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Even uneasy bedfellows huddle together for warmth on a cold night. China’s assertiveness, North Korea’s belligerence and Russian aggression have pushed America, Japan and South Korea closer into each other’s arms. When their leaders meet at Camp David, the American president’s retreat, on Friday, countering these threats will be high on the agenda.

The two East Asian countries, both American treaty allies, have not always got on well. But an attempt at reconciliation, mostly driven by Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s president, has created a rare possibility of greater co-operation, albeit one which could be undone by a change in administration in any of them. This is especially true of South Korea, where memories of Japan’s colonial misdeeds, and a feeling that it has not properly atoned for them, remain strong. If the amity is to last, the leaders need to create structures, such as regular trilateral meetings or a communication hotline, that will outlast their terms in office.

Estée Lauder is not looking her best. In May the grande dame of the American cosmetics industry reported quarterly net sales of $3.75bn, a 12% drop from the same quarter last year. The conglomerate also lowered its sales forecast for 2023—from a year on year decrease of 5-7% to 10-12%—as sales at Asian airports and other travel-retail outlets, an important market, recovered more slowly than anticipated. Its latest quarterly earnings will be released on Friday.

It was not meant to be this way. High-end cosmetics brands thought that the easing of China’s covid restrictions would lead to a boom for the lucrative duty-free travel business. Long locked-down consumers, it was thought, would enjoy new-found freedoms. But China’s economic recovery has spluttered; now the world’s second-largest economy is flirting with deflation, which would hit revenues and profits. Time, perhaps, to work some of Estée Lauder’s revitalising magic on its own brand.

Because human embryos—usually defined as cells in the first eight weeks of development—can develop into fetuses and ultimately people, research on them is in most countries restricted to the first 14 days. But scientists can now make embryo-like models, called “embryoids”, from human stem cells. The legal status of these remains unclear. This has prompted an international group of eminent biologists to suggest a new legal definition of embryos, to help clarify when society should limit research.

Writing in the journal Cell, they propose that an embryo be defined as a group of human cells that, combined with a womb-like environment, has the potential to form a fetus. That breaks with many countries’ current definitions, which state that embryos arise from fertilisation, and introduces the idea that an embryo is not just a clump of cells, but also must be in surroundings that allow it to develop. If adopted, the new definition would put embryoids outside current restrictions on research.

Although floods in America have caused at least $323bn of direct damage since 1960, private insurers generally do not offer residential coverage. That is sold by the federal government. But a history of underpricing risk and allowing development in floodplains has left its National Flood Insurance Programme more than $20bn in debt to the Treasury.

Congress has repeatedly failed to reform the programme. Legislation passed in 2012 that updated flood maps, for example, was reversed when voters realised that their premiums would shoot up. In 2021 the NFIP unilaterally changed how it determines premiums. Risk Rating 2.0 includes more sources of flooding, such as heavy rainfall.

Again, homeowners with higher premiums are unhappy. On Friday ten states, led by low-lying Louisiana, will ask a federal judge to make the NFIP ditch its new methodology. The Government Accountability Office, an auditor for Congress, has warned of a further budget crisis if the reform is rolled back. For Congress, simply treading water may soon become impossible.

In 1983 Talking Heads released their fifth album, “Speaking In Tongues”. It was a commercial and critical hit. With an expanded line-up of first-rate funk musicians, the influential New York art-pop quartet embarked on a tour, including three nights at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, which were set up to be filmed by director Jonathan Demme. His film, “Stop Making Sense” would go on to be acclaimed as the greatest concert movie ever made.

A newly expanded soundtrack to the film is re-released on Friday. It underlines a belief by David Byrne, the lead singer, that many of the movie’s songs are now the definitive versions, surpassing their original studio counterparts. A remastered film will return to cinemas in the autumn. The irresistible joy in the performance, ingenious staging by Mr Byrne (inspired by traditional Japanese theatre) and the open artifice of arranging the shows for cinematic effect make it a peerless big-screen music experience.

