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Following another week of turmoil in global banking, UBS, a Swiss bank, announced on Sunday that it was acquiring Credit Suisse, its struggling Swiss rival, in a rescue deal that valued the latter at around SFr3bn ($3.2bn). As part of the deal, holders of Credit Suisse’s “additional Tier-1” bonds—a type of debt designed to absorb losses when a bank fails—were wiped out. This controversial move is reverberating through the market for similar debt, worth $275bn, as investors revise their expectations of what might happen in the unlikely event of another bank failure.

The enlarged UBS will now begin a knotty integration process with Credit Suisse. The new mega-bank will hold nearly one-third of the Swiss market and manage $3.4trn through its wealth-management division. The combined investment-banking business will see brutal cost-cutting in coming months, much of it inflicted on traders and dealmakers from Credit Suisse. Financial policymakers around the world will be fervently hoping the new union succeeds.

After years of unabated scandal, a pay-off to a porn actress may yield the first criminal charges against Donald Trump. For weeks a grand jury in Manhattan has been hearing evidence that America’s former president falsified business records to hide hush money paid to Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford), whom he allegedly slept with in 2006. A vote to indict him, which appears imminent, would cue the indignities of arrest: mugshot, finger-printing and a not-guilty plea.

The case is far from straightforward. To classify the allegedly fraudulent record-keeping as a felony, rather than a mere misdemeanour, prosecutors must prove that it facilitated a second crime, of falsifying campaign expenses. But the Federal Election Commission, a regulator, dropped its civil probe into that matter because of partisan deadlock among commissioners. And the prosecutors’ star witness—Michael Cohen, Mr Trump’s former lawyer—is himself a convicted felon. The outcome of any case is unpredictable but its place in the history books is assured.

On Tuesday two candidates for an open seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court will debate in Madison, the state’s capital. The election is being closely watched. At stake is a liberal or conservative majority on the highest legal authority in one of America’s closest swing states. Wisconsin’s governor and one of its two senators are Democrats. But thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans dominate lower-level races and are just one seat short of a supermajority in the state senate.

The contest in the Supreme Court could shift the balance in Wisconsin’s politics. If Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal judge, wins, the court may be able to overturn an archaic state law banning abortion. And it could compel the state to undo some of the gerrymandering devised by the Republican-dominated state house. Victory for her opponent, Daniel Kelly, would maintain conservative control over the court, which has held since 2008.

If there were a contest for the sector hardest hit by inflation and high interest rates, it would be a crowded field. Banks are currently in the lead, but construction firms could also be a solid bet. For them, higher rates means less demand from would-be house buyers. And higher prices for construction materials and energy shrink their margins.

So far, however, Europe’s construction sector is holding up. Figures released on Tuesday showed a construction rebound in January after a very weak December, with production in the euro area rising 3.9% in seasonally adjusted terms. And surveys of construction managers suggest that the sector’s overall confidence, while falling, is still higher than its average over the last twenty years or so.

Yet the number of new construction projects given the go-ahead is a cause for concern. In Germany, for instance, building permits issued for family dwellings fell by 26% in January compared with the year before. Europe’s builders will hope not to rival the continent’s banks for top spot anytime soon.

America is the ancestral home of baseball. Yet curiously it has won the game’s international tournament— the World Baseball Classic, or, between 1938 and 2011, the Baseball World Cup—only five times in 43 attempts. American stars routinely skip the tournament as the risks of injury or suffering a humiliating loss outweigh the rewards; most of their fans care more about the domestic competition, Major League Baseball.

Yet the American team for this year’s competition, which concludes with the final on Tuesday, is strong. Mike Trout and Mookie Betts, two generational talents, are in the squad and will play in the final, when America will take on Japan. America’s general manager, Tony Reagins, said that securing Mr Trout’s participation made recruiting other players easier. A win would bring America its second successive title. That would make recruitment for the next edition, in 2026, much easier.

Facing a knife-edge vote in parliament, Emmanuel Macron’s government on Thursday forced through his controversial plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, in effect linking the measure to a vote of no confidence. The move ends six weeks of parliamentary debate—but few consider the matter closed. Thousands protested against Mr Macron’s decision on Friday and unions have called for a bumper turnout at demonstrations this weekend.

