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Antony Blinken, America’s top diplomat, was scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Sunday. The visit—the first by a secretary of state since 2018—seemed like proof that the countries’ fractious relationship was improving. But now it will not happen. On Friday Mr Blinken postponed his trip after a Chinese high-altitude balloon was spotted flying over America.

The Pentagon claimed it was a surveillance balloon, though it downplayed its potential value for gathering intelligence. China said it was a “civilian airship” used mainly for meteorological research. It expressed regret about the balloon’s “unintended” entry into American airspace.

Officials in Washington are disinclined to give China the benefit of the doubt. No politician wants to appear soft towards the country. That limits the Biden administration’s room for manoeuvre. Mr Blinken may still hope to visit Beijing at some point. One could argue, though, that now is precisely the time when talks are needed.

In 2019, months after striking a power-sharing agreement, Salva Kiir and Riek Machar—the president and one of the vice-presidents of South Sudan, respectively—visited the Vatican. Pope Francis famously kissed their feet, imploring the foes to maintain their fragile peace. The two men, who come from rival tribes, had watched their young country descend into a civil war in 2013. In less than five years the conflict was estimated to have left nearly 400,000 people dead and 4m displaced.

On Friday Francis arrived in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, a predominantly Christian country, with the same message. Joining him are Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Iain Greenshields, of the Church of Scotland. But their prayers for peace will probably fall on deaf ears. Between August and December 166 civilians were killed as violence rose in South Sudan’s Upper Nile state, in the north. And on the eve of Francis’s arrival 27 were killed in the south of the country.

“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window”

At 25 Lorraine Hansberry, a black lesbian communist playwright, longed for fame. But she couldn’t have predicted how soon it would come. She was 28 when “A Raisin in the Sun”, about a black family seeking a piece of the American dream, opened on Broadway in 1959. It marked the first time a black woman playwright had reached the Great White Way.

More than 60 years on, “Raisin” remains in heavy rotation. But another of Hansberry’s plays, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window”, has hardly been staged since it closed on Broadway in 1965, the year she died of cancer aged 34. The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s rare revival, starring Rachel Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac, opens in previews on Saturday. James Baldwin once raved of the play, about a group of friends in Greenwich Village straining to reconcile their ideals with reality, that “it is about nothing less than our responsibility to ourselves and each other.”

This year’s Six Nations tournament starts on Saturday. The competition, which pits the top European men’s rugby teams against one another, will also be keenly watched on the other side of the world. Ahead of a World Cup this autumn, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are eyeing the northern-hemisphere competition.

Those southern-hemisphere powerhouses have won all but one of the previous World Cups. But France will look forward to home advantage. Les bleus have been in formidable form recently, with a powerful pack and a scrum-half, Antoine Dupont, who was voted World Rugby player of the year in 2021.

It would, then, be a brave fan who bet against France in the Six Nations. But Ireland, who top the world rankings ahead of France and New Zealand, will be favourites. In Josh van der Flier, a flanker, they possess the player of 2022. Of all the northern teams, it is these two that will make southern boots quake come autumn.

Britney Spears brought the sex appeal, plaintive vocals and teen longing. Max Martin supplied the rest. In 1998 their track “...Baby One More Time” ruled the radio. Any allusions to domestic violence or sado-masochistic sex in the chorus—“Hit me baby one more time”—were supposedly unintentional. Mr Martin, the song’s Swedish writer and producer, says he understood “hit me” to mean “call me”.

The earworm was the first of Mr Martin’s 25 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, a chart of America’s most popular songs. Only Paul McCartney and John Lennon rank higher as songwriters. His collaborators include pop heavyweights from Celine Dion to Taylor Swift. On Sunday, at the Grammy Awards, the 51-year-old has three separate nominations for album of the year: for his production work on Adele’s “30”, Lizzo’s “Special” and Coldplay’s “Music of the Spheres”.

Unlike the Beatles frontmen, Mr Martin has shunned the mic since his early days as a heavy-metal rocker in Sweden. Then he was known as Karl Martin Sandberg. But Denniz PoP, the producer who steered his turn towards songwriting, insisted that he rechristen himself. “‘Martin Sandberg’ wasn’t exactly a disco name, so you couldn’t really talk to him,” Mr PoP later recalled.

Mr Martin is a proponent of a technique he calls “melodic math”, the principle that every element should serve the record and its melody. Words are chosen for their sound as much as their meaning. Take “...Baby One More Time”—the percussive Bs of “baby” make it a more common endearment in pop songs than, say, “darling”.

