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Thirteen countries; 20-odd warships; 35 aircraft; and some 4,000 personnel. Exercise Formidable Shield, the air-defence exercise NATO holds every two years, begins on Monday in and around the High North, close to the Arctic Circle. Though a routine exercise, it comes just when the need for strong air defences has become grimly apparent from Russia’s heartless strikes against Ukrainian cities.

The wargame has a threefold purpose. First, to improve allies’ ability to operate seamlessly in fending off enemy aircraft, as well as cruise and ballistic missiles. Second, it offers reassurance to nervous allies, especially those neighbouring Russia. And third, it is a warning to Russia against trying to intimidate NATO members.

The live-fire exercise, running until May 26th, will use missile ranges in Scotland and Norway, and will be commanded from a Spanish frigate. It will feature F-35 jets, in service with several of the allies. Commanders say the exercise will “integrate joint capability from the ocean bottom to low earth orbit.” Expect Russia to be watching closely, from the sea floor to space.

On May 4th the European Central Bank slowed down the pace of its monetary tightening with an interest-rate increase of just 0.25 percentage points, to 3.75%, despite stubbornly high inflation. The ECB argued that higher rates were already having the desired effect of cooling down the economy. On cue, data released the following day showed German industrial orders dropping by a whopping 10.7% in March, compared with a month earlier. The country’s industrial production figures for March will follow on Monday.

Having dodged a recession last year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis, Europe is still hoping for a soft landing from high inflation. Yet the economy is increasingly divided: services are still doing well, according to the latest survey data, but manufacturing is being squeezed by lower demand. A sizeable drop in Germany’s production numbers may lead central bankers to conclude that their policies are working rather too well.

This is a difficult time for American journalists. Public trust in the media is slumping: more than 80% of Americans see fake news as a big problem, says Pew, a pollster. Some shun the news as too depressing. In a recent survey published by the Associated Press, almost 75% of respondents blamed the media for political polarisation. Nearly half had no faith in media impartiality.

Nonetheless, journalism done right brings public benefits. Expect the winners of this year’s Pulitzer prizes, announced on Monday, to provide examples of this. Consider those recognised in 2022. The Pulitzer foundation honoured outlets for coverage of the Capitol riot, police violence, the legacy of 9/11 and lead in drinking water.

Prizes, however, don’t deliver financial security. Buzzfeed News, which picked up a Pulitzer in 2021, closed in April. And local papers continue to vaporise: last year an average of two papers folded every week.

“Treasure there was in plenty—tents full of gold and silver furniture,” wrote Herodotus, a Greek historian, in the fifth century BC. He was describing the quarters of a Persian commander, captured during one of the many Greek-Persian wars. Records from this turbulent period, mostly written by the Greeks, claim that their civilisation rejected such displays of wealth. But an exhibition at the British Museum in London suggests the story was more nuanced.

Through ancient artefacts unearthed in Afghanistan, Bulgaria and beyond, “Luxury and power: Persia to Greece” shows that the warring societies were more entwined than Herodotus and his contemporaries cared to admit. On display are gilded amphora and intricate drinking vessels deployed by the Persian court to show their wealth and power. In turn, the Greeks reinterpreted decorative items from Persia. Jewellery found in Greece, for instance, bears the same animal motifs that caper across Persian treasures. An appreciation for opulence transcended the rivalry.

Glioblastoma is a fiendish disease in which fast-growing tumours spread mesh-like through the brain. Even after treatments including surgery, chemotherapy and immunotherapy, glioblastoma nearly always returns. Only 10% of those afflicted survive beyond five years. Now, as reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have taken an encouraging step forward with a new treatment on mice.

The treatment is a hydrogel combining paclitaxel, a chemotherapy drug, with an antibody called aCD47. After removing glioblastoma tumours from the brains of mice, researchers spread the gel around the cavity. There it filled the tiny grooves left behind and killed any lingering cells. Removing the tumour and using the gel cured 100% of the mice. Even more hopefully none showed regrowth of glioblastoma when reinjected with tumour cells after the treatment. What works in mice does not necessarily mean a miracle cure for humans, but the progress bodes well for tackling one of the most insidious of cancers.

On Saturday Charles III will be formally crowned king in Westminster Abbey in London. The ceremony will be rich in history, tradition, kings, queens and people with improbable titles. Among those present in the abbey will be the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant; the Garter King of Arms; the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this realm; and His Most Godly Beatitude Theophilos III, Patriarch of Jerusalem and All Palestine.

