Jun 10th 2023

Ukraine strikes back

The world this week

Leaders

Taking back what is theirs

Ukraine strikes back

The counter-offensive is getting under way. The next few weeks will be critical

Mind-goggling

Apple’s Vision Pro is an incredible machine. Now to find out what it is for

The meaning of “spatial computing”

History meets accountancy

California’s reparations scheme is bad policy and worse politics

Democrats should ditch it in favour of ideas that Americans actually support

Climate finance

The struggle to kill King Coal

Financial tools alone cannot stamp out the world’s dirtiest fuel

Africa’s diamond geyser

How to get rich from commodities

Tips from Botswana on how to avoid the resource curse

Letters

On illegal drugs, data privacy, place names, Sudan, London’s Elizabeth line

Letters to the editor

By Invitation

Anglo-American ties

Kim Darroch on the “special relationship” between America and Britain

War in Ukraine

Mick Ryan assesses Ukraine’s counter-offensive

Briefing

Probing questions

Ukraine’s counter-offensive is gathering pace

Its army is mounting big pushes in the south and east

Ukraine’s D-Day

The geopolitical stakes of Ukraine’s counter-offensive

How to ensure Russia suffers a strategic defeat

Nothing to see here

Pretending that everything is under control in Russia

It is getting ever harder

Asia

Soft(ware) power

How India is using digital technology to project power

Jungle shelters and jerry-rigged drones

Inside the armed Burmese resistance

In the wreckage

Despite a crash, Indian railways have an impressive safety record

Banyan

Japan offers Ukraine a lesson in reconstruction

China

The threat of rising sea levels

China’s new Great Wall

Precious bodily fluids

China’s guarding of genetic data is a drag on scientific research

Chaguan

The end of Western naivety about China

United States

The tide goes out

California may punt on paying reparations to the descendants of slaves

The Republican pack

The bad bind bedevilling Mike Pence and Chris Christie

Slim pickings

Georgia, the Peach State, has no peach crop this year

Opting out

Columbia University ditches the college-ranking system

Pre-emptive strikes

Republicans intensify their assault on city governments

Constitutional convulsions

Montana, climate-change pioneer

The Big Uneasy

Southern Baptists are arguing about the extent of male authority

Middle East & Africa

Carats and sticks

Botswana, an African success story, looks ever less exceptional

An African beacon of stability begins to flare up

Tension in Senegal is set to persist

Bye-bye to bungs

Nigeria’s new president scraps the fuel subsidy

Iraq’s real new bosses

The Iraqi militias are copying their overmighty cousins in Iran

Bye-atollah

Who will succeed Shia Islam’s top man?

The Americas

A land of frustrated workers

Why are Latin American workers so strikingly unproductive?

All the single ladies, and their kids

Latin America’s single mothers are being left behind

Europe

France and Germany

Russia’s war on Ukraine is changing Europe

Exit Erdoganomics?

Turkey’s President Erdogan shifts towards sane economics

Green fades to brown

Costly climate rules are turning Germans away from the Greens

Fjords and forges

A huge Norwegian phosphate rock find is a boon for Europe

Charlemagne

Albania is no longer a bad Balkan joke

Britain

The state on trial

The difficulties facing Britain’s covid-19 inquiry

Clap for the NHS

Why does London have so much sexually transmitted disease?

The lingering effects of covid-19

Children’s centres in Britain are crammed again

Dropped catches

How grassroots schemes are helping England’s non-white cricketers

No intermission

The fading charms of Britain’s historic cinemas

Ebb and flow

Britons still do like to be beside the seaside

Bagehot

British politics is littered with fake taboos

International

Studying for success

Should you send your children to private school?

Business

Reality check

Apple’s Vision Pro is a technical marvel. Will anyone buy it?

First thing we do, let’s bot all the lawyers

Generative AI could radically alter the practice of law

Aussie rule-bending

PwC has disgraced itself down under

Golf and the Gulf

The PGA agrees to team up with its golfing arch-enemy

Angst

German bosses are depressed

Sequoia leaves China

Why Sequoia Capital is sawing off its Chinese branch

Bartleby

Why employee loyalty can be overrated

Schumpeter

What TIM’s mega-spin-off reveals about Europe’s telecoms industry

Finance & economics

Ember alert

Who is keeping coal alive?

Growth problems

Japan’s stockmarket rally may disappoint investors

Buttonwood

Surging stockmarkets are powered by artificial intelligence

Forged in fire

Amoral cities are flourishing in a turbulent geopolitical era

Crackdown

Regulators put the future of America’s crypto industry in doubt

Nasty hangover

After debt-ceiling negotiations, America faces a debt deluge

Free exchange

A flawed argument for central-bank digital currencies

Science & technology

Homo naledi

A tiny, ancient hominin may have been surprisingly clever

Maybe she’s barn with it

A new study asks whether racehorses have hit their genetic peak

When it takes one to tango

Reproduction without sex is more common than scientists thought

Green energy

Sucking a carbon-neutral fuel out of thin air

Some like it hot

A Finnish firm thinks it can cut industrial carbon emissions by a third

Culture

Runaway justice

Two alarming books on the power of America’s Supreme Court

Memory and forgetting

A museum in Albania aims to commemorate a painful past

Avian adventures

A raptor’s mystique inspires “What an Owl Knows”

Post-colonial fiction

Leïla Slimani’s new novel ranges from France to Morocco

Things fall apart

“Amongst the Ruins” explores the collapse of civilisations

Johnson

Gestures are a subtle and vital form of communication

The Economist reads

Banned books

Eight books you are forbidden from reading

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

Lavender haze

Smoke blackens the air in America’s north-east

The Economist explains

How drugs and alcohol have fuelled soldiers for centuries

The Economist explains

How the breach of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam could affect a nuclear plant

Obituary

Her special child