HMBR and Co.

It has been nearly a year since the Adani Group was rattled by accusations of fraud made by Hindenburg, an American short-seller. The Indian conglomerate denied allegations that one of the Adani family had been manipulating a subsidiary’s share price. Still, the valuation of Adani companies collapsed from over $200bn to under $100bn.

Since then, however, the group has forged on. Earlier this month it received a refinancing package worth $3.5bn from ten international banks. This week one of its biggest businesses, Adani Green Energy, reported a 149% year-on-year surge in profit for the July-September quarter. Adani Enterprises, the group’s flagship company, will hope for similarly buoyant results when it reports on Thursday.

But the fallout from the Hindenburg affair is far from over. On Wednesday regulators announced tighter transparency rules for foreign investors to prevent the type of share-price shenanigans Adani was accused of. And later this month, India’s Supreme Court is finally expected to issue a verdict on the allegations.

Shell, a British oil giant, will report quarterly earnings on Thursday. The results will probably compare poorly with last year’s record profits. Its newish boss, Wael Sawan (pictured), is under pressure: along with BP, another British oil major, Shell faces demands to do more to reduce climate change. This led both firms to make big bets on renewable energy, which have not performed well. Mr Sawan admits that he had hoped that returns from renewables investments “would come sooner”.

Both firms are under pressure from Wall Street, too. BP and Shell have lagged in financial performance behind ExxonMobil and Chevron, big American rivals that have refused to invest in renewables and have instead acquired rival oil companies. Markets have punished the European firms with lower earnings multiples. Shell’s results are unlikely to satisfy investors. That may explain Mr Sawan’s promise of a renewed focus on “ruthless” capital discipline.

The gates of Egypt’s Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip creaked open on Wednesday to allow foreign nationals and some injured Palestinians to leave the besieged enclave. But Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, will be looking to limit the numbers: he is well aware that the country’s economy would struggle to cope with a large influx of Palestinian refugees.

Many Egyptians cannot afford enough food. Inflation hit an annual rate of 38% in September, its highest-ever level. Mr Sisi wants to postpone difficult economic decisions until after elections in December. The central bank has kept interest rates steady at 19.75% since spring to avoid causing a recession. When it meets on Thursday it will probably leave them unchanged, again. Meanwhile, the IMF has warned that the war in Gaza could spook foreign investors in Egypt and has downgraded the country’s growth outlook. The country’s economic woes will probably worsen in the months to come.

The Bank of England’s monetary-policy committee is expected to hold interest rates steady at 5.25% when it meets on Thursday. That would continue a pause in tightening that began at the committee’s last meeting in September. The pause, which may prove temporary, followed 14 consecutive hikes, beginning in December 2021. Inflation has fallen sharply this year, but the annual rate remains uncomfortably high, at 6.7%.

Even if interest rates have peaked, they are unlikely to fall quickly—and much of the pain from almost two years of increases is yet to be felt by households. Swati Dhingra, a member of the MPC, reckons that only 20-25% of the tightening has hit consumers so far. In the second half of 2023, 800,000 fixed-rate household mortgages are due to expire. Another 1.6m will expire in 2024. The average new deal will probably cost borrowers around £288 ($350) more each month.

Sixty-one years after their first single, the Beatles will release a new song on Thursday. It has been decades in the making. After John Lennon’s murder in 1980 Yoko Ono, his widow, gave Sir Paul McCartney a tape of Lennon’s unpublished demos. It contained three songs, two of which the surviving Beatles added to and released in the mid-1990s. But the audio of the last song, “Now and Then”, was so poor that they abandoned it.

Now technology has come to the rescue. With the help of AI, Lennon’s voice has been separated from the demo’s background noise, allowing the remaining Beatles, Sir Paul and Ringo Starr, to fill in the instrumentation. Guitar tracks from the discarded 1990s session, played by the late George Harrison, have also been added. “Now and Then” is a melancholic, nostalgic love song penned by Lennon in the aftermath of the Beatles’ break-up in 1970.

“How stupid are the people of Iowa...to believe this crap?” asked Donald Trump in 2015, while running for the Republican presidential nomination. Ben Carson, one of his rivals, was telling an improbable story on the campaign trail about finding God after a belt buckle miraculously prevented him from killing his friend. Mr Carson did not win Iowa, which hosts the first nominating contest—but nor did Mr Trump.

