Jul 20th 2024

When markets ignore politics

The world this week

Leaders

America’s presidential election

Where would Donald Trump and J.D. Vance take America?

The anti-globalist MAGA enthusiast is more consequential than the average veep pick

The bull’s big blind spot

Euphoric markets are ignoring growing political risks

Investors’ exuberance in the face of political ructions is unlikely to pay off

The Middle East

Gaza could become “Mogadishu on the Med”

Even if there is a ceasefire, its prospects are grim

A profligate president

To halt Brazil’s decline, Lula needs to cut runaway public spending

Investors have started to worry

Avian influenza

Millions of birds have died. How to stop humans dying, too

As isolated human cases of H5N1 emerge, now is the time to prepare

Chokka chokey

How Labour should reform Britain’s overstuffed prisons

With no room for new prisoners, something has to change

Letters

On AI and war, peer review, renewable energy, salmon farms, drugs in Canada, football, legal advice

Letters to the editor

By Invitation

Breaking good

Rachael “Raygun” Gunn on the new sport that will invigorate the Olympics

Games over?

Halt the Olympics to save the planet, pleads a sports historian

Briefing

Glad-handing and grinding teeth

Will Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to America repair or weaken ties?

He may damage relations with Israel’s indispensable protector

When the shooting stops

Optimistic plans for post-war Gaza have little basis in reality

Aid, policing, reconstruction—everything is even harder than it sounds

Asia

Indo-Chinese relations

The epic bust-up between China and India could be ending

Too much and not enough

Climate change is making the monsoon more dangerous

To ban or not to ban

Imran Khan comes under further pressure in Pakistan

Bay of dreams

The Bay of Bengal should be an economic superpower

China

The Chinese tech scene

Xi Jinping is trying to love-bomb China’s entrepreneurs

Fuelling outrage

Fury erupts in China over a food-safety scandal

Trickle-down economics

The No.1 reason for success in China? Connections

Chasing ghosts

A spectre looms over Hong Kong’s property market

Chaguan

When party propaganda falls flat

United States

The emperor’s reign

Why MAGA is the future, not just present, of the GOP

Off-target

The Trump shooting has made a mockery of the Secret Service

Day of the jackals

What was the motive of Trump’s would-be assassin?

Courting chutzpah

A maverick judge tosses out Donald Trump’s classified-documents case

Dem dilemmas

Momentum against Joe Biden is mounting again

Politics for profit

Bob Menendez is found guilty of corruption

Lexington

Calling Donald Trump a threat to the rule of law has backfired

Middle East & Africa

A railway boom

Africa’s surprising new age of rail

Creeping authoritarianism

The far right has captured Israel’s police

Students of destruction

To see the future of urban warfare, look at Gaza

The Americas

The Brazilian economy

Under Lula, Brazil is walking on the financial wild side

An overmighty Congress

Peru’s president survives because she’s not in charge

Bitcoin mining

Crypto cowboys have found paradise in Paraguay

Europe

While stocks last

Russia’s vast stocks of Soviet-era weaponry are running out

Racing against time

Half Ukraine’s power is knocked out; winter is coming

Romanian doctor training

Romania is now a magnet for the world’s medical students

Fifty years on

The division of Cyprus looks indefinite

Charlemagne

J.D. Vance, an honorary Frenchman, sends Europe into panic mode

Britain

Cell signals

A crisis in prisons gives Britain’s new government its first test

Penguins v modernism

Why do penguins struggle with modernist architecture?

Shein on?

The potential listing of Shein is a test of London’s allure

Blast off!

Can Britain’s “mission-led” government defy gravity?

BNO visas

Britain is a home but not a haven for Hong Kongers

Bagehot

The secret to good government? Actually trying

International

The Geneva Conventions at 75

Could America fight its enemies without breaking the law?

Business

Research developments

China is the West’s corporate R&D lab. Can it remain so?

Lower your aspirations

Can Burberry put its chequered past behind it?

Married, with chiding

What a $600m wedding says about India’s attitude to wealth

Wiz kid

Google wants a piece of Microsoft’s cyber-security business

Shop lifting

Can anyone save Macy’s?

Bartleby

How a CEO knows when to quit

Schumpeter

Tech bros love J.D. Vance. Many CEOs are scared stiff

Finance & economics

Matadors gather

Stocks are on an astonishing run. Yet threats lurk

Buttonwood

Why investors have fallen in love with small American firms

Results season

At last, Wall Street has something to cheer

Tokyo drift

Japan’s strength produces a weak yen

Sour spot

China’s leaders face miserable economic-growth figures

Yes, please

YIMBY cities show how to build homes and contain rents

Free exchange

Americans are wrong to wish for an era of stable bipartisanship

Schools brief

Artificial intelligence

A short history of AI

Science & technology

Epidemiology

H5N1 avian flu could cause a human pandemic

Pied-à-lune

Astronomers have found a cave on the moon

Critical moment

AI can predict tipping points before they happen

Culture

Water world

Shallow thinking about water imperils the planet

Gangsters-in-chief

Taking on the global brotherhood of despots

Moving the goalposts

Why American sports teams switch cities so often

The telephone game

The largest sting operation you’ve never heard of

Can we have a word?

Plenty of words have no clear origin

Screen time

The best film and television of 2024 (so far)

The Economist reads

The Economist reads

Five books on the glories and flaws of the Olympics

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Obituary

Let’s talk about sex