South America’s biggest and the world’s fifth largest. But it forms a small minority of Argentina’s 46m people.

Mr Milei’s pious bent prompts mixed feelings among Argentine Jews. His Judaism seems to play a role in his messianic self-image. “My main reference…is Moses,” he told La Nación, an Argentine newspaper. At his rallies some supporters, copying the president’s sister, Karina, who is his closest aide, wear caps emblazoned with the phrase “The forces of heaven”. That is a quote from the Third Book of Maccabees, an ancient Greek text which though about Jews is not canonical in Judaism: “In battle, victory does not depend on the number of soldiers, but on the forces of heaven.”

Unhappy union

The irrelevance of Mercosur

Once the herald of a liberal future, the trade bloc’s members are increasingly at odds

Jul 11th 2024 | SÃO PAULO

IT WAS AN especially pointed snub. Skipping the twice-yearly get-together of the presidents of Mercosur, Javier Milei, Argentina’s president since December, chose instead to speak to the hard right at a Conservative Political Action Conference in Brazil. “If Mercosur is so important, all presidents should be here,” huffed Luis Lacalle Pou, Uruguay’s centrist leader, at the summit in Asunción, Paraguay’s capital.

The reality is that Mercosur, a trade bloc that includes Paraguay, Uruguay and now Bolivia (formally admitted in Asunción) as well as Brazil, is no longer so important. Even the host, Santiago Peña of Paraguay, admitted that “Mercosur is clearly not going through its best moment.” Mr Milei has never formally met Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, whom he slags off as “corrupt” and a “communist” (Brazil’s supreme court quashed Lula’s conviction—and he is a socialist). But political incompatibilities go back further: Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former leader, and Alberto Fernández, Mr Milei’s Peronist predecessor, similarly shunned each other.

Created in 1991 as a free-trade area and customs union, Mercosur once promised much. Trade between members surged, in real terms, from $9bn in 1990 to over $31bn in 1996. Two things killed the promise. The first was macroeconomic volatility. Brazil devalued its currency in 1999; Argentina suffered a financial collapse in 2001-02. Second, widening trumped deepening, as political leaders including Lula and Argentina’s Peronists sought to use Mercosur to attract ideological allies (such as Bolivia’s leaders) rather than as a tool of economic policy. Protectionism grew: since the financial crisis of 2008, members have imposed over 400 non-tariff measures against each other.

Asia

- The world’s next food superpower

- Narendra Modi cuddles up to Vladimir Putin in Moscow

- Social-media populists have arrived in Japan

- Singapore’s foreign admirers see only the stuff they like

No business like sow business

The world’s next food superpower

Farming in India should be about profits and productivity, not poverty

Jul 11th 2024 | ARAKU VALLEY, ANDHRA PRADESH

FOR YEARS the Araku Valley, deep in the mountains on India’s east coast, was mired in poverty and rocked by Maoist violence. The government classifies most of its inhabitants as “particularly vulnerable tribal groups”; for generations they relied on slash-and-burn farming to scrape by. But now locals grow high-grade coffee that is sold at high prices to posh Europeans. Araku Coffee, the company that processes and markets their berries, runs cafés in fancy bits of Bangalore, Mumbai and Paris. The valley’s transformation is an agricultural success story. It is also a glimpse of what—with the right policies—the rest of rural India might achieve.

Indian agriculture has come a long way since the “ship-to-mouth” days of the 1950s and 1960s, when the country depended on food aid from abroad. It has long since become a net exporter of stuff people eat. Yet big inefficiencies persist. Although India has a third more land under cultivation than China, it harvests only a third as much produce by value, according to analysis by Unupom Kausik of Olam, an agri-business listed in Singapore. Agriculture employs almost half of all Indian workers—some 260m people—but contributes only 15% of output and 12% of exports (see chart 1). By contrast, business services such as call centres and IT companies employ less than 1% of workers but produce 7% of GDP and almost a quarter of exports.

Bear-hugging bros

Narendra Modi cuddles up to Vladimir Putin in Moscow

India’s prime minister visited amid fresh Russian atrocities in Ukraine

Jul 10th 2024

FOR TWO and a bit years India has walked a tightrope when it comes to Russia. Indian officials have refused to condemn its invasion of Ukraine, citing a history of close ties with the Kremlin, as well as India’s need for cheap Russian weapons and oil. At the same time, India has tried to avoid Western criticism by consistently calling for peace, and by presenting itself as a trusted partner for the West in its efforts to manage China’s rise.

Up to now this approach has paid off. But it came under unusual scrutiny when India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, visited Moscow from July 8th to 9th—his first trip to Russia since 2019. Mr Modi was filmed bear-hugging Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, before touring his residence in a golf cart, sharing a private dinner and watching a display by performers on horseback.

The timing made the bonhomie all the more striking. While Mr Modi and Mr Putin toasted their friendship and signed a slew of deals, leaders of NATO gathered in Washington for a summit that was focused primarily on Ukraine. NATO’s partners in the Indo-Pacific—Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand—attended. So did Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Politics in Japan

Social-media populists have arrived in Japan

A small-town mayor shakes up Tokyo’s city election

Jul 11th 2024 | TOKYO

POLITICS IN JAPAN can be a staid affair. The race to become the governor of Tokyo, which reached its climax on July 7th, was anything but that. Fifty-six candidates, many of them eccentrics, traded barbs. Pets featured on election posters; so, in one case, did pornography. A candidate dressed as the Joker from “Batman” spouted nonsense on national television. Another took off her clothes.

In the end Koike Yuriko, the incumbent governor, bagged herself a third term with some 43% of votes. Yet it was the second-place finisher—Ishimaru Shinji, an outspoken but little-known former banker—who stole the headlines. Up to now, Japanese voters have seemed curiously unmoved by the kinds of social-media-fuelled populism that have upturned politics in other countries. That no longer seems so true.

Most people expected that the race would be a head-to-head between Ms Koike, a former national legislator for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Saito Renho from the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), the main liberal opposition (who goes by just her given name). Both Ms Koike and Renho gained fame as television newsreaders before they entered politics. Yet relative obscurity was no obstacle for Mr Ishimaru. His brief political career—four years as mayor of Akitakata, an unremarkable town in Hiroshima—did not produce any noteworthy achievements. His candidacy was not backed by any political party.

Banyan

Singapore’s foreign admirers see only the stuff they like

It is a Rorschach nation

Jul 11th 2024

A CENTURY AGO a Swiss psychoanalyst called Hermann Rorschach pioneered a diagnostic test that would eventually become famous worldwide. Patients were shown a series of inkblot patterns on cards, and asked to describe what they saw. The result was thought to reveal much about their state of mind.

For fans of foreign affairs and students of public policy, here is another kind of Rorschach test: ask them about Singapore, and see what they say. The tiny nation’s undoubted success is analysed endlessly. But the lessons drawn from it tend to reveal more about the viewer than they do about the city-state.

Observers from wildly different countries all agree that there is much to like in a country notable for its sparkling infrastructure, low crime, high social cohesion and sky-high GDP of $88,000 per person. Liz Truss, a former (and disastrous) British prime minister, has argued that her country should have become “Singapore on steroids” after leaving the European Union; by that she had in mind an economic model of very low taxes and ultra-light regulation. The respective presidents of Rwanda and El Salvador, Paul Kagame and Nayib Bukele—the one a stern authoritarian and the other a Trump-style populist disdainful of democratic checks on power—handily see proof in illiberal Singapore that Western-style democracy is not required to reach first-world prosperity.

China

- China views America’s presidential nightmare with mirth—and disquiet

- Songs, pandas and praise for Xi: how China courts young Taiwanese

- China is using archaeology as a weapon

- What China means when it says “peace”

Under Xi’s gaze

China views America’s presidential nightmare with mirth—and disquiet

Some Chinese are rooting for Gavin Newsom to become the Democratic candidate

Jul 11th 2024 | BEIJING

CHINESE OFFICIALS scorn President Joe Biden’s view that the world is engaged in a “battle between democracy and autocracy”. In their view this is dangerous cold-war talk. But they are tough fighters themselves, ever keen to sow misgivings at home and abroad about Western democracy’s failings. The weaknesses revealed by America’s presidential contest and, in particular, the debate between Mr Biden and Donald Trump on June 27th may help their case. The Communist Party’s Schadenfreude, though, is mixed with apprehension.

Unlike Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who was said to be asleep during the encounter (it began at 4am in Moscow), China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was about to deliver a speech on Chinese diplomacy in Beijing (it was 9am there) as the debate began. He was in full flow—reading confidently from a script—as the befuddled American president struggled against his waffling, truth-dodging rival. Mr Xi did not mention America, let alone the debate, but took a swipe at American anxiety about China’s rise. “Every increase of China’s strength is an increase of the prospects of world peace,” he said.

Chinese netizens were quick to heap scorn on the Biden-Trump encounter. Clips showing Mr Biden’s confused and fumbling remarks circulated widely on China’s social media. “One is a ‘mentally deranged felon’ and the other is an ‘elderly narcoleptic’,” said one commenter on Weibo, an X-like platform. “Two people who are about to enter their coffins are fighting back and forth,” said another. “Western politics is truly ruptured. There’s no one left.” Posts on Weibo with tags relating to the debate gained well over 100m views and attracted thousands of comments.

United Front summer camp

Songs, pandas and praise for Xi: how China courts young Taiwanese

Come for the hot pot, endure the propaganda

Jul 11th 2024 | TAIPEI

HENRY WANG enjoyed his recent trip to the province of Sichuan. The 22-year-old was in China to attend a camp for young Taiwanese. He spent seven nights in four-star hotels, feasting on hot pot, viewing pandas and visiting historic sites. The Chinese government paid for most of it. The only annoying part was the political indoctrination. He tolerated yammering about cross-strait unity, praise for China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and songs about being one family. “I thought of it as the extra cost I had to pay for a cheap trip,” he says. As long as you know you are on a “United Front tour”, you can ignore the propaganda, he adds, referring to the branch of the Communist Party in charge of boosting its influence among Chinese abroad.

