HMBR and Co.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“How stupid are the people of Iowa...to believe this crap?” asked Donald Trump in 2015, while running for the Republican presidential nomination. Ben Carson, one of his rivals, was telling an improbable story on the campaign trail about finding God after a belt buckle miraculously prevented him from killing his friend. Mr Carson did not win Iowa, which hosts the first nominating contest—but nor did Mr Trump.

The former president is trying a different approach this autumn: courting, rather than insulting, the Hawkeye state. Unlike in 2015, the Republican race is not close and, although he aims to shut out his challengers within the party, he is increasingly focusing his attacks on Joe Biden. On Saturday he will hold events in two eastern counties that Mr Biden won in the general election in 2020. A decade ago Iowa was purple-ish, but is now bright red. Mr Trump stands to benefit. “We love the farmers,” he said last Sunday, while autographing a combine harvester.

So divided are Israel’s religious and secular Jews that even its holiest festivals trigger conflict. Simchat Torah, which is celebrated on Saturday, marks the annual completion of the weekly readings of the Torah, or five books of Moses. But the secular mayor of Israel’s biggest city, Tel Aviv, banned open-air celebrations of the traditional rite. He says the mechitzah, or curtain, that orthodox Jews erect between men and women amounts to gender discrimination in public space.

Tel Aviv is the centre of this year’s predominantly secular protests against Israel’s predominantly religious government. Some of the protesters view any display of religiosity as a threat to their secular redoubt. On Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, they heckled outdoor worshippers, called them “Nazis” and sounded bike horns to drown out the shofar.

At the last minute, facing criticism from the High Court of Justice, the municipality agreed to let the religious ceremony go ahead—with no physical barriers and gender separation only voluntary. Still, the police are preparing for clashes.

Max Verstappen has dominated Formula 1 this season—so much so that the sport’s new American fans have started to tune out. Few drivers have challenged him or his team, Red Bull, which has won all but one of this year’s 16 races so far. Mr Verstappen took 13 of them. The 26-year-old Dutch driver is set to cruise to victory again on Sunday at the Grand Prix in Lusail, Qatar.

He may not even need to race on Sunday in order to clinch the title. The sport works on a points system, and if he finishes sixth or higher at a sprint fixture on Saturday he will be crowned victor. The season wraps up next month, and Mr Verstappen is just three points away from becoming world champion. He will join legends, such as Ayrton Senna, in taking the title for a third time. If the F1 procession continues, he will equal the record of seven championships with barely the need for a pit stop.

Ron DeSantis was a longshot when he announced his campaign for governor of Florida in 2018, and he notably lacked knowledge of the intricacies of state-level politics. Fortunately, another ambitious 30-something congressman was ready to help: Matt Gaetz. It was he who saw Mr DeSantis’s early potential and nudged Donald Trump to endorse him. In 2022 Mr DeSantis went on to consolidate control over Florida politics in a landslide re-election.

Last week there was another demonstration of Mr Gaetz’s keen political intuition. In the face of fierce opposition from most of his own party he orchestrated the removal of Kevin McCarthy as the speaker of America’s House of Representatives.

Mr Gaetz, now 41, has made plenty of enemies since arriving on Capitol Hill in 2017. But even those who bristle at his hardline posturing (not to mention his dramatic eyebrows and bright blue suits) cannot deny his political skill. Donald Trump is 77 and running what could well be his final campaign. Mr Gaetz offers one potential Republican future.

Until a few years ago his 75-year-old father, Don, was the more famous Gaetz. As former president of the Florida Senate, he frequently annoyed Rick Scott, then the Republican governor. “Matt and his dad are very close,” says Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “Some people run away from what their parents do. Matt embraced it, learned from it and then took it to another level.”

Despite his success, the younger Mr Gaetz’s career in the House seems moribund. He is disliked by much of the conference and faces an ethics investigation over alleged sexual misconduct and misuse of funds in his bachelor days—allegations he denies. (He has since married, having proposed to his wife, naturally, at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.) The House investigation is one reason why he loathes Mr McCarthy, whom he blames for smearing him, although he insists that is not why he dethroned Mr McCarthy as speaker. The Department of Justice launched its own investigation but declined to bring charges. The congressional inquiry, therefore, may not be of much importance to Mr Gaetz, who raised money off the back of his fight with the speaker, and boosted his profile even higher. He denies that he wants to succeed Mr DeSantis in the governor’s mansion. Even so, speculation persists.

Without a political miracle on Saturday, the American government will shut down on October 1st for the fourth time in a decade. Earlier in the week, the Senate passed a stopgap funding bill full of Ukraine aid that made it dead on arrival in the Republican-led House of Representatives, which has yet to approve legislation to keep the government open. Millions of government workers, including congressional staffers, could soon miss paychecks. Federal services, such as environmental inspections and passport processing, could cease.

