The world this week

Politics
Business
KAL’s cartoon
This week’s cover
Leaders


A new world order
Joe Biden’s global vision is too timid and pessimistic
The president underestimates America’s strengths and misunderstands how it acquired them

The debt-relief duet
China and the West take a step to ease Africa’s debt crisis
A deal for Ghana is the first test case for a new approach

Thailand’s election
The humiliation of Thailand’s regime is a boost for Asian democracy
The monarcho-military establishment must give Thai voters the change they demand

Payment parity
The fight over the future of global payments
Digital payments have transformed domestic finance. Now competition is going global

Cretaceous capitalism
Trade in dinosaur fossils is good for science
The market for specimens should be regulated, not banned

Letters

On bacteriophages, Bakhmut, Sir Keir Starmer, the Philippines, AI twaddle, ice picks
Letters to the editor
By Invitation


Global health
Tedros Adhanom, head of the WHO, on the lessons from covid-19
Sovereign debt
Abebe Aemro Selassie on Africa’s brutal funding squeeze
Briefing


One hundred years of inquietude
Henry Kissinger explains how to avoid world war three
America and China must learn to live together. They have less than ten years
Asia


Global summitry
Can the West win over the rest of the world?
Pooches of the Panjshir
The Taliban go big on animal welfare
Moving Forward
Thailand’s pro-democracy parties trounce the military establishment
Southern approaches
Narendra Modi’s party takes a beating in Karnataka
Banyan
Myanmar’s conflict is dividing South-East Asia
China


A new mandate in the heavens
Why China fears Starlink
Don’t look up
China is unusually secretive about its space programme
The city of Xi
Xiongan is Xi Jinping’s pet project
United States


Decoding the detente
The fault lines in America’s China policy
New York’s hottest venue
What do George Santos, R. Kelly and FIFA have in common?
Flipping balls
Pinball is booming in America, thanks to nostalgia and canny marketing
Sweet and salty
Anoint my caverns with oil
Aftershocks
Congress should fund the BLM (no, not that one)
The woke maths experiment
San Francisco’s “woke maths” experiment
Lexington
It turns out that Democrats bus migrants, too

Middle East & Africa


A power project
Iran’s proxies in the Middle East remain a powerful force
Behold now behemoth
America’s new embassy in Beirut is vast
Big deals on the bus
Looking for the African middle class? Head to the bus park
Grounded in Nigeria
Foreign airlines in Nigeria are frustrated by the blocking of their funds
A new age of austerity
Africa faces a mounting debt crisis
The Americas


A polarising pendulum
Latin America’s left-wing experiment is a warning to the world
A desperate measure
Ecuador’s president dissolves Congress to avoid impeachment
Europe


Round one, Erdogan
Recep Tayyip Erdogan beats his challenger as Turkey votes
A message from Europe
Volodymyr Zelensky’s European trip secures a lot more military backing
City of love and war
How a front-line city became Ukraine’s romantic capital
Nuclear nightmares
Fears about the reactors at Zaporizhia continue to mount
Calculated effort
For Giorgia Meloni, supporting Ukraine has some useful benefits
Charlemagne
Meet the lefty Europeans who want to deliberately shrink the economy
Britain


Out of order
Britain’s Public Order Act goes too far
Home, still home
Why are more British adults still living with their parents?
Green with envy
The Inflation Reduction Act is turning heads among British businesses
Fault lines
The missing ingredient in Britain’s new law on tenants’ rights
Autonomous vehicles
Aboard Britain’s first commercial self-driving bus
Spiritually testing
Want to be a nun? You need to pass these tests
Bagehot
Truss Tour: 2023
International


From Macron to Mercedes
Europe can’t decide how to unplug from China
Special report


Digital finance
As payments systems go digital, they are changing global finance
Emerging markets
A digital payments revolution in India
Techfin v fintech
The old bank/card model is still entrenched in the rich world
Cryptocurrencies
The promise of crypto has not lived up to its initial excitement
Digital money
Central-bank digital currencies are talked about more than coming to fruition
International finance
Could digital-payments systems help unseat the dollar?
The future
There are risks but also big potential benefits from digital payments
Digital finance
Video: insights from the author
Digital finance
Sources and acknowledgments
Business


After the binge
Businesses are in for a mighty debt hangover
Green-sky thinking
The aviation industry wants to be net zero—but not yet
Awaiting a second wind
The wind-turbine industry should be booming. Why isn’t it?
Bartleby
Businesses’ bottleneck bane
Not over Reliance
Mukesh Ambani returns to the spotlight
Schumpeter
America’s culture wars threaten its single market
Finance & economics


Leviathan swells
The financial system is slipping into state control
Budgetary dysfunction
What America does after a debt-ceiling disaster
Shanghai sighs
Is China’s recovery about to stall?
Laid to rest
LIBOR will at last be switched off in June
Buttonwood
How to invest in artificial intelligence
Free exchange
Robert Lucas was a giant of macroeconomics
Science & technology


Digging up the money
The market for dinosaur fossils is booming
Painting the heavens
Artists hope to turn selfies into comets
The DNA dragnet
Humans shed genetic information everywhere they go
Mercury rising
The coming years will be the hottest ever
Bug-fed steak
Insects could help turn beer waste into beef
Culture


“Death of a Salesman” in Beijing
In 1983 Arthur Miller directed one of his best-known plays in China
Cybercrime
“Fancy Bear Goes Phishing” charts the evolution of hacking
New American fiction
In Emma Cline’s new novel, a young woman loses control of her life
World in a dish
Wings v tenders: the choice says more about you than you think
Exorcising German history
In “Fatherland”, an author reckons with his Nazi grandfather
Back Story
Quiet artworks sometimes make the deepest impressions
Economic & financial indicators

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Graphic detail


Tuckered out
Sacking Tucker Carlson has put a dent in Fox News’s ratings
Obituary


The long take
Pema Tseden was the founder and builder of Tibetan cinema
The Economist reads


Corporate scandals
What to read about villains in business