The world this week

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


Taking back what is theirs
Ukraine strikes back
The counter-offensive is getting under way. The next few weeks will be critical

Mind-goggling
Apple’s Vision Pro is an incredible machine. Now to find out what it is for
The meaning of “spatial computing”

History meets accountancy
California’s reparations scheme is bad policy and worse politics
Democrats should ditch it in favour of ideas that Americans actually support

Climate finance
The struggle to kill King Coal
Financial tools alone cannot stamp out the world’s dirtiest fuel

Africa’s diamond geyser
How to get rich from commodities
Tips from Botswana on how to avoid the resource curse

Letters

On illegal drugs, data privacy, place names, Sudan, London’s Elizabeth line
Letters to the editor
By Invitation


Anglo-American ties
Kim Darroch on the “special relationship” between America and Britain
War in Ukraine
Mick Ryan assesses Ukraine’s counter-offensive
Briefing


Probing questions
Ukraine’s counter-offensive is gathering pace
Its army is mounting big pushes in the south and east

Ukraine’s D-Day
The geopolitical stakes of Ukraine’s counter-offensive
How to ensure Russia suffers a strategic defeat

Nothing to see here
Pretending that everything is under control in Russia
It is getting ever harder
Asia


Soft(ware) power
How India is using digital technology to project power
Jungle shelters and jerry-rigged drones
Inside the armed Burmese resistance
In the wreckage
Despite a crash, Indian railways have an impressive safety record
Banyan
Japan offers Ukraine a lesson in reconstruction
China


The threat of rising sea levels
China’s new Great Wall
Precious bodily fluids
China’s guarding of genetic data is a drag on scientific research
Chaguan
The end of Western naivety about China
United States


The tide goes out
California may punt on paying reparations to the descendants of slaves
The Republican pack
The bad bind bedevilling Mike Pence and Chris Christie
Slim pickings
Georgia, the Peach State, has no peach crop this year
Opting out
Columbia University ditches the college-ranking system
Pre-emptive strikes
Republicans intensify their assault on city governments
Constitutional convulsions
Montana, climate-change pioneer
The Big Uneasy
Southern Baptists are arguing about the extent of male authority

Middle East & Africa


Carats and sticks
Botswana, an African success story, looks ever less exceptional
An African beacon of stability begins to flare up
Tension in Senegal is set to persist
Bye-bye to bungs
Nigeria’s new president scraps the fuel subsidy
Iraq’s real new bosses
The Iraqi militias are copying their overmighty cousins in Iran
Bye-atollah
Who will succeed Shia Islam’s top man?
The Americas


A land of useless workers
Why are Latin American workers so strikingly unproductive?
All the single ladies, and their kids
Latin America’s single mothers are being left behind
Europe


France and Germany
Russia’s war on Ukraine is changing Europe
Exit Erdoganomics?
Turkey’s President Erdogan shifts towards sane economics
Green fades to brown
Costly climate rules are turning Germans away from the Greens
Fjords and forges
A huge Norwegian phosphate rock find is a boon for Europe
Charlemagne
Albania is no longer a bad Balkan joke
Britain


The state on trial
The difficulties facing Britain’s covid-19 inquiry
Clap for the NHS
Why does London have so much sexually transmitted disease?
The lingering effects of covid-19
Children’s centres in Britain are crammed again
Dropped catches
How grassroots schemes are helping England’s non-white cricketers
No intermission
The fading charms of Britain’s historic cinemas
Ebb and flow
Britons still do like to be beside the seaside
Bagehot
British politics is littered with fake taboos
International


Studying for success
Should you send your children to private school?
Business


Reality check
Apple’s Vision Pro is a technical marvel. Will anyone buy it?
First thing we do, let’s bot all the lawyers
Generative AI could radically alter the practice of law
Aussie rule-bending
PwC has disgraced itself down under
Golf and the Gulf
The PGA agrees to team up with its golfing arch-enemy
Angst
German bosses are depressed
Sequoia leaves China
Why Sequoia Capital is sawing off its Chinese branch
Bartleby
Why employee loyalty can be overrated
Schumpeter
What TIM’s mega-spin-off reveals about Europe’s telecoms industry
Finance & economics


Ember alert
Who is keeping coal alive?
Growth problems
Japan’s stockmarket rally may disappoint investors
Buttonwood
Surging stockmarkets are powered by artificial intelligence
Forged in fire
Amoral cities are flourishing in a turbulent geopolitical era
Crackdown
Regulators put the future of America’s crypto industry in doubt
Nasty hangover
After debt-ceiling negotiations, America faces a debt deluge
Free exchange
A flawed argument for central-bank digital currencies
Science & technology


Homo naledi
A tiny, ancient hominin may have been surprisingly clever
Maybe she’s barn with it
A new study asks whether racehorses have hit their genetic peak
When it takes one to tango
Reproduction without sex is more common than scientists thought
Green energy
Sucking a carbon-neutral fuel out of thin air
Some like it hot
A Finnish firm thinks it can cut industrial carbon emissions by a third
Culture


Runaway justice
Two alarming books on the power of America’s Supreme Court
Memory and forgetting
A museum in Albania aims to commemorate a painful past
Avian adventures
A raptor’s mystique inspires “What an Owl Knows”
Post-colonial fiction
Leïla Slimani’s new novel ranges from France to Morocco
Things fall apart
“Amongst the Ruins” explores the collapse of civilisations
Johnson
Gestures are a subtle and vital form of communication
The Economist reads


Banned books
Eight books you are forbidden from reading
Economic & financial indicators

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Graphic detail


Lavender haze
Smoke blackens the air in America’s north-east
The Economist explains


The Economist explains
How drugs and alcohol have fuelled soldiers for centuries
The Economist explains
How the breach of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam could affect a nuclear plant
Obituary


Her special child
Vera Putina claimed to be Vladimir Putin’s real mother