The world this week

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


The war between Israel and Hamas
How to end the Middle East’s agony
War is spreading across the region. There is an alternative

Online media
The end of the social network
As Facebook turns 20, social apps are being transformed

Financial crisis in Cairo
Egypt doesn’t deserve a bail-out, but should get one
The Middle East cannot afford the collapse of its most populous country

A charter for change
The evidence in favour of charter schools in America has strengthened
Meanwhile, both parties have run away from them

Beating retreat
How to fix British defence
It needs more money and more people, but also reform

Letters

On Europe’s single market, Israel and genocide, the death penalty, shipping sanctions, lawn bowls
Letters to the editor
Briefing


Not posting, but watching
As Facebook turns 20, politics is out; impersonal video feeds are in
Social media are more popular than ever, but social networks are dying
Asia


On the rocks
Japan’s ruling party is in crisis
Dancing to victory
TikTok is a key battleground in Indonesia’s election
Counting cattle
The Hindu right’s pro-cow policies are terrible for India’s cows
Bihar blues
India’s opposition bloc disintegrates
Banyan
Asia’s commercial heft helps keep Russia’s war economy going
Clean bowled
Imran Khan is convicted. Pakistan’s generals are content
China


Operation Sit Tight
Is China a winner from the Red Sea attacks?
One is not enough
Hong Kong gets a second draconian security law
Salvation lies within
Watching “The Shawshank Redemption” on stage in China
Chaguan
Hard times for China’s micro-industrialists
United States


Political orphans
Charter schools do things that all Democrats say they support
Fear and voting in Las Vegas
How Nevada’s Republicans made their primary irrelevant
The Lake tape
A leaked recording shakes up the Republican Party in Arizona
Lactose laws
Dunkin’ faces a moo-ving class-action suit from the lactose intolerant
Grab him by the purse
Donald Trump is ordered to pay for his bullying
The insecure security secretary
Why not impeach everyone?
Lexington
How to overcome the biggest obstacle to electric vehicles
Middle East & Africa


Gaza and its reverberations
America’s shuttle diplomacy to wind down the war in Gaza
Egypt’s economic woes
The war in Gaza is exacerbating Egypt’s economic collapse
The United Nations and Gaza
Did UN workers participate in the October 7th attacks?
Hunger returns
Northern Ethiopia is again sliding into starvation
Disunity in west Africa
Three countries hit by coups are leaving west Africa’s main bloc

The Americas


Autocratic tactics
Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator, thumbs his nose at Joe Biden
All eyes on Five Eyes
Did spies from China, India and Russia meddle in Canada’s elections?
5,000 tax rates and counting
Can Lula fix Brazil’s fiscal mess?
Europe


Trouble at the top
The feud between Ukraine’s president and army chief boils over
A tame candidate turns a little wild
Meet Boris Nadezhdin, Vladimir Putin’s brave challenger
Still sovereign
Meet the Knights of Malta
F-16s, by any means
Sweden clears a Turkish hurdle to NATO accession
The war on the waves
Russia is losing the battle for the Black Sea
Charlemagne
Europe’s grumpy farmers are a symptom of wider malaise
Britain


Losing muscle
Britain’s armed forces are stretched perilously thin
Ever closer?
Labour wants to make Brexit work better. What does the EU think?
The power comes back on
Northern Ireland gets its government back
As prescribed
The pharmacist will see you now
The charge is sputtering
EV sales in Britain are disappointing expectations
Bagehot
The search for Conservative Party unity
International


Combat in orbit
War in space is no longer science fiction
Technology Quarterly


The foundations of the cloud
Users of the internet need not think about its physical underpinnings
Towers of glass and steel
Advances in physical storage and retrieval made the cloud possible
The edge of tomorrow
The internet got better and faster by moving data closer to users
The internet and climate change
Data centres improved greatly in energy efficiency as they grew massively larger
Politics
The physical borders of the digital world
Starlink
Satellites offer an important alternative to the wired internet
Securing the cloud’s future
The internet is integrated into virtually every aspect of life
The physical internet
Sources and acknowledgments
Business


After the iPhone
Apple’s Vision Pro headset ushers in a new era of personal technology
The AI-chip race
Could AMD break Nvidia’s chokehold on chips?
Pseudo-heir apparent
Many family firms lack heirs. Unrelated help is at hand
High rollers
Rolls-Royce goes electric—in style
Gas gaffe
Joe Biden’s limits on LNG exports won’t help the climate
Bartleby
Jürgen Klopp and the importance of energy
Schumpeter
How much should TikTok fear a resurgent Donald Trump?
Finance & economics


The octogenarian radical
What four more years of Joe Biden would mean for America’s economy
Buttonwood
Bitcoin ETFs are off to a bad start. Will things improve?
Game changing
China’s leaders are flailing as markets drop
Never grand
Evergrande’s liquidation is a new low in China’s property crisis
Prices and wages
Your pay is still going up too fast
Free exchange
Biden’s chances of re-election are better than they appear
Science & technology


Embodying the future
Why prosthetic limbs need not look like real ones
Medicine and dementia
Alzheimer’s disease may, rarely, be transmitted by medical treatment
Hazy figuring
AI could accelerate scientific fraud as well as progress
Bloodhounds of the sea
Why some whales can smell in stereo
Culture


Write on
Authors are collaborating with AI—and each other
So long, Hong Kong
A row over the Hong Kong Heritage Museum is a window on China
Bad sport
The violence of “Power Slap” is part of its allure
Secrecy and sketchiness in art
The Sotheby’s trial revealed the art market’s unsavoury practices
Dance like nobody’s watching
Martha Graham’s life tracked the jumps and dips of modern dance
Back Story
A new “Mr & Mrs Smith” is about more than action, money and sex
The Economist reads


The Economist reads
What are (some of) the best comic novels?
Economic & financial indicators

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
The Economist explains


The Economist explains
Did an Israeli hospital raid breach the laws of war?
The Economist explains
What on earth is happening in Poland?
Obituary


The short-tempered klavier
Peter Schickele and P.D.Q. Bach were sides of the same coin