The United Front Work Department sponsors many such trips. They aim to immerse Taiwanese high-schoolers and university students in Chinese culture and to foster their sense of Chinese nationalism. Before 2020 several thousand Taiwanese students went to China each summer for internships and exchanges. These largely stopped during the pandemic, but the number is growing again. In 2023 Chinese officials boasted of all the Taiwanese young people attending summer camps and events in China. Around 1,300 Taiwanese are thought to be participating in a youth summit in Beijing this month. At its opening ceremony Song Tao, the head of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, called on them to become the “vanguard force against Taiwan-independence separatism”.

All of this ought to please Mr Xi, who says young people in China and Taiwan should be the driving force for peaceful unification. In April, while welcoming Taiwan’s former president, Ma Ying-jeou, to Beijing, Mr Xi introduced new slogans about cultivating Chinese nationalism in Taiwanese people. Xinhua, a state news agency, commented on the rhetoric: “Taiwanese youth are not ‘naturally independent’, but have the culture, history and values of the Chinese nation flowing in their blood and deeply hidden in their hearts.”

Artefacts that serve a purpose

China is using archaeology as a weapon

The state is unearthing ancient justifications for its rule over Xinjiang

Jul 11th 2024 | KASHGAR

IN THE DESERT outside Kashgar, an oasis city in the far-western region of Xinjiang, an ancient Buddhist stupa rises out of the sand. Because of its conical shape, it is known as Mo’er, the word for “chimney” in the language of the native Uyghurs. The stupa and a temple next to it were probably built some 1,700 years ago and abandoned a few centuries later. Chinese archaeologists started excavating the site in 2019. They have dug up stone tools, copper coins and fragments of a Buddha statue.

They also claim to have found clear proof that Xinjiang has been part of China since ancient times. According to official statements, artefacts discovered at Mo’er temple are similar to those dug up thousands of miles to the east in areas dominated by the Han, China’s majority ethnic group. Parts of the temple were built in a “Han Buddhist” style. And its architectural features suggest that it was visited by a famous 7th-century monk from central China called Xuanzang. He is known for spreading Buddhism in the country.

These claims may sound academic, but China’s government is using them to justify its brutal rule over Xinjiang. At the peak of a security campaign in 2018-19, perhaps a million Uyghurs and other Muslim residents of Xinjiang passed through camps where they were forcibly assimilated into Han Chinese culture. Critics accuse China of cultural genocide. Officials say they are trying to stamp out religious extremism. Moreover, if the inhabitants of Xinjiang have always been Chinese, then accusations of forced assimilation make no sense.

Chaguan

What China means when it says “peace”

From Ukraine to Gaza, China sees a chance to promote an ultra-realist worldview

Jul 11th 2024

A SWIFT END to the Ukraine war on Russian terms would fill many governments with a sense of loss. In much of western Europe and beyond, a deal that rewarded Russia for its aggression—exchanging a ceasefire for vast swathes of Ukrainian territory, for instance, or a pledge that Ukraine will never join NATO or any other Western alliance—would feel like appeasement, not peacemaking. A pillar of the post-second-world-war order, involving a refusal to see borders redrawn by force, would have fallen.

China disagrees. For Communist Party bosses in Beijing, a quick Russia-friendly end to the fighting in Ukraine would be grounds for celebration. Most simply, it would humiliate the Biden administration and every power that backs Ukraine, while vindicating China’s confidence that Western unity cannot last. More important, it would offer a glimpse of a future world order which, according to Chinese officials and scholars, already enjoys the support of most governments, notably in the developing world.

In effect, China’s coldly realist version of international relations sees no meaningful distinction between appeasement and peacemaking. In such a world, conflict is avoided by balancing and respecting the interests of large and powerful countries, while lesser nations do what they must to accommodate them. This order has no patience with hand-wringing talk about values or freedom, or about individual rights and wrongs. What counts is preserving stability, order and economic opportunity for the many.

Middle East & Africa

- Iran’s new hope: a cardiologist president

- Why food is piling up on the edge of Gaza

- Jordan’s Islamists have been boosted by the war in Gaza

- Soaring food-price inflation is hurting Nigeria’s poor

- Kenya’s deadly Gen-Z protests could change the country

Elections in Iran

Iran’s new hope: a cardiologist president

He is said to detest the capital, Tehran. Can he master its politics?

Jul 11th 2024

THE ELECTION of Masoud Pezeshkian, a reform-minded cardiologist, as president of Iran on July 5th prompted jubilation. In the hours after the vote, men and women danced in the streets as if the country’s strict dress code were no more. Some speculated that they would now escape the grip of their ayatollahs and of American sanctions. Hossein Derakhshan, a former political prisoner now close to Mr Pezeshkian, chirped that this was “the age of freedom from the cage”.

Mr Pezeshkian’s election certainly heralds change. After four decades of five clerics and one hizbullahi (a staunch supporter of the regime), ordinary Iranians at last have a president who looks and speaks like them. He articulates the concerns of the increasingly impoverished middle class. He comes from the marginalised north-west. He ran the university hospital in Tabriz, its main city, which he represented in parliament for 16 years. He is said to detest the capital, Tehran. The furniture in the flat he keeps there is tacky and unloved.

Muhammad Khatami, a popular reformist former president, emerged from a long purdah to endorse Mr Pezeshkian. Other veterans of the government of Hassan Rouhani, a former reformist leader, have joined his team. They include Ali Tayebnia, the former finance minister who a decade ago brought inflation down to single digits for the first time since 1990. Many Iranians hope he may repeat the trick; the price of chicken and tomatoes has risen seven-fold since the last presidential election, in 2021. Another Pezeshkian ally is Javad Zarif, who as Mr Rouhani’s foreign minister was the architect of Iran’s nuclear deal with America and the West but who has in recent years been under a travel ban imposed by the regime.

The flow of aid

Why food is piling up on the edge of Gaza

Thousands of tonnes of food and medicine are still waiting to get in

Jul 11th 2024

JUDGING BY the amount of aid that has arrived at the Egyptian side of the border with Gaza, the embattled Palestinians should be well catered for. Canvas warehouses rise out of the desert, piled high with blankets and tents. Depots are packed with medicines and sanitary kits. Lorries loaded with food line the roadsides in their thousands. And a floating hospital with 100 beds, courtesy of the United Arab Emirates, is docked at a nearby Egyptian port.

Yet all of this stuff, worth millions of dollars, waits in vain. Since early May, when Israel launched its assault on Rafah, Gaza’s last city still standing, it has controlled the crossing to Egypt and kept traffic through it to a bare minimum (see chart). “They’re women and children who are dying and we can’t get to them,” says a doctor on the hospital ship. “We’re just watching.”

Tightrope over Gaza

Jordan’s Islamists have been boosted by the war in Gaza

The king is caught between his country’s peace with Israel and his angry people

Jul 11th 2024 | Amman

THE MINI-MARKETS in Amman, Jordan’s capital, have banished Coca-Cola, a brand long associated with America, Israel’s closest ally. Local franchises of other American firms have printed leaflets stressing their support for the Palestinian cause, especially in Gaza. But such virtue-signalling hardly helps King Abdullah, who is awkwardly caught between growing popular support for Hamas and the peace treaty with Israel signed by his father, King Hussein, back in 1994.

Islamists have long been entrenched in Jordan under the aegis of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a branch. Opinion polls conducted a month after Hamas’s attack on October 7th (and Israel’s retaliation) suggested that 66% of Jordanians approved of the group’s actions.

Half a bowl of stew

Soaring food-price inflation is hurting Nigeria’s poor

Conflict, a weakening currency and government blunders are all to blame

Jul 11th 2024 | LAGOS

IN A VIDEO on social media, Amarachi makes a stew that replaces pricey tomatoes with more affordable watermelon chunks. “Today we say bye-bye to tomatoes,” she says. As Nigerians adjust to soaring food prices, the video has gone viral.

Tomato prices that fluctuate with the seasons are normal in Nigeria, but the record annual pace of food inflation, which hit 41% in May, is not. Most pinched are the poor. Staples such as beans and maize cost 400% more than they did a year ago, while a 100kg bag of sorghum has more than tripled in price. Since wages have barely moved, the result is a deepening food crisis. Whereas hunger was once concentrated in conflict-ridden areas in northern Nigeria, now it affects poorer households nationwide (see map). Of the 44m people in west Africa and the Sahel who do not get enough to eat, more than half are Nigerian.

Zacchaeus climbs down

Kenya’s deadly Gen-Z protests could change the country

Almost 40 people have died in violence

Jul 9th 2024 | NAIROBI

FOR WEEKS Kenya has been mired in unrest. Confronted with demonstrators denouncing the tax policies of William Ruto, Kenya’s president, the security forces responded ruthlessly. They have killed at least 39 people, most of them in Nairobi on June 25th, when protesters briefly overran Parliament and set a portion of it ablaze. Looting has also erupted in several towns and cities, though it is unclear whether this was by state-backed provocateurs, as the protesters allege, or by opportunist criminals, as Mr Ruto claims.

Yet far from provoking fear among Kenya’s better-off, the unrest has inspired wild optimism. Unlike most protests in recent decades, these are led by young, eloquent, educated Kenyans who are unsullied by political or tribal allegiance. Their cause—an end to corruption, injustice and inequality—seems noble rather than tawdry. Instead of championing a self-serving political leader or faction, they have denounced the entire political class. These protests have consequently united rather than polarised people. Perhaps the only parallel that can be drawn is with the protests led by the present lot’s parents, who also braved police bullets in 1990 to demand, successfully, an end to dictatorship and the restoration of multiparty elections.

The reverberations of the “Gen-Z protests”, as they are known in Kenya, could be as profound. Mr Ruto has been weakened and humiliated. Could the chastening of the political class lead to a cleansing of corruption and fairer politics? Stung by the extent of the unrest, Mr Ruto has capitulated on tax. Much will depend on whether Kenya’s people and its rulers can overcome the challenges and seize the opportunities created by past weeks’ events.

Europe

- France is desperately searching for a government

- When will Ukraine join NATO?