This legislative failure has been driven by a small but powerful faction of House Republicans that seeks to force through ultra-conservative policies and topple Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House. Mr McCarthy became the weakest House leader in memory after 15 rounds of voting in January, but he can take heart knowing that, in 1856, Nathaniel Banks won the job only after the 133rd ballot. Banks, however, never had to contend with a government shutdown. A path out of this mess remains elusive.

Slovaks vote in early parliamentary elections on Saturday, after the governing coalition lost a no-confidence vote in December. The result is too close to call. For the past six months Smer, the party of former prime minister Robert Fico, has been leading the polls. But recently Progressive Slovakia, a liberal party led by Michal Simecka, has gained an edge. Slovakia is ruled by a caretaker government appointed by Zuzana Caputova, the sitting president and a former member of Progressive Slovakia.

Mr Fico’s party has taken on a pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian line. Opponents fear that if it comes to power, Slovakia, hitherto a staunch supporter of Ukraine, will become an ally to Hungary, obstructing efforts within the EU and NATO to aid Ukraine.

What happens next will probably depend on whether Mr Fico or Mr Simecka can find coalition partners among the smaller parties. Voters should not stand down just yet: if neither party can form a stable government, a new election will be in the offing.

When the Collingwood Magpies and the Brisbane Lions run onto Melbourne Cricket Ground for the Australian Football League’s grand final on Saturday, the cheers will be quieter than usual. The showcase, which attracts 100,000 spectators, has been rocked by a furore over tickets. An unusually high number of corporate allocations meant even some top-tier members, who pay for guaranteed seats, were left without spots.

But that won’t deter the punters for long. Relative to population, the AFL is the best attended domestic-sports league in the world. Some 9.6m Australians support one of its 18 clubs; one-in-21 Aussies are club members. In 2022 the league generated over A$944m ($601m) in revenue. And since September 22nd, fans have been able to indulge their passion for its brawny tactics in Xbox’s new game, AFL 23. Like its spectacular “marks”—acrobatic catches that provide some of the sport’s most exciting moments—Australian football is flying high.

Ofelia Rodríguez liked to collect things. At markets in Mexico and her native Colombia, she unearthed items such as a child’s doll and a figurine of a man. Objects that others discarded were her treasure. Over five decades the surrealist artist, who died recently, produced paintings, sculptures and drawings that have been exhibited across the Americas and in Europe. A new show featuring more than 50 of her works opens on Saturday in Britain at Spike Island, a gallery in Bristol.

Her colourful creations combine these objets trouvés with myths and symbols from the Caribbean coast. Animal horns curve up from an orange wooden crate (one of her “magic boxes”), which opens to reveal a pile of jean buttons, nestled like coins in a purse. Gabriel García Márquez, a great Colombian author, once said that “surrealism runs through the streets” of Latin America. Rodríguez’s alluring, at times jarring, art is a case in point.

In 2017 Lina Khan, then a student at Yale Law School, published a controversial article. In it she argued that Amazon, the e-commerce giant, was a monopolist and that the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust laws failed to rein it in. Since being appointed the regulatory agency’s youngest-ever chair in 2021, she has launched an aggressive antitrust campaign against big corporations. On Tuesday she took on her old foe: Amazon. The FTC and 17 states sued the company, alleging that it illegally keeps prices high, charges sellers unfair fees and stifles competition.

Ms Khan, now 34, was born in Britain to Pakistani immigrants. Her family moved to America when she was 11. Her interest in corporate misbehaviour sparked early: as a high-school newspaper editor, she ran critical coverage of a branch of Starbucks that was preventing teenagers from sitting in the cafe, which was picked up by the New York Times.

Before law school, she worked for the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think-tank, where she became interested in—and incensed by—corporate consolidation. When asked about her hobbies in 2021, she listed photography and “trying to find the most obscure industry where I can find consolidation”. On her honeymoon Ms Khan ploughed through a book on corporations and American democracy. (Her husband, a cardiologist, opted for Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”.)

Since taking over the FTC, she has led it with a single-minded vision, sometimes bruising the morale of long-time staffers in the process. She has pushed through new rules, including banning “non-competes” (which bar employees from working for a competitor) and asserting the agency’s authority to pursue privacy violations. Her past work informs her work, but may also constrain her mandate: Amazon lobbied for Ms Khan to recuse herself from investigating it, alleging bias.

Last year the FTC filed more merger lawsuits than in any year for over a decade, including an attempt to block Microsoft’s $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a video-game developer. Although victories in court have been limited, Ms Khan’s leadership has reframed public thinking about trustbusting. Companies have become more wary: deals are down in America, suggesting firms are avoiding larger acquisitions. Politicians, too, are more willing to bash big companies. If Mr Biden fails to win re-election, Ms Khan’s tenure will be up next year. But cases take years to wind their way through the courts. Ms Khan’s legacy may outlast her.