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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.

On Monday another trial of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident, begins. It is taking place at a penal colony some 250km (150 miles) east of Moscow, where the politician has been imprisoned for the past year.

Since his arrest in January 2021, Mr Navalny has been convicted of parole violation, fraud and contempt of court. Now the Kremlin is adding spurious charges of extremism and terrorism. If Mr Navalny is found guilty, as is almost certain, he could face 35 years in jail.

The charges show the role the courts are playing in carrying out the Kremlin’s increasingly repressive policies. As Vladimir Putin’s bloody and expensive invasion of Ukraine grinds on, he is suppressing dissent back home. Last week, Lilia Chanysheva, a co-ordinator for Mr Navalny’s political office in Bashkortostan, a region in central Russia, was jailed for seven and a half years on extremism charges. In Mr Putin’s Russia, it is becoming increasingly costly to speak out.

Imran Khan is in a precarious position. On Monday the bail granted to him in a corruption case will probably be extended again, staving off a looming arrest. Pakistan’s former prime minister has suffered a spectacular reversal of fortunes in recent weeks. Until early May the country’s most popular politician looked on course to force Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister, into early elections—or at least to be odds-on to win a vote later in the year. But after Mr Khan’s supporters attacked military installations on May 9th, Pakistan’s powerful army set about dismantling his base.

Thousands of Mr Khan’s followers have been arrested; many face trial in military courts. His party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, disintegrated as senior leaders defected; the government has mooted banning it. Media have been told not to broadcast Mr Khan’s speeches or even mention his name. Threatened with jail, deprived of political support and the oxygen of publicity, the flamboyant rabble-rouser looks increasingly lonely and powerless.

The aerospace and defence executives, industry analysts, journalists and hangers-on pounding the baking tarmac at Le Bourget airport will do so with springs in their steps this year. The first Paris Air Show since 2019, which starts on Monday, will probably bring a glut of orders for passenger jets. Order books at Boeing, the American planemaker, and Airbus, its European rival, are already stuffed as air travel bounces back with a vengeance. And the war in Ukraine is boosting military spending by governments around the world. Defence companies will be keen to show off their newest kit.

There will be plenty of talk about decarbonising air travel, with companies that plan to launch battery-powered flying taxis in the coming years converging on the show too. None has yet carried passengers, but by the end of a long day in the heat, the promise of a quick flight from the suburbs of Paris to the city centre will seem worth waiting for.

When Bret Baier, Fox News’s senior political correspondent, last interviewed Donald Trump, it was aboard Air Force One in 2018. The then-president was in negotiations with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. His concessions in a tentative agreement on Korea’s denuclearisation alarmed many Republican lawmakers.

On Monday Mr Baier will sit down again with Mr Trump, who is now tussling with America’s Justice Department. But more Republicans have his back this time. Last week Mr Trump was charged with 37 felonies related to an alleged mishandling of classified documents. At least 100 Republicans in Congress have questioned the validity of his stunning indictment; about 76 fully reject it.

Expect Mr Baier to let Mr Trump air his grievances. But even Fox’s support has its limits. A recent town hall with Mr Trump was pre-recorded, so that any references he made to a “stolen” election in 2020—a claim similar to one that cost Fox $787.5m in a recent legal settlement—could be edited out.

“Everyone at some point in their lives should have a long great love affair with a magnificent lunatic,” declares Finn, a melancholic schoolteacher, in the beautifully idiosyncratic “I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home” by Lorrie Moore, an American novelist. The deceptively slender volume, published on Tuesday, ponders heavy themes, such as love, death, suicide and the meaning of life. But its true power lies in the almost antic ingenuity of each sentence.

Does Finn actually spot his beloved ex-girlfriend wandering around the cemetery where she has just been buried, smelling vaguely of rot? Do they really embark on a road trip, discussing their love and trials? Perhaps Finn is simply undone by his grief. Yet Ms Moore seems to be probing how we are all haunted by past loves, unhealed wounds and slipping memories. As Finn observes: “no longer caring about a thing was key to both living and dying. So was caring about a thing.”

