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In 2018 India’s Supreme Court handed down a landmark judgment. Arguing that a colonial-era law banning sex between men violated the constitution, it decriminalised same-sex relationships in the country. This week it is hearing the final arguments in a case that may result in another historic judgment, based on a raft of petitions asking for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

The deliberations pit the court, which has indicated its support for expanding gay rights, against the government, which says that the demands to give same-sex couples the right to marry reflects “urban elitist views” at odds with Indian culture. The government also maintains that legalisation is a matter for parliament rather than the courts.

Polls suggest most Indians still oppose same-sex marriage, though acceptance of gay relationships is slowly becoming more widespread. If the petitioners prevail, India’s law would be among the most progressive in the region; Taiwan, for instance, allowed same-sex couples to marry in 2019.

No social-media company has been hit as hard by the recent tech crunch as Snap. The Los Angeles-based firm, which runs the Snapchat messaging app, has lost nearly 90% of its market value since its peak in 2021. Apple’s tighter restrictions on tracking users’ behaviour have made it harder for companies to show relevant ads on their apps. Meanwhile TikTok has come for Snapchat’s 20-something viewers and creators.

On Wednesday at its annual “partner summit” Snap will try to tempt them back. Expect updates on the company’s new artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot, incentives to lure back creators, and new tricks with augmented-reality lenses (the filters that put you in a virtual Prada dress or turn you into a hamster). Snap faces an uphill struggle. But with TikTok facing a possible ban, Facebook turning into an online retirement home and Twitter under erratic new management, Snap will seldom have a better opportunity than it does right now.

On Wednesday the Supreme Court of the United States will consider “true threats”, one of the few categories of expression that fall outside the protection of the First Amendment. The case, Counterman v the state of Colorado, concerns a barrage of strange and unwanted messages (including “Fuck off permanently” and “Was that you in the white jeep?”) that Billy Raymond Counterman sent to Coles Whalen, a musician, on Facebook over several years.

The missives terrified Ms Whalen and caused her to cancel shows, according to her lawyers. Mr Counterman was later convicted for violating Colorado’s anti-stalking laws. But Mr Counterman’s lawyer insists his client, who has a mental illness, never meant to be menacing and warns that innocent expression stands to be criminalised if the authorities can charge people for expression delivered without hostile intent. The lawyers for Colorado counter that such messages cause harm “no matter what the person making the threat had in mind”. The Court must decide whether a person’s words can be separated from their intentions.

Elon Musk, the world’s second-richest man, is hoping to launch the most powerful rocket ever built this week (see next story). But investors on Earth are focused on Tesla, the electric carmaker Mr Musk runs and which announces first-quarter results on Wednesday. Tesla is trying to maintain speed amid an inflation-fuelled slowdown in consumer spending. It has cut prices six times this year in America, its biggest market, and is also slashing prices in China, its second biggest. That will dent profitability—analysts are forecasting gross margins of 21% for the first quarter, down from 29% the year before.

Still, that is nothing to scoff at—rivals Ford and General Motors are expected to clock in at 16%. A fall in the price of lithium, a key component in electric batteries, should also put some wind at Tesla’s back. Investors are used to a bumpy ride—after Tesla’s market value fell by around $672bn (or roughly two-thirds) during 2022, it has gained $204bn back since January.

Rocket-watchers this week are looking towards the Gulf Coast of Texas—where SpaceX intends to fire its Starship system into the sky. The launch, initially scheduled for Monday, was postponed due to a frozen valve. A second attempt is expected on Thursday.

SpaceX’s system combines its “Super Heavy” rocket with a prototype of the Starship spacecraft. If the launch is successful, the most powerful rocket ever built will put into orbit the largest spacecraft to be carried in a single launch since the space shuttle. The Starship system could begin a new space age in which large spacecraft take off, land and take off again. That will allow SpaceX, which already dominates the satellite-launch business, to put into orbit more and bigger satellites than ever before. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s boss, also wants it to take crews to the Moon and Mars. But much more work is needed. The process for landing has not been tested; those needed for flight beyond Earth orbit are further off still.

Last year China’s vast housing market was caught in a vicious circle. Tight borrowing limits and weak sales left over-indebted property developers with too little cash to finish building homes they had sold in advance. These construction delays then put off prospective homebuyers, further weakening sales.

