Nov 2 update

Israel launched a second air strike in two days on the crowded Jabalia refugee camp in north Gaza. Hamas said that at least 195 Palestinians were killed in the attacks. The Israel Defense Forces claimed to have killed a Hamas commander in each strike. Earlier, more than 400 foreigners and wounded Palestinians crossed into Egypt from Gaza. Egypt is expected to allow more people to evacuate through its sole crossing with the besieged enclave on Thursday, although its government continues to refuse to accept Palestinian refugees. At a campaign event on Wednesday, President Joe Biden called for a “pause” in fighting in Gaza in order to “get the prisoners out”.

America’s Federal Reserve held its benchmark interest rate steady at a range of 5.25-5.5%, maintaining its highest level in 22 years. The central bank did not rule out a future increase, but nodded to “tighter financial” conditions that could “weigh” on the economy. Financial markets have pushed up long-term bond yields recently, perhaps doing some of the Fed’s work for it.

Disney agreed to buy Comcast’s 33% stake in Hulu, a streaming service. The world’s biggest media company already owns 67% of Hulu and wants to integrate the platform’s 48.3m subscribers into Disney+, its own streaming operation. Disney said it expects to pay $8.6bn for Comcast’s stake. But Comcast’s chief executive recently suggested it was worth more than double that. Price negotiations are expected to conclude in 2024.

Kishida Fumio, Japan’s prime minister, announced a ¥17trn ($113bn) stimulus package in an attempt to boost growth and help people hit by rising inflation. The government will cut taxes and introduce subsidies to reduce fuel and utility bills. Mr Kishida’s approval rating is at 33%, the lowest level since he took office two years ago.

Jordan withdrew its ambassador from Israel in protest against the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. The country’s foreign ministry said it would restore full diplomatic ties only once its neighbour “stopped its war on Gaza”. Jordan has long distanced itself from Hamas, but has also quarrelled with Israel over shared holy sites. Bolivia, Chile and Colombia have also withdrawn their ambassadors from Israel.

General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, admitted that “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough” in the stalemate with Russia. In an interview with The Economist General Zaluzhny also lamented the slow delivery of arms from the West, but said that new technologies and methods of warfare, not simply more weapons, would be the key to victory. Five months into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has advanced by just 17km.

The second person to have received a genetically altered pig heart died this week, it was announced. Lawrence Faucette, who had terminal heart disease and was ineligible for a human transplant, lived with the heart for almost six weeks before his body began rejecting it. David Bennett, the first such patient, died last year, two months after receiving a pig heart.

Figure of the day: 124,000, the expected shortage of doctors in America in a decade. Read the full story.

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PHOTO: ALAMY

Adani forges on, for now

It has been nearly a year since the Adani Group was rattled by accusations of fraud made by Hindenburg, an American short-seller. The Indian conglomerate denied allegations that one of the Adani family had been manipulating a subsidiary’s share price. Still, the valuation of Adani companies collapsed from over $200bn to under $100bn.

Since then, however, the group has forged on. Earlier this month it received a refinancing package worth $3.5bn from ten international banks. This week one of its biggest businesses, Adani Green Energy, reported a 149% year-on-year surge in profit for the July-September quarter. Adani Enterprises, the group’s flagship company, will hope for similarly buoyant results when it reports on Thursday.

But the fallout from the Hindenburg affair is far from over. On Wednesday regulators announced tighter transparency rules for foreign investors to prevent the type of share-price shenanigans Adani was accused of. And later this month, India’s Supreme Court is finally expected to issue a verdict on the allegations.

PHOTO: REUTERS

Big oil’s transatlantic divide

Shell, a British oil giant, will report quarterly earnings on Thursday. The results will probably compare poorly with last year’s record profits. Its newish boss, Wael Sawan (pictured), is under pressure: along with BP, another British oil major, Shell faces demands to do more to reduce climate change. This led both firms to make big bets on renewable energy, which have not performed well. Mr Sawan admits that he had hoped that returns from renewables investments “would come sooner”.

Both firms are under pressure from Wall Street, too. BP and Shell have lagged in financial performance behind ExxonMobil and Chevron, big American rivals that have refused to invest in renewables and have instead acquired rival oil companies. Markets have punished the European firms with lower earnings multiples. Shell’s results are unlikely to satisfy investors. That may explain Mr Sawan’s promise of a renewed focus on “ruthless” capital discipline.

PHOTO: REUTERS

Egypt’s floundering economy

The gates of Egypt’s Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip creaked open on Wednesday to allow foreign nationals and some injured Palestinians to leave the besieged enclave. But Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, will be looking to limit the numbers: he is well aware that the country’s economy would struggle to cope with a large influx of Palestinian refugees.

Many Egyptians cannot afford enough food. Inflation hit an annual rate of 38% in September, its highest-ever level. Mr Sisi wants to postpone difficult economic decisions until after elections in December. The central bank has kept interest rates steady at 19.75% since spring to avoid causing a recession. When it meets on Thursday it will probably leave them unchanged, again. Meanwhile, the IMF has warned that the war in Gaza could spook foreign investors in Egypt and has downgraded the country’s growth outlook. The country’s economic woes will probably worsen in the months to come.

PHOTO: DAVE SIMONDS

Britain reckons with high interest rates

The Bank of England’s monetary-policy committee is expected to hold interest rates steady at 5.25% when it meets on Thursday. That would continue a pause in tightening that began at the committee’s last meeting in September. The pause, which may prove temporary, followed 14 consecutive hikes, beginning in December 2021. Inflation has fallen sharply this year, but the annual rate remains uncomfortably high, at 6.7%.

Even if interest rates have peaked, they are unlikely to fall quickly—and much of the pain from almost two years of increases is yet to be felt by households. Swati Dhingra, a member of the MPC, reckons that only 20-25% of the tightening has hit consumers so far. In the second half of 2023, 800,000 fixed-rate household mortgages are due to expire. Another 1.6m will expire in 2024. The average new deal will probably cost borrowers around £288 ($350) more each month.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

The Fab Four’s swan song

Sixty-one years after their first single, the Beatles will release a new song on Thursday. It has been decades in the making. After John Lennon’s murder in 1980 Yoko Ono, his widow, gave Sir Paul McCartney a tape of Lennon’s unpublished demos. It contained three songs, two of which the surviving Beatles added to and released in the mid-1990s. But the audio of the last song, “Now and Then”, was so poor that they abandoned it.

Now technology has come to the rescue. With the help of AI, Lennon’s voice has been separated from the demo’s background noise, allowing the remaining Beatles, Sir Paul and Ringo Starr, to fill in the instrumentation. Guitar tracks from the discarded 1990s session, played by the late George Harrison, have also been added. “Now and Then” is a melancholic, nostalgic love song penned by Lennon in the aftermath of the Beatles’ break-up in 1970.