To taste the effects of inflation in India, visit a fast-food restaurant. Last week the American chain Subway announced that it would no longer add a free cheese slice to its sandwiches because of rising costs. Similarly, many McDonald’s outlets have done away with tomatoes in their burgers. Food prices have risen because of erratic monsoons, which have submerged crops in parts of the country.

As a result, inflation has surged. Data released on Monday revealed that the annual inflation rate accelerated to 7.4% in July, from 4.8% in June and well above the central bank's upper threshold of 6%. Last week the bank left interest rates unchanged for a third consecutive meeting since April, but sustained food inflation may force it back into action. The government has already acted, restricting exports of rice to slow rising domestic prices. With a general election scheduled next year, the government knows Indian voters won’t stomach rising costs.

When Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was ousted in a coup, his followers protested in Rabaa Square, in Cairo. On August 14th 2013, Egyptian security forces killed at least 900 members of the Brotherhood gathered there. Ten years later the group has barely recovered.

Many of those who survived the massacre were thrown into prison; others fled into exile. In 2020 Mahmoud Ezzat, the Brotherhood’s then leader, was arrested. The succession dispute that followed was unusually messy.

But the Brotherhood elected a new acting “general guide”, or leader, 78-year-old Salah Abudlhaq, in March of this year. Mr Abulhaq’s arrival could signal a new start. He has been far removed from the recent internal squabbles. Nonetheless, he will have his work cut out. The government has not yet loosened its hold on the Brotherhood. The anniversary on Monday will probably pass relatively quietly. Members fear that any protests would be aggressively dispersed—again.

Monday will be no ordinary Heroes’ Day in Zimbabwe. The day is supposed to commemorate the thousands of people who lost their lives in the “liberation war” of the 1960s and ’70s that led to the end of white-run Rhodesia and the establishment of Zimbabwe in 1980 under the rule of Robert Mugabe. But with a general election due on August 23rd Zanu-PF, the party that has misruled the country since independence, will use the moment for political rallies.

It will argue, falsely, that it alone liberated the country and insist that only Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s successor, can keep the revolution alive. Many—almost certainly most—Zimbabweans are beyond tired of this hogwash. Decades of corruption, idiotic policies and thuggery mean that real GDP per capita is lower today than in 1980. But Zanu-PF has a history of rigging elections. There are ample reasons to believe it will try to do so again.

In June the Supreme Court ordered Alabama to re-draw its electoral map. In 2021 the state’s legislature created one with just a single majority-black district out of seven, though black Alabamans comprise 27% of the voting-age population. The Supreme Court agreed with a lower court’s decision: the map violated the Voting Rights Act.

On Monday the district court that rejected the first map will consider the legislature’s revised effort. The Supreme Court instructed lawmakers to create a second majority-black district “or something quite close”. Republicans, who have a super-majority in the legislature, are testing that formulation. Their proposed map preserves one majority-black district and increases the share of black voters in a second to just under 40%. It all but ensures that Alabama will continue to send six Republicans to the House of Representatives (black voters tend to prefer Democrats), where the GOP has a razor-thin majority. Republicans hail a “compromise”; the district court might see it differently.

How can $101m disappear from a bank? It is a question investigators struggled to answer in 2016, when hackers stole that sum from Bangladesh’s central bank. “Billion Dollar Heist”, a documentary which comes out on Monday, explains how scammers used SWIFT, a cross-border payments network, to wire funds from the bank’s deposit with America’s Federal Reserve to accounts in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. The show’s title seemingly refers to the fact that, if not for their sloppiness, the cybercriminals could have escaped with $1bn.

The story is well suited to the screen. It features shadowy baddies, obscure online worlds and transnational criminal operations. Audiences were hooked by “The Lazarus Heist”, a podcast and subsequent book about state-sponsored hackers in North Korea (the same group was probably behind the Bangladesh scam). And our sister magazine, 1843, recently reported on the theft of $2.5bn from Iraq’s largest state bank. It seems no prize is too big for today’s bank robbers.

