The world this week

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


American politics
Why Biden must withdraw
The president and his party portray themselves as the saviours of democracy. Their actions say otherwise

Keir not
Labour has won the British election. Now it has to seize the moment
A volatile electorate and a strong showing for Reform UK are no reason for caution

The northern front
Hizbullah poses a grave threat to Israel
But a war right now would be disastrous

Everything in store
As Amazon turns 30, three factors will define its next decade
It will have to deal with trustbusters, catch up on AI and revive its core business

The end of the beginning
Central banks are winning the battle against inflation. But the war is just getting started
Politics and protectionism will make life difficult

Cloud and dagger
How spies should use technology
Digital tools are transforming spycraft, but won’t replace human agents

NATO at 75
How to Trump-proof America’s alliances
An essential step will be to let Ukraine into NATO

Letters

On solar power, the New York Times bestseller list, Metallica, football, presidential debates
Letters to the editor
By Invitation


Geopolitics
The West’s values are important, but so is realism, says Finland’s president
Europe’s other flashpoint
NATO must tackle instability in the Balkans, says an ex-head
Briefing


Demotivational speaking
Democratic bigwigs are starting to call for Joe Biden to step aside
A sitting congressman has broken ranks

President Lear
Senility in high office
Even leaders who are spry for their age eventually lose their grip

Gerontocrats ascendant
One generation has dominated American politics for over 30 years
How have they become so entrenched?

A new podcast
Introducing “Boom!”
A six-part series about the generation that blew up American politics
Asia


A new era begins
Japan’s mind-bending bento-box economics
The strange death of liberal arts
Why many young Asians are no longer studying history
An Asian model
Why is Thai health care so good?
Going nuclear
Demand for uranium is booming. Who is benefiting?
Banyan
Indians have grown used to getting nice things from politicians
China


Worrying about water
China is struck by floods and drought—at the same time
No defence
How to provoke the fury of Xi Jinping
An attack and a crackdown
China takes a step to curb anti-Japanese rhetoric online
United States


Supremely controversial
The Supreme Court’s term ends with a rash of divisive rulings
Vulture capital
The unsteady comeback of the California condor
Bureaucratic power
What the Chevron ruling means for the next US president
Fertile ground
Will IVF really be the next frontier in America’s culture wars?
Lexington
Joe Biden is fooling only himself

Middle East & Africa


The northern front
The next terrifying war: Israel v Hizbullah
The new nationalists
Meet the victors in Africa’s coup belt
The forest for the trees
How EU do-goodery risks harming Africa’s small farmers
The Americas


The sleepwalkers
China’s presence in Latin America has expanded dramatically
The other China
Paraguay and Taiwan strengthen their embrace, for now
A different kind of therapy
Mexico has become a testing ground for psychedelic therapies
Europe


France’s parliamentary election
Le Pen’s hard right looks set to dominate the French parliament
A black hole
Ukraine’s war has created millions of broken families
Send in the Turks
Turkish tourists can now easily visit nearby Greek islands
Green policies
The EU should be the world’s heat-pump pioneer
Charlemagne
Europe faces a new age of shrunken French influence
Britain


The British election
Labour’s landslide victory will turn politics on its head
Legacy thinking
The inheritance awaiting Britain’s next government
Deplatforming
The woes of Hargreaves Lansdown, Britain’s DIY-investing titan
Onboarding
Nukes and King Charles—but no door key
Political retirements
A prime minister, a plotter and others say farewell as British MPs
Bagehot
A weekend with Gareth Southgate and friends
Bagehot
What now for Britain’s right-wing parties?
International


Fickle friends
Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen will haunt NATO’s 75th birthday party
Technology Quarterly


New-look spooks
The tools of global spycraft have changed
Dead drop drops dead
Ubiquitous technical surveillance has made spying more difficult
Dot-dot-dot dashed
Signals intelligence has become a cyber-activity
Old-school broadcasts
Sometimes the old ways of espionage are the best
SpookGPT
Artificial intelligence can speed-sort satellite photos
Intelligence, Inc
Private firms and open sources are giving spies a run for their money
Spycraft
Sources and acknowledgments
Business


Growing closer
What next for Amazon as it turns 30?
Erase and rewind
Hollywood enters a frugal new era
A bunker mentality
Panic rooms and private bunkers are all the rage in Germany
Bartleby
Your conference-survival handbook
Schumpeter
Lessons in risk-taking from buccaneering BBVA
Finance & economics


A sequence of zeroes
What happened to the artificial-intelligence revolution?
Business creation
How Starbucks caffeinates local economies
Disappearing act
Why Chinese banks are now vanishing
In the wars
Ukraine has a month to avoid default
Buttonwood
America’s banks are more exposed to a downturn than they appear
Free exchange
How much cash should be removed from the financial system?
Science & technology


Tropical biology
The world’s most studied rainforest is still yielding new insights
Neurosurgery
A new technique could analyse tumours mid-surgery
Brewed awakenings
New yeast strains can produce untapped flavours of lager
Best foot forward
A new bionic leg can be controlled by the brain alone
Culture


Call of the desert
Can Saudi Arabia become a premier tourist hotspot?
Not of an age, but for all time
Making a case for Shakespeare, 400 years after his death
Manners maketh money
Finishing schools for the age of TikTok
Stories from Kerala
The rise of Mollywood, India’s more subtle film hub
Melancholy in the mountains
Like its Montana setting, Kevin Barry’s novel is brutal and gorgeous
The Economist reads


The Economist reads
The best and worst memoirs by British prime ministers
Economic & financial indicators

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
The Economist explains


The Economist explains
Who could plausibly replace Joe Biden?
The Economist explains
How could Democrats replace Joe Biden as their candidate for president?
Obituary


The keeper of memory
Ángeles Flórez Peón, “Maricuela”, made sure Spain did not forget its history