But the sector seems on the brink of a remarkable recovery. Sales rose by 44% year-on-year in March in 30 big cities. New figures out on April 18th will reveal whether that turnaround is spreading to the rest of the country. The government has relieved pressure on property developers’ financing and increased pressure on them to finish building pre-sold homes. Households now seem more confident that purchased properties will actually be delivered. They also seem more confident that house prices will increase, according to a recent survey by the central bank. Indeed, figures released on Saturday showed that the price of a new home rose in 65 out of 70 cities in March, compared with the month before.

The lights will go out at Germany’s last three nuclear power plants on Saturday. When a deadline to close them was set in 2011, following a deadly nuclear blow-out at Fukushima in Japan, most Germans expected to be cheering the demise of a “dangerous and dirty” industry. But war in Ukraine has yanked up energy prices, throttled natural gas supplies and forced Germany back to using far filthier coal. Polls show that 68% of Germans now want nuclear plants to stay open. So why is Germany bucking the global trend of reappraising nuclear energy as a good thing?

The answer is coalition politics. It may look daft to scrap 6% of your power capacity—which is what the three plants still provide, down from 31% when Germany’s nuclear industry peaked in the 1990s. But nuclear exit is a trigger issue for the Greens. If the two parties with which they share power touch that, Germany’s government might melt down.

The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for Ethiopian music. Among the musicians of “Swinging Addis”, as the capital became known, was a prolific pianist called Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, who was also a nun in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This month, Mississippi Records is reissuing two of her albums, recorded during the 1960s, in addition to a new LP called “Jerusalem”. It features three tracks that the nun wrote around 1970 and several from the 1980s, which were only recently discovered.

Ms Guebrou’s uplifting compositions blend Western classical traditions with jazz and Ethiopia’s holy music. The songs feel at once ancient and modern, and in many ways reflect her extraordinary life. Born in 1923, she studied piano in Switzerland as a girl, and was later imprisoned during Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Afterwards, she joined a monastery and eventually moved to Jerusalem in 1984. Ms Guebrou died in March, at the age of 99, but in each meandering piano solo, her spirit lives on.

This year’s NBA playoffs are anyone’s to win. The post-season tournament begins on Saturday, with the Philadelphia 76ers tipping off against the Brooklyn Nets and the Boston Celtics playing the Atlanta Hawks. Pundits judged this season to be unusually open before it began: the tipsters at FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism site, gave 11 teams at least a 5% chance of winning the title, the most since they started forecasting eight years ago. For the first time in more than two decades, no team managed to win 60 of their 82 regular-season games.

This may be because the top players are more evenly dispersed. There is not a single side this year who can put up three superstars, as did the Golden State Warriors when Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green were in their prime. The 20 players rated most highly by FiveThirtyEight represent 14 different teams. This increased parity will make for an unpredictable nine weeks.

It is not the end, but perhaps the beginning of the end. On April 9th a delegation from Saudi Arabia flew to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, to meet representatives of the Houthis, a Shia militia that controls much of the country. At the Yemeni president’s request, a Saudi-led coalition stepped in to help topple the Houthis. They have been at war for eight years.

At the centre of this month’s talks were two men who probably never expected to be. The first, Muhammad Ali al-Houthi (pictured), is a senior figure in the militia that bears his family name. A forty-something cousin of the group’s leader, he has said the Saudis are a satrap of America and a stalking-horse for Israel. He has been a target of coalition airstrikes; one reportedly wounded him in 2015. He is third on Saudi Arabia’s most-wanted list in Yemen, with a $20m bounty on his head.

Yet there he was, shaking hands with an emissary of the enemy: Muhammad al-Jaber, the Saudi envoy to Yemen since 2014. Little is known about Mr al-Jabar, but well-connected Saudis describe him as a fearsome member of the Mukhabarat, or intelligence service.

The meeting of these two men is a mark of how dismal conditions have become in Yemen. The war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis: more than 200,000 people have died, and two-thirds of the population need foreign aid to survive. But it has not dislodged the Houthis from power. The Saudi-backed “legitimate government” of Yemen has been feckless and prone to infighting. The Houthis, backed by Iran, have lobbed thousands of rockets and drones across the border into Saudi Arabia.