The ceremony itself is even more baroque. Charles will be anointed with oil using a special Coronation Spoon and sit on a chair inside which lies an ancient “Stone of Destiny”. Whether he will be enjoying his own destiny is unclear: he once said the realisation that he would be king dawned upon him “with the most ghastly inexorable sense”.

In one nod to modernity, however, members of the House of Lords may wear their “usual” parliamentary robes—which is to say, red robes lined with silk and trimmed with ermine—rather than fancier coronation ones. It’s almost street style.

This year, according to the latest stocktake from Forbes, there are 2,640 dollar billionaires. Their collective wealth amounts to $12trn, or 12% of global GDP.

The Economist’s crony-capitalism index classifies the sources of their wealth into rent-seeking and non-rent-seeking sectors. Rent-seeking is common in sectors close to the state, including banking, construction, and natural resources. Rent-seekers sometimes gain favourable access to land, form cartels or lobby the government for advantageous regulations. Most billionaires do not operate in rent-seeking sectors. But we find that crony-sector wealth has increased from 1% of global GDP in 1998 to 3% today. Some two-thirds of that rise comes from four countries: America, China, India and Russia.

Yet plutocrats in all four countries—whether rent-seekers or not—have taken a hit recently. America’s tech founders have been pummelled by falling valuations. China has continued to shake down much of its capitalist class. And Russia’s plutocrats, many of them close to the Kremlin, have been hit by sanctions that have frozen their bank accounts, homes and yachts overseas.

The “Madonna of the Baldacchino”, painted by Raphael in the early 16th century, has had an adventurous life. The painting travelled around Italy, and even to Paris, before settling in the Pitti Palace in Florence, part of the Uffizi galleries. Itinerant again, it will be unveiled on Saturday in the cathedral of the Tuscan town of Pescia, where it was housed for around 150 years until the late 17th century.

The temporary relocation of Raphael’s early masterpiece is part of a project to show works from the Uffizi's vast collection in places where they are particularly relevant. The galleries’ director, Eike Schmidt, calls his programme the “Uffizi Diffusi”, or “Scattered Uffizi”. It has held more than 30 exhibitions since 2021. Mr Schmidt is planning a second phase, in which works that would otherwise languish in the Uffizi’s storerooms will be exhibited permanently at newly restored sites around Tuscany. Visitors to Pescia can see the “Madonna of the Baldacchino” from next week to the end of July.

Over the past fortnight India’s best wrestlers, including Olympic medallists, have been training on the streets of Delhi. But this is no outdoor camp; it is an act of protest. The grapplers are hoping to pin down Brijbhushan Sharan Singh, the president of India’s national wrestling federation, whom they accuse of sexual harassment. Mr Singh, a member of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, denies all allegations, and accuses the protesters of playing a “political game”.

In January, when the claims first surfaced, the government promised an inquiry. But the wrestlers are demanding more—including Mr Singh’s arrest. (Delhi’s police have launched an investigation.) Support for the wrestlers’ cause is swelling, especially among fellow athletes. Indeed, sexual wrongdoing is a problem in other sports. And efforts to protect athletes are poorly enforced: 16 of India’s 30 sporting bodies do not have internal committees to deal with harassment issues, as the law requires.

“Shut it all down.” Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, pulled no punches in a recent op-ed in Time magazine. For years Mr Yudkowsky, now 43, has warned, in relative obscurity, of the threat that a runaway artificial intelligence (AI) could pose to humankind. But since late last year, when services such as ChatGPT have become capable of giving human-like answers to all kinds of questions, many more have started to listen.

An autodidact, Mr Yudkowsky has a loyal following in the AI-research community. In his 20s, influenced by science-fiction writers such as Vernor Vinge, he yearned for a “singularity”—a superintelligence, to solve all human problems—and he put his many talents to creating it. But he realised that he was wrong: such a superintelligence was likely to develop a mind of its own, not aligned with the interests of humans. His goal became to further the development of a “friendly AI”, one that would not harm mankind.

Mr Yudkowsky does not mind being somewhat wrong. He started the blog “LessWrong”, which was once the main organ of the “rationalist” intellectual movement. Contemporary rationalists seek “to move our beliefs closer to reality”, as another leading light of the movement put it, in particular by making mistakes and using probability and logic to deal with uncertainty.

