May 20th 2023

How should America lead? The Biden doctrine and its flaws

The world this week

Leaders

A new world order

Joe Biden’s global vision is too timid and pessimistic

The president underestimates America’s strengths and misunderstands how it acquired them

A man holds a 100 cedis, the Ghana currency, note in Accra, Ghana, on December 1, 2022. - Ghana is battling its worst economic crisis in decades.The government on December 14, 2022 signed a $3 billion bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund in a bid to shore up its public finances, but economic stability is still a way off.Once applauded as a haven of economic stability and security in a region plagued by coups and jihadist wars, Ghana has steadily lost investor confidence as its economy slipped into crisis. (Photo by Nipah Dennis / AFP) (Photo by NIPAH DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images)

The debt-relief duet

China and the West take a step to ease Africa’s debt crisis

A deal for Ghana is the first test case for a new approach

FILE PHOTO: Move Forward Party leader and prime ministerial candidate Pita Limjaroenrat waves to supporters as they celebrate the party's election results in Bangkok, Thailand, May 15, 2023. REUTERS/Jorge Silva and REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha/File Photo

Thailand’s election

The humiliation of Thailand’s regime is a boost for Asian democracy

The monarcho-military establishment must give Thai voters the change they demand

MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA, INDIA - 2022/08/01: A Unified Payment Interface (UPI) barcode, or QR code, is kept at a vegetable stall for customers to make digital payments in Mumbai. Unified Payment Interface (UPI) recorded over 6,000,000,000 (six billion) transactions in July in India which is the highest ever by a digital payment platform since it started in 2016. (Photo by Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Payment parity

The fight over the future of global payments

Digital payments have transformed domestic finance. Now competition is going global

An entire T. rex skeleton has sold for 5.55 million Swiss francs ($6.2 million USD, £5 million GBP) as only third of its kind to ever go up for auction - and the first ever in Europe., The approximately 67-million-year-old TRX-293 TRINITY Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton is “among the finest specimens of one of the largest terrestrial predators ever to inhabit the Earth”, according to Koller Auctions., It measures in at 11.6 metres (38 feet) long and a towering 3.9 metres (12.8 feet) high., Koller says it is only the third time worldwide a full T. rex skeleton of such quality has gone under the hammer., The skeleton was bought by a unnamed private collector and will remain in Europe, although it is not yet clear if it will go on public display., The sale price - which includes the buyer’s premium and fees - failed to reach the high estimate of CHF5-8 million (Swiss Franc) ($5.37 million-$8.6 million USD), possibly because it is a composite., It is named "293 Trinity", because it is built from three different T. rexes from US dinosaur sites in Montana and Wyoming., Before the auction, Zurich-based Koller said: “Trinity is one of the most spectacular T. rex skeletons in existence, a well-preserved and brilliantly restored fossil.”, It added: “Mounted in a dynamic, scientifically accurate and modern pose, it is among the finest specimens of one of the largest terrestrial predators ever to inhabit the Earth.”, The more than 50 per cent original bone material comes from three Tyrannosaurus specimens excavated between 2008 and 2013, from the Hell Creek and Lance Creek formations in Montana and Wyoming., Both sites are known for two of the most important Tyrannosaurus discoveries - “Sue”, which sold at auction for $8.4 million in 1997 and “Stan”, whose world-record hammer price of $31.8 million in 2020 catapulted dinosaur fossil prices into a realm usually reserved for the most sought-after works of art., According to the April 2021 scientific journal nat

Cretaceous capitalism

Trade in dinosaur fossils is good for science

The market for specimens should be regulated, not banned

Letters

On bacteriophages, Bakhmut, Sir Keir Starmer, the Philippines, AI twaddle, ice picks

Letters to the editor

By Invitation

Global health

Tedros Adhanom, head of the WHO, on the lessons from covid-19

Sovereign debt

Abebe Aemro Selassie on Africa’s brutal funding squeeze

Briefing

Henry Kissinger photographed by Vincent Tullo for The Economist, New York 2023.Credit: The Economist/Vincent Tullo

One hundred years of inquietude

Henry Kissinger explains how to avoid world war three

America and China must learn to live together. They have less than ten years

United States

Decoding the detente

The fault lines in America’s China policy

New York’s hottest venue

What do George Santos, R. Kelly and FIFA have in common?

Flipping balls

Pinball is booming in America, thanks to nostalgia and canny marketing

Sweet and salty

Anoint my caverns with oil

Aftershocks

Congress should fund the BLM (no, not that one)

The woke maths experiment

San Francisco’s “woke maths” experiment

Lexington

It turns out that Democrats bus migrants, too

The Americas

A polarising pendulum

Latin America’s left-wing experiment is a warning to the world

A desperate measure

Ecuador’s president dissolves Congress to avoid impeachment

Asia

Global summitry

Can the West win over the rest of the world?

