The world this week

Politics
Business
The weekly cartoon
This week’s cover
Leaders


The envy of the world
America’s economy is bigger and better than ever
Will politics bring it back to Earth?

Financial firepower
How the Biden administration botched America’s sanctions against Iran
With the financial deterrent undermined, only military deterrence is left

Justin’s time
Canada’s Trudeau trap
How the world’s most reasonable country grew sick of centre-left liberalism

Reeves’s first rodeo
Britain’s budget risks being a huge missed opportunity
Rachel Reeves looks set to please no one for little return

Space travel
Starship will change what is possible beyond Earth
The successful test-flight of SpaceX’s massive new space vehicle promises a host of new projects, including the colonisation of Mars

Letters

On VAT, Spain, UNRWA, electric cars, tuition fees, working lunches
Letters to the editor
By Invitation


The space industry
Europe must play to win—not just play nice—in a new space race, argues ESA’s boss
America’s election
Europe should not see a potential Trump return as a threat, says Nadia Schadlow
Briefing


Filling up space
The rockets are nifty, but it is satellites that make SpaceX valuable
Elon Musk’s space venture may soon be more valuable than Tesla
Asia


The fifth Five Eye
New Zealand’s biggest pivot since the 1980s
Big dreams in a small place
Bhutan prays it can be India’s Hong Kong
Stormy weather
Pakistan rolls out the red carpet for China’s prime minister
Banyan
Myanmar’s military junta has conjured up a crazy currency system
China


The view from Beijing
Does China welcome—or dread—an Iran-Israel war?
Drill, baby, drill
China makes love and war with Taiwan
Buy, buy, buy…sell!
Do amateurs regret jumping into China’s frenzied stockmarkets?
Evil influencers
In China, fib online and find out
United States


Getting the drift
Democrats struggle to limit the loss of black voters in Georgia
Barnstorming
Republicans ramp up efforts to court Amish voters in Pennsylvania
Degrees of difference
Polarisation by education is remaking American politics
Campaign calculus: the customer is sometimes wrong
Voters won’t thank Kamala Harris for the state of the economy
Crying over split milk
Vital election races in Wisconsin are awfully close
Payback time
Brandon Johnson is giving Chicago’s teachers’ union everything
Lexington
One big thing Donald Trump and Elon Musk have in common

Middle East & Africa


Once more, with feeling
Bad ideas are back on the menu in the Middle East
Hell and horror, again
Does Israel’s new plan for Gaza include withholding food?
Above the fray
Lebanon’s army is less useless than its reputation suggests
A study in resilience
How Wagner survived Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death
Next-generation transportation
Africa’s EV revolution has two wheels not four
The Americas


The dying of the light
Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream
Running on empty
Bolivia’s slow-motion economic crisis is accelerating
India-Canada relations
The Mounties take on Modi. Who will win?
Europe


Out of sight, out of mind?
Italy starts outsourcing its migrant crisis to Albania
Maia Sandu takes a stand
This tiny country is a laboratory for Russia’s dirty tricks
Digging for victory
Why Russia is trying to seize a vital Ukrainian coal mine
Between BRICS and a hard place
The limits of Turkey’s strategic autonomy
Reclaiming the centre
Poland’s new modern-art museum wants to give the capital a fresh look
Charlemagne
Hopes for religious harmony come to life in the Muslim Vatican
Britain


They will come and build it
Sir Keir Starmer’s elevator pitch for investment
The ticked-off well-off
Is Britain’s government at war with the wealthy?
Tech brothers
Trade unions have their eye on Britain’s tech sector
A shrunken giant
Alex Salmond went from the fringes to the mainstream and back again
Testing times
Could you pass the British citizenship test?
The right to die
An assisted-dying bill is again introduced to Westminster
Bagehot
The war on prices: British edition
International


Going feral
Vladimir Putin’s spies are plotting global chaos
Special report


Special report
The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust
Economic output
American productivity still leads the world
For richer and poorer
Is higher inequality the price America pays for faster growth?
Energy
The shale revolution helped make America’s economy great
Stocks
Why the American stockmarket reigns supreme
The dollar
China’s yuan is nowhere close to displacing the greenback
Looking ahead
What can stop the American economy now?
The American economy
Sources and acknowledgments
Business


Autonomous cars
The trouble with Elon Musk’s robotaxi dream
On the rack
Pity the superstar fashion designer
Little frog, bigger pond
Poland’s stockmarket has a hot new entrant
Mine your own business
BHP and Rio Tinto are heading in different directions
Reign of the spreadsheet
Why Microsoft Excel won’t die
Called out
Can artificial intelligence rescue customer service?
Bartleby
The horrors of the reply-all email thread
Schumpeter
What if carmaking went the way of consumer electronics?
Finance & economics


Dark commerce
Inside the secret oil trade that funds Iran’s wars
Buttonwood
Why investors should still avoid Chinese stocks
Mein Gott
Germany’s economy goes from bad to worse
Everyone wins
Trump’s trillion-dollar tax cuts are spiralling out of control
Free exchange
An economics Nobel for work on why nations succeed and fail
Science & technology


The new Moon race
SpaceX is NASA’s biggest lunar rival
The new Moon race
SpaceX is NASA’s biggest lunar rival
Life finds a way
Tubeworms live beneath the planetary crust around deep-sea vents
Forget about Mars
Could life exist on one of Jupiter’s moons?
Culture


Who are you calling cute?
Why the world is so animated about anime
The aquatic underworld
Is the deep ocean more magnificent than outer space?
World in a dish
Food lovers the world over are tickled by pickles
Sexual politics
In the second world war, some diplomacy was done between the sheets
Known unknowns
How to analyse chance, ignorance and risk
Wall of worry
What don’t you know about your partner?
The Economist reads


The Economist reads
What to read about grief and bereavement
Economic & financial indicators

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Obituary


The boy who aged too fast
Sammy Basso led research into his own rare disease