- A Russian missile hits a children’s hospital in central Kyiv

- Germany’s debt brake and the art of fantasy budgeting

- The Kremlin is rewriting Wikipedia

- Viktor Orban solidifies his credentials as the EU’s pantomime villain

The French parliamentary election

France is desperately searching for a government

Party rivalry threatens deadlock before compromise

Jul 11th 2024 | PARIS

AFTER THE relief, the confusion. France pulled back from the brink on July 7th when it rejected Marine Le Pen’s hard right at a final parliamentary vote. The electorate instead relegated her alliance to third place, and returned a hung parliament in which no bloc is close to holding a majority. But this has plunged France into new uncertainty. “Now what do we do?” asked the front page of Le Parisien, a daily paper, above a photo of a perplexed-looking President Emmanuel Macron.

In other European countries, the response is simple: rival parties sit down to hammer out a coalition agreement. But France has a weak culture of political compromise. The country has entered a period of bluff, posture, muddle and manoeuvring while it tries to work out who can govern.

A bridge too far?

When will Ukraine join NATO?

Its road to membership could be blocked if Donald Trump becomes president

Jul 11th 2024 | WASHINGTON, DC

NATO’S LEADERS gathered in Washington this week to overcome a big gap in their Ukraine strategy—between the principle that Ukraine is free to join the alliance with no veto by Russia and the reality that few are ready to let it in while it is at war with Russia. That proved impossible, so NATO made do with lots of smaller commitments of weapons, money and training, and many warm words for Ukraine.

A twisted metaphor stood out: the allies had built “a bridge” to NATO membership. This was a “strong, robust, well-lit” thing, declared Antony Blinken, the American secretary of state, adding that it was “short”, too. In their communiqué, moreover, the allies declared that Ukraine’s progress towards NATO was “irreversible”.

The latest outrage

A Russian missile hits a children’s hospital in central Kyiv

The Kremlin tries to deny responsibility

Jul 11th 2024 | KYIV

SERHIY, A CARDIAC surgeon, stepped out from the Okmatdyt’s main building at about 1.30pm local time. He had spent the previous two hours stabilising his patient, a little girl who had been in the middle of open-heart surgery when the blast ripped through the children’s hospital. “There was chaos, glass flying everywhere,” he says. The surgeon and his patient were lucky. Across the yard the toxicology unit at the centre of the strike was in ruins. Amid the foliage in between lay a woman’s corpse, bloody legs sticking out of the carpet that had been wrapped around her lacerated body.

The missiles that hammered down on Kyiv just before 11am on July 8th jolted the capital out of its sweaty summer daze. At least six missiles initially hit a military site 1.5km north of Ukraine’s leading specialised children’s hospital, piercing the sky in a terrifying staccato. But it was the missile that landed in Okmatdyt that was more shocking. Approximately 600 patients were in it at the time of the impact; the vast majority of the children were, thankfully, in bomb shelters.

Houdininomics

Germany’s debt brake and the art of fantasy budgeting

The country is tiring of its self-imposed fiscal straitjacket

Jul 11th 2024 | BERLIN

LIKE A SQUIRMING Harry Houdini, Germany’s government has once again wriggled its way out of a straitjacket it applied to itself. On July 5th, having blown through one self-imposed deadline to conclude a draft budget for 2025, the coalition’s negotiators pulled an all-nighter to avoid missing a second. The result, said a bleary-eyed Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, was a “work of art”.

That may be pushing it. But in the run-up to the talks, estimates had circulated of a fiscal gap of over €40bn ($43bn, about 1% of GDP) for the year. Closing it came close to blowing up the government. But in the end money was found for various pet projects and even some tax breaks. If the budget is not as austere as some had feared, that is in part because Christian Lindner, the finance minister, belied his reputation as Germany’s fiscal hawk-in-chief with a quiet flexibility in negotiation.

Ignorance is strength

The Kremlin is rewriting Wikipedia

A new version of history is taking shape

Jul 9th 2024

WIKIPEDIA HAD faced trouble from the Kremlin before, with Russian censors threatening it almost from the start of the Ukraine war in 2014. But it was only in late 2023, with the appearance of glitzy ads across Moscow, that a serious plan to replace it became clear. RuWiki, as the censors’ project is known, is mostly a straightforward copy of Wikipedia. But the most sensitive moments of history have been left out or rewritten. The Kremlin’s ideologues hope that millions of Russians will now embrace these new versions as the truth.

The RuWiki project might be called Orwellian, if the author were not himself occasionally censored. The entry on “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, for example, omits the regular site’s description of Winston Smith’s Ministry of Truth, where historical records are “corrected” (though Smith’s job gets a mention elsewhere). RuWiki’s rewriters hack their way through the sensitive zones of Putinist ideology: LGBT rights, oral sex, Soviet history and the war in Ukraine.

Charlemagne

Viktor Orban solidifies his credentials as the EU’s pantomime villain

The Hungarian prime minister’s “peace mission” to Russia has peeved Europeans

Jul 11th 2024

EUROPEANS, with their art-house sensibilities, can rarely match the dramatic heights coming out of Hollywood. At last the action blockbuster genre has crossed the Atlantic, in a series of short films released on social media in recent days. Their unlikely star is one Viktor Orban. Set to rousing music the producers of “Top Gun” might recognise, the clips feature the portly Hungarian prime minister as a latter-day Jason Bourne, striding decisively from motorcade to conference table, then back to his motorcade. Rapid-fire shots leave no doubt as to who is in charge. What the videos lack in terms of explosions and fight scenes they make up for with plenty of world leaders’ hands manfully shaken, documents assertively signed and platitudes emphatically uttered. The impossible mission having been completed, our Hungarian saviour stares into the distance, no doubt ready for a sequel.

The pound-shop James Bond remakes are designed to flatter Mr Orban as he tries to big up his new gig as leader of the country that holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union starting on July 1st. Alas, they are not the only consequence of the EU’s longest-serving national leader taking up the mantle until the end of the year. In what his official videographer has dubbed “Peace Mission 3.0”, Mr Orban has used his new position to engage in some freelance diplomacy in Kyiv, Moscow and Beijing before attending a summit of NATO leaders in Washington. The backdrops of the action-hero videos thus feature cameos by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin as Mr Orban dropped by China and Russia after visiting Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.

Mr Orban is not the first European leader to wilfully confuse being the leader of the country holding the rotating presidency for a job as “EU president”. In fact the gig is largely a ceremonial one, if that. While Hungarian officials and ministers chair meetings of their peers, Mr Orban as national leader has no such responsibilities (since 2009 that job has gone to the president of the European Council, a former national leader who is appointed for five years). But the media-savvy Mr Orban rarely lets a spotlight go to waste. Convinced he holds a special role in the world as a bridge between East and West, democracy and autocracy, he is determined to wade into situations his supposed European allies would rather he stay out of. In a show of solidarity with Ukraine, no EU leader had deigned to visit Moscow since the opening salvoes of its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Now, one has.

Britain

- What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?

- Britain’s Labour government has declared war on NIMBYs

- Britain’s general election was its least representative ever

- How did pollsters do in predicting the British election?

- Why are British beach huts so expensive?

- How the Gaza war affected the British election

- The new front line of British politics is just lovely

Labour and the world

What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?

Continuity on NATO and Ukraine, and hopes for a reset with Europe

Jul 9th 2024

SIR KEIR STARMER enjoyed many strokes of luck en route to becoming Britain’s prime minister on July 5th. The diary of diplomacy has handed him two more. On July 9th Sir Keir and some of his most senior ministers left for a summit in Washington, DC, to mark NATO’s 75th anniversary. And on July 18th, just a fortnight into the job, Sir Keir will host a meeting of the European Political Community (EPC), a loose gathering of states in and around the European Union, at Blenheim Palace, a vast Baroque edifice where Winston Churchill was born.

These two events, and the EPC in particular, will give the new Labour government an immediate stage to signal where Britain’s foreign policy will stay the same and where it will shift. They will also reinforce the biggest change of all, to the country’s reputation. Almost overnight an exaggerated image of Britain as a chaotic clown-show—true under Boris Johnson, a bit less so for Rishi Sunak—has flipped to an idealised image of stable government led by a serious-minded centrist.

On most of the foreign-policy fundamentals—principally NATO, Ukraine and the relationships with America and China—there is lots of continuity between the new government and the old. In Washington, Sir Keir affirmed Britain’s “unshakable” support for the alliance. Re-embracing NATO was an essential part of his project to make Labour fit for power again after the tenure of Jeremy Corbyn, his leftist predecessor.

The enemy within

Britain’s Labour government has declared war on NIMBYs

The battle is likely to define its success

Jul 10th 2024 | BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

STAND ON THE bridge where Iver lane crosses the M25 and look north. Eight lanes of traffic hurtle along London’s orbital motorway beneath you. Shift your gaze east of the roaring stream, between the motorway barriers and an industrial estate, and you will see a former landfill site that happens to sit in the green belt (protected land that surrounds many English cities).

In 2022 Buckinghamshire council blocked a proposed data centre here, saying it would harm “the ecological value of the site”. Last year the Tory government threw out an appeal, in part because the site would have been visible “above the vegetation along the motorway”. A smaller scheme was nixed by the council in June.

Bizarre decisions such as these exemplify the paralysing effects of Britain’s planning regime. They are now firmly in the cross-hairs of the new Labour government. In her first speech as chancellor on July 8th, Rachel Reeves said that two blocked data centres, one in Buckinghamshire and another in Hertfordshire, would be called in for reconsideration; more projects are expected to follow. She announced that the government had ended an “absurd” de facto ban on onshore wind farms in England and would reimpose housing targets on local authorities. “The system needs a new signal,” said Ms Reeves. “This is that signal.”

Disproportional representation

Britain’s general election was its least representative ever

The rise of multi-party competition will build pressure for electoral reform

Jul 11th 2024

IT CAN SOUND like so much bleating from bad losers. Some members of the Conservative Party, which has dominated elections since the 19th century by mastering Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, do not much like being on the other end of a drubbing. Labour’s majority is a “mile wide and an inch deep”, grumbled Boris Johnson, a former prime minister. Other Tories gripe that there isn’t “any enthusiasm” for the party that just routed them in the general election on July 4th. The implication is that voters have handed Sir Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, a huge majority by accident.

