The world this week

Business

NEW YORK, US - MAY 1: The troubled First Republic Bank was closed by US regulators, while its assets are to be acquired by JPMorgan Chase, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said Monday in a statement. (Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Politics

KAL’s cartoon

The Economist

This week’s covers

Bust budgets

Governments are living in a fiscal fantasyland

Leaders

The most important election this year

If Turkey sacks its strongman, democrats everywhere should take heart

A new Afghanistan policy

Time to engage (very carefully) with the Taliban

Rebuilding the buffers

How to shore up America’s banks after First Republic’s demise 

When viruses are good for you 

How to battle superbugs with viruses that “eat” them 

On greening electricity pylons, Englishness, banking, our banana index, jerks at work, cider

Letters to the editor

Letters

Crossroads at a crossroads

Could Erdogan be ousted in Turkey’s coming election?

Briefing

A coronation

Britain crowns Charles III its new king

Britain

Bourse correction 

Britain is liberalising its stockmarket-listing rules, again

Fixing the state 

Britain takes a more sensible approach to post-Brexit regulation

Striking difference

Britain’s NHS has never seen industrial action on this scale

Science lessons

Britain plans new guidance on sex and gender in schools

Bus swap

Wrightbus bets on hydrogen buses

Bagehot

The Tories v the institutions

Atrocity exhibitions

War-crimes prosecutions in Ukraine are a long game

Europe

No Victory Day

Russia could take Bakhmut within weeks

Producing patriotic children for Russia

Vladimir Putin wants to militarise Russian schools

The reckoning

Europe will need to fundamentally reset its fiscal policies

Charlemagne 

Emmanuel Macron hopes to reinvent himself in 100 days

DeSantis and his dissenters

Ron DeSantis’s lurch in Florida hurts his presidential chances

United States

Lights, camera, industrial action

Hollywood’s writers go on strike

Bye-bye covid

America is ending its emergency declaration for the pandemic

Aid and a bet

USAID is changing the way it tries to do good in the world

Snake, rattle and roil

The fun and the fury of a rattlesnake derby

Lexington

What walking from Washington to New York reveals about America

Wrangling over white gold 

The green revolution will stall without Latin America’s lithium

The Americas

A libertarian turn

Javier Milei, an Argentine libertarian, is rising in the polls

Stability amid chaos

Santiago Peña, a former economist, is Paraguay’s next president

Strategic struggle 

Sudan’s war is home-grown, but risks drawing in outsiders

Middle East & Africa

Macron’s mission

France moved quickly to evacuate civilians from Sudan

A name to die for 

Leaders of Islamic State have a short life-expectancy

Syrians unwanted in Lebanon

Lebanon’s government is squeezing out Syrian refugees

From the Baltic to the Caspian and onwards

Russia and Iran are upgrading their transport links

Afghan reality

Life under the rule of the Taliban 2.0

Asia

A tepid taste of freedom

The opposition looks set to win Thailand’s election

The revolution is over

The Philippines’s once-proud Maoist insurgents are out of ammo

Banyan

America’s closest Indo-Pacific allies are cosying up

Closed society 

China needs foreign workers. So why won’t it embrace immigration?

China

The smokeless war

A battle against spies in China is spooking locals and foreigners

Battle of the bricks

Lego, the world’s top toymaker, focuses on China

Chaguan

China’s new “Top Gun” normalises war with America

Which billionaires lost out?

The 2023 crony-capitalism index

International

The missing middle

The business trend that unites Walmart and Tiffany & Co

Latin America’s other Amazon

Why MercadoLibre keeps soaring as other e-emporiums sink

Coding in the moonlight

How to two-time your employer: a tech worker’s guide

Ghost writers 

Artificial intelligence is remixing journalism into a “soup” of language

Can I sink Icahn?

Hindenburg Research takes on Carl Icahn

Bartleby

A short guide to corporate rituals

Information overlords

China’s data-security laws rattle Western business executives

Schumpeter 

America needs a jab in its corporate backside

In God we bust 

America faces a debt nightmare

Finance & economics

Borrowing problems

China’s local-debt crisis is about to get nasty

Capital v labour

Are greedy corporations causing inflation? 

Prize fighter

Gabriel Zucman, a controversial John Bates Clark medallist

Buttonwood

What the First Republic deal means for America’s banks

Free exchange

How Japanese policymakers ended up in a very deep hole

The antibiotics crisis

Western firms are becoming interested in a Soviet medicine

Science & technology

Exploring the blue planet

Much of the Earth remains unexplored

Tides of filth 

What shipwrecked insects reveal about life at sea in the 17th century

The emperor’s new abode

Was Charlemagne’s base really in Italy rather than Germany?

Culture

Reach for the stars

How SpaceX set off a new race to commercialise space

World in a dish

A hunt for ramps exemplifies the pleasures of foraging for dinner

Pocket rockets

The evolution of watches reflects changing relations with time

Back Story

What happens when a story loses a main character?

A whistle in the dark

Carolyn Bryant’s was the testimony that doomed Emmett Till

Obituary

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Economic & financial indicators

The jury is still out

Suicide rates for girls are rising. Are smartphones to blame?

Graphic detail

Artificial intelligence

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

By Invitation

The Crown: a review from down under

Charles III is a good bloke, says Malcolm Turnbull

Banking

Andreas Wesemann asks what government-backed deposit insurance is for

The Economist explains

Why are migrants to Europe fleeing from and through Tunisia? 

What is the special district at the heart of Disney’s feud with Ron DeSantis?

Fiscal fantasyland: When will politicians wake up?

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Business

The world this week May 6th 2023

From the May 6th 2023 edition