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Michael Bloomberg’s ill-fated presidential campaign in 2020 cost more than $1bn. The splurge worked out at around $17m for each delegate he won in the Democratic primary. Vast sums of money are useful in American elections—but they are not decisive.

That, at least, is what candidates with the least cash will tell themselves on Saturday, when presidential hopefuls report their fundraising hauls between April and June. The pressure is on for Republicans, who need 40,000 individual donors to qualify for next month’s opening debate. Some campaigns have published some numbers: Donald Trump has raised $35m (some of which will go towards his legal fees); Ron DeSantis has raked in $20m since late May.

On Friday Joe Biden’s camp, with the Democratic National Committee, announced a $72m haul for the same period, surpassing Mr Trump. And with a bare-bones operation—Mr Biden has so far reportedly hired fewer than 20 campaign aides—his expenses are low. Still, the figure trails those reported by his predecessors, Barack Obama and Mr Trump, when they were running for second terms.

Attendees at this year’s Sun Valley business gathering will get back on their jets on Saturday, as the annual shindig winds up. Tech and media moguls descend on the Idaho resort every summer to chinwag, in a jamboree organised by Allen & Company, an investment bank. This year’s guests included Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Tim Cook of Apple and Bob Iger of Disney.

The campers had plenty to talk about, from artificial intelligence to the impact of war in Ukraine. But the deals for which Sun Valley is known have probably not been flowing as freely as in past years. High interest rates and inflation have put a dampener on merger-making. Profits in medialand are down, as consumers and advertisers tighten their belts. Still, don’t expect many of those return flights to be economy.

In February 2022, on the fourth day of the war in Ukraine, Russian shelling set fire to a small museum housing some of the works of Maria Prymachenko, a beloved folk artist who died in 1997. Despite the best efforts of locals to recover the art from the blaze, around 25 of her works were destroyed.

In an exhibition which opened this week in London, the Saatchi gallery is showing 23 of her works—which have been preserved by Prymachenko’s family—for the first time. Originally conceived as illustrations for a children’s book, they are bright and cheerful. Some are magical depictions of hybrid beasts. Others are biographical, depicting her life grazing geese and herding horses in the village of Bolotnya, in the Kyiv region.

In life, Prymachenko rarely left Bolotnya. Since the start of the war, her work has been reproduced and reimagined far beyond its borders. Far from dimming her legacy, Russian forces only succeeded in doing the opposite.

To fight cancer, medicine has devised myriad ways to drug, irradiate, poison and cut out tumours. The problem with all these assaults is collateral damage: what kills cancer cells also kills healthy ones. In a first, scientists reporting in the journal Theranostics encoded a bacterial toxin into mRNA to hijack cancer cells and force them to kill themselves.

Echoing covid-19 vaccines, the injections delivered mRNA directly to cancer cells—except the toxin, rather than covid’s spike protein, was encoded into the mRNA’s molecules. These particles were injected into melanoma tumours in mice, where the code hacked into the cancer’s genes and forced them to produce the toxin—like “a Trojan horse”, as one researcher put it. After one injection, the tumours shrank significantly as they underwent programmed cell death. The mice were otherwise unaffected. This strategy, if replicable in humans, would be an elegant addition to the oncologist’s arsenal.

No one had expected him to win. In the lead up to Thailand’s general election in May, Pita Limjaroenrat’s political party, Move Forward, was considered a bit player, popular among young, liberal activists. But after campaigning on a promise to reform the monarchy and military, two institutions that have long dominated the country of 71m people, Mr Pita’s party won the most seats of any party. The results signalled that a growing majority of Thais are fed up with the military establishment’s control. Instead, they want a fully democratic country led by the 42-year-old Mr Pita.

The first-born scion of a Thai-Chinese agribusiness family, Mr Pita was sent to New Zealand for high school. He studied at Harvard and MIT, then worked at the Boston Consulting Group, Thailand’s Ministry of Commerce and as an executive at Grab, South-East Asia’s answer to Uber. But politics, on some level, always intrigued him. Growing up, he listened to New Zealand’s parliamentary debates while doing his homework (admittedly there were limited channels). At Harvard, he shadowed American classmates who were campaigning for Barack Obama.