The former president is trying a different approach this autumn: courting, rather than insulting, the Hawkeye state. Unlike in 2015, the Republican race is not close and, although he aims to shut out his challengers within the party, he is increasingly focusing his attacks on Joe Biden. On Saturday he will hold events in two eastern counties that Mr Biden won in the general election in 2020. A decade ago Iowa was purple-ish, but is now bright red. Mr Trump stands to benefit. “We love the farmers,” he said last Sunday, while autographing a combine harvester.

So divided are Israel’s religious and secular Jews that even its holiest festivals trigger conflict. Simchat Torah, which is celebrated on Saturday, marks the annual completion of the weekly readings of the Torah, or five books of Moses. But the secular mayor of Israel’s biggest city, Tel Aviv, banned open-air celebrations of the traditional rite. He says the mechitzah, or curtain, that orthodox Jews erect between men and women amounts to gender discrimination in public space.

Tel Aviv is the centre of this year’s predominantly secular protests against Israel’s predominantly religious government. Some of the protesters view any display of religiosity as a threat to their secular redoubt. On Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, they heckled outdoor worshippers, called them “Nazis” and sounded bike horns to drown out the shofar.

At the last minute, facing criticism from the High Court of Justice, the municipality agreed to let the religious ceremony go ahead—with no physical barriers and gender separation only voluntary. Still, the police are preparing for clashes.

Max Verstappen has dominated Formula 1 this season—so much so that the sport’s new American fans have started to tune out. Few drivers have challenged him or his team, Red Bull, which has won all but one of this year’s 16 races so far. Mr Verstappen took 13 of them. The 26-year-old Dutch driver is set to cruise to victory again on Sunday at the Grand Prix in Lusail, Qatar.

He may not even need to race on Sunday in order to clinch the title. The sport works on a points system, and if he finishes sixth or higher at a sprint fixture on Saturday he will be crowned victor. The season wraps up next month, and Mr Verstappen is just three points away from becoming world champion. He will join legends, such as Ayrton Senna, in taking the title for a third time. If the F1 procession continues, he will equal the record of seven championships with barely the need for a pit stop.

Ron DeSantis was a longshot when he announced his campaign for governor of Florida in 2018, and he notably lacked knowledge of the intricacies of state-level politics. Fortunately, another ambitious 30-something congressman was ready to help: Matt Gaetz. It was he who saw Mr DeSantis’s early potential and nudged Donald Trump to endorse him. In 2022 Mr DeSantis went on to consolidate control over Florida politics in a landslide re-election.

Last week there was another demonstration of Mr Gaetz’s keen political intuition. In the face of fierce opposition from most of his own party he orchestrated the removal of Kevin McCarthy as the speaker of America’s House of Representatives.

Mr Gaetz, now 41, has made plenty of enemies since arriving on Capitol Hill in 2017. But even those who bristle at his hardline posturing (not to mention his dramatic eyebrows and bright blue suits) cannot deny his political skill. Donald Trump is 77 and running what could well be his final campaign. Mr Gaetz offers one potential Republican future.

Until a few years ago his 75-year-old father, Don, was the more famous Gaetz. As former president of the Florida Senate, he frequently annoyed Rick Scott, then the Republican governor. “Matt and his dad are very close,” says Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “Some people run away from what their parents do. Matt embraced it, learned from it and then took it to another level.”

Despite his success, the younger Mr Gaetz’s career in the House seems moribund. He is disliked by much of the conference and faces an ethics investigation over alleged sexual misconduct and misuse of funds in his bachelor days—allegations he denies. (He has since married, having proposed to his wife, naturally, at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.) The House investigation is one reason why he loathes Mr McCarthy, whom he blames for smearing him, although he insists that is not why he dethroned Mr McCarthy as speaker. The Department of Justice launched its own investigation but declined to bring charges. The congressional inquiry, therefore, may not be of much importance to Mr Gaetz, who raised money off the back of his fight with the speaker, and boosted his profile even higher. He denies that he wants to succeed Mr DeSantis in the governor’s mansion. Even so, speculation persists.

Without a political miracle on Saturday, the American government will shut down on October 1st for the fourth time in a decade. Earlier in the week, the Senate passed a stopgap funding bill full of Ukraine aid that made it dead on arrival in the Republican-led House of Representatives, which has yet to approve legislation to keep the government open. Millions of government workers, including congressional staffers, could soon miss paychecks. Federal services, such as environmental inspections and passport processing, could cease.