Inside parliament, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen, leaders of parties of the hard left and right respectively, called for a no-confidence vote. If successful, that would annul Mr Macron’s measure and probably prompt fresh parliamentary elections less than a year into the lower house’s five-year term. Support for Mr Macron from the centre-right the Republicans party makes that unlikely. Still, Parisians hoping for their rubbish to finally be collected by striking binmen seem out of luck. Even Mr Macron’s watered-down pension proposals—diluted from an earlier plan—have caused a stink worthy of a Parisian cul-de-sac.

Saturday marks nine years since Russia illegally annexed Crimea, a strategic peninsula jutting into the Black Sea. Rumours abound that President Vladimir Putin will speak at a large rally in Moscow to commemorate what he calls Crimea’s “reunification” with Russia. In truth, the annexation was a shameless land grab from Ukraine on the back of a bogus referendum. All but a handful of countries refuse to recognise it.

Nearly a decade after those events, Crimea’s fate again looks uncertain. Publicly, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, says his country can and will retake the peninsula, a position largely backed by his people. But the odds of a successful military assault on Crimea are steep. And many of Ukraine’s Western allies are reluctant to support any such attempt, worrying that it may lead Russia to escalate the conflict. Mr Putin has suffered numerous setbacks during the war; losing Crimea would be a humiliation from which his authority may not recover.

America’s primary system means that presidential hopefuls must energise their base without repelling moderate voters. On abortion, Republicans used to have it both ways: they talked up pro-life values, but, in a country where a majority favours abortion access in most cases, Roe v Wade conveniently constrained them from doing much about it. No longer.

On Saturday the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative Christian group in South Carolina, will host a forum with Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, two Republican candidates for president in 2024, among others. They will be pressed about how tightly to regulate the procedure. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe and allowed states to set their own limits, pro-lifers have called for a federal abortion ban. Donald Trump has not endorsed that; it is unclear if others will. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor and a likely contender for the nomination, supports a six-week ban. Fully 75% of voters in his state, however, oppose that.

On Saturday Kehinde Wiley, an African-American artist, opens an extraordinary exhibition memorialising victims of state violence. “An Archaeology of Silence”, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, is at once transcendent and a punch to the gut. In darkened galleries, spot-lit statues of black bodies lie recumbent like the fallen Christ. The walls, meanwhile, explode with vibrant colour and figures painted at billboard size. That tension—between death and life, mistreatment and resistance—is Mr Wiley’s way of forcing viewers to grapple with racism in America and elsewhere.

The work responds to the police killing of George Floyd and other black people, and the disproportionately high toll that covid-19 took on minorities. Mr Wiley, famously chosen to paint Barack Obama’s presidential portrait, is known for his lush images of African-Americans in art-historical poses. This show, he says, is a “kind of celebration that you see surrounding people who were fallen heroes, fallen gods”.

Of all those caught out in the recent banking crisis, the most surprising must be Barney Frank. As a Democratic congressman during the financial crisis of 2007-08, he helped craft the Dodd-Frank reforms designed to prevent another implosion. Yet there he was, 15 years later, sitting on the board of the failed Signature Bank, which regulators took control of last weekend. Mr Frank was supposed to have ensured that there be no more banking crises.

Mr Frank thinks New York regulators acted too hastily in closing down Signature. He argues it was specifically targeted to discourage other banks from getting too involved in cryptocurrencies. (Signature had served lots of crypto firms.) The authorities, meanwhile, say that the bank could not have opened “in a sound and safe manner” last Monday. The episode reminded anxious observers of Lehman Brothers, which failed to open on a Monday morning in September 2008.

Mr Frank says he was less interested in Signature’s crypto dealings than in its business of writing loans to developers building affordable housing, one of his life-long passions as a liberal Democrat. Born into a Jewish family in New Jersey in 1940, he got his start in Boston politics, then represented Massachusetts’s fourth congressional district from 1981 until 2013.

The rumpled, mumbling, often overweight congressional candidate was never going to win any votes for presentation, so an early campaign slogan was “Neatness isn’t everything”. In 1987, he became the first congressman to voluntarily “come out of the room”, as the House speaker at the time put it. Mr Frank has since campaigned strongly for gay marriage; he tied the knot in 2012, the first congressman to marry someone of the same sex while in office. His wit has both helped his causes and ruffled opponents. On abortion, he once quipped that “conservatives believe life begins at conception and ends at birth”.

