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Who will be the next Dalai Lama?

Tibetan Buddhists consider it inauspicious to discuss what happens after the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, dies. Some think it unnecessary since he remains in good health. Nonetheless on Wednesday, in the run-up to his 90th birthday on July 6th, he is expected to issue his most definitive statement yet on his succession plans. Tradition holds that, after his death, aides and senior lamas identify a child as his reincarnation. But the Dalai Lama may choose not to be reborn. He may also “emanate” as another person while still alive.

The only certainty is that China will dispute his decision. The country’s Communist Party, which seized Tibet in 1951, claims that it alone can approve the next Dalai Lama. It hopes the death of the current one, who fled to India in 1959, will curb international backing for his non-violent campaign for Tibet’s greater autonomy within China. And it plans to appoint a rival successor.

The Middle East divides South America

On Wednesday President Javier Milei of Argentina (pictured) will host a summit of Mercosur, a customs union in the Southern Cone, with the region’s presidents. Last year the bloc agreed to a historic trade deal with the European Union. But the tone of the meeting is unlikely to be triumphant: the deal has not yet been fully ratified in Europe.

And tensions smoulder between the bloc’s heavyweights, the libertarian Mr Milei and the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, known as Lula. The two seldom speak. Their divergent view on the Middle East, in particular, will not make conversation any easier: Mr Milei is a forthright supporter of Israel; Lula is not. Both bang on about it. Lula may also visit Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a leftist former president of Argentina, who is under house arrest after she was given a six-year sentence for corruption. The leaders of Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia would be happy to just chat about trade.

Russia’s party is over

Figures due out on Wednesday are expected to confirm that Russia’s economy is slowing. In 2023 it boomed, defying forecasts of a deep recession. Last year GDP grew by more than 4%. Oil exports surged and the government spent big on defence and welfare. Sanctions, what sanctions?

Now, though, growth has fallen to about 1%. That is in part due to tougher Western sanctions on oil exports. But domestic developments play a role, too. The central bank has raised interest rates to quell high inflation. As a result, consumers have pulled back on spending and companies on investment. And the government is taking its foot off the fiscal accelerator, in part because it no longer sees the need to continue to build up the military. Other statistics due out on Wednesday, from retail sales to real-wage growth, will reinforce the downbeat narrative.

Spain’s water-pistol moment

Last year a record 94m tourists visited Spain—nearly double the size of the country’s population. This year it is on track to receive even more visitors, as data for May, released on Wednesday, will probably confirm. In April Spain hosted almost 9m tourists, a tenth more than in the same month last year. They brought in €10.8bn ($12.8bn), contributing to Spain’s healthy economic growth.

But with the peak season about to begin not everyone is happy. Last year activists protested against “overtourism”. In one widely publicised incident young women shot water pistols at tourists tucking into their tapas on Barcelona’s famous las Ramblas. This year hard-left groups have already repeated the stunt. Although protests are sporadic, many Spaniards sympathise with them. Tourist apartments worsen an acute housing shortage and visitors choke pavements, they say. For the authorities, the challenge is to allay those concerns without strangling the tourist goose that lays the golden tortilla.

Europe’s women footballers fight for the crown

Bookmakers have Spain as narrow favourites to win the UEFA Women’s Euro 2025, which kicks off on Wednesday in Switzerland. But England, Germany and France are close behind. Spain are the reigning world champions and have what looks like the strongest squad, which balances experienced players and fearless young talent. Midfielders Alexia Putellas and Aitana Bonmati have each won the Ballon d’Or Féminin, the award for the world’s best female player, twice in the last four years.

England won the previous Euros but have had a horrid build-up to the tournament with three important players retiring. Their coach, Sarina Wiegman, is however an expert at negotiating tournament football. Staggeringly, Germany lost only one knock-out match at the Euros between 1991 and 2007. And France, who draw players from some of the world’s best clubs, have until now been women’s football’s great underachievers. They have reached only one semi-final. This year they will have another very talented squad but also the toughest path to victory, with England, the Netherlands and Wales in their group.

China’s economy defies the odds

The first half of this year has gone better for China’s economy than anyone could have expected a couple of months ago. Despite American tariffs, exports have continued to grow. And despite low consumer confidence, retail sales have picked up, thanks partly to a recent online shopping festival and government subsidies for consumers who trade-in old products for new. This week Citigroup, an American bank, raised its growth forecast for 2025 to from 4.2% in early April to 5%.

The purchasing-managers’ indices released on Monday by China’s statistics bureau are likely to confirm this stability, registering little change from May to June. But worries remain. The property market is still fragile and deflationary pressures linger. China’s steady growth could also lull the country’s policymakers into delaying further fiscal stimulus. The economy has started the year well. But if China’s leaders take too much encouragement from that fact, it may finish the year badly.