In the early 2000s Mr Yudkowsky was a prolific blogger, writing not just about the risk of AI, but about everything sci-fi-influenced geeks might be interested in, from cognitive biases and quantum physics to transhumanism and zombies. Today, the “Sequences”, as Mr Yudkowsky’s collected posts have come to be called, are required reading for rationalists. He has also published his ideas in a popular form, a fan-fiction novel called “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”.

Mr Yudkowsky’s critics say his approach is less rational than it is religious. Meta’s chief AI scientist recently called on him to stop his alarmism. Mr Yudkowsky retorted that it was “silly to claim that you’re not risking anyone’s life”.

The spread of authoritarianism and attacks on democracy have eroded press freedom around the world. A 2022 analysis of 180 countries by Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit group, classified the situation as “very bad” in 28 countries—a record number. Its latest analysis will be published on Wednesday, designated as World Press Freedom Day by the United Nations.

It will probably show that things have become even worse. Attacks on journalists, both physical and online, are all too common. The Russian authorities’ arrest of Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, in March on spurious charges showed the extreme lengths governments will go to silence reporters.

The media also increasingly faces another, more insidious, threat: fake news. Artificial intelligence is making it easier to tamper with content and pump out disinformation. When the public no longer knows what to believe, the job of a newsroom is tougher than ever.

The market’s mantra is “one and done”. America’s Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates on Wednesday, in what would be the tenth increase in a row. Investors expect the Fed to lift short-term borrowing rates to a floor of 5%, up from 0% in March 2022—the country’s sharpest monetary tightening in four decades. But as suggested by the motto—which should perhaps be the less pithy “one more and done”—many think this should be the final turn of the screw.

The Fed’s rapid tightening has engendered financial risks, as evidenced by bank failures in recent weeks. And America’s economy is slowing: employment data released on Friday is likely to show another drop in job creation last month (though no recession, yet). But inflation—the trigger for the tightening—remains uncomfortably high. So even if the next rate increase is the final one in this cycle, the Fed may signal that it will keep rates high until inflation is vanquished.

Talks on extending a deal designed to allow Ukrainian ports to export grain are due to resume on Wednesday. The initial agreement, brokered by the UN and Turkey last July, granted Russia sanctions relief on agricultural produce in exchange for unblocking Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. But it expires on May 18th, and the Kremlin has indicated that it is unwilling to agree to an extension.

Ukrainian officials say that Russia is undermining the agreement anyway. One minister has accused it of making exports unviable by taking longer to inspect Ukrainian vessels for no apparent reason. Even with the deal in place grain exports currently stand at around 30% of the pre-war norm. (In peacetime, Ukraine’s ports could export up to 7m tonnes a month.)

To get around Russia’s troublemaking Ukraine has been developing export terminals along the Danube. These ports’ proximity to the territorial waters of Romania, a NATO member, helps protect them from Russian guns. Yet few observers think exports from the Danube can fully compensate for the Black Sea. A lot rides on renewing the deal.

In recent days a jury in Manhattan has heard E. Jean Carroll, a writer, accuse Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s. Mr Trump, who denies the allegations, skipped the civil trial citing logistical “burdens”. But he seems unburdened enough to travel to, as he says, “inspect my great properties”. On Monday he opened a new golf course in Scotland; on Wednesday he will tour Trump Doonbeg, another resort in Ireland.

During Mr Trump’s presidency, his real-estate company paused foreign dealmaking. Since he left office it has inked just one deal, with a Saudi firm for a resort in Oman. The Trump Organisation has been preoccupied with lawsuits instead. In January it was fined for tax fraud. And New York’s attorney-general alleges that Mr Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth to secure bigger loans (a charge that he denies). She wants to bar him from real-estate deals in the state for five years. That would at least free up some time for more legal proceedings.

When the “Time Warp” comes on, everyone knows the moves: “it’s just a jump to the left! And then a step to the right!” “The Rocky Horror Show”, Richard O’Brien’s campy send-up of horror films, was first performed in 1973 in a theatre with just 63 seats. It has now been seen by 30m theatregoers and is one of the longest-running musicals in the world. Fifty years after its debut, on Wednesday the raucous comedy returns to London’s West End.