On one level, this is nonsense. The rules of the game are clear. The aim, in FPTP, is to come first in as many constituencies as possible; votes for losing candidates do not count. Labour’s critics on the left, who carp that the party won more votes nationally under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019, similarly struggle to grasp this basic fact.

Still, even by the standards of FPTP systems, this result was extraordinary. Labour won 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote; it garnered 42 seats for every 1m votes it received. The Liberal Democrats were similarly ruthless, taking 72 seats with just 12% of the vote. But what did Reform UK get for its 4.1m votes, almost 600,000 more than the Lib Dems? Five seats. Some 58% of voters backed a candidate who did not win; the average across post-war elections has been 47%.

Poll post-mortem

How did pollsters do in predicting the British election?

The biggest miss since 1992

Jul 8th 2024

THERE WAS no shortage of predictions about how Britain’s general election would pan out on July 4th. A huge amount of data gathered over the six weeks of the campaign—144 national polls in all, surveying a total of 622,000 people—pointed to one outcome: a Labour landslide. That outcome duly materialised: Labour’s haul of 411 seats gives it a working majority of 181 in the new Parliament, which began on July 9th. Even so, the polling firms did not cover themselves in glory.

An average of 17 voting-intention polls conducted immediately before election day suggested that Labour would enjoy an 18-percentage-point lead over the Conservatives. But once the ballots had been counted, Labour’s share of the vote was just 10.3 points ahead of the Tories’ (see chart 1). Underestimating Tory support and overestimating Labour’s is an age-old problem for the polling industry in Britain. But this is the biggest miss since the election in 1992. Jane Green, a professor of politics at Oxford University and president of the British Polling Council, says it is “too soon to know why” the pollsters were off-target. Even so, several theories abound.

Shore things

Why are British beach huts so expensive?

Scarcity and sentimentality drive the market

Jul 11th 2024 | Margate

BRITISH SEASIDE towns contribute more than their fair share of the country’s iconography: fairground piers, fish and chips, Punch and Judy puppet shows. High on that list are beach huts—those “colourful sentinels on the border between land and sea”, in the words of Kathryn Ferry, a historian and co-founder of the Seaside Heritage Network, which campaigns for a renewed appreciation of the country’s often-faded coastal resorts.

Beach huts are small wooden sheds, often painted in bright pastels, lined side-by-side up and down the British coast. They’re changing rooms, kitchenettes, storage spaces and shelters all in one, with a typical footprint of around six foot by six foot. They may look like a large box, but their price tag tells a different story. Owning one, particularly in sought-after corners of Dorset or Suffolk, is absurdly expensive.

In 2012 incredulous newspaper headlines reported the sale of a hut on Mudeford Spit in Christchurch, a town on England’s south coast, for £170,000 ($270,000 at the time). Now a local estate agent is advertising several for nearly triple that price. Unlike most such places, the Mudeford huts can be slept in, but even the most expensive one, listed at just under half a million pounds, has no running water.

Independents’ day

How the Gaza war affected the British election

Deciphering the striking success of independent candidates

Jul 11th 2024 | Leicester

“IN GENERAL INDEPENDENT candidates do not do very well in Westminster elections,” says Matt Singh, a pollster. That changed in the general election on July 4th, when the Labour Party won a landslide but also lost five of its safest seats to independents. Their victories mean there are now six independents in Parliament, the most elected since 1945. With the exception of a unionist in Northern Ireland, all campaigned heavily on Gaza.

Jeremy Corbyn, a pro-Palestinian former Labour leader, won comfortably in Islington North despite being barred from standing for the party. But Mr Corbyn had name recognition and years of service in his constituency to help him. The surprise of the night came in Leicester South, where Shockat Adam, an optometrist, beat Jonathan Ashworth, a shadow cabinet minister. An even bigger shock was only just avoided: the new health secretary, Wes Streeting, came within 529 votes of losing his seat to Leanne Mohamad, a 23-year-old British Palestinian.

On the streets of Leicester, a city in the East Midlands, it is easy to see why Labour suffered. Beneath Palestinian flags hanging from the windows of orange-brick terraced houses, residents remain furious about Labour’s initial refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Some repeat comments made by Sir Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, soon after the October 7th attacks, when he appeared to agree that Israel had “the right” to withhold power and water. In Blackburn, a northern city where Adnan Hussain, a 34-year-old lawyer, won a stunning victory, similar views prevail. “This is a protest vote, and I’ve come on the back of a genocide,” he says.

Bagehot

The new front line of British politics is just lovely

From the “left-behind” to the “well-ahead”

Jul 10th 2024

PICTURE AN IDYLLIC British summer scene and the mind will generally conjure up an image of rich people having a lovely time. It might be a pink-faced crowd watching tennis at Wimbledon. Maybe it is men in blazers cheering rowers at Henley Royal Regatta. It could be horsey people roaring on their four-legged cousins at Glorious Goodwood, a fancy race meeting. In other words, you are picturing a Liberal Democrat constituency.

On July 4th the Lib Dems gutted the Conservatives in their prosperous heartlands across southern England, cantering to victory in seats such as Wimbledon, Henley and Thame, and Chichester. The electoral consequences were profound: the Liberal Democrats gained 61 seats almost entirely from the Conservatives, enough to condemn the Tories to opposition even before Labour bulldozed through more marginal seats on the way to a landslide victory. The political consequences will be profound, too. There is a new frontline in British politics—and it is just lovely.

For years British politics has focused almost entirely on rather grim places. Bellwether seats can be unappealing. Few tourists visit Harlow in Essex. People live in Dartford, a town in Kent, because of its convenience for London rather than because it is particularly nice. After the 2019 general election political attention turned to poorer seats in “left-behind” post-industrial regions such as Teesside, which are tough to love.

International

- How China and Russia could hobble the internet

Cable ties

How China and Russia could hobble the internet

The undersea cables that connect the world are becoming military targets

Jul 11th 2024

NOT LONG ago a part of the British government asked RAND Europe, a think-tank in Cambridge, England, to conduct some research on undersea critical infrastructure. The think-tank studied publicly available maps of internet and electricity cables. It interviewed experts. It held focus groups. Halfway through the process Ruth Harris, the leader of the project, realised that she had inadvertently unearthed many sensitive details that could be exploited by Russia or other adversaries. When she approached the unnamed government department, they were shocked. The reaction, she recalls, was: “Oh my god. This is secret.” When they learned that Ms Harris’s team was drawn from all over Europe, they demanded that it be overhauled, she says: “This needs to be UK eyes only.”

Western governments have been quietly concerned about the security of undersea cables, which carry most of the world’s internet traffic, for many years. But only recently has the issue come into sharp focus, owing to a series of murky incidents from the Baltic Sea to the Red Sea and a wider realisation that infrastructure, of all sorts, is a target for subversion and sabotage.

Across Europe, Russian spies and their proxies have attacked Ukraine-linked targets, hacking into water utilities, setting fire to warehouses and plotting to strike American military bases in Germany. The fear is that underwater communications could be crippled in a crisis or in wartime, or tapped for secrets in peacetime. And as America and China joust for influence throughout Asia, undersea cables have become a crucial part of their competition.

Special report

- Schools in rich countries are making poor progress

- The rich world’s teachers are increasingly morose

- Will artificial intelligence transform school?

- Efforts to teach character bring promise and perils

- England’s school reforms are earning fans abroad

- Sources and acknowledgments

Schooling’s stagnation

Schools in rich countries are making poor progress

They need to get back to basics, argues Mark Johnson

Jul 7th 2024

EVEN BEFORE the covid-19 pandemic ejected millions of children from their classrooms, schools across America were stuck in a rut. For 50 years the country has tracked pupils’ performance in maths and reading through its National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of reference tests that are sometimes referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card”. For most of those five decades, scores kept improving. But they reached a plateau in the early 2010s. By 2020 test scores had started edging down.

Test scores in many other rich countries (the focus of this special report) also show gloomy trends. For two decades analysts at the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, have been asking 15-year-olds in dozens of places to sit comparable exams for what is known as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In 2018 these tests found that a typical 15-year-old in the OECD countries was no more adept at maths, reading or science than had been the case in the early and mid-2000s (see chart). In science and reading, scores had generally risen until 2009 and 2012 respectively, after which they fell back down. In maths they largely plateaued. This was the case even though spending per pupil had been going up.

Teachers

The rich world’s teachers are increasingly morose

Hanging on to the best of them is getting harder

Jul 7th 2024

IN A SECONDARY school on the outskirts of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a pupil scrawls the solutions to mathematical equations on a whiteboard. His teacher, a young woman, stands at the back helping to guide the student and encouraging his peers to comment. In a chemistry lesson down the corridor, two students race to scribble out formulae for compounds while their classmates offer helpful critiques.

Such cleverness is easy to find in Estonian classrooms: its teenagers rate as the brainiest in Europe. In maths the country’s 15-year-olds post test scores that suggest they are roughly a year ahead of British children, and two years ahead of American ones.

Yet for all their success Estonia’s world-beating schools face a formidable long-term challenge. More than half of its teachers are 50 or over, compared with an EU average of 38%. Many will retire in the next ten years. And just like less-celebrated school systems, Estonia is finding it difficult to recruit and retain the youngsters it needs to replace them. One in three of its new teachers leaves the profession within three years; roughly half are gone within five. In 2023 the national chamber of commerce warned that the country had trained only 13 physics teachers in ten years.

Technology

Will artificial intelligence transform school?

The boldest visions for AI in classrooms misunderstand much about education

Jul 7th 2024

“BOOKS WILL soon be obsolete in schools,” opined Thomas Edison in 1913. He believed the motion picture would replace texts and teachers as means of instruction, and that it would happen within a decade. A century later, Mr Edison is unwilling to admit error, no matter how hard your correspondent probes. He insists his prediction was “not entirely incorrect”, and that he got it “both right and wrong”. The best he will offer is that it was “perhaps a bit premature”.