Since the first quarter of 2022, Britain’s economy has oscillated between contraction and growth—of around 0.1% of GDP either way. Forecasters predict much the same for the second half of this year. Official GDP figures for the second quarter of 2023, released on Friday, will probably fit the pattern, too.

In a way, that would be good news. Inflation is still too high and requires some cooling of the economy. The June figures showed that core inflation—which strips out volatile prices such as energy—stuck at an uncomfortable 6.4% year on year (down from 6.5% in May). Policymakers would like to achieve lower inflation while avoiding a deep recession, and have so far succeeded.

Nonetheless, the risk remains that the economy might weaken too much. A recent survey of recruitment agencies found a drop in permanent hires; another one among purchasing managers put the economy close to stagnation. The balancing-act continues.

Residents of Nuh, a town in the Indian state of Haryana, are coming to terms with the damage of recent unrest. Deadly violence erupted there during a religious procession in late July. In the days that followed, state authorities, controlled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which also rules at the national level, demolished houses and businesses in the area, ostensibly for violating building codes. On Monday Haryana’s high court halted the demolitions. It suggested they were a form of “ethnic cleansing” directed almost exclusively against Muslim residents.

Over 1,200 structures had already been bulldozed. Such incidents will probably proliferate in India ahead of next year’s election. An uptick in the number of political rallies and religious processions raises the risk of violence. That, in turn, may tempt local authorities to use demolition drives to intimidate and punish Muslims. The events in Nuh could be a sign of things to come.

Still engaged in a shameless land grab in Ukraine, the Kremlin has eyes on a more distant frontier, too. On Friday Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, is due to launch its Luna-25 probe from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, around 5,550km (3,450 miles) east of Moscow. The mission aims to achieve Russia’s first lunar landing since 1976.

The probe will head to the Moon’s south pole to search for evidence of water, in the form of ice, which could help sustain a human lunar presence. But Russia faces competition: India’s Chandrayaan-3 probe, which launched in July, is headed to the same region. And Earth-bound geopolitics risks denting Russia’s space ambitions. After the invasion of Ukraine, the European Space Agency ditched its promise to provide Luna-25 with specialist equipment. Meanwhile, Russia is only a junior partner on a planned Moonbase with China. Alas, the challenges facing the Kremlin’s moonshot sound awfully like its problems back on Earth.

Spain’s government entered this year touting some of the best economic figures in the euro zone. A bigger-than-average covid contraction led to a later, stronger recovery in GDP compared with its peers’. Even more impressive has been the low accompanying inflation: in June Spain became the first country in the bloc to get the headline figure below an annual rate of 2%. On Friday final figures for July will be released.

They are expected to confirm preliminary data which put headline inflation at 2.3%. More worrying, those figures also suggested core inflation was 6.2% in July, up from 5.9%. The core measure, more closely watched, strips out volatile fresh-food and energy prices. Spain’s headline inflation has been flattered by its lower energy costs: it does not get much energy from Russia and has won a so-called “Iberian exception” from European Union rules linking electricity prices to gas prices. The downward trend in Spanish inflation may be broken.

Football’s centre of gravity has long been in England. The country hosts the English Premier League, the world’s richest and most popular football division. And its champion, Manchester City, is the world’s best team. On Friday City will travel to Burnley to begin a new league season.

At around the same time, another league kicks off thousands of kilometres away in Saudi Arabia. Traditionally football fans outside the kingdom have paid little attention to the Saudi Pro League. No longer. Over the summer Saudi clubs, with some generous state backing, have spent more than $480m signing players from Europe. The most eye-catching arrivals include Karim Benzema, a French player crowned the world’s best in 2022, and Riyad Mahrez, an Algerian star from Manchester City. Reports suggest the Saudis have set aside more than $17bn to develop its league. The Saudi effort may not yet rival the EPL, but football fans know better than to write off an underdog.