This legislative failure has been driven by a small but powerful faction of House Republicans that seeks to force through ultra-conservative policies and topple Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House. Mr McCarthy became the weakest House leader in memory after 15 rounds of voting in January, but he can take heart knowing that, in 1856, Nathaniel Banks won the job only after the 133rd ballot. Banks, however, never had to contend with a government shutdown. A path out of this mess remains elusive.

Slovaks vote in early parliamentary elections on Saturday, after the governing coalition lost a no-confidence vote in December. The result is too close to call. For the past six months Smer, the party of former prime minister Robert Fico, has been leading the polls. But recently Progressive Slovakia, a liberal party led by Michal Simecka, has gained an edge. Slovakia is ruled by a caretaker government appointed by Zuzana Caputova, the sitting president and a former member of Progressive Slovakia.

Mr Fico’s party has taken on a pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian line. Opponents fear that if it comes to power, Slovakia, hitherto a staunch supporter of Ukraine, will become an ally to Hungary, obstructing efforts within the EU and NATO to aid Ukraine.

What happens next will probably depend on whether Mr Fico or Mr Simecka can find coalition partners among the smaller parties. Voters should not stand down just yet: if neither party can form a stable government, a new election will be in the offing.

When the Collingwood Magpies and the Brisbane Lions run onto Melbourne Cricket Ground for the Australian Football League’s grand final on Saturday, the cheers will be quieter than usual. The showcase, which attracts 100,000 spectators, has been rocked by a furore over tickets. An unusually high number of corporate allocations meant even some top-tier members, who pay for guaranteed seats, were left without spots.

But that won’t deter the punters for long. Relative to population, the AFL is the best attended domestic-sports league in the world. Some 9.6m Australians support one of its 18 clubs; one-in-21 Aussies are club members. In 2022 the league generated over A$944m ($601m) in revenue. And since September 22nd, fans have been able to indulge their passion for its brawny tactics in Xbox’s new game, AFL 23. Like its spectacular “marks”—acrobatic catches that provide some of the sport’s most exciting moments—Australian football is flying high.

Ofelia Rodríguez liked to collect things. At markets in Mexico and her native Colombia, she unearthed items such as a child’s doll and a figurine of a man. Objects that others discarded were her treasure. Over five decades the surrealist artist, who died recently, produced paintings, sculptures and drawings that have been exhibited across the Americas and in Europe. A new show featuring more than 50 of her works opens on Saturday in Britain at Spike Island, a gallery in Bristol.

Her colourful creations combine these objets trouvés with myths and symbols from the Caribbean coast. Animal horns curve up from an orange wooden crate (one of her “magic boxes”), which opens to reveal a pile of jean buttons, nestled like coins in a purse. Gabriel García Márquez, a great Colombian author, once said that “surrealism runs through the streets” of Latin America. Rodríguez’s alluring, at times jarring, art is a case in point.

In 2017 Lina Khan, then a student at Yale Law School, published a controversial article. In it she argued that Amazon, the e-commerce giant, was a monopolist and that the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust laws failed to rein it in. Since being appointed the regulatory agency’s youngest-ever chair in 2021, she has launched an aggressive antitrust campaign against big corporations. On Tuesday she took on her old foe: Amazon. The FTC and 17 states sued the company, alleging that it illegally keeps prices high, charges sellers unfair fees and stifles competition.

Ms Khan, now 34, was born in Britain to Pakistani immigrants. Her family moved to America when she was 11. Her interest in corporate misbehaviour sparked early: as a high-school newspaper editor, she ran critical coverage of a branch of Starbucks that was preventing teenagers from sitting in the cafe, which was picked up by the New York Times.

Before law school, she worked for the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think-tank, where she became interested in—and incensed by—corporate consolidation. When asked about her hobbies in 2021, she listed photography and “trying to find the most obscure industry where I can find consolidation”. On her honeymoon Ms Khan ploughed through a book on corporations and American democracy. (Her husband, a cardiologist, opted for Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”.)

Since taking over the FTC, she has led it with a single-minded vision, sometimes bruising the morale of long-time staffers in the process. She has pushed through new rules, including banning “non-competes” (which bar employees from working for a competitor) and asserting the agency’s authority to pursue privacy violations. Her past work informs her work, but may also constrain her mandate: Amazon lobbied for Ms Khan to recuse herself from investigating it, alleging bias.