Since Ueda Kazuo took over as the Bank of Japan’s governor in April, he has bolstered his reputation as a man of restraint. Speculation has been rife that the bank might exit from its ultra-loose monetary policy. But Mr Ueda insists it will “patiently” maintain its approach, which was designed to haul the country out of decades of deflation. After the bank concluded a two-day meeting on Friday, Mr Ueda decided to continue existing policies including yield-curve control, which caps ten-year government-bond yields.

Now inflation is back. Prices excluding fresh food and fuel rose by 4.1% in April from a year earlier—the biggest increase in four decades. Some analysts suggest this heralds the beginning of a virtuous cycle, which will lift wages and consumer spending. But the evidence so far is thin. Wages have risen by just 1% over the past year, meaning workers are enduring pay cuts in real terms.

Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket, published a quarterly trading statement on Friday. Total sales in Britain stood at £10.8bn, a 9.3% increase from last year. The update for investors comes amid pressure from politicians to tackle Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. According to the Office for National Statistics, hard-pressed consumers now fret more about rising food prices than they do about the cost of energy. The ONS estimates that food is dearer by around a fifth than it was a year ago, the second-highest jump in more than 45 years.

The Conservative government has suggested an agreement with leading supermarkets to cap prices of some basic items such as milk and bread. The British Retail Consortium, a trade body, says the plan will not work. It blames the higher costs that retailers are incurring for energy and labour. For its part, Tesco says it expects its operating profit to remain broadly flat this year.

America’s Supreme Court justices have just two weeks to release 20 decisions in cases heard between October and April. The most important of the three rulings handed down on Thursday was in Haaland v Brackeen, a 7-2 decision rebuffing an attempt to hobble the Indian Child Welfare Act. This law, enacted in 1978, protects Native American children from being removed from their families and tribes. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas agreed with plaintiffs’ claims that the law amounted to congressional overreach.

More decisions are expected to arrive on Friday. Does the First Amendment give a Christian web designer the right to refuse to make websites for gay weddings, a state anti-discrimination law notwithstanding? Can President Joe Biden proceed with his plan to relieve millions of borrowers of a portion of their student debt? How generously must employers accommodate workers’ religious beliefs? Is race-based affirmative action in university admissions compatible with the constitution? Stay tuned.

The Ashes, a biennial cricket series between Australia and England, is steeped in tradition. But this year’s edition, which started on Friday at the Edgbaston ground in Birmingham, will feature something radical. Over the past year, England has revolutionised Test cricket by injecting pace into a very slow game. English batsmen have been scoring at five runs an over, when the norm is closer to three. This hyper-aggressive style, nicknamed “Bazball” after Brendon McCullum, the team’s coach, has borne fruit: England have won 11 of their past 13 Tests, a form of cricket match that lasts five days, many in record-breaking manner.

The matches against Australia will be Bazball’s toughest test yet: the Aussies won Test cricket’s world championship last week. Still, England could yet lay claim to being the world’s best team. According to our own Test-cricket rankings, if they were to win three tests in the five-match series then they would leapfrog Australia and India into top spot.

The robin’s-egg blue skies and sandy stretches of desert in “Asteroid City” evoke a Kodachrome postcard. This charming film is the latest marvel of design from Wes Anderson, an American director who delights fans with his pastel palettes and deadpan characters. In this movie Mr Anderson lovingly and comically sketches a mourning family’s adventures during a science convention for child prodigies, set in a flyspeck town in the mid-century American West.

Mr Anderson’s meticulously crafted world has a crucial quality that a lot of studio output lacks: personality. That extends to the cast. Scarlett Johansson plays a droll film starlet whose daughter is among the prodigies; Jeffrey Wright is a military general who emcees the convention. “Asteroid City” feels nostalgic for a bygone Hollywood era of top-notch production values and casts. Mr Anderson’s distinctive aesthetic has inspired parodies, but the gently bittersweet heart of this film suggests that there is more than meets the eye in his elaborate concoctions.