Republicans push to deliver a bill

The end may be in sight for Donald Trump’s sprawling budget bill. Republicans in the Senate won a tricky preliminary vote late on Saturday, and could take a final poll as early as Monday. John Thune, the top Republican in the upper chamber, faced a daunting task: some of his members balked at the cost, others objected to the cuts to Medicaid (government health insurance for the poor). But a few last-minute tweaks—a fund to help rural hospitals, for example—appears to have helped pull a few sceptics back into line.

For months Donald Trump has been talking about passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act by July 4th. But merging the Senate’s version with the one that the House of Representatives passed earlier could be harder still. More than a dozen congressmen have already said the Senate’s Medicaid cuts are a deal-breaker. There are more negotiations to come, probably even beyond Independence Day, before the saga ends.

Back to the bloody impasse in Gaza

With the war between Israel and Iran apparently over, attention has returned to Gaza. Israel’s bloody offensive is dragging on into its 21st month amid reports that Israeli soldiers have been shooting at civilians trying to get food from the controversial distribution hubs of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Hundreds have been killed, adding to a death-toll that surpasses 55,000.

Israeli forces now control around a third, or more, of the strip. The chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces reckons that Israel will soon “reach the lines” of its aims in Gaza. But this contradicts the ambitions of the far-right parties in Israel’s government. They want to occupy Gaza in perpetuity. While Israel’s stance remains unclear, and Hamas still refuses to accept a 60-day truce, President Donald Trump has weighed in. He posted on his social media channel “MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!!” In Iran he succeeded in imposing a ceasefire this way. In Gaza it may be more difficult.

Soured cream on the Wimbledon strawberries 

This year, like every year, Wimbledon will look pristine, blooming flowerbeds offsetting the crisp Ralph Lauren uniforms. But underneath the sheen, the tournament, which begins on Monday, faces complaints from some of its players. The Professional Tennis Players’ Association, an organisation co-founded by Novak Djokovic in 2020, is suing the sport’s governing bodies that set the rules and organise the calendar. The operators of the four grand slams, including the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which runs Wimbledon, are also named as “co-conspirators”.

The PTPA wants a shorter calendar and more prize money. It has a case. The off-season is just six weeks. Wimbledon paid out £50m to players in 2024, which is around 12% of the AELTC’s revenue. In America’s National Basketball Association and National Football League, collective bargaining agreements ensure that the players receive around 50% of total revenue. The PTPA has given the grand slams three months to negotiate before it adds them to its lawsuit.

The OIC is powerless on Israel’s wars

The summit of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, which begins in Istanbul on Saturday, will no doubt focus on Israel’s war with Iran. Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, is set to attend. Many of his counterparts from the OIC’s 57 member states are expected to call for an immediate ceasefire. But the war in Gaza, now in its 21st month, and the humanitarian crisis triggered by Israel’s blockade and relentless bombing of the strip, will be on the agenda as well.

The situation in Gaza is grim. Aid workers say that more Palestinians are killed while trying to collect food than in the actual fighting. According to Gaza’s health ministry, at least 59 people were killed on June 17th—Israeli tanks reportedly opened fire near an aid centre run by the Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israel’s armed forces said they would review the incident. The OIC has been powerless to stem the bloodshed in Gaza. It will probably fare no better in Iran.

An anti-abortion gathering in Kansas

This weekend anti-abortion activists will meet outside Kansas City for the National Right to Life’s annual conference. The mood is mixed. Next week marks three years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, which overturned the federal right to abortion. Since then, 16 states have banned the procedure at or before six weeks.

Yet the number of abortions is rising. Recent data suggest nearly 98,000 procedures are performed each month, up from around 81,000 before Dobbs. So some campaigners are pressing lawmakers to go further. In at least 14 states legislation has been introduced that would punish abortion as murder and recognise fertilised eggs as full legal persons. Others are hoping for action at the federal level. Donald Trump has so far kept relatively shtum on abortion: he pardoned activists for conspiring to block access to clinics, but has not restricted the availability of abortion medication. For activists in Kansas, Dobbs’s third birthday will be bittersweet.

A zombie franchise returns from the dead

In 2002 “28 Days Later” let loose a zombie horde that has been shambling across the landscape of popular culture ever since. The British horror film inspired countless film and television series, including “The Walking Dead” and “The Last of Us”.

Now the film’s writer, Alex Garland, and director, Danny Boyle, have reunited for “28 Years Later” (“23 Years Later” would have been more accurate). The film-makers’ feelings about Brexit inspired the conceit: while the rest of the world is now free of the Rage Virus, which turns people into marauding homicidal maniacs, Britain is a quarantined, zombie-infested island.