Mr Pita ran on a platform of dismantling business monopolies, boosting economic growth beyond the capital city of Bangkok and amending the law that criminalises criticism of the monarchy. This revision of the lèse-majesté law makes most other political parties nervous. Discussion of this topic is taboo in Thailand; disparaging the king can lead to 15 years in prison.

Despite his popularity, Mr Pita’s hopes of becoming prime minister are fading. On July 13th he failed to win enough votes in parliament to become the country’s leader. Only 13 of 250 senators (the upper house is appointed by the army) backed him. The military establishment also controls the electoral commission, constitutional court and anti-corruption commission. Two complaints, one submitted by an activist lawyer and the other by a conservative politician, are before the constitutional court: one about Move Forward’s plan to amend the lèse-majesté law and another over specious allegations that Mr Pita failed to adequately declare his ownership of shares in a media firm.

Parliament will reconvene on July 19th for another vote. If the senate continues to ignore the will of the people, protests may sweep the country.

America is an indispensable supporter of Ukraine’s fight to repel Russia’s invasion. Yet it is also an insurmountable obstacle to Ukraine’s hope of rapidly joining NATO. Before departing for the alliance’s summit on Tuesday in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, President Joe Biden said bluntly: “I don’t think it’s ready for membership”.

Yet Mr Biden must tread carefully; he cannot be too obstructionist. The American president must help NATO grapple with its central dilemma: how to refuse Ukraine’s membership while it is at war, without giving Russia a reason to keep waging it. Ukraine will be told that it is getting closer, even if it is not invited in. NATO will probably waive its formal “membership action plan” (the old antechamber to NATO) but ensure conditions on democratic and military reforms are not more onerous. Countries will want to offer credible long-term security guarantees without offering troops.

The summit starts well, with news that Turkey will belatedly allow Sweden to join. But on the question of Ukraine’s bid, the allies have to work hard to preserve unity.

Tuesday saw the release of Germany’s latest inflation figure, covering the year to June. At 6.8%, the harmonised index of consumer prices was higher than expected, and a jump from May. Core inflation, excluding volatile items such as food and energy, came in at 5.8%, up from 5.4% in May, reflecting a rise in transport prices. The data show that inflation is proving sticky in Germany, as elsewhere. It is one reason for Germany entering a technical recession in the first quarter of the year. Higher food prices are dampening household consumption; the higher cost of raw materials and energy are affecting industrial orders.

Other economic data do not seem encouraging. Numbers published last week showed a bigger-than-expected fall of 0.2% in industrial production in May (compared with April), though they also revealed a surprise rise of 6.4% in industrial orders. That suggests Germany’s recovery will be sluggish, and slower than some hoped earlier this year.

Amazon’s annual shopping bonanza, Prime Day, begins on Tuesday (and, confusingly, will last two days). The tech giant will be hoping for a boost. Sales growth, excluding Amazon’s cloud division, was a meagre 8% in the most recent quarter, far below the pre-pandemic pace. That partly reflects a decelerating economy, but also stiffer competition.

Shein, a fast-growing Chinese e-commerce rival beloved by youngsters, is expanding beyond fashion into categories like electronics and stationery. It has added a third-party seller option akin to Amazon’s Marketplace. Meanwhile, Walmart, America’s biggest retailer, has been outgrowing Amazon in e-commerce, just as Amazon’s move into physical retailing (Walmart’s home turf) has stuttered.

Amazon is also facing antitrust scrutiny. Last month the Federal Trade Commission initiated a complaint into tactics allegedly used by the firm that trick consumers into enrolling in its Prime membership programme and then make it difficult to unsubscribe. That would hardly be consistent with the firm’s ambition to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company”.

Statistics for the British labour market in the three months to May were published on Tuesday. They showed wages rising by a worryingly hot 7.3%, matching the record set by the previous set of figures (covering the three months to the end of April). The latest data confirm that private-sector wages are growing faster than ever on the current measure, excluding the distortions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Bank of England worries that the overheated labour market is helping inflation boil over. In recent months prices have kept rising faster than expected, particularly for services. The central bank believes that this reflects the impact of domestic factors like employment rather than the effect of imported food and energy, which have more sway over inflation’s headline figure. Investors now anticipate that the BoE will raise interest rates to 6.5% by next March, from 5% at present. That will spell yet more misery for mortgage-holders and, consequently, the governing Conservative Party—a general election is due before February 2025.