On Wednesday the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, the biggest event of Russia’s economic calendar, kicks off. The talking-shop has previously attracted everyone from the secretary-general of the United Nations to the president of France. The cost of attendance ($25,000) is supposed to reflect the opportunities for schmoozing.

But this year will be different. True, Russia’s finance minister and central-bank governor are expected to attend. President Vladimir Putin will probably stop by. Yet few other dignitaries will participate in the discussions, which will cover weighty subjects such as “technological sovereignty in agribusiness”. Western journalists are not allowed to take part; Western businesspeople do not want to. Indeed it is not clear that any world leaders are planning to make the trip. The event is billed as Russia’s answer to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, a Swiss mountain resort. Instead, it merely highlights the country’s isolation on the global stage.

After 11 failed attempts, Lebanon’s parliament will try again on Wednesday to elect a president to replace Michel Aoun, whose term ended in October. Previous votes were a farce: many MPs cast blank ballots or failed to show up. Do not expect progress this time. The apparent front-runner is Jihad Azour, a former finance minister, who announced his candidacy on Monday after denying for months that he wanted the job. Christian parties and independent MPs have endorsed Mr Azour, whose economic expertise would be useful. The country has been mired in a financial crisis since 2019.

Still, he faces fierce opposition from Hizbullah, the Shia militia-cum-political-party. It wants Suleiman Frangieh, a veteran politician close to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, to fill the job. Many Lebanese think the parties supporting Mr Azour are in fact doing so to try and convince Hizbullah to dump Mr Frangieh and back a lesser-known consensus candidate. With little prospect of that, the deadlock looks set to continue.

Before taking office in late 2021, Germany’s three-party coalition sought to reassure voters it would govern wisely. Its pledges included drafting a National Security Strategy, a first for the country. Delayed by Russia’s war on Ukraine and internal wrangling, the document will finally be released on Wednesday.

The strategy will probably commit to strengthening Germany’s trans-Atlantic and European alliances. That means reaffirming a commitment to raise defence spending to 2% of GDP—a longstanding promise to NATO that Germany has failed to meet. But talk is cheap: analysts will pore over the wording for firm details. The text may also skirt tough topics, such as how to steer between German economic interests in China and the growing rivalry between the Asian military power and America. Still, it is the ambition underpinning the statement that counts: in a more dangerous world, Germany is recognising the need to step up.

A new team of monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN nuclear watchdog, could arrive at the Zaporizhia nuclear-power facility in occupied southern Ukraine as early as Wednesday. Fears of a possible nuclear accident are heightened. The plant drew water to cool its reactors from the Kakhovka reservoir, which was destroyed with the bursting of a huge dam in the neighbouring Kherson region.

After the dam explosion, IAEA staff said that there was “no immediate risk” to the facility as it stores enough water for a few months nearby. The new monitoring team will assess these water reserves and the plant’s cooling systems. Yet the dam’s destruction, probably by the Russians, has also introduced an ominous possibility that will hang over the team’s work. It’s now highly unlikely that the plant’s reactors, which have been in “shutdown” modes for months, could be fired up to generate electricity in the foreseeable future. If deemed useless by the Russian occupiers, it is possible that they might sabotage the plant, perhaps before a retreat.

A quarter of a century after their one-night-only striptease, the six former steelworkers who were the heroes of “The Full Monty” are back. An eight-part drama series of the same name is out on Wednesday on Hulu in America and Disney+ elsewhere. Released in 1997, the original film was a surprise international hit. Its many fans fondly recall the scene in which the men dance to “Hot Stuff” in a dole queue in Sheffield, a city in Yorkshire.

In the television reprise, things are the same but different. The group’s ringleader is once again Gaz (played by Robert Carlyle), a chancer with a heart of gold; his best friend Dave (Mark Addy) is still married to Jean (Lesley Sharp). But do not expect the greybeards to get their kit off again. There are plenty of fully clothed high jinks, but the plot focuses on the friends’ enduring struggles as they navigate the impact of government austerity and the caprices of the welfare state.

