HMBR and Co.

Senior Israeli ministers are usually on friendly turf when visiting Washington. But not Bezalel Smotrich, the new finance minister. Mr Smotrich will be in America’s capital on Sunday for the annual conference of Israel Bonds, a fundraising operation that sells government bonds on behalf of the Israeli state. No one from the Biden administration will attend the conference or meet the minister, who also leads the far-right Religious Zionism party. Indeed, America has condemned his call for Israel’s government to “wipe out” an entire Palestinian town that was rampaged by Israeli settlers on February 26th.

In a calculated insult, the State Department waited until the last minute to authorise Mr Smotrich’s diplomatic visa. And once in America, he will probably face protests from Jewish-American groups and Israeli expatriates furious at his extreme positions, as well as the Israeli government’s plans to weaken the country’s Supreme Court. Perhaps Israel could have sent a better salesman for its bonds.

Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, will announce its annual results on Sunday. Expect no surprises. Analysts forecast a net income of $35bn for the fourth quarter of 2022. That would be lower than the past two quarters, but only because they were so extraordinary: Aramco’s $48.4bn profit in the second quarter was its highest ever. If estimates are correct, the company’s full-year net income will be around $165bn, up 50% from 2021.

2023 should be another good year, with Brent crude hovering around $80 a barrel. OPEC, a cartel of oil-producing countries, thinks demand will rise by around 2m barrels a day, to 102m. Worried about sluggish growth in rich countries, Saudi Arabia will probably be reluctant to boost supply. That is likely to annoy the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, which is keen to sell higher volumes, even at a lower price. But the Saudi government, Aramco’s largest shareholder, will not mind. It needs eye-popping oil takings to fund its ambitious economic programme.

At this year’s Oscars, which take place on Sunday, the frontrunner for the best-picture award is “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, a universe-jumping comedy adventure with ten other nominations. (Two of its stars, Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu, are competing for best supporting actress). Other big winners could include “The Banshees Of Inisherin”, Martin McDonagh’s black comedy set in rural Ireland, and “All Quiet on the Western Front”, a German adaptation of a classic novel about the first world war. Both movies have nine nominations.

Prizes aside, the big question is whether the 95th Academy Awards will be as disastrous as last year’s ceremony, when Will Smith, an actor, slapped Chris Rock, a comedian who was presenting a gong. At least this year’s master of ceremonies, Jimmy Kimmel, is a safe pair of hands, having hosted twice before. That said, during Mr Kimmel’s first outing in 2017, the best-picture award was accidentally given to the wrong film. A happy ending to film’s glitziest evening is never guaranteed.

Britain’s Kennel Club, a society for dog lovers, has a penchant for pseudo-scientific terms like “pure-breed”, “pedigree” or “bloodline”. In the pursuit of creating aesthetically pleasing puppies, its members often take a special interest in the genealogy of elite pooches. Crufts, an annual dog show, is the club’s chance to parade its members’ collection of breeds. On Sunday seven dogs battle it out in Birmingham, a city in central England, for the coveted best-in-show trophy.

Yet decades of in-breeding have taken their toll. Behind the cameras canine-health problems, such as epilepsy and heart disease, are common. Crufts is determined to change things. This year a team of DNA testers will offer health checks to 78 breeds for 80 different conditions. “We recognise the problems that can result from breeding closely related dogs,” says Bill Lambert, a Kennel Club spokesperson. After 150 years, a much-loved British institution is trying to wash its paws of the past.

Laura Poitras appreciates the risks that her subjects take. They are, in some cases, jeopardising their lives or careers. When she was making “Citizenfour”, a film about Edward Snowden, the American security contractor who went rogue, she backed up footage and entrusted it to a third-party, then destroyed the original files. Her portrayal of Mr Snowden—with its famous shot of the bespectacled leaker, sitting in a mirrored hotel room in Hong Kong—won Ms Poitras an Oscar for best documentary feature.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, for which she is up for a second Oscar on Sunday, has nothing to do with matters of national security. But she treats Nan Goldin, a photographer and the film’s subject, with the same care that she showed Mr Snowden. The documentary is about Ms Goldin’s campaign to strip the name of the Sackler family, the owners of the company that makes OxyContin, from the world’s largest museums, many of which house her work. It is a bracing look at Ms Goldin’s own history of addiction, domestic abuse and sex work. Ms Poitras told Ms Goldin that she could excise anything that felt too intimate. Ms Goldin, she said, wanted only to go “deeper”.