Last year the FTC filed more merger lawsuits than in any year for over a decade, including an attempt to block Microsoft’s $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a video-game developer. Although victories in court have been limited, Ms Khan’s leadership has reframed public thinking about trustbusting. Companies have become more wary: deals are down in America, suggesting firms are avoiding larger acquisitions. Politicians, too, are more willing to bash big companies. If Mr Biden fails to win re-election, Ms Khan’s tenure will be up next year. But cases take years to wind their way through the courts. Ms Khan’s legacy may outlast her.

Elections to the European Parliament do not take place until June 2024, but the campaign effectively gets under way on Sunday in Italy. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s hard-right National Rally, will join Matteo Salvini, head of Italy’s populist League (previously called the Northern League), in Pontida, near Milan, for the Italian party’s annual jamboree. Ms Le Pen’s guest appearance, and speech, will transform the affair into a European campaign event.

The two leaders are hoping next year to boost their European parliamentary group, which also includes the hard-right Alternative for Germany party. The gathering is also a chance for Ms Le Pen to remind the French at home that she has lost none of her drive. Polls suggest that the RN could top French voting at the European election, beating Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition into second place. Ahead of the next French presidential election in 2027, when Mr Macron cannot stand again, that would send a tremor through Europe.

“Our window of opportunity is about to close” is the stark message from Climate Group, the organisers of this year’s Climate Week, which begins on Sunday. The event will see business leaders, politicians and policy wonks—including Jim Skea, the new chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—gather in New York, where the high-level meetings of the UN General Assembly are also taking place from Monday. Film screenings and speaker sessions on environmental justice and sustainable living are scheduled around the city.

The gathering’s aim is to find ways to hold “those in positions of power” responsible for climate change. That feels urgent after months of record-breaking heatwaves and extreme weather events, and ahead of COP28, the UN climate summit taking place in the UAE from November 30th. The theme of this year’s Climate Week is “We can. We will”. The hope is that such determined words can encourage decisive action, too.

Over the past two weeks 719 athletes from 117 countries have gathered in Riyadh for the World Weightlifting Championships, which is being held in Saudi Arabia for the first time. The event serves as the qualification route for the Olympics in Paris in 2024. The choice of location for weightlifting’s flagship tournament also carries extra significance.

First, it is another display of Saudi sporting ambitions. The country’s lavish spending on football and golf has grabbed more attention, but it is expanding its influence in even niche sports. Second, the tournament shows a softening in the kingdom’s stance towards Israel. On Sunday, the last day of competition, Israel’s David Litvinov will try to win the super-heavyweight division, following three compatriots in other categories. It is the first time Israeli athletes have ever been allowed into Saudi Arabia. The shift follows a slight rapprochement between the two countries in recent months, after years of hostility. But establishing genuine diplomatic ties will require much more heavy lifting.

In 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists invited Edvard Munch, then an obscure Norwegian painter, to stage a solo show. His unusual canvases caused such a scandal that it closed after one week. The modernist artist capitalised on the unexpected publicity by moving to Berlin, where he lived and worked for several periods on and off until 1908.

A new exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie, on until January, traces Munch’s influence on the city’s art scene. “Magic of the North” displays around 80 pieces, with paintings, photographs, lithographs and woodcuts. The works include portraits of Munch and his contemporaries in Berlin, such as Dagny Juel Przybyszewska, his muse.

The controversy around Munch’s early exhibition in Berlin was driven, in part, by his paintings’ personal and psychological subject matter (best exemplified in “The Scream”, a later work). Visitors to the latest incarnation may be surprised by much brighter offerings, such as “Young People on the Beach”, painted in 1904.

Since Israel’s government revealed its judicial-overhaul plans in January, it has been on a collision course with the Supreme Court—and a particle physicist. Shikma Bressler has become the unlikely face of protests against the country’s far-right coalition government. This week, as the Supreme Court began discussing whether to strike down the government’s first reform aimed at shrinking the judiciary’s powers, thousands of demonstrators again took to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Ms Bressler claims she never had any political ambitions. She normally works as a senior scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. There she leads a research group that deals in other collisions: bashing particles into each other at the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN in Switzerland, to understand the universe’s fundamental building blocks. She has said that she longs to return to everyday life in the lab.

Since March 2020, however, she has been in the political spotlight. At the time, Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, was due to stand trial on corruption charges (which he denies). But his trial was postponed when the courts were shut as part of the first coronavirus lockdown. In response, Ms Bressler and two of her brothers founded the Black Flags, a pro-democracy protest movement that spread across the country. When Mr Netanyahu was relegated to the opposition after the 2021 election, the group disbanded—but within 18 months, “Bibi”, as he is known, was back in office.