To keep his marauding warriors entertained and in shape between battles, Genghis Khan, the fearsome Mongol conqueror, held tournaments of wrestling, archery and horse-racing. Eight centuries later, these sports are at the heart of Mongolia’s most important festival, Naadam, which begins on Tuesday. In Ulaanbaatar, the capital, crowds will flock to the central stadium to watch competitions of the “Three Manly Games”, as well as displays of knucklebone shooting (a game of manual dexterity involving small marble tablets) and singing.

For those in the stands, the galloping hooves and twang of bowstrings hark back to a time when all Mongolians herded livestock, their daily rhythms dictated by the changing seasons. These days, nomadism is less common. People are quitting the steppe for the city, in search of jobs and shelter from increasingly harsh winters. Still, for five days each year, Mongolians proudly celebrate their patrimony, while Tengri, the sky god, gazes down at the colourfully-dressed competitors.

On Sunday negotiators from the 14 countries of the American-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework begin a seven-day trade summit. At their last meeting in May they set in stone one of the four “pillars” of President Joe Biden’s trade vision for the region, striking a deal on supply-chain resilience. In Busan, South Korea, they will focus on making trade more connected, greener and fairer.

IPEF members hope to conclude negotiations by November. China’s rival Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is already reshaping the region’s trade terrain. And as the Sino-American tech war heats up, Asian countries are getting anxious about being asked to pick sides.

The supply-chain agreement in May (whose full text has not been made public) was praised by some analysts for pioneering a multilateral framework but criticised by others as platitudinous. And Asia’s exporters continue to lament the lack of measures to improve access to America’s market. To make the IPEF bear weight, haste cannot be allowed to excuse shoddy workmanship.

When Uzbeks vote in a presidential election on Sunday, the result is a foregone conclusion. There is no real opposition to the incumbent, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. He will storm to victory against three stalking horses put up to create a veneer of democratic choice.

When he assumed power in 2016, Mr Mirziyoyev surprised his compatriots by enacting reforms. He loosened the screws on the media and civil society in what was then one of the world’s harshest dictatorships. But his liberalising tendencies have not extended to allowing political opposition. His regime does not tolerate political dissent and has rejected a potential rival’s attempts to register his party legally.

In April Mr Mirziyoyev oversaw constitutional reforms that extended presidential terms from five to seven years. This “election” is being held under the new constitution, allowing him to run for office twice more. Uzbekistan could remain a political one-man show until 2037.

With its population of just over 100,000, Jersey, a self-governing British island near France, rarely seems a sporting powerhouse. However, at the Island Games, a biennial event for athletes from non-sovereign territories of European nations, it has won more medals than anywhere else. The 19th edition of the games kicks off on Sunday in neighbouring Guernsey, also in the British Isles, with 3,000 athletes from as far south as the Falkland Islands and as far north as Greenland, competing across 14 sports.

Being a big fish in a small pond is the extent of most islanders’ success, but occasional break-out stars have emerged. Heptathlete Kelly Sotherton represented the Isle of Wight before winning Olympic medals for Britain in 2004 and 2008, and Mark Cavendish of the Isle of Man is skipping the games to ride in the Tour de France, seeking the single stage win he needs to break Eddy Merckx’s all-time record.

Since their debut ten years ago, the global ascent of BTS, a South Korean boy band, has been smooth like butter—as one of their songs goes. In 2016 they released their second album, “Wings”, which sold more than 1m copies. By 2020 they were the biggest-selling artists in the world. Even a hiatus in 2022, when several members performed their country’s mandatory military service, has caused little friction, with successful solo singles.

The release of an oral history of BTS on Sunday—the tenth anniversary of the group’s fan club getting its name, ARMY—is also set to be a hit. “Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS”, written by Kang Myeong-seok, a journalist, has already topped bestseller lists with preorders. Full of interviews with the band’s members as well as QR codes linking to videos and songs, the book is sure to keep the most militant member of ARMY happy.

Sporting a black-and-white striped swimsuit, red lips and a sideways gaze, Barbie first tottered off the production line in 1959. She was named after the daughter of the couple who developed her, but her figure was copied from an erotic doll sold to German men. American children were besotted; their mothers fretted that the 11.5-inch, anatomically impossible woman was a bad influence. So Barbie was given a job (as a model) and marketed as a way to teach girls to look neat and stylish. On Sunday, 64 years later—yet not one day older—she will grace the pink carpet for the Hollywood premiere of “Barbie”, her first live-action film.