The renegade reformer has argued that having a tough regulator sit on a bank board is a good thing. Critics are unpersuaded, but his track record suggests that he is unlikely to quiet down. On his first day of high school he was sent to the vice-principal’s office for speaking too much. Why stop now?

On Tuesday Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, attended the inaugural meeting of the International Russophile Movement in Moscow. The organisation, which is linked to Tsargrad, a right-wing, Russian-Orthodox media group, aims to promote Russian culture and society abroad. Mr Lavrov’s spokesperson claims it will counteract the West’s “anti-Russia campaign”, and that delegates from “several dozen” countries will attend.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen it cast as an international pariah by many—but not all. Earlier this month only five countries (Belarus, Eritrea, Syria, North Korea and Russia itself) rejected a resolution in the UN General Assembly condemning the invasion, out of 181 that voted. But 35 others abstained, including China and India. Moreover, a study of global polling data by the University of Cambridge suggests that in some parts of the world, notably South and South-East Asia, as well as sub-Saharan Africa, public perceptions of Russia remain broadly positive. In such places, the information war still rages.

Electricity markets are tricky to design—especially in Europe, where countries with vastly different energy policies must agree on common rules for electricity production and trading. The EU’s design came under heavy criticism in 2022 when energy costs soared. Like any homogenous good, electricity prices are set by the most expensive supplier. So profits at some power plants with low operating costs, such as wind farms, rocketed. Meanwhile, consumers and businesses had to be supported with billions in taxpayer money.

On Tuesday the European Commission will unveil proposals for an updated electricity market. Those hoping for sweeping changes will be disappointed. Instead the EU will introduce some long-term focus and stability to the market so as to protect consumers from the type of volatility seen last year. For example, countries will be allowed to support longer-term, fixed-price contracts between renewable generators and customers. A repeat of the crisis in 2022 is unlikely. But insulating the market for a more volatile, renewable future still makes sense.

The fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse is reverberating through markets. Other American regional lenders have been hit especially hard. On Monday two of them, First Republic Bank and Western Alliance Bank, saw their share prices fall by more than 61% and 47% respectively. For these and a clutch of other mid-tier banking stocks, trading was punctuated through the day by repeated pauses due to high volatility. The jitters have spread across the world: Europe’s Stoxx index of bank share prices was down by 7% on Monday. Asian stocks slumped as markets opened on Tuesday.

SVB was brought down by loading up on long-term securities, the value of which fell as interest rates rose; one fear is that after years of low rates others have been similarly reckless. Another concerns an old central-banking adage: that to quell inflation, the Federal Reserve must tighten monetary policy until something breaks. Contagion from SVB may be contained, but its failure suggests that the breakage phase is under way.

Reparations for slavery, under debate in America, are meant to acknowledge both the horrors of the slave trade and its legacy of racial discrimination. In 2019, Evanston, Illinois became the first city to approve a limited government-run reparations scheme, which will distribute $10m over ten years.

On Tuesday, San Francisco’s city council will hold its first public hearing about planned reparations to black residents harmed by past discriminatory policies. The committee that drafted the plan suggests the city should pay each eligible resident $5m, and create housing, education and health policies to tackle racial disparities.

Slavery was never legal in California, but committee members argue that the city owes black San Franciscans compensation for generations of discrimination. City officials seem unlikely to adopt the costly plan. The Hoover Institution, a conservative think-tank, estimates that the lump sums alone could cost the city, already operating with a budget deficit, up to $175bn. And details of how the scheme would be funded are scant.

Since 2020 “Ted Lasso”, a television series, has offered viewers a cheerful depiction of English football. Ted is an out-of-his-depth American coach hired to run AFC Richmond, a fictional Premier League club. For two series he won over his detractors with little more than kindness and southern charm, motivating players with a homemade sign reading “Believe”. His star players are generally decent.

Season three, released on Apple TV+ on Wednesday, introduces a touch more realism. Nate, a status-obsessed former assistant coach at Richmond, has taken charge at West Ham, a rival (and real) English club. He humiliates his players and takes potshots at Ted in the press. But Ted rises above the petty rivalry.

Yet “Ted Lasso” remains a feel-good comedy, skipping any mention of the human-rights violations, sexual-assault charges or dodgy financial dealings that dog the real sport. Perhaps the writers want viewers to believe that a better way is possible.