This slippery interviewee is not, needless to say, the long-dead Wizard of Menlo Park. It is a chatbot generated by Khanmigo—a set of AI tools designed for students and teachers that was released in America last year. Users who tire of teasing Mr Edison can speak instead to other giants of history like Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill or William Shakespeare, or with famous characters from literature. Kids may ask Captain Ahab about his whale, Victor Frankenstein about his monster, and Winnie where he got the name Pooh.

Khanmigo—produced by Khan Academy, an education non-profit, and powered by ChatGPT—can do lots of other startling things. Ask it a maths problem, and it will guide you through the steps required to figure out the answer for yourself. Ask for help writing a science-fiction story, and it will trade you a sentence for a sentence until your hero gets gobbled by an alien or falls into a black hole. The gobsmacking speed at which such tools are developing has revived grand visions of tech-driven transformation, in which every child is educated by an all-knowing, automated tutor.

Soft skills

Efforts to teach character bring promise and perils

‘Social and emotional learning’ bundles good sense with some quackery

Jul 7th 2024

ARISTOTLE TAUGHT his students the importance of managing their emotions. John Dewey, an early 20th-century reformer, sparked the idea that teachers must educate the “whole child”. For decades wealthy parents in Britain (and a few other places) sent kids to boarding schools in the hope that they would pick up traits such as independence and resilience. It is not controversial to argue that a young child’s first years in education are as much about learning social skills and self-control as about anything else.

Many educators today take enthusiastically to this thinking, under the auspices of “social and emotional learning” (SEL), a term as fuzzy as it is ubiquitous. Proponents of SEL say that teachers could be doing heaps more to instil in youngsters useful attributes such as optimism, empathy and emotional stability. The pandemic supercharged interest in this approach, as educators searched for ways to shore up young teens’ lagging social skills or give them techniques for beating the blues. Yet critics see a shiny distraction from the hard graft of academic learning. They worry that all sorts of spurious ideas are riding in on its coat-tails.

The modern business of SEL builds on previous thinking in a number of ways. For one thing, enthusiasts have sought to be more rigorous in defining the non-academic traits which they seek to nurture, and in seeking to measure their growth. In April the OECD—an outfit that for years has carried out international tests in maths, reading and science—published data purporting to show which of a dozen or so character traits best predict higher test scores (persistence and curiosity, for example) and which seem good for mental health (“energy” and “trust”, to take two). To produce these metrics, analysts sent youngsters in 15 countries surveys seeking to measure these characteristics. The goal is to start making these traits more visible—and, ideally, improvable—in school.

Back to basics

England’s school reforms are earning fans abroad

Countries that have made more fashionable changes have seen their scores fall hard

Jul 7th 2024

ON PAPER, Mercia School in the north of England is a forbidding and unfashionable place. Teachers focus unrelentingly on “the acquisition of knowledge”, if its intimidating website is any guide. Lessons are “didactic”, delivered to pupils sitting in orderly rows. Youngsters form lines in the playground before processing silently into class. Failure to bring a pen can earn a demerit. Chatting in the corridors is banned.

Yet on a cloudy morning in May the secondary school in Sheffield is a far cheerier place than its pen portrait suggests. In its airy dinner hall 12-year-olds in PE kit prepare to tackle an orienteering course set across school grounds. During a noisy breaktime, two youngsters explain how they won the badges that hang in thick bunches from their lapels (for good attendance, speaking up in class and the like). The school is oversubscribed, absence rates are low and expulsions rare, says Dean Webster, its headteacher. Last year it ranked third in England for how much progress children make between the ages of 11 and 16. For boosting disadvantaged youngsters, it came top.

Founded in 2018 on the site of a school closed for its poor grades, Mercia is emblematic of a shift on education that politicians in England have pursued for a decade and a half. Conservative ministers who entered government in 2010 were convinced that faddish ideologies had diverted schools from teaching in ways that evidence suggests work best. Many people believe that the reforms they wrought amount to a big step backwards. Yet lately England’s schools have been climbing up international league tables. Meanwhile countries that have pressed on with more fashionable approaches have been watching their own scores fall.

Schooling’s stagnation

Sources and acknowledgments

Schooling’s stagnation

Jul 11th 2024

Acknowledgments

In addition to those cited in the text, the author would like to thank:

Chad Aldeman, Ryan Baker, Tom Bennett, Christian Bokhove, Marc Brackett, Markus Broer, Drema Brown, Gesa Bruno-Latocha, Anna Katyn Chmielewski, Daisy Christodolou, Gemma Coleman, Lucy Crehan, Elis Cullen, Matthias von Davier, Dan Goldhaber, Catharine Gress-Wright, Marie Hamer, Matthew Hood, Michael Horn, Neil Humphrey, Jennifer Jacobs, Stephanie Jones, Tom Kane, Karl Känd, Eneli Kindsiko, Ruochen Li, Tom Loveless, Triinu Orumaa, Tim Oates, Dominic Register, Sean Reardon, Benjamin Riley, Steve Ritter, Joel Rose, Abel Schumann, Dagmar Wolf, Jack Worth

Business

- America’s giant armsmakers are being outgunned

- Why most battery-makers struggle to make money

- What German business makes of France’s leftward turn

- Europe’s biggest debt-collector has a debt problem

- The EV trade war between China and the West heats up

- The CEO’s alternative summer reading list

- Once high-flying Boeing is now a corporate criminal

Past their prime

America’s giant armsmakers are being outgunned

Why there is little sign of a defence-industry bonanza in a post-peace world

Jul 7th 2024 | Warton

ARMSMAKING IS NOT like other businesses. It is impervious to macroeconomics and sheltered from fickle consumer tastes. Its prospects are determined by one factor—how militarily threatened its government customers are feeling. With wars blazing in Ukraine and Gaza, another on the brink between Israel and Lebanon, and more conflict looming as China eyes Taiwan, the perceived threat level as leaders of NATO countries gathered for a summit in Washington from July 9th to 11th was through the roof.

Last year NATO’s 32 members spent $1.3trn on defence, a record high after adjusting for inflation at least since the fall of the Soviet Union. America, by far the biggest spender, is budgeting $842bn this year. Historically more peacenik Europeans, spooked by Russian tanks on their doorstep, are undoing decades of stinginess that has resulted in accumulated underinvestment in equipment of about $600bn. This year NATO expects 18 members to meet the target of dedicating 2% of GDP to defence, up from three in 2014.

Power drain

Why most battery-makers struggle to make money

This is not your classic boom-and-bust cycle

Jul 11th 2024

BOOM-AND-BUST cycles all tend to look the same. A consumer fad or industrial urgency fuels demand for a product. Prices rise. Producers invest in capacity. By the time new supply materialises it outstrips already sated demand. Prices crash. Then, at some point, things get so cheap as to set off another demand upswing. And so on.

The inevitability is comforting for bosses in industries from mining to chipmaking. Not, though, in battery manufacturing. Anticipating booming demand for electric vehicles (EVs), since 2018 companies around the world have ploughed more than $520bn into battery-making, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a research firm. Sure enough, the investments (plus improvements in technology) have pushed down the prices of batteries and, since these make up a third of the cost of an EV, of battery-powered cars. But not sufficiently to entice motorists to go electric. And so the industry is facing a bust without ever having had much of a boom.

On July 7th SK On, a giant South Korean battery-maker building factories in America to supply Ford and Volkswagen, said it was in a state of “emergency management”. A few days earlier Northvolt, a European rival, announced a strategic review, potentially delaying new factories. LG Energy Solution, another South Korean firm, has paused work on part of a $5.5bn factory in Arizona. Its ratio of capital spending to sales rose from 10% in 2020 to almost 30% in the 12 months to March.

Peering across the Rhine

What German business makes of France’s leftward turn

Deutschland AG and France SA are closer than ever

Jul 11th 2024 | Berlin

GERMAN POLITICS is followed closely in Paris. So is French politics in Berlin. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said on July 8th that he was “relieved” that the far right failed to win the French parliamentary election on July 7th. What Mr Scholz did not mention were worries in German companies about what the New Popular Front (NFP), the leftist alliance which won the most votes and includes a hard-left element led by a former Trotskyist, have in store for business.

What happens to French business matters to Germans because ties between Deutschland AG and France SA are closer than ever. Germany is France’s biggest export market and its biggest trading partner. France is likewise among the largest recipients of German goods and services. Businesses in each country invest a lot across the Rhine. Airbus, a Franco-German planemaking Goliath worth over €100bn ($108bn), is among Europe’s most valuable companies. Siemens, a German engineering conglomerate, and Alstom, a French one, were blocked by EU trustbusters from creating an Airbus for trains but still plan to build locomotives together.

Other cross-border ventures are proliferating. Siemens Energy, which was spun off from Siemens and makes power equipment, and Air Liquide, a French purveyor of industrial gases, are co-operating to manufacture large-scale electrolysers to produce hydrogen, a promising clean store of energy. French and German armsmakers are in talks about the joint production of a combat tank.

Where’s my money?

Europe’s biggest debt-collector has a debt problem

Intrum gets into hot water with its creditors

Jul 11th 2024

BEHIND EVERY on-screen loan shark is an even harder character making sure the mob’s debts are paid—make Peter pay, or Paulie might break your legs. The financial system is less violent, but similarly interconnected. Intrum, Europe’s biggest debt collector, has struggled to make its business of buying and settling bad loans work. Now it is under pressure from its own excessive borrowing. The firm’s $6bn pile of debt trades at levels indicating deep distress. So do its shares, whose value has fallen by half this year (see chart).

On July 11th Intrum said it had reached an agreement with its creditors. Most bondholders will take a 10% haircut in exchange for new shares in the company, which looks like a cross between a call centre and a hedge fund. It earns around half its revenue collecting non-performing loans (NPLs) on behalf of other firms—this involves hassling errant borrowers with letters and telephone calls. The second, more troublesome part of Intrum’s business entails not just chasing loans but actually owning them.