After eight years of failure, the Saudis want out. Months of negotiations were given a boost by last month’s unexpected rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. On Friday the Saudis and Houthis began to exchange nearly 900 prisoners, the biggest such swap in two and a half years. Next may come a permanent ceasefire, extending the temporary truce that was agreed in April 2022. The truce is unlikely to end Yemen’s civil war, which predates Saudi involvement. But it should herald more uncomfortable meetings between two longtime foes.

After stirring controversy abroad with his remarks about Taiwan, on Friday Emmanuel Macron faces a crucial decision at home. The French Constitutional Council will rule on whether the president’s pension reform passes muster. His legislation raises the country’s minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years, and has provoked ongoing protests and strikes. Mr Macron pushed the measure through parliament in March without a direct vote, narrowly winning a subsequent vote of no-confidence in his government.

It is rare, but not unprecedented, for the council to overturn legislation that has passed through parliament. An outright rejection of the reform would provoke a political crisis. But if the council validates it, this too will be met with an outcry. The council will also rule on an opposition initiative to launch a petition for a referendum on limiting the pension age to 62. Mr Macron’s political troubles are not over yet.

America’s big banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, report first-quarter earnings on Friday. After the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and subsequent shocks, these results should reveal something of the lay of the land. There was widespread deposit flight from smaller banks to larger ones—just how much will now become apparent. Lower deposits should lead to rising funding costs for some smaller banks, which will squeeze their net interest margins (the difference between what they pay for funding and what they receive on loans). Whether that has imperilled any other banks will soon be clearer. And the extent to which certain banks have drawn on emergency lending facilities created by the Fed could also show up.

Some of those details, however, might only be revealed by the regional banks, which report next week. The smaller ones that have struggled, like First Republic, don’t report until the week after that. The worst of the storm appears to have passed. Now it is time for the fog to clear.

Republican presidential hopefuls are fine-tuning their Second Amendment talking points. Confirmed candidates such as Donald Trump and Nikki Haley—and unconfirmed ones, like Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence—are speaking on Friday at the National Rifle Association’s 152nd annual convention. As was the case in 2022, the meeting comes on the heels of two mass shootings; the cities in mourning this year are Louisville, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee.

Nashville will also host a Republican meeting on Friday, as donors gather there for a long-planned retreat. They are sure to face uncomfortable questions about both the recent school shooting, in which a former student killed three children, as well as the subsequent vote by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to expel two black Democratic lawmakers who agitated for gun control.

Some conservatives have expressed concern about the party’s image. Even before the latest tragedies, a majority of Americans said they favoured stricter gun laws. In the wake of these events Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, said that members of her party “aren’t showing compassion”.

On Saturday morning nearly 50,000 junior doctors in England and Wales conclude a 96-hour strike for better pay. As many as 300,000 operations and procedures will have been cancelled as a result of the walk-out; disastrous given that hospital waiting lists already top 7m. Despite this, polling suggests that over half of Britons still support the strikers.

Doctors, many of whom are not actually so junior, are tired of working on understaffed wards. Adding insult to injury are the years of real-terms pay cuts: a union talking point is that one in ten of their number are paid little more than baristas at a popular chain of coffee shops. But the government will never agree to their demands for a 35% pay rise—which would make salaries equivalent to their level 15 years ago—and thus genuine negotiations have never begun. Meanwhile, a third of junior doctors, according to the British Medical Association, plan to leave to work abroad in the next 12 months.

“Dracula” films are rising from the grave. Since “Dracula Untold” came out in 2014, the archetypal vampire from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel has been seen only in the “Hotel Transylvania” cartoons. But now he is back in the flesh in “Renfield”, a gory action comedy. Nicolas Cage plays the Transylvanian blood-sucker; Nicholas Hoult plays the minion who realises that he has the boss from hell (in more ways than one).

In August a more serious chiller, “The Last Voyage of the Demeter”, will depict Dracula’s sea voyage from Carpathia to England. And Mr Hoult will appear again in Robert Eggers’ forthcoming remake of “Nosferatu”, the classic German adaptation of Stoker’s book.

Hollywood is counting on the Count because monster movies and slasher movies are currently making a killing, as this year’s “M3gan” and “Scream VI” demonstrated. Besides, now that studios are running out of comic-book superheroes to put in their blockbusters, they need new blood.