Pooches of the Panjshir

The Taliban go big on animal welfare

Moving Forward

Thailand’s pro-democracy parties trounce the military establishment

Southern approaches

Narendra Modi’s party takes a beating in Karnataka

Banyan

Myanmar’s conflict is dividing South-East Asia

China

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is seen in this time exposure from Cocoa Beach, Florida as it launches the company's third Starlink mission on January 6, 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket is carrying 60 Starlink satellites as part of a planned constellation of thousands of satellites designed to provide internet services around the world. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

A new mandate in the heavens

Why China fears Starlink

Don’t look up

China is unusually secretive about its space programme

The city of Xi

Xiongan is Xi Jinping’s pet project

Middle East & Africa

Iranian clerics carrying flags and a portrait of the Iranian former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani (C) who were killed in an American drone attack in Baghdad airport, shout anti-U.S. and anti-Israel slogans during a symbolic gathering at the International Imam Khomeini Airport (IKIA) in the south of Tehran for traveling to Gaza to fight against Israel as a sign of their unity with Palestinian people, on May 19, 2021. (Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

A power project

Iran’s proxies in the Middle East remain a powerful force

Behold now behemoth

America’s new embassy in Beirut is vast

Big deals on the bus

Looking for the African middle class? Head to the bus park

Grounded in Nigeria

Foreign airlines in Nigeria are frustrated by the blocking of their funds

A new age of austerity

Africa faces a mounting debt crisis

Europe

LUSAIL, QATAR - MAY 14: An aerial view of Al Jaber twin towers after illuminated in colors of Turkish flag and photos of Turkish President Erdogan shown following 28th presidential and parliamentary elections of Turkiye in Lusail, Qatar on May 14, 2023. (Photo by Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Round one, Erdogan

Recep Tayyip Erdogan beats his challenger as Turkey votes

A message from Europe

Volodymyr Zelensky’s European trip secures a lot more military backing

City of love and war

How a front-line city became Ukraine’s romantic capital

Nuclear nightmares

Fears about the reactors at Zaporizhia continue to mount

Calculated effort

For Giorgia Meloni, supporting Ukraine has some useful benefits

Charlemagne

Meet the lefty Europeans who want to shrink the economy

Britain

Police officers detain an activist from the "Just Stop Oil" environmental coalition as they attempted to block a road during a sit-in protest in London, UK, on Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022. The coalition of groups are pushing for the government to commit to halting new fossil fuel licensing and production. Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Out of order

Britain’s Public Order Act goes too far

Home, still home

Why are more British adults still living with their parents?

Green with envy

The Inflation Reduction Act is turning heads among British businesses

Fault lines

The missing ingredient in Britain’s new law on tenants’ rights

Autonomous vehicles

Aboard Britain’s first commercial self-driving bus

Spiritually testing

Want to be a nun? You need to pass these tests

Bagehot

Truss Tour: 2023

International

From Macron to Mercedes

Europe can’t decide how to unplug from China

Special report

Digital finance

As payments systems go digital, they are changing global finance

Emerging markets

A digital payments revolution in India

Techfin v fintech

The old bank/card model is still entrenched in the rich world

Cryptocurrencies

The promise of crypto has not lived up to its initial excitement

Digital money

Central-bank digital currencies are talked about more than coming to fruition

International finance

Could digital-payments systems help unseat the dollar?

The future

There are risks but also big potential benefits from digital payments

Digital finance

Video: insights from the author

Digital finance

Sources and acknowledgments

Business

After the binge

Businesses are in for a mighty debt hangover

Green-sky thinking

The aviation industry wants to be net zero—but not yet

Awaiting a second wind

The wind-turbine industry should be booming. Why isn’t it?

Bartleby

Businesses’ bottleneck bane

Not over Reliance

Mukesh Ambani returns to the spotlight

Schumpeter

America’s culture wars threaten its single market

Finance & economics

Leviathan swells

The financial system is slipping into state control

Budgetary dysfunction

What America does after a debt-ceiling disaster

Shanghai sighs

Is China’s recovery about to stall?

Laid to rest

LIBOR will at last be switched off in June

Buttonwood

How to invest in artificial intelligence

Free exchange

Robert Lucas was a giant of macroeconomics

Science & technology

Phipps with a section of the Nanotyrannus, one of the Dueling Dinosaurs

Digging up the money

The market for dinosaur fossils is booming

Painting the heavens

Artists hope to turn selfies into comets

The DNA dragnet

Humans shed genetic information everywhere they go

Mercury rising

The coming years will be the hottest ever

Bug-fed steak

Insects could help turn beer waste into beef

Culture

CHINA. Beijing. 1983. Arthur MILLER, Ying RUOCHENG and cast during the Beijing production of "Death of a Salesman".

“Death of a Salesman” in Beijing

In 1983 Arthur Miller directed one of his best-known plays in China

Cybercrime

“Fancy Bear Goes Phishing” charts the evolution of hacking

New American fiction

In Emma Cline’s new novel, a young woman loses control of her life

World in a dish

Wings v tenders: the choice says more about you than you think

Exorcising German history

In “Fatherland”, an author reckons with his Nazi grandfather

Back Story

Quiet artworks sometimes make the deepest impressions

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

Tuckered out

Sacking Tucker Carlson has put a dent in Fox News’s ratings

Obituary

FILE - In this Aug. 11, 2009, file photo, Tibetan film director Pema Tseden poses during a photo call at the 62nd Locarno International Film Festival in Locarno, Switzerland. Tseden was detained Saturday, June 25, 2016, following a dispute over left luggage at the airport in the western city of Xining. The next morning, he was ordered held for five days of administrative detention for causing a disturbance and was taken to a hospital Monday night suffering from a headache, chest pain and other complaints, his producer said. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File) ** EDITORIAL USE ONLY **

The long take

Pema Tseden was the founder and builder of Tibetan cinema

The Economist reads

Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos Inc., center, arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, US, on Friday, Nov. 18, 2022. Holmes's punishment for her role in the collapse ofÊTheranos will finally be decided Friday, closing a key chapter in one of the biggest scandals in Silicon Valley history. Photographer: Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Corporate scandals