The film stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes. There are plenty of breathless chases and grisly deaths. But “28 Years Later” is also a melancholy coming-of-age drama, an eerie rural folk-horror film and a smart state-of-the-nation satire. The zombies may be mindless, but the movie isn’t.

Celebrating the summer solstice

Four celestial events define the Earth’s seasons. On the two equinoxes, marking the start of spring and autumn, the planet’s orbit brings its equatorial plane closest to the Sun, so everywhere gets roughly 12 hours of daylight. On the two solstices, in late December and, this year, on Saturday, the sun is at its farthest from the equatorial plane. The northern hemisphere will experience its longest day, the summer solstice; the southern will have its shortest, inaugurating winter.

The solstices have long been occasions for celebration. Christmas probably absorbed pre-Christian winter-solstice festivities. People still mark the summer solstice. Midsummer is a significant holiday in Scandinavia, parts of which will not see the Sun set until August. Swedes dance flower-garlanded maypoles; Finns and Norwegians light bonfires. Across the Nordic region, people spend the holiday outside, under the midnight sun.

Weekend profile: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s great survivor

Just over a week ago it seemed as if Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, might be part of a breakthrough. Talks between Iran and America were approaching decision-hour. A nuclear deal seemed achievable. But things changed on June 13th, when Israel began launching air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and its military leaders. The Islamic Republic has been battered. Now, while a diplomatic breakthrough is still possible, Mr Khamenei must worry about his regime breaking apart.

Mr Khamenei was born in 1939, one of eight children of a poor religious scholar from the north-east of Iran. He followed in his father’s footsteps and went to study in the city of Qom, the pre-eminent place of Shia scholarship. From the first he reasoned that God needed a helping hand from man to deliver. Alongside the Koran, he listened to music, recited poetry and read novels such as “Les Miserables” and “The Grapes of Wrath”, which depict a secular struggle against oppression.

The first positions he held after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 had little to do with God. He was deputy defence minister and a commissar in the newly formed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s most powerful security force. In 1981 he won a tightly controlled election to become president of the republic. Obedient and uncharismatic, he was favoured by Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution. Mr Khamenei would hold the largely ceremonial post for eight years, winning re-election in 1985.

His opponents consistently underestimated him. After Khomeini’s death, the late cleric’s wily chief adviser, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, shoehorned Mr Khamenei into the post of supreme leader. Rafsanjani assumed what he anticipated would be an empowered presidency. But Mr Khamenei proved adept at playing Iran’s state institutions off against each other, turning himself into the final arbiter. And he had an inbuilt advantage over Rafsanjani and his successors as president, many of whom wanted to turn Iran into a more normal Islamic republic. Whereas they had a limit of two terms, he was appointed for life.

Over time, the contradictions of Mr Khamenei’s rule have grown more stark. He lives frugally, but heads a business empire worth tens of billions of dollars. While he celebrates Iran’s isolation from the cultural impurities of the West (he has visited America only once), most Iranians want to connect with the world. Women resent his enforcement of a dress code that requires them to wear a veil and black manteaux. Increasingly, Iran’s transformation from hybrid-democracy into dictatorship has stirred dissent.

At protests in recent years, participants have chanted not just for Mr Khamenei’s downfall, but for his death. His response has always been the same: beating, shooting, jailing and kangaroo courts. The lesson he took from the fall of the Shah during the Islamic Revolution was to never concede.

In his pursuit of power he has come to resemble the Shah. Many insiders have tipped his second son, Mojtaba, to be his successor. The war might scupper any such plans. If Mr Netanyahu doesn’t get him, his own security forces might. Tehran’s rumour mill is rife with talk of a new IRGC council which has taken the reins while Mr Khamenei is cloistered in a bunker for his safe-keeping. But his latest opponents would be wise not to underestimate him.

Iran has few good responses to Israel

Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, promised that Israel would face “severe punishment” for air strikes on Friday that knocked out its air defences, damaged its nuclear-enrichment facility at Natanz and decapitated its military. Late on Friday it launched a barrage of ballistic missiles, sending Israelis across the country heading for bomb shelters.

More exchanges of fire will follow. Israel has promised a wave of strikes lasting for weeks, presumably targeting more of Iran’s nuclear sites. Iran will want to hit back—both to avenge a humiliated regime and to compel Israel to stop. It has few good options. If its response is too weak, it will not deter Israel; too strong, and it might draw America into the war. The least risky course of action is to carry out further missile-and-drone attacks to wear down Israeli defences. But it can no longer rely on allied militias in the region: Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza are exhausted by their own fronts with Israel.

What might happen to oil prices?