Ms Poitras, aged 59, grew up in Boston and previously worked as a chef. But she abandoned that for film school in San Francisco: cooking was about pleasing, rather than challenging, guests. Her training was largely in experimental filmmaking—her first teacher opened his course with what she described as “a 23-minute structuralist meditation on a hallway”.

Ms Poitras’s documentaries are more accessible: portraits of people at a crossroads, filled with old-fashioned human drama. Her subjects’ struggles, she told an interviewer, should make viewers interrogate how powerful people and institutions operate. Her goal is to “re-wire the audience” and get them “questioning”.

She favours presenting events as they unfold, rather than lining up talking heads to opine on past achievements. The protagonist of her 2006 film, “My Country, My Country”, is a doctor running for office in Iraq. The outcome of the race—like the result of Mr Snowden’s gambit and the success of Ms Goldin’s campaign—is far from assured. And the risks are real.

A presidential announcement of the annual budget would, in most countries, be a big event. But when President Joe Biden lays out his tax-and-spending plans on Thursday, it will be merely the opening bid in messy fiscal negotiations. Mr Biden will propose raising a health-care tax on rich Americans and imposing a surtax on billionaires. These changes would shore up Medicare and reduce the federal debt.

Alas, these ideas stand little chance of making it into the final budget. Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, want to focus on cuts. The debate could play out over months. A moment of peril will come around July when Congress approaches a hard deadline to raise the debt ceiling, a legal cap on government borrowing. The battle lines are drawn: Democrats want to protect entitlement programmes; Republicans want to shrink the government. There are no obvious compromises to be found.

On Thursday Georgia’s parliament was meant to vote on a new law requiring civil-society organisations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence”. But such was the public backlash that the ruling party, Georgian Dream, quietly brought the vote forward to Tuesday, where a version of the bill passed its first reading. In response, thousands of protesters gathered in Tbilisi, the capital, where riot police used tear-gas and arrested dozens.

The bill’s critics say it comes straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook (a similar foreign-agents law exists in Russia). They also fear it will damage Georgia’s faltering attempts to join the EU, as the bloc has already sounded the alarm over the country’s democratic backsliding. Now, observers from America, Europe and the United Nations have condemned the latest example of that authoritarian turn. The vast majority of Georgia’s people want EU accession. Should the government continue to jeopardise it, the protests will grow.

As Britain launches its latest chest-thumping plan to stop migrants arriving in small boats, Italy’s conservative government is trying to present a softer image. The country’s cabinet will meet on Thursday in Cutro, a town in southern Italy near the site of a migrant-boat shipwreck late last month. Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, wants to show that her government cares about the victims, even though it is opposed to migrants arriving without authorisation. At least 72 people, including 17 children, died in the latest disaster. Ms Meloni’s interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, has been criticised for appearing to blame the victims for their misfortune, something he strenuously denies.

Prosecutors have begun an investigation into the causes of the tragedy. Questions surround the coastguard’s failure to reach the scene until about five hours after the EU’s border agency, Frontex, signalled the approach of the boat. Irregular landings on Italy’s shores more than doubled between January 1st and February 23rd this year, compared with the same period in 2022.

At a meeting in Brussels on Thursday, Finnish and Swedish diplomats will try to convince a delegation from Turkey that their countries have met its conditions for NATO membership. Turkey has blocked the pair’s accession, accusing both countries of harbouring Kurdish separatists. It wants the Nordic neighbours to crack down on local members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an armed Kurdish group that has long been a thorn in Turkey’s side.

No one expects a breakthrough. Turkey has warmed to the idea of Finnish membership, but says Sweden’s government needs to do more. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, seems to think he can win more concessions, including extraditions of Kurds whom his government considers terrorists. He probably also wants to appear strong at home, ahead of presidential elections in May. Sweden and Finland look set for at least a few more months in the waiting room.

In 2011 Bassem Youssef, an Egyptian heart surgeon, began filming political satire in his laundry room. Mr Youssef was funny—perhaps dangerously so. His show was soon picked up by a big television network. At its peak “The Programme”, as it was called, raked in 30m viewers each week. Then in 2013 Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi came to power in a coup. The stiff-lipped military dictator did not consider satire, particularly at his expense, a laughing matter. “The Programme” was blocked from the air; Mr Youssef received death threats. He eventually fled to America.

Mr Youssef has since reinvented himself as an English-speaking stand-up comedian. A tour of his new routine, “Adam”, lands in Britain on Thursday, with other stops in Europe and America. The set will focus on his experiences as an Arab immigrant to the West; expect witty criticism of dictators and sharp commentary on racism. Mr Youssef has an exceptional talent for finding humour in even the darkest of places.

