Jul 6th 2024

No way to run a country

The world this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump and other populists 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