The Middle East has been a tense place for the past two years. But so long as a full-blown war between Israel and Iran was avoided, oil prices remained calm. That all changed when Israel launched its offensive on Friday. Further attacks threaten to inflame the Gulf, which pumps a third of the world’s oil. How high might prices go?

In the case of de-escalation, the risk premium would evaporate, leaving Brent prices between $65 and $70 a barrel, according to experts contacted by The Economist. A more probable continued tit-for-tat would hurt the Iranian oil supply, nudging up prices by a few more dollars. But in more desperate scenarios, such as if Iran were to shut the Strait of Hormuz, through which 30% of the world’s seaborne crude and 20% of its liquid natural gas travel, Brent may rush past $100. Worse still, if Iran were to bomb the Gulf’s largest oil-production sites, $120 could be in sight.

Trump’s birthday clash

On Saturday America will celebrate 250 years of its army. June 14th is also the day that America officially adopted the stars and stripes as its flag. And, serendipitously for Donald Trump, it is his 79th birthday. The president has promised a “spectacular” military parade in Washington, DC. While 7,000 soldiers march, he has said, “thundering tanks and breathtaking flyovers will roar through our capital city”. The price tag is certainly spectacular—up to $45m, according to estimates by defence officials.

Many plan to RSVP to a very different event. At least 1,500 anti-Trump “No Kings” protests are planned across America and elsewhere in the world to counter the parade. Organisers expect millions to turn out, with attendance doubtless boosted by outrage over Mr Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles. The president is not keen on the competition. This week he warned that protesters would be “met with very big force”.

Ferrari defends its title at Le Mans

The 24 Hours of Le Mans takes place in France on Saturday. The race is the most prestigious of motor racing’s endurance events, held annually since 1923 (with a roughly ten-year hiatus in the 1930s and 40s because of labour strikes and war). The team that covers the most distance in one day wins.

Ferrari (whose biggest shareholder, Exor, also part-owns The Economist’s parent company) was one of the most successful teams at Le Mans in the event’s early years; it won the first time that it competed, in 1949. But Ferrari stepped back from endurance racing in 1973 to focus entirely on Formula One. In 2023 the team returned to compete in the new hypercar category, which permits a broader design brief. That year one of Ferrari’s two teams delivered a stunning victory over Toyota, which had dominated in recent years, and prevailed again in 2024. Ferrari will be hoping to secure an unlikely hat trick.

Weekend profile: Gavin Newsom, a governor with an opportunity 

Normally, Gavin Newsom is loose. The Democratic governor of California talks with a staccato cadence, often flitting from one incomplete thought to the next. But on June 10th he was clear and direct. “This brazen abuse of power by a sitting president inflamed a combustible situation,” he said during a televised address after President Donald Trump deployed nearly 5,000 troops to Los Angeles to quell protests over immigration raids.

Mr Newsom was already a national figure. But the protests give him the chance to establish—or damage—his credentials. Born in 1967, he is a fourth-generation San Franciscan. His father was a lawyer before becoming a judge. His parents divorced when he was young and Mr Newsom often talks about his mother working at several jobs to raise him and his younger sister. Dyslexia meant that he struggled in school; he went to university on a partial baseball scholarship.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s he rose through San Francisco’s cut-throat, Democrat-dominated politics. Republicans now paint Mr Newsom as a bleeding-heart liberal, but in true blue San Francisco he was considered a moderate, pro-business Democrat. But he was still provocative. After he was elected mayor in 2003, Mr Newsom issued marriage licences to same-sex couples at City Hall even though state law defined marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. Republicans used the episode to convince social conservatives to vote against John Kerry, the Democratic candidate in the 2004 presidential race.

After eight years as lieutenant-governor, he was elected in 2018 to California’s top job, and won re-election in 2022. The governor’s podcast, first aired in March, has Californians wondering how he has so much free time. In “This is Gavin Newsom”, he asks right-wingers and Democrats alike where his party went wrong in 2024. Progressives are suspicious that Mr Newsom’s chummy conversations with MAGA leaders are a bald attempt to try to win back the bro vote, and presage a move to the centre ahead of a possible presidential run in 2028.

Certainly, Mr Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles—which one federal judge has ruled is illegal—offers Mr Newsom a political opportunity. The president looks reckless; the governor, like a responsible adult. By condemning violence and trying to safe-guard Californians’ right to protest, he is striking a balance that could resonate with Americans beyond the Golden State, and perhaps help unite a Democratic Party that has seemed fractured and aimless since 2024.

But Mr Trump will try to convince Americans that the governor is protecting dangerous illegal immigrants from deportation. Scenes of disorder and burning cars in LA fit a narrative some Republicans have been pushing for years: that Democratic-run cities are lawless, and their leaders irresponsible. Mr Newsom is concentrating on his home state now, but 2028 isn’t far away.