On Thursday, Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, concludes a three-day trip to China. Despite mounting Western pressure on China over its stance on the war in Ukraine, President Xi Jinping hosted Mr Lukashenko, a staunch Russian ally, meeting him in Beijing on Wednesday.

Mr Lukashenko has ruled his ex-Soviet republic since 1994 and crushed anti-government protests there with Russian help in 2020. That triggered Western sanctions, leaving him heavily reliant on Kremlin support. Last year, he let Russia use Belarus as a staging ground to invade Ukraine.

China portrays Mr Lukashenko’s visit as a regular diplomatic exchange, describing Belarus as an “all-weather” strategic partner. In his meeting with the Chinese president, Mr Lukashenko commended China’s recent peace plan for Ukraine, which did not include any demands for a Russian withdrawal from occupied Ukrainian territory. American officials say the visit is another sign of Chinese support for the Russian invasion. Some also believe it could lay the ground for Mr Xi to visit Moscow soon.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, met her Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, in Delhi on Thursday at the start of a tour intended to mend fences—and sell arms.

Until recently ties between the two countries were strained, notably by the trial of two Italian marines for the shooting of two fishermen mistaken for pirates off the Indian coast in 2012. But Ms Meloni’s visit aligns with Western efforts to lure India away from its dependence on Russian weaponry. Mr Modi’s government recently announced a hefty increase in defence spending, so the potential gains for Italian firms such as Leonardo and Fincantieri are alluring.

Ms Meloni will then continue to Abu Dhabi. Relations there are even more delicate, bedevilled by an ill-fated investment by Etihad, Abu Dhabi’s flag-carrier, in its now-defunct Italian counterpart, Alitalia. Another bone of contention has been Italy’s ban in 2021 on arms sales to the United Arab Emirates because of its role in the war in Yemen.

It has been a bumpy few years for Macy’s, America’s oldest surviving department-store group. After a strong 2021, in which sales rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, growth at the retailer—whose main chain is the mid-market department store of the same name—stalled last year as inflation-squeezed consumers cut back on spending.

Macy’s reported its fourth-quarter results on Thursday, covering the all-important holiday shopping season. Despite growth at Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury, two high-end chains that the group also operates, poor performance at Macy’s itself meant total sales came in at just $8.3bn, down from $8.7bn the prior year. Consumers are switching to cheaper alternatives as cost pressures bite.

More worryingly, the group issued guidance that sales will likely continue falling this year, by up to 3%. Steep discounts during the 2022 holiday season may merely have pulled forward spending. Mid-market retailers that cater to customers who are neither budget-conscious nor budget-free have a tough year ahead.

It’s been a busy week for those concerned about the world’s oceans. The Economist’s annual summit on the subject concluded on Wednesday in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. Across the Atlantic in Panama, the “Our Ocean” conference—created by America’s state department—begins on Thursday. Both assess how industry and the public sector can protect the economies and ecosystems that oceans foster.

Meanwhile, government representatives gathered in New York are once again at loggerheads over a new treaty to govern the high seas. These areas lie outside territorial waters and cover 64% of the oceans, yet there is no accord on how to govern them. Talks due to finish last year failed to come to an agreement over who will pay to implement and enforce the treaty, and who should own the plants and animals at sea, often used for medicine and bio-engineering. The outcome this time around will be a key part of making good on the global pledge agreed at COP15 in Montreal to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030.

Popular music has always been driven by technology. Not just the invention of electric guitars or arena-grade amplification, but also by the technology we employ to listen to recordings. Jonathan Scott, a music journalist, lays out the history of recording music in his book “Into the Groove”, tracing the story of sound reproduction back to Thomas Edison in the 19th century.

The problem, as Mr Scott concedes, is that few other than scientists really understand, or care, how sound is simulated. Nevertheless, every breakthrough is meticulously described and the reader may get lost in pages and pages of arcane detail about new styluses, regional equipment distributors and short-sighted bosses. Along the way, though, there are delightful snippets: the phonograph was envisaged as a dictation aid for businesses, among other things, and it was not until the first primitive jukeboxes that the commercial possibilities of playing back music were revealed. The romance of recording lies in the byways, not in the laboratories.

Expect well-tempered bonhomie as Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, meets Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, in Delhi, the capital on Sunday, before heading south to the country’s start-up hub of Bengaluru. Mr Scholz may seek Mr Modi’s support for Western efforts to isolate Russia—probably to little avail. But discussions on economic co-operation may prove more fruitful. The chancellor will bring a group of German CEOs whose primary interest is expanding access to India’s growing market.