In 2019, in a rare interview with the Guardian, he explained the importance of phonetics, and how “melodic math” came about as a result of not speaking English as a child. He would listen to Abba, Elton John and the Beatles without registering what the songs were about. “I felt something hearing this music, and it meant something to me,” he said. “If you can have a great lyric that also phonetically sounds amazing, then you’re golden. But it’s also kind of cool if you write a song and people are emotionally moved without understanding what’s being said.”

All these years on, Mr Martin’s knack for meaningful nonsense shows no sign of diminishing.

What next for the Adani Group? On Wednesday the flagship company of the Indian conglomerate cancelled a secondary share offering, which had been fully subscribed, after its share price plunged. The rout started last week when Hindenburg Research, an American short-seller, accused the Adani Group of accounting fraud and share-price manipulation—charges that it forcefully denies.

The threat does not appear existential. Gautam Adani, the founder and until recently the world’s third-richest man, is considered an able operator and his companies own many valuable assets. No rating agency has yet reappraised the group’s debt, which boasts an investment grade.

Yet it is hard to believe that Mr Adani’s grand investment plans will be unaffected. Between 2023 and 2027 his group was forecast to spend more than $50bn on investments. If the yields on Adani bonds remain elevated and its share prices depressed, securing the necessary funds will prove difficult. Foreign investors are not taking any chances. In just two recent days, global funds pulled a net $1.5bn from the Indian stockmarket.

When Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, welcomes his Finnish counterpart, Sanna Marin, to Stockholm on Thursday, he will be looking for a show of solidarity. After Russia invaded Ukraine the Nordic neighbours decided to give up their long-standing non-aligned status, and applied to join NATO. But they were blocked by Turkey, which like all NATO members has a veto. Turkey extracted promises from both countries to crack down on residents associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a violent separatist group in Turkey.

Now Turkey has new demands. Last month, for reasons unknown, a far-right Danish politician burnt a Koran outside Denmark’s embassy in Stockholm. The act prompted protests across the Muslim world. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says he is ready to approve Finland’s NATO application, but that Sweden must outlaw Koran-burning before it can join. Mr Kristersson has condemned the act, but says his country’s laws on freedom of expression are non-negotiable. Ms Marin will no doubt pledge to stand by her Swedish friends.

The steady retreat of democracy that began in 2016 at last came to an end in 2022. Yet a hoped-for revival did not materialise. According to the Democracy Index, an annual snapshot published by The Economist’s sister company, EIU, the average score among 167 countries ticked up by just 0.01 points, to 5.29 out of 10. More than a third of people worldwide still live under authoritarian rule and less than half live in a democracy.

The lifting of pandemic-related restrictions almost everywhere last year—China was a notable exception until December—improved scores in the “civil liberties” category. But any gains were wiped out by democratic backsliding elsewhere. A bungled attempt by the now-ousted president of Peru to shut down Congress resulted in the country’s being downgraded to a “hybrid regime”. Burkina Faso suffered not one but two coups. But it was Russia that recorded the biggest democratic decline of any country in the world, falling 22 places to 146th.

The Bank of England is expected to raise its interest rate to 4% on Thursday, from 3.5%. The key question, though, is what signal the central bank’s nine-member monetary-policy committee will send about the pace of future rises. In November it noted that market expectations of where rates would peak were higher than its own. Market interest rates have since come down.

The committee may be more uncertain than usual about prospects for inflation, and thus interest rates. The bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, has suggested that falling wholesale gas prices will make it easier to reduce inflation without steep increases in rates, which would be good news for the economy. But the bank’s chief economist, Huw Pill, has warned that Britain faces a unique combination of challenges that could cause inflation to persist more stubbornly than in America or Europe. If so, interest rates may have to continue rising more quickly and steeply than some observers expect.

Zhang Hongbing’s mother was executed in 1970 after being branded a counter-revolutionary. Such horrors were not uncommon during the Cultural Revolution, a decade of Maoist madness that began in 1966 and saw up to 2m people killed for supposed political transgressions. But the case of Mr Zhang’s mother stands out, because he and his father had been her accusers.

Mr Zhang’s memory of the event seems strange to Tania Branigan, the author of “Red Memory”. He existed in it “as a Maoist algorithm: inputs, rules, outputs”, she writes. How people remember the Cultural Revolution—or why they have forgotten it—is the theme of her penetrating book.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has suppressed discussion of the Cultural Revolution. He has accumulated more power than any leader since Mao Zedong and created his own cult of personality. “What makes the era’s lessons so vital is also what makes them impermissible,” writes Ms Branigan.