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On Tuesday Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, will host a meeting of more than 200 mayors of towns and suburbs that have been battered by nightly violence and rioting in the past week. Among them is Vincent Jeanbrun (pictured, gesturing), the centre-right mayor of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a southern suburb of Paris, whose front gate was rammed with a car that was set on fire on Saturday night. Mr Jeanbrun’s wife broke her leg escaping with their children as fireworks were hurled at them.

The rioting, which began after a teenage driver was shot dead by police during a traffic check on June 27th, seems to have peaked. But it obliged Mr Macron to cancel a state visit to Germany so that he could manage the crisis and meet the leaders of both houses of parliament. The president hopes that deploying tens of thousands of policemen will keep things calmer. His government will now start to unpick the reasons for the sudden social upheaval.

On Tuesday Vladimir Putin met global leaders for the first time since the Wagner rebellion rattled his regime. Russia’s president is participating in a virtual summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, along with the leaders of China, India, Pakistan and former Soviet states in central Asia. In theory, the broad-based regional talking-shop should offer a welcome setting for Mr Putin to assure his counterparts that all is well in the Kremlin. The SCO is one of the few international groupings in which Russia still enjoys some support.

Yet Mr Putin could yet face some awkward questions. India, for instance, the host of this year’s summit, is moving towards the West. Narendra Modi, its prime minister, has just concluded a state visit to America. At last year’s SCO summit Mr Modi urged the Russian leader to pursue peace in Ukraine. Kazakhstan’s leader has gone further than Mr Modi, directly criticising the war. Mr Putin will be hoping that his flagging invasion will not have emboldened them to go any further.

On Tuesday Germany reveals its foreign trade figures for May. Going on the previous month, the outlook looks better than feared: in April, Destatis, the German statistics agency, reported an increase of 1.2% for that month, whereas a contraction of 2.5% had been predicted. Most notably in April, exports to China increased by 10.1% to €8.5bn ($9.3bn). That has also helped improve Germany’s long-standing trade deficit with its largest trading partner. German exports to America, the country’s biggest market, also increased, by 4.7% compared with March. That helped offset falling trade with Britain and a precipitous drop with Russia.

The data release comes as investor sentiment darkens over Germany’s technical recession (defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth). The country’s manufacturing sector shrank in June as both new orders and production dwindled. Good news from the statistics office could help lift the gloomy mood.

There are signs that interest rates are starting to bite down under. Australia’s annual inflation dropped to a 13-month low of 5.6% in May, from 6.8% in April. But GDP growth is also slowing.

That prompted the Reserve Bank of Australia to hold interest rates at 4.1% when it met on Tuesday. But analysts expect at least one more hike in the coming months. Core inflation (which strips out volatile food and fuel prices, as well as holiday travel) remains above the central bank’s target of 2-3%. The labour market remains tight and house prices, against the odds, are rebounding.

The bank’s governor, Philip Lowe, says he wants to “keep the economy on an even keel”. But much more tightening and it could start to list. For many Australians, that would be a new experience. Barring a brief downturn during the pandemic, when wages were anyway subsidised, the country’s last recession ended over 30 years ago.

This week the National Education Association holds its annual meeting in Orlando, the “backyard” of Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. It is America’s biggest labour union’s first fully in-person conference since 2019, and will include a “Freedom to Learn” rally. The union opposes Mr DeSantis’s education policies, which they say curtail teachers’ and students’ rights. New laws in Florida that block discussion of race and sexuality have led teachers to reconsider how they teach the history of slavery, and school libraries to ban books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

But Mr DeSantis seems to be digging in. The Republican presidential hopeful pitches himself as a defender of “parental rights”—against, implicitly, those of teachers. Other Republican governors have also accused teachers of indoctrinating pupils with critical race theory. At least eight states have enacted new so-called school-choice laws this year, such as giving residents vouchers they can use to pay private-school tuition, bypassing public education altogether.