Germany, which is already India’s biggest European trading partner and an important investor in the country, is keen to reduce its economic dependence on China. The leaders are likely to discuss the potential for a free-trade agreement with the EU. There is also scope for co-operation on climate-change mitigation and investment in renewable energy. Thornier issues in India, including assaults on press freedom and human rights, have been missing from announcements leading up to the visit. Like other Western countries, Germany prefers to focus on India’s bright side.

After a year of war, Western leaders are patting themselves on the back for remaining united behind Ukraine. But the mood elsewhere is more ambivalent. Countries in Africa, Asia and South America are less preoccupied with a Ukrainian victory and more concerned with the impact of war on their economies.

A new report from the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, lays bare these divisions. Pluralities in China (42%), Turkey (48%) and India (54%) say that the war needs to stop as soon as possible, even if that means Ukraine ceding territory to Russia. A whopping 63% of Indian respondents see Russia as having become “much or somewhat stronger” because of the war. Thus, whereas the conflict might have sparked a revival of the alliance between America and Europe, the authors argue that “the consolidation of the West is taking place in an increasingly divided post-Western world”. This, they conclude “may end up being the biggest geopolitical turning point revealed by the war”.

Successful invaders usually have superior weapons, and few invaders have been more successful than Homo sapiens. Those who suffered as a result of sapiens’ expansion into Europe included Homo neanderthalensis. Both species had hand-hurled spears when they first met. But according to a paper in Science Advances by Laure Metz, of Aix-Marseille University, European sapiens also carried bows and arrows, a better hunting and fighting technology, from the get-go. Previously, these were known only from the more recent past.

Dr Metz has been studying finds from Grotte Mandrin in the Rhône valley, a site where strata containing remains of sapiens go back 54,000 years, the oldest yet discovered in Europe. Many of the numerous stone artefacts found at this site were probably weapon tips. She and her colleagues compared the sizes of these, and the pattern of impact-damage on them, with those of others, ancient and modern. They conclude that many are, indeed, arrowheads rather than spear-points. The poor Neanderthals didn’t stand a chance.

Test cricket’s greatest spectacle, the biannual Ashes series between England and Australia, is less than four months away. As a pointer to the outcome, both teams are currently negotiating tricky away assignments, with very different results. Australia are struggling against India. They lost the first two Tests; the third starts on Wednesday but a drawn series is the best that Australia can now hope for. Meanwhile England, and in particular Harry Brook, their new superstar batter, have been putting New Zealand, the World Test Champions, to the sword.

Brendon McCullum, himself a New Zealander, has transformed England’s team since he was appointed head coach in May 2022. It is not just their results—though they have won ten out of 11 tests under Mr McCullum—but the calculated aggression of their batting that might unnerve the Aussies. The tactic has been nicknamed “Bazball” in honour of the coach. Twenty years ago, Steve Waugh’s Australian team redefined Test cricket by aiming to score at four runs an over, a breathtakingly high rate. This England team is managing to go even faster.

Ever since Russia invaded its neighbour, tiny Moldova has worried it might be next. Like Ukraine it was once a Soviet republic and is partly Russian-speaking; Russian soldiers occupy Transnistria, a breakaway statelet along its eastern border with Ukraine. But if Vladimir Putin thinks Moldova will be intimidated, he has not reckoned with its president, Maia Sandu, a pocket-sized pro-European who has spent her career facing down powerful, corrupt opponents.

The 50-year-old Ms Sandu was born in a small village where her father managed a pig farm. After university she worked for the economics ministry, part of a generation of modernising young technocrats, then joined the World Bank. Upon entering politics she became education minister, and won public acclaim for cleaning up a corrupt school-exam system that had obliged pupils to pay bribes.

In 2015 protests brought down the government after $1bn was embezzled from the central bank in a Russian-linked money-laundering scheme. Ms Sandu was nominated for the prime ministership, but turned it down when parties refused to fire crooked officials. She set up the Party of Action and Solidarity and ran for president, but was beaten by Igor Dodon, the pro-Russian leader of the Socialist Party. Ms Sandu then waged quixotic electoral campaigns against the Socialists and parties controlled by Moldova’s oligarchs. While she and her volunteers operated out of a deteriorating 19th-century villa, oligarchs ran their parties out of office towers where TV monitors carried the broadcasts of the propaganda stations they owned.

Everything changed in 2019, when Mr Dodon cut a deal (with Russian and American approval) to make Ms Sandu prime minister. Political scheming soon brought down Ms Sandu’s government, but in 2020 she beat Mr Dodon in the presidential race. She has since appointed two pro-EU, anti-corruption prime ministers.