His plans to limit the judiciary’s power spurred Ms Bressler to return to the megaphone. Shortly before the first legal step of that plan passed, which in July ended the Supreme Court’s ability to use “reasonableness” as grounds to overturn government decisions, she led 20,000 people on a five-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Among her concerns are the decision’s implications for women’s rights in Israel.

Her campaign has not been without missteps. Last week she likened parts of the coalition to “Nazis” for their views on Palestinians, which Mr Netanyahu was quick to condemn as “an insult to the Holocaust” and an “incitement to murder”. Ms Bressler, who is Jewish, later apologised on X (formerly Twitter). Many of her fellow protesters, though, seem unlikely to hold it against her; like Ms Bressler, they see these demonstrations as the battle of a generation.

“Will anything ever be the same?” The Economist asked after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. On Monday, 22 years on, Americans will remember the roughly 3,000 people killed (19 hijackers also died) and reflect on how much changed starting with that day.

The “Tribute in Light”, an art installation presented on every 9/11 anniversary, will beam searchlights into the sky over Manhattan to represent the fallen twin towers. Kamala Harris, America’s vice-president, will attend a ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which on the anniversary is open only to victims’ families and dignitaries such as Ms Harris. Joe Biden, who will be heading back from Vietnam, will mark the day with a ceremony at a military base in Alaska. George Pataki, New York’s Republican governor at the time of the attacks, has fiercely criticised the president’s unusual absence from the commemoration in the city. The attack initially united Americans. Now, sometimes, it divides them.

The past month has been difficult for Russia’s economy—perhaps the toughest since March 2022, when foreign investors fled the country and the rouble collapsed. Russia’s currency is once again losing value as Western sanctions hit exports. Higher interest rates have failed to support it. Data published on Monday will probably show that the country’s trade surplus is continuing to decline, partly because exports are weak.

But not all the signs are negative. Despite the plunge in the currency, economic activity is holding up, according to a range of “real-time” economic data tracked by The Economist. The deteriorating trade surplus is in part caused by higher imports—a sign that the economy has reoriented itself away from Western suppliers. The Russian economy has a weak pulse, but its heart is still beating.

The earthquake lasted mere seconds; the cleanup could take months. The death toll from Friday’s quake in Morocco, which had a magnitude of 6.8, has climbed above 2,100. That makes it the country’s deadliest since 1960. Workers have another day or so to find survivors. After that, rescue shifts to recovery. Some Moroccans believe that the response has been too slow. The king, who spends much of his time in Paris, took almost a day to issue a statement on the disaster.

Much attention has focused on Marrakech, a historic city popular with visiting foreigners (it is supposed to host the IMF’s annual meetings next month). But the bigger challenge for rescuers is to reach villages near the quake’s epicentre, high in the Atlas mountains. Roads are blocked and broken, making it hard to bring in heavy equipment. Villagers will be short of food and medicine. They will need prolonged support.

American soldiers are in Armenia for military exercises, which start on Monday and continue for ten more days. The drills are supposed to prepare Armenian troops for international peacekeeping operations. They are small scale, involving just 85 American soldiers. But their presence has upset Russia, which has historically positioned itself as Armenia’s main regional ally. It has also rattled Azerbaijan, which has fought two bloody wars with Armenia in three decades.

Russian officials say that the exercise furthers American efforts to draw Armenia into the West’s sphere of influence. Armenia is increasingly unhappy about the influence that Russia has. Earlier this year Armenia cancelled drills with Russia and other members of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation. Its government says that Russia has failed to defend Armenia against Azerbaijan, which has reportedly begun to amass troops near their border. If Armenia is indeed gravitating towards the West, Russia has only itself to blame.

Overfishing has caused the number of sharks and rays to shrink by 71% since 1970. Ecotourism companies say that, by arranging for people to dive with wild sharks, they are raising awareness of the risks that the animals face. Around 590,000 shark watchers pay an estimated total of $300m a year for the experience. But a new paper in Scientific Reports, a journal, shows that such activities may harm the very creatures they purport to be helping.

Researchers who tracked whale sharks in Mexico found that swimmers caused the animals to move abnormally, as if they were fleeing a predator. That forced them to expend energy that they could have used for reproduction and migration.

These findings add to a growing list of criticisms of some types of ecotourism. Tourists stress out animals, which can lower their defences against disease. They can also infect animals with diseases, especially when they feed them, or catch diseases from animals. As the ecotourism industry grows, its justification seems to shrink.