The aborted mutiny of the Wagner mercenary group on June 24th temporarily shook the foundations of the world’s 11th-largest economy. The rouble fell sharply, before edging up again. The share prices of several of Russia’s largest companies wobbled. A slew of economic data released on Wednesday, including on retail sales and industrial production, will not yet reflect the turmoil of recent days. But the future looks more uncertain than it did before.

For now, many of Russia’s respected technocrats—including those leading the central bank and the economy ministry—remain in charge. That rules out any madcap policies, such as money-printing. But Wagner’s revolt has brought the conflict with Ukraine home in a way that a war on foreign soil never could, damaging consumer and business confidence. Russia still looks likely to avoid recession: the latest data puts year-on-year growth at around 1.5%. Yet if there is more instability, that could change quickly.

Having just been through a real crisis, America’s banks now face a hypothetical one. On Wednesday the Federal Reserve will publish the results of its annual stress tests, designed to see how lenders would fare in dire economic circumstances. This year, it subjected them to some of its toughest scenarios yet, including a 38% plunge in housing prices. Analysts think the test will show that big banks are well capitalised, allowing them to return cash to shareholders through stock buybacks.

But the stress tests have themselves been tested recently, and found wanting. The Fed failed to include sharply higher interest rates as a potential problem last year. Markets had little forewarning that rates—not an economic slowdown—could spark a regional-bank meltdown, as they did in March, leading to the failure of First Republic and other lenders. This year’s test, which began before that tumult, also excludes pressure from higher rates. The Fed, unlike the rest of America, would benefit from extra stress.

On Wednesday Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, will greet Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. They will discuss NATO’s renewed effort to bolster its eastern flank in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The bloc has recently taken several steps in this direction. On Monday Mr Stoltenberg travelled to Lithuania to observe “Exercise Griffin Storm”, a NATO exercise, with Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister. While there Mr Pistorius announced that Germany would station a brigade permanently in Lithuania, provided the Baltic state supplies the required infrastructure for around 4,000 soldiers. The decision—which Germany had been previously reluctant to make—was warmly welcomed by Gitanas Nauseda, Lithuania’s president.

Estonia already has warplanes and troops from other NATO countries on the ground. More could now follow. The next, much-heralded, summit of the alliance will be held in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, starting on July 11th.

There were positive signs on Wednesday that Italy’s inflation rate has settled on its downward trajectory. Provisional inflation figures showed that consumer prices rose at an annual rate of 6.4% in June, down from 7.6% in May, mainly owing to a drop in energy costs. Core inflation, which excludes energy and fresh food, was also down, from 6% to 5.6%.

Inflation is a sensitive issue in the country. Giorgia Meloni’s government has been complaining for months about the European Central Bank’s efforts to dampen price rises by ratcheting up borrowing costs. Higher interest rates both throttle economic growth and make it more costly for Italy to service its huge, though shrinking, public debt of more than 140% of GDP. Before the release of the latest inflation data, Ms Meloni took another swipe at the ECB, calling its interest-rate rises a “simplistic” approach.

On Wednesday a court in Paris will rule on whether a Russian performance artist, Pyotr Pavlensky, and his partner, Alexandra de Taddeo, breached privacy laws in a French sexting case. The lawsuit was brought by Benjamin Griveaux, a former government minister who abandoned his political career after Mr Pavlensky posted online two private sex videos he had made. Mr Griveaux had sent them to Ms de Taddeo during a brief liaison. She later started a relationship with Mr Pavlensky.

The French usually believe that the public interest stops firmly at the bedroom door. Mr Pavlensky—who once nailed his scrotum to the ground in Moscow’s Red Square (a metaphor for society’s “apathy, political indifference and fatalism”, he later said) and was granted asylum in France after being accused of sexual assault—judges this attitude to private life hypocritical when it concerns politicians. He “stole” the videos from Ms de Taddeo’s phone, he said, as part of an art project he called “Pornopolitique”. Mr Griveaux’s lawyer called it “revenge porn”.