China’s state-owned enterprises have weathered the country’s recent economic setbacks better than most firms. Their pay and profits have been relatively resilient. That may help explain the frenzied online reaction this week when the married boss of a state-owned engineering firm in Beijing was photographed breezily out shopping with a young female employee holding his hand. Overall, consumer confidence is still weak and retail sales disappointing, though both have recovered a little this year.

How should policymakers respond to China’s faltering recovery? Elsewhere, central bankers’ hands are tied by high inflation, which obliges them to keep monetary policy tight. But in China inflation is dangerously low. Data out on Friday showed that consumer prices rose by only 0.2% year on year in May. This week China’s big banks said they would cut interest rates on many deposits. That could pave the way for the central bank to lower the interest rate on loans. Meanwhile the interest in scandals seems strong.

Carers for the 6.7m Americans currently living with Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia, should pay close attention to a meeting on Friday of a committee of the Food and Drug Administration. It may grant “traditional” approval to Leqembi (a brand name for lecanemab), a drug produced by Eisai of Japan and America’s Biogen. Leqembi won “accelerated” approval in January.

The change is more than semantic: it would mean that the FDA accepts that Leqembi offers proven clinical benefits—ie, that it actually slows cognitive decline. The earlier approval—like one granted two years ago to Aduhelm (aducanamab), another drug—was based on its effectiveness in attacking a build-up of protein plaques in the brain, a possible cause of Alzheimer’s. Traditional approval would also unlock coverage from both Medicare (federal health-insurance for the elderly) and private insurers. With Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical giant, hoping to win approval for a similar medicine this year, glimmers of hope are at last flickering for those with early-stage Alzheimer’s.

Following its latest monetary-policy meeting on Friday, Russia’s central bank is expected to leave interest rates at 7.5%—their pre-war level. Not long ago such loose monetary policy would have been unthinkable. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 the rouble tanked, causing inflation to spike. The central bank quickly raised rates to an astonishing 20%.

Even with this extraordinary policy in place, many were surprised by how quickly inflation subsequently came down. The rouble stabilised. Inflation expectations, which had mounted, fell once more. That has allowed the central bank to cut rates aggressively, supporting the economy. Energy prices, pushed up by the war, have fallen in recent months but, according to “real-time” data on everything from business confidence to consumer surveys, Russia’s GDP is growing about as quickly as before the pandemic—not fast, but considerably faster than expected. The Russian economy is poorer than it was before February 2022. But it is, against the odds, stable.

This weekend in Greensboro, North Carolina, Republicans hoping to lead the state will rub shoulders with those hoping to govern the country. The North Carolina Republican Party is hosting its annual convention of GOP candidates for local, state and national office. The speaking slots are much coveted—and prime podium time is carefully allocated.

Ron DeSantis, the Republican presidential candidate who is polling in second place, will address the Old North State dinner on Friday. Mike Pence, a former vice-president who jumped into the race on Wednesday, gets Saturday’s First in Freedom lunch. But the best speaking spot, at the Grand Old Party dinner on Saturday, will go to Donald Trump, who won North Carolina in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. (Expect him to have some choice words on his latest indictment.)

Republicans have so far been cautious about criticising the former president but—now that the field is growing more crowded—an elbow or two has emerged. As Mr Trump said recently, “this is a war of a certain kind.”

After the golfing merger between the PGA Tour in America, the DP World Tour in Europe and the Saudi-funded LIV Golf on Wednesday, where will Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern governments invest next? The merger certainly represents an intensification of Saudi’s sports-investment programme. Although buying Premier League football clubs (such as Newcastle United) is expensive, taking control of an entire sport is a much more ambitious enterprise. That is what the merger amounts to: the PGA Tour has bent to the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s wishes.

Middle Eastern countries will continue to persuade fading footballers based in Europe—such as Cristiano Ronaldo, though not Lionel Messi—to play in their domestic leagues. Saudi Arabia remains determined to bid for the 2030 football World Cup. It also has a long-standing interest in launching a short-format cricket franchise that would be richer even than the Indian Premier League. The lesson from golf is that, no matter how vociferous the protest and disavowals, money eventually makes things happen.