Tit for tat, not Tesla

The EV trade war between China and the West heats up

But Elon Musk’s carmaker is somehow escaping the worst of it

Jul 10th 2024 | Shanghai

IN THE TRADE war between the West and China, a battle over electric vehicles (EVs) has begun. In May, as part of a broader volley against Chinese tech, America slapped a 100% duty on Chinese EVs. On July 2nd Canada launched a consultation on what it called “unfair Chinese trade practices” in the EV industry. Three days later a provisional tariff of up to 37.6% on Chinese EVs took effect in the EU. On July 10th, days after the symbolic swipe of opening an anti-dumping probe into European brandy, China’s ministry of commerce signalled it will not take the assault lying down. It says it will study whether the EU’s tariffs create barriers to free trade.

Western car companies with large Chinese businesses fear getting caught in the crossfire. They would join earlier casualties of the intensifying conflict. Chinese government agencies have been told to tear out software and hardware made by American firms such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, ostensibly on national-security grounds. Some officials have even been told not to buy Apple’s iPhones.

The most obvious target for China in EV tit-for-tat is Tesla. America’s EV pioneer has a huge presence in China and is constantly vying with BYD, a local rival, to be the world’s top maker of battery-powered cars. And yet, far from being the big loser from the tariff spat, Tesla appears to be notching one win after another in China.

Bartleby

The CEO’s alternative summer reading list

Some genre-bending management books

Jul 11th 2024

“HE INSPIRED NEITHER love nor fear, nor even respect…He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all.” As a description of your typical middle manager, it is hard to surpass Marlow’s view of the boss at a river port in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. The novella is a critique of colonialism in Africa, and an exploration of power and morality. It is also a guide to dealing with corporate bureaucracy. Marlow’s steamboat is in tatters and the manager is useless—Marlow must solve the problem himself. It sounds like an ordinary day at a Fortune 500 company.

Bookshops are stuffed with management tomes on how to be a good leader, inspire others, survive office politics, navigate cultural differences and win negotiations. But executives would do well to ignore the corporate self-help shelves and head instead for the classics section. Great works of literature, with their piercing examination of the human condition, have much to teach the aspiring chief executive about business—values of honesty, empathy and commercial acumen, as well as insights into vanity, pettiness, greed and ruthless ambition, all of which punctuate the journey from cubicle to corner office.

Ditching corporate prose for fabulous stories is itself the subject of at least one business book. In “Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature”, Joseph Badaracco, a professor of business ethics at Harvard Business School, considers eight works that provide lessons on what good leadership is—and isn’t. If Mr Badaracco had to recommend one book executives should read this summer, it would be “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe. “Serious literature tends to be tragic literature,” he says. “The struggles of the main character, Okonkwo, reveal the profound challenges leaders confront when they face evolving social norms, novel economic challenges, shifting power dynamics and the challenge of communicating across cultural divides.” Your guest Bartleby has other literary recommendations, on a range of management topics.

Schumpeter

Once high-flying Boeing is now a corporate criminal

Its woes illustrate the excesses of a lean-and-mean era in corporate America

Jul 8th 2024

AT THE TURN of the century Boeing launched an advertising blitz to show what a marvel of American manufacturing it was. Called “Forever New Frontiers”, it highlighted its pioneering work on some of the 20th century’s biggest breakthroughs, from passenger and fighter jets to space rockets and satellites. Coming a few years after its merger with McDonnell Douglas, a smaller rival, Boeing stood tall in the fast-consolidating aerospace industry.

How far it has fallen since. On July 7th the American government said Boeing had agreed in principle to plead guilty to fraud in connection with two deadly crashes by its 737 MAX jets in 2018 and 2019. This latest frontier, its most disgraceful yet, makes it the corporate equivalent of a criminal. Looking back over the decades, it becomes clear that Boeing’s embrace of what were once the defining trends in American business have come back to haunt it.

First, the tie-up with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 was part of what The Economist then approvingly called “one of the great industrial upheavals of all time”: the hammering together of America’s fragmented defence industry into a few global Goliaths. Since then consolidation has been the name of the game across corporate America. The second trend was outsourcing. In 2005 Boeing joined the rush to offload capital-intensive manufacturing and cut labour costs by selling off parts of its production line, becoming an assembler of planes rather than a vertically integrated manufacturer. Third, like many listed American firms, Boeing showered stockholders with cash via share repurchases and dividends rather than investing in non-financial innovation.

Finance & economics

- Trumponomics would not be as bad as most expect

- Betting markets are useful when politics is chaotic

- Europe prepares for a mighty trade war

- The dangerous rise of pension nationalism

- How strongmen abuse tools for fighting financial crime

- Xi Jinping really is unshakeably committed to the private sector

Halting his charge

Trumponomics would not be as bad as most expect

Opposition would come from all angles

Jul 11th 2024 | Washington, DC

IN MARKETS IT is known as the “Trump trade”, a bet that Donald Trump’s return to the White House would herald more inflation and higher interest rates. Many of Mr Trump’s core policies push in this direction: tariffs would add to import costs, deportations of immigrants could push up wages and deficit-financed tax cuts would juice the economy. Amid mounting inflation, the Federal Reserve would have little choice but to opt for higher rates.

In the wake of Joe Biden’s calamitous debate on June 27th, a preview of the trade played out. As investors grappled with the likelihood that Mr Trump would romp to the presidency, they sold off Treasuries, which led to a brief surge in yields. The big fear is that much worse would come to pass. If Mr Trump fought the Fed on rates, he might sow doubts about the central bank’s independence, undermining confidence in America’s markets and the dollar. That is the economic nightmare scenario for a second Trump administration.

But as with any nightmare, the bogeyman of Trumponomics may be more terrible than its reality. Mr Trump and his advisers have many rotten ideas. They also have some decent ones. And their ability to implement damaging policies will be constrained, with Congress, America’s institutions and markets all serving as checks.

On the money

Betting markets are useful when politics is chaotic

Why, then, are they largely outlawed in America?

Jul 11th 2024 | Washington, DC

IN THE EARLY 20th century, for brief periods, the most frenetic American trading pits were not the raucous markets in which stocks were traded, nor the venues where bonds were exchanged. The real action was in the market for betting on the next president. “Crowds formed in the financial district...and brokers would call out bid and ask odds as if trading securities,” write Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, two economists. Markets were deep, liquid and smart: in 15 presidential elections from 1884 to 1940, the favourite won 11 times and three races were essentially tied (in odds and result). Only once did markets miss the mark.

Lively markets in political betting would be a gift today, since they have taken on a profound importance in the days since Joe Biden’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump. The question of whether Mr Biden should drop out is urgent; the answer influenced by his chances of beating Mr Trump. Polls, even fast ones, are slower than markets. And markets moved sharply against Mr Biden’s chances of continuing in the White House and being the Democrat nominee, before recovering a little in response to the president’s obstinacy (see chart).

Retaliate, negotiate, repeat

Europe prepares for a mighty trade war

Will it be able to stick to its rule-abiding principles?

Jul 11th 2024

“WE CANNOT CARRY on trade without war, nor war without trade,” wrote Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a brutal governor-general of the Dutch East India Company, to shareholders in 1614. Four centuries later, things sound a bit different. “Let’s make no mistake: assertiveness is a prerequisite for keeping our markets open,” says Sabine Weyand, the EU’s top trade negotiator. After decades during which America supported the global rules-based trade order and European commerce thrived, the bloc now has to learn how to do business in a fractious world.

Electric vehicles (EVs) from China are the EU’s latest target. On July 5th the European Commission started to apply provisional tariffs to them. These differ by firm, from 17% for BYD to 38% for SAIC, based on subsidies they have received from the Chinese state and their co-operation with the EU’s investigation. The commission’s logic for applying levies on top of an existing 10% tariff on car imports is that Chinese carmakers have an unfair advantage owing to favoured treatment at home—a justification that allows the levies to fall within the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) rules. The move nevertheless illustrates the tightrope European officials must walk. They want to uphold the rules-based order, from which the continent benefits enormously, while ensuring that they are not bullied by more protectionist rivals.

The EV decision is controversial. German carmakers, fearing China’s response, oppose the move. Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, reportedly wants a mutual car tariff at China’s level of 15%. On July 10th the Chinese trade ministry announced that it was investigating the latest EU trade practices, with a view to suing the bloc at the WTO and implementing retaliatory measures. Cecilia Malmström, a former EU trade commissioner, thinks talks will produce lower tariffs by the autumn, but that the levies will not go entirely, as China will not meet the commission’s demands and European officials want to look tough.

Buttonwood

The dangerous rise of pension nationalism

Pursuing domestic investment at the expense of returns is reckless

Jul 11th 2024

RACHEL REEVES, Britain’s new chancellor, says that she has inherited the worst fiscal circumstances since the second world war. An exaggeration, perhaps, but only a small one. To address the squeeze, Ms Reeves will seek the help of Britain’s retirement savings. On July 8th she said that she wants the country’s pension funds “to drive investment in homegrown businesses and deliver greater returns to pension savers”.

Details of Ms Reeves’s plans are still to emerge. Her predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, set the ball rolling by mandating that defined-contribution pension funds will have to disclose the scale of domestic investments by 2027. Other countries are joining in. Stephen Poloz, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, is looking at how to increase pension-fund investment in domestic assets on behalf of the Canadian government. Enrico Letta, a former Italian prime minister, recently argued in favour of an EU-wide auto-enrolment pension scheme that could be funnelled into green transport and energy infrastructure.

What explains the rise of pension-fund nationalism? Many Western countries, other than America, face similar problems. Politicians fret about low levels of business investment. The most promising high-tech firms flee for Silicon Valley when seeking venture-capital funding or Wall Street when requiring a stockmarket on which to list. High interest rates and mighty government debts mean that cash is scarce. Time, then, to shake down pension funds.

Good cop, bad cop

How strongmen abuse tools for fighting financial crime

They can get Western governments and banks to crack down on exiled dissidents

Jul 9th 2024

IN MAY 27 members of the Community Empowerment Resource Network (CERNET), a Philippine charity, were charged with bankrolling communist rebels. Straight away the case looked strange. A social-media post by police claimed they had jailed Estrella Flores-Catarata, one of CERNET’s associates, who received an award from the UN for her work with indigenous people last year. She has no criminal record and was set free after paying bail. Other charities that support small-scale farmers and help people after natural disasters have also had their top brass charged and accounts frozen for allegedly breaching the Philippines’s Anti-Terrorism Act, a draconian law passed in 2020.