Mr Putin has tried to cow her by cutting gas deliveries and sowing disinformation. On Thursday Russia alleged that Ukraine was planning a false-flag provocation in Transnistria to justify invading it. Ms Sandu promptly rebutted that and reiterated her defiance of Russian pressure. There would be no “puppet government enslaved to the interests of the Kremlin” in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, she said. She seems to be getting what she wants: last June the EU granted Moldova candidate status.

Tech problems are especially embarrassing when everyone is watching. As the world awaited the release of the euro zone’s January inflation figures on February 1st, Eurostat, the EU’s statistics bureau, announced that Germany’s contribution was missing because of a technical problem that had forced the agency merely to estimate the country’s figure. On Thursday the euro area’s price data was updated and released.

Inflation came in slightly higher than the estimate, at 8.6% compared to 8.5%. Germany published its full January figures on Wednesday. They show consumer prices rising by 9.2% year-on-year, or 0.5% on the previous month (not seasonally adjusted). The energy data show why. As a one-off government rebate on utility bills ran out, energy prices increased by 8.3% between December and January. Energy costs have come down in wholesale markets, but it is not clear if or when that decline will be passed on to consumers. Europe’s inflation data over the coming months may be volatile, IT problems or not.

When the Federal Reserve publishes new balance-sheet figures on Thursday, they will probably show another step downwards. Since mid-2022 the Fed has shrunk its assets from $9trn to $8.4trn. This carefully managed decline is known as quantitative tightening (QT), the reverse of the quantitative easing (QE)—purchases of bonds on a massive scale—used by the Fed to support the economy during downturns.

The Fed wants QT to play out quietly. It plans to shrink its balance-sheet by about $2.5trn in total by mid-2024 in order to bring it closer to its pre-covid size. But the Fed’s monetary operations may soon get trickier. Many investors think that it will shift from raising interest rates to cutting them later this year as economic growth falters. That could create a conflict in which the Fed is cutting rates (a form of easing) at the same time as shrinking its assets (a form of tightening). Markets would go from QE to QT to Q-confusion.

China’s reopening after three years of zero-covid measures is great news for consumer-tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent. The attempt by the country’s president, Xi Jinping, to shut out the pandemic depressed consumption, and these companies suffered. The extent to which they braced the pain became clearer on Thursday when Alibaba reported its final quarterly earnings of 2022.

The results were better than expected. Revenue grew 2% year-on-year when many analysts had predicted a decline; its net income of 46.8bn yuan ($6.8bn) was also above expectations. The company’s figures were partly buoyed by ruthless cost-cutting measures as it shed nearly 20,000 jobs in 2022. Still, investors will hope the worst is nearly over. Some believe that opening up will result in a consumption boom, boosting sales on Alibaba’s platforms of discretionary goods such as clothing and cosmetics. Others hope Mr Xi’s crackdown on big tech is over.

Britain’s FTSE 100 share index has been on a tear of late, but few of its companies have done as well as BAE Systems. The share price of Europe’s biggest defence contractor has risen by more than 50% over the past year. And its financial results for 2022, released on Thursday, showed that revenues rose 8.9% year-on-year. As a manufacturer of everything from frigates and fighter jets to electronic-warfare systems, it has done very well out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A BAE product, the 155mm howitzer shell, is at the heart of the West’s struggle to keep Ukraine’s arsenal stocked. Having exhausted their Soviet-era ammunition, Ukraine’s army increasingly relies on NATO countries for such shells. Yet America and Europe combined currently make enough in a year only to maintain a three-month barrage. That is a worry as Ukraine faces the prospect of a new Russian offensive. BAE’s earnings will interest investors. But of more general concern is how fast it can ramp up production.

Growing up, Vivian Yoon hid a secret behind her baggy jeans and emo records. The Korean-American was raised in Los Angeles’s K-town, the centre of its Korean diaspora. But one thing she would never reveal: she loved K-pop.

For more than a decade now, K-pop has been globally popular and Ms Yoon (pictured) is ready to confess. A writer and actor, her new podcast, “K-pop Dreaming”, recounts the rise of K-pop and Korean-Americans’ contribution to it. The first two episodes, released on Thursday, suggest that both the music and the diaspora have been explored better elsewhere. But then the podcast’s real subject is Ms Yoon herself. Her attempts to figure out how her Korean heritage and K-Town upbringing have shaped her life are the podcast’s most compelling elements, and perhaps its most divisive. Listeners charmed by Ms Yoon’s openness will enjoy her frequent autobiographical recollections. For others, her confessional style may be a distraction from her musical and sociological themes.