Barbie’s inventor was Ruth Handler. With her husband she founded Mattel, the toymaker that still owns Barbie. Barbie prototypes were mistakenly given nipples. Deemed too outré, they were delicately filed off. In 1961 Barbie acquired a preppie boyfriend, Ken.

Handler believed that “little girls want to pretend to be bigger girls” and that Barbie would free them from the infantilising world of baby dolls. Never presented as a wife or a mother, Barbie has had 250 careers including astronaut, surgeon and presidential candidate. Still, many feminists have long despaired at her unrealistic shape, materialism and conformity to gender stereotypes. Lamenting that “math class is tough” did a 1992-era talking Barbie few favours. The best-selling Barbie model, also sold in the 1990s, had floor-length hair, irresistible for brushing. Barbie’s biographer, M.G. Lord, calls this “a modern re-enactment of an ancient goddess-cult ritual”.

Baby-boomers who grew up with Barbie bought her for their children. Mattel needs those millennial children, now parents themselves, to do the same. But there is more competition these days: Barbie’s crown has been threatened by Elsa, the star of Disney’s “Frozen”; Lego is ascendant. So Mattel has given Barbie a makeover. In 2016 she was relaunched with seven skin tones and four new body shapes.

But what better marketing ploy than a feature-length advert? The doll’s on-screen universe is a kitschy, girlie utopia until one Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, starts asking existential questions. Trailers have lit up social media in advance of the film’s opening in cinemas on July 21st. It will take a truly determined parent to avoid Barbiemania this summer.

On Tuesday Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, will host a meeting of more than 200 mayors of towns and suburbs that have been battered by nightly violence and rioting in the past week. Among them is Vincent Jeanbrun (pictured, gesturing), the centre-right mayor of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a southern suburb of Paris, whose front gate was rammed with a car that was set on fire on Saturday night. Mr Jeanbrun’s wife broke her leg escaping with their children as fireworks were hurled at them.

The rioting, which began after a teenage driver was shot dead by police during a traffic check on June 27th, seems to have peaked. But it obliged Mr Macron to cancel a state visit to Germany so that he could manage the crisis and meet the leaders of both houses of parliament. The president hopes that deploying tens of thousands of policemen will keep things calmer. His government will now start to unpick the reasons for the sudden social upheaval.

On Tuesday Vladimir Putin met global leaders for the first time since the Wagner rebellion rattled his regime. Russia’s president is participating in a virtual summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, along with the leaders of China, India, Pakistan and former Soviet states in central Asia. In theory, the broad-based regional talking-shop should offer a welcome setting for Mr Putin to assure his counterparts that all is well in the Kremlin. The SCO is one of the few international groupings in which Russia still enjoys some support.

Yet Mr Putin could yet face some awkward questions. India, for instance, the host of this year’s summit, is moving towards the West. Narendra Modi, its prime minister, has just concluded a state visit to America. At last year’s SCO summit Mr Modi urged the Russian leader to pursue peace in Ukraine. Kazakhstan’s leader has gone further than Mr Modi, directly criticising the war. Mr Putin will be hoping that his flagging invasion will not have emboldened them to go any further.

On Tuesday Germany reveals its foreign trade figures for May. Going on the previous month, the outlook looks better than feared: in April, Destatis, the German statistics agency, reported an increase of 1.2% for that month, whereas a contraction of 2.5% had been predicted. Most notably in April, exports to China increased by 10.1% to €8.5bn ($9.3bn). That has also helped improve Germany’s long-standing trade deficit with its largest trading partner. German exports to America, the country’s biggest market, also increased, by 4.7% compared with March. That helped offset falling trade with Britain and a precipitous drop with Russia.

The data release comes as investor sentiment darkens over Germany’s technical recession (defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth). The country’s manufacturing sector shrank in June as both new orders and production dwindled. Good news from the statistics office could help lift the gloomy mood.

There are signs that interest rates are starting to bite down under. Australia’s annual inflation dropped to a 13-month low of 5.6% in May, from 6.8% in April. But GDP