Their ordeal is an example of how governments are weaponising rules intended to stop dirty-money flows, both at home and abroad. LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data firm, lists 130,000 entities alleged by governments or media to have laundered money. Some 30,000 have had their assets frozen, up from 24,000 last year—the biggest rise in at least nine years. Although some of this increase reflects genuine crime-fighting, international directives create opportunities for large-scale abuse. And evidence suggests that strongmen are becoming increasingly creative in how they wield tools of financial suppression.

At fault is a body called the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Established in 1989 by the G7 as a one-year, fact-finding unit that would catalogue policies to stop money-laundering associated with the illegal drugs trade, FATF has grown into a 40-member outfit central to the global fight against all grubby finance. The task-force now has two main jobs. One is to recommend basic measures—such as blocking suspicious funds and surveilling dodgy groups—to stop cash going to mafias, terrorists and weapons-traders; countries are then expected to translate the recommendations into domestic policies. The second is to assess countries’ compliance.

Free exchange

Xi Jinping really is unshakeably committed to the private sector

He balances that with being unshakeably committed to state-owned enterprises, too

Jul 11th 2024

CHINA’S PARAMOUNT leader, Xi Jinping, contains multitudes. His economic philosophy touts both self-reliance and openness. His vision of policymaking embraces top-down design, but also bottom-up experimentation. During the covid-19 pandemic, he urged local officials to eliminate infections (which often required lockdowns) and promote growth (which required mobility). His recent call to cultivate “new productive forces” entails championing cutting-edge technologies, but without neglecting traditional industries. Communists are taught to believe in the power of contradictory forces, as Trivium, a consultancy, once put it. So Mr Xi “will expect his comrades to cope”.

For others, Mr Xi’s priorities can be baffling. Take the “two unshakeables”, one of his favourite slogans, which has been heard a lot in the past year or so. This refers to the Communist Party’s unshakeable commitment to both the state-owned economy and private enterprise. The pledge, sometimes translated as the “two unswervings” or the “two unwaverings”, first appeared under Mr Xi’s predecessors. It was reaffirmed in 2013 when his party promised to “unwaveringly encourage, support and guide the development of the non-public sector”. And it will no doubt feature at the forthcoming “third plenum”, a twice-a-decade meeting devoted to long-term reforms, which will take place from July 15th-18th.

But what does the formula mean? At first blush, each unshakeable seems to be in contradiction with the other. Almost 867,000 firms in China have some degree of state ownership, according to Franklin Allen of Imperial College London and co-authors. Real resources, unlike party slogans, are scarce. Any land, labour or capital used by China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) ceases to be available to scrappier private firms. A commitment to one form of ownership must surely come at the expense of the other.

Science & technology

- Researchers are figuring out how large language models work

- A scientific discovery could lead to leak-free period products

- Freeze-dried chromosomes can survive for thousands of years

- Vaccines could keep salmon safe from sea lice

Artificial intelligence

Researchers are figuring out how large language models work

Such insights could help make them safer, more truthful and easier to use

Jul 11th 2024

TO MOST PEOPLE, the inner workings of a car engine or a computer are a mystery. It might as well be a black box: never mind what goes on inside, as long as it works. Besides, the people who design and build such complex systems know how they work in great detail, and can diagnose and fix them when they go wrong. But that is not the case for large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, Claude and Gemini, which are at the forefront of the boom in artificial intelligence (AI).

LLMs are built using a technique called deep learning, in which a network of billions of neurons, simulated in software and modelled on the structure of the human brain, is exposed to trillions of examples of something to discover inherent patterns. Trained on text strings, LLMs can hold conversations, generate text in a variety of styles, write software code, translate between languages and more besides.

Models are essentially grown, rather than designed, says Josh Batson, a researcher at Anthropic, an AI startup. Because LLMs are not explicitly programmed, nobody is entirely sure why they have such extraordinary abilities. Nor do they know why LLMs sometimes misbehave, or give wrong or made-up answers, known as “hallucinations”. LLMs really are black boxes. This is worrying, given that they and other deep-learning systems are starting to be used for all kinds of things, from offering customer support to preparing document summaries to writing software code.

Periods

A scientific discovery could lead to leak-free period products

Polymers from algae can turn menstrual blood into a gel

Jul 11th 2024

BLEEDING THROUGH a tampon or pad never makes for a good time. The risk of leaks is annoying and stressful for all women who bleed, and especially for the 20% to 30% whose menstrual flow is so heavy that they sometimes must change their tampons or pads every hour. Some dread leaving their homes for fear of getting caught out.

A new discovery could one day ease that anxiety. Writing in Matter on July 10th, scientists from Virginia Tech described an easy way to turn blood into a thick, semi-solid gel, which could limit leaks and spills from period products. It would be a rare step forward in menstrual care. This is “one of those quality-of-life issues”, says Bryan Hsu, the microbiologist who led the work, regarding which there has not been any progress “in a century”.

The team began by looking for a material that could make blood more solid. They did so by mixing various polymers—molecules whose structure consists of long chains—with pig’s blood and measuring how quickly the resulting concoction flowed down a test tube. After discarding those that produced too runny a gel, they settled on a powder based on alginate, a polymer found in algae. The team’s tests suggested that the positively charged calcium ions in the blood would attract the alginate’s negatively charged molecular chains, creating a tangled web capable of trapping the blood in a firm gel.

Windows on the past

Freeze-dried chromosomes can survive for thousands of years

They contain unprecedented detail about their long-dead parent organisms

Jul 11th 2024

FOR PALAEONTOLOGISTS, DNA is infuriatingly fragile. Its long chains begin to break apart shortly after death, destroying valuable information about the deceased parent organism. Unlike bones, footprints and even faecal matter, which can comfortably survive—in fossilised form—for millions of years, DNA rarely lasts much more than a hundred. In recent decades scientists have discovered that some exceptionally well-preserved bodies do still have readable fragments of genetic code hundreds of thousands of years after death. But these have been tiny scraps. They lack much of the valuable information that an intact genome provides.

A major advance may be at hand. A new paper in Cell, a scientific journal, describes the discovery of fossil chromosomes—coiled-up strands of DNA millions of base pairs long—inside the cells of mammoths that died tens of thousands of years ago. The research “really opens a door for a new kind of exploration of ancient life”, says Erez Aiden of the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston, Texas, who is one of the paper’s lead authors.

DNA is a resolutely three-dimensional molecule. In animals and plants, long strands are coiled and folded into chromosomes, which store genetic information inside the nucleus of a body’s cells. The architecture of those chromosomes is as important as their content. It enables interactions between specific strands of DNA and regulatory proteins in the nucleus, thus determining which genes are expressed in different cells and tissues. Snippets of DNA recovered from ancient specimens lack this valuable information. Given the structural complexity of a chromosome, the chances of ever finding one were deemed to be extremely slim.

Aquaculture

Vaccines could keep salmon safe from sea lice

A successful jab would be a boon to fish farmers

Jul 10th 2024

ERIK SLINDE has spent 40 years developing vaccines. Not for humans; for salmon. “Back in the 1980s, it was looked upon as a joke,” says Dr Slinde, the former director of aquacultural research at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway.

Nobody is laughing now. Sea lice—rice-grain-sized crustaceans that have evolved to parasitise salmon fish and live inside them, munching away at their skin, protective mucus and blood—have been ravaging salmon aquaculture worldwide. The burden is heavy—infestations cost the British aquaculture industry alone more than £20m ($25.6m) each year—and, for now, there are no good, long-term solutions. The development of a successful louse-preventing vaccine could change that. Some teams think they might be close.

Sea lice come in many varieties, but all share a common modus operandi. By eating salmon alive they weaken them and compromise their immune systems, leaving entire farm populations susceptible to new infections acquired through their open wounds. As they enjoy warm waters dense with fish, aquaculture and climate change have boosted their numbers.

Culture

- Power-grabbing tips from “House of the Dragon” and “Shogun”

- The drama of election night: a critical guide

- What happens to your data when you die?

- Whoever wins at Wimbledon, many of tennis’s professionals are losers

- A history of Hamas dispenses with some pervasive myths

- Henry VIII’s wives get their revenge

Backstabbing blockbusters

Power-grabbing tips from “House of the Dragon” and “Shogun”

One swords-and-scheming TV show seems more relevant today than the other

Jul 5th 2024

BOTH ARE big-budget sagas about the ruthless pursuit of power. Both combine exquisite production values with immense popularity. “House of the Dragon”—which started airing its second season on HBO in June—is the third-most “in-demand” television series in the world, according to Parrot Analytics, a data firm. (“Game of Thrones”, its antecedent, still tops the charts despite finishing in 2019.) “Shogun”, released in February and streaming on Hulu and Disney+, is in the top 0.2%. The tens of millions of people who have watched these shows undoubtedly include plenty of politicians, from Washington to Warsaw. This raises an intriguing question: might they learn something? And if so, which of the swords-and-scheming blockbusters offers a better guide to seeking power in real life?

At first glance, the answer is obvious. The world of “Game of Thrones” is a fantasy. Humans in Westeros ride dragons through the clouds at several hundred miles an hour, a feat that would be impossible even if dragons existed, which they don’t. Enemies are dispatched not in debates or at the ballot box, but via magic shadows, magic disguises and magic minerals. Sometimes they are raised from the dead. Sometimes dragons are raised from the dead, to become zombie dragons. None of these options is available to a politician in the real world.

“Shogun”, by contrast, is loosely based on actual events. An English ship’s navigator, William Adams, really did wash up in Japan in 1600, and he really was ennobled for helping the Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, build a stronger navy. The television series, like the novel by James Clavell on which it is based, changes the names: Adams becomes John Blackthorne (played by Cosmo Jarvis) and Tokugawa becomes Lord Toranaga (Sanada Hiroyuki). It also exaggerates the Englishman’s role in the warlord’s rise to power. But as historical dramas go, it is fairly true to life. An Englishman in 17th-century Japan would certainly have been astonished by the locals’ elaborate courtesy, superior personal hygiene and impromptu beheadings.