A film from 1975—“The Rocky Horror Picture Show”—further cemented the musical as a subversive cult classic. Audience participation is now a tradition at many showings: spectators shout out lines and dress up like the cast. And Dr Frank-N-Furter’s gender-bending universe was ahead of its time: though some numbers such as “Sweet transvestite” may seem outdated today, it presaged more modern theatrical depictions of drag such as “Kinky Boots” and “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie”. Audiences will probably be doing the Time Warp for many years to come.

Before 2023 began many forecasters thought the American economy would enter a recession at the start of the year. It has fared quite a bit better than that. GDP figures for the first quarter, released on Thursday, are now expected to show growth at an annual pace of about 2%. That is largely because of a tight labour market, which has pushed up wages and helped to sustain consumption.

Continued predictions of recession may sound too gloomy given America’s better-than-expected performance to date. But it will struggle to avoid a sharp slowdown. Turmoil in the banking sector threatens the wider economy. The labour market is starting to weaken, with more people collecting unemployment insurance. Meanwhile, inflation is still high, forcing the Federal Reserve to maintain a tight monetary policy. The first quarter may be the high-water mark for American growth this year.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, comes to London on Thursday to meet her British counterpart, Rishi Sunak. Co-operation between their countries has been blossoming. Last December, Britain and Italy joined Japan in a project to develop next-generation fighter aircraft. In February, the two countries signed Britain’s first trade agreement with an EU state since Brexit.

Ms Meloni, a populist, and Mr Sunak, who styles himself as more of a technocrat, in fact, have plenty in common. Each is tackling seaborne irregular migration (even if the roughly 5,000 migrants crossing the Channel to Britain this year are dwarfed by the almost 37,000 who have landed in Italy). Both leaders came into office last October. Both are conservatives, though Ms Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, has a more radical tradition with roots in neo-fascism—leading to a colder shoulder from French and German counterparts compared with the reception of her moderate predecessor, Mario Draghi. She could do with a friend in London.

On Monday First Republic Bank revealed that it had lost more than $100bn of its deposits in the first quarter. After the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March, well-heeled customers, who held balances too large to be insured by regulators, had fled the mid-sized American bank. With depositors gone its alternatives are recapitalisation by investors or the government. But investors are fleeing too, with the bank’s share price plunging by 50% on Tuesday. The firm is reported to be in talks with regulators, who have repeatedly promised deposits in the banking system are safe.

How many more banks are at risk? One study found that if half of uninsured depositors—the type that felled SVB and may soon fell First Republic—pulled their money out, some 190 American banks, with combined assets of $300bn, would be left with negative equity capital. If this figure included First Republic it suggests any other lurking zombies would be much smaller. Still, another scare hardly seems out of the question.

In the name of protecting children, more than a dozen American states restrict access to gender medicine for minors. But few have sought to ban such treatments for adults. Grown-ups should, the argument goes, be free to do with their bodies what they wish. Yet if Missouri has its way, treatment will be severely restricted for adults too. An emergency law, due to take effect on Thursday, would have banned doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery to new patients before high bars are met. These include evidence of three consecutive years of “medically documented” gender dysphoria, hours of therapy, resolution of any mental-health conditions, and screening for autism and “social-media addiction”. On Wednesday, however, a judge put the new regime on pause while a legal challenge to it plays out.

The state’s Republican attorney-general, Andrew Bailey, says that such measures will help those struggling with their gender identity “make good decisions”. But the litigation will be a test case for other states. Conservative politicians and advocates of trans rights elsewhere will be watching closely.

On Thursday James Corden will sit under Studio 56’s neon purple lights for the last time. After eight years of hosting “The Late Late Show” in Los Angeles, the British comedian is returning to London to spend more time with his family.

He won’t be short of things to do. Mr Corden has continued to act in films and television shows during his tenure; he has said he hopes to return to theatre, too. Other talk-show hosts, such as David Letterman and Jon Stewart, landed deals with streaming services after stepping away from their duties.

But CBS, the network which airs the programme, will feel Mr Corden’s absence. Clips of his show are watched online by hundreds of millions of people. (Its YouTube channel has 28.3m subscribers; by comparison, the rival “The Daily Show” has 10.4m.) According to Deadline, an entertainment website, the lights will go off on the “Late Late Show” franchise when Mr Corden, its fourth host, departs. Talk about being irreplaceable.