This week Hunter Biden, the American president’s famously troubled son, will appear in federal court in Delaware. On Tuesday Mr Biden reached a deal with prosecutors: he will plead guilty to two misdemeanours over his failure to pay more than $200,000 in taxes between 2017 and 2018, and serve a two-year probation for allegedly lying about his drug use on a background-check form when purchasing a gun. He will probably not serve prison time.

Donald Trump, who faces his own federal indictment, likened Mr Biden’s punishment to a “traffic ticket”. Prosecutors, he complained, had underhandedly “cleared everything up”. Indeed many Republicans have accused Hunter and Joe Biden of evading charges for corruption, alleging that they took bribes from foreigners in exchange for policy concessions.

Republicans have failed to substantiate those claims, though they are still trying. Instead their probe has revealed how Hunter Biden capitalised on his father’s name. That may be unseemly, but it is not illegal.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has devastated infrastructure, industry and housing. The World Bank estimates the cost of repairing the damage to be at least $411bn. On Wednesday a two-day conference in London will begin to discuss how to raise that money and how to spend it.

Delegates include diplomats from Ukraine and its allies, as well as big donors, multilateral financial institutions, businesses and civil-society groups. Ukraine wants the West to use frozen Russian funds to pay for reconstruction. Some in the room will be worried about corruption when massive donations are made.

One question is how much more detail Ukraine’s government can add to its previous plan, presented last July. Ukraine wants to “build back better”, raising infrastructure standards in line with the EU. But exactly where it rebuilds depends on how much territory it can reclaim from Russia. Meanwhile war damage, including the ecologically disastrous destruction of the Kakhovka dam, continues to mount.

Narendra Modi will mark International Yoga Day on Wednesday by leading a mass session at the UN headquarters in New York. The annual celebration is a UN initiative that was launched, at the Indian prime minister’s urging, in 2015, the year after he came to power.

Critics of Mr Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda have treated his yoga evangelism with suspicion, given the practice’s Hindu origins. “Om”—a yoga chant—is considered a sacred sound in Hindu scripture. The Sun Salutation, a common set of yoga poses, is associated with Hindu prayer. Others note that yoga’s popularity in the West, which Yoga Day is intended to reinforce, is positive and culturally inclusive.

Mr Modi, who urges practising yoga daily, appears to have been mainly motivated to underline the activity’s association with India. It is one of the many examples of the prime minister’s flair for branding and marketing—of his country and himself.

Figures due on Wednesday will probably show that Britain’s annual rate of consumer-price inflation fell again in May, from April’s 8.7%. But on Thursday the Bank of England will all but certainly raise its benchmark interest rate, currently 4.5%, for the 13th consecutive meeting. Inflation in Britain is not only the highest in the G7 but looking worryingly persistent. The “core” measure (excluding food, energy, alcohol and tobacco) rose unexpectedly in April. In a still-tight labour market, wage growth has picked up.

Fretful markets have priced in higher rates. Two-year gilt yields are above the peak that followed last autumn’s catastrophic mini-budget, and this week briefly topped 5%. Mortgage-holders whose fixed-rate deals are ending face eye-watering increases: the average two-year rate now exceeds 6%, reports Moneyfacts, a data provider, against 2.59% in June 2021. The central bank seems baffled. Having been too optimistic about inflation, it is commissioning an external review of its forecasting. Its 2% target seems far off.

Too few showers mean many revellers at the Glastonbury Festival, which is Britain's largest and begins on Wednesday, will be stale, pale and male. But they do not expect the same of the acts. Emily Eavis, the organiser, aspires to fill half of the lineup with female artists. She also consciously books acts from a range of genres and ethnic backgrounds. But when it comes to picking headliners, she says that is difficult.

The star acts this year—Arctic Monkeys, Elton John and Guns n’ Roses—are all white men who are veterans of the music business. The industry has a “pipeline” problem, Ms Eavis argues, with too few female-fronted acts getting the investment or radio airplay needed to become headliners. Others argue that Lizzo, a black female pop star who will perform before Guns n’ Roses, could have had their slot. But the problem goes beyond Glastonbury. According to Sky News across 104 British festivals this summer, only a fifth of headline acts are fronted by women.