Back Story

The drama of election night: a critical guide

In a bumper year for voting, elections are the top-billing show

Jul 9th 2024

A CAR DRIVES down a road in drizzly central London, taking a besuited man home from a meeting. It is a mundane image, transmuted into spectacle by the alchemy of elections. Tracked in the sort of aerial footage normally reserved for felons on the run, the car conveyed Sir Keir Starmer to Downing Street from Buckingham Palace, where, at the king’s invitation, he became Britain’s new prime minister on July 5th.

Walter Bagehot, a Victorian editor of The Economist, divided the constitution into the “efficient” parts (like the cabinet) and the “dignified” or “theatrical” elements (like the monarchy). Election night—the top-billing show in many countries in what is a bumper year for voting—brings the two together. It is a pivotal moment in the life of a nation. But it is also a drama, mixing a high-stakes plot with actorly set pieces and rhetorical motifs.

These days the night’s action begins with an exit poll, which, like a prologue, announces the key themes. Sometimes the findings are predictable, as with the thumping of the Conservatives foretold by pollsters in Britain. Sometimes this opening scene is electrifying. In France the preliminary results of parliamentary elections flash up on TV after a ten-to-one countdown; on July 7th they landed with a boom, showing Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally surprisingly beaten into third place.

A date with destiny and your data

What happens to your data when you die?

An individual’s digital footprint will long outlive them. That presents many quandaries

Jul 10th 2024

The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care. By Carl Ohman. University of Chicago Press; 200 pages; $22.50 and £18

FRANZ KAFKA died 100 years ago in literary obscurity. He had instructed his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished works. Fortunately for generations of readers, Brod did not; he believed Kafka to be among the greatest writers of his time and instead edited and published his late friend’s writing. In other words, Brod decided that Kafka’s stories belonged not to the late author, but to the literate public.

Brod’s conundrum echoes today. People live online and generate far more data than they did just a decade ago. Everyone leaves digital traces behind when they die, either deliberately, in the form of social-media profiles and posts, or incidentally, with web searches, phone-location data, banking records and so on.

What a racket

Whoever wins at Wimbledon, many of tennis’s professionals are losers

A new book chronicles the grim reality of chasing sporting success

Jul 11th 2024

The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation—and the other 99%. By Conor Niland. Sandycove; 320 pages; £20

THE WOMEN’S and men’s finals at Wimbledon on July 13th and July 14th, respectively, are the biggest events in tennis. They each feature two of the world’s best players competing for the oldest and most prestigious prize in the sport. But at around the same time, a dozen or so other professional tournaments will take place worldwide in far less glamorous settings, including Iasi, Romania and Tianjin, China.

These small-fry competitions are crucial because they cater to tennis’s masses: players ranked anywhere between 100th and 2,000th in the world. They may be lowly ranked, but they are highly skilled. Tennis demands remarkable speed, hand-eye co-ordination and mental fortitude. It is played by some 90m players globally, making anyone in the top 2,000 a stellar talent.

Dance of death

A history of Hamas dispenses with some pervasive myths

But it does not offer much hope for the future

Jul 11th 2024

Hamas: The Quest for Power. By Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell. Polity; 340 pages; $79.95 and £60

THE HORRIFIC events of October 7th 2023 are well known. Gunmen stormed into Israel from Gaza, killing around 1,200 people and dragging 251 hostages back to the long-besieged territory. The consequences are well documented, too. Israel’s retaliatory onslaught has killed at least 37,000 people and displaced around 90% of the 2.3m people living in Gaza.

What led up to October 7th? The answers are bound to fill plenty of doorstoppers. One uncomfortable explanation is that for decades extremists on both sides have acted in a tacit alliance. This is true of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007 and perpetrated the October 7th massacres, and Israel’s hard right, particularly under Binyamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving prime minister. For 30 years these bitter foes have hammered each other during repeated rounds of violence. But they share a goal: undermining the peace process.

Heads will roll

Henry VIII’s wives get their revenge

New tales resurrect the Tudor queens for modern audiences

Jul 11th 2024

HILARY MANTEL knew that some stories “compel retelling”. One such tale—imagined in her acclaimed trilogy of “Wolf Hall” novels—is that of Henry VIII, the cultured Renaissance king turned wife-murdering monster. The tale of the English monarch and his six spouses has been retold countless times by novelists, biographers and film-makers. Why is this tribe of Tudors so enthralling?

Some of the fascination is owed to the sheer melodrama. Children learn a catchy mnemonic in school: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Henry VIII turned the royal household into a place of domestic terror. In a dispatch home, Charles de Marillac, the French ambassador, wrote in 1540 that “A climax of evils has arisen and all sorts of unhappiness are registered in England.” Filled with sex, intrigue, blood and betrayal, Henry VIII’s reign is a ready-made soap opera.

Yet it is a story in which the monarch is increasingly being pushed to the margins; instead, the focus is on his victims. Storytellers are looking at the lives, rather than the grisly deaths, of King Henry’s spouses.

Economic & financial indicators

- Economic data, commodities and markets

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Indicators

Jul 11th 2024

Obituary

- Pål Enger never quite knew why he had to steal “The Scream”

Haunted by a painting

Pål Enger never quite knew why he had to steal “The Scream”

The petty criminal and former footballer died on June 29th, aged 57

Jul 10th 2024

SOME PAINTINGS are just too provoking. They have to be responded to. Picasso’s “Guernica”, a howl against war, with red paint; Velázquez’s shapely “Rokeby Venus” with a meat cleaver wielded by a cross suffragette; the infuriating smile of the “Mona Lisa” with almost anything (stones, cake, paint, a teacup, soup). And Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” with its swirling reds and blues and its anguished central figure, silently crying out, hands clamped over ears…? With plain removal.

Pål Enger was never sure why he stole it. But the fact was that one minute his ladder was up against the wall of the National Gallery in Oslo, just below a window he could silently break, and the next he was wedging the painting, worth $55m, behind the front seat of his car. He then drove around the city for hours, wondering what to do next. The feeling was magical, really electric: “The Scream” was his. Ever polite, he had left a thankyou note.

His theft, which horrified the art world and traumatised Norway, had been brewing for at least six years. He was in prison for half of that, for having stolen another Munch, “Love and Pain”, from the same museum in 1988. He had meant to nab “The Scream”, but picked the wrong window for his ladder. Out of his keen disappointment a better plan emerged. On February 12th 1994 the Winter Olympics would open in Lillehammer; the police would be distracted, and he would strike. A friend had been called in to lend a hand. It would be the perfect heist.

Table of Contents

Economist: 13 Jul, 2024

The world this week

Politics

Business

KAL’s cartoon

This week’s cover

Leaders

How to raise the world’s IQ

Faddish thinking is hobbling education in the rich world

The French far right may not have peaked

How to prevent strongmen from hijacking the fight against dodgy money

Britain’s skewed election reinforces the case for voting reform. After 2029

Letters

Letters to the editor

By Invitation

A big donor says Joe Biden’s team has gone all Trumpian

Justice Sotomayor was right for the wrong reasons

Briefing

Small investments in nutrition could make the world brainier

United States

Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside

Anguish about Joe Biden’s candidacy is rational, polls suggest

The Republicans’ policy platform previews the coming campaign

Meet a leading Trump vice-presidential contender

Las Vegas’s power couple says goodbye to power

How do you solve a problem like Joe Biden?

The Americas

A new danger for Venezuela’s autocrat

In Catholic Argentina, Javier Milei embraces Judaism

The irrelevance of Mercosur

Asia

The world’s next food superpower

Narendra Modi cuddles up to Vladimir Putin in Moscow

Social-media populists have arrived in Japan

Singapore’s foreign admirers see only the stuff they like

China

China views America’s presidential nightmare with mirth—and disquiet

Songs, pandas and praise for Xi: how China courts young Taiwanese

China is using archaeology as a weapon

What China means when it says “peace”

Middle East & Africa

Iran’s new hope: a cardiologist president

Why food is piling up on the edge of Gaza

Jordan’s Islamists have been boosted by the war in Gaza

Soaring food-price inflation is hurting Nigeria’s poor

Kenya’s deadly Gen-Z protests could change the country

Europe

France is desperately searching for a government

When will Ukraine join NATO?

A Russian missile hits a children’s hospital in central Kyiv

Germany’s debt brake and the art of fantasy budgeting

The Kremlin is rewriting Wikipedia

Viktor Orban solidifies his credentials as the EU’s pantomime villain

Britain

What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?

Britain’s Labour government has declared war on NIMBYs

Britain’s general election was its least representative ever

How did pollsters do in predicting the British election?

Why are British beach huts so expensive?

How the Gaza war affected the British election

The new front line of British politics is just lovely

International

How China and Russia could hobble the internet

Special report

Schools in rich countries are making poor progress

The rich world’s teachers are increasingly morose

Will artificial intelligence transform school?

Efforts to teach character bring promise and perils

England’s school reforms are earning fans abroad

Sources and acknowledgments

Business

America’s giant armsmakers are being outgunned

Why most battery-makers struggle to make money

What German business makes of France’s leftward turn

Europe’s biggest debt-collector has a debt problem

The EV trade war between China and the West heats up

The CEO’s alternative summer reading list

Once high-flying Boeing is now a corporate criminal

Finance & economics

Trumponomics would not be as bad as most expect

Betting markets are useful when politics is chaotic

Europe prepares for a mighty trade war

The dangerous rise of pension nationalism

How strongmen abuse tools for fighting financial crime

Xi Jinping really is unshakeably committed to the private sector

Science & technology

Researchers are figuring out how large language models work

A scientific discovery could lead to leak-free period products

Freeze-dried chromosomes can survive for thousands of years

Vaccines could keep salmon safe from sea lice

Culture

Power-grabbing tips from “House of the Dragon” and “Shogun”

The drama of election night: a critical guide

What happens to your data when you die?

Whoever wins at Wimbledon, many of tennis’s professionals are losers

A history of Hamas dispenses with some pervasive myths

Henry VIII’s wives get their revenge

Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Obituary

Pål Enger never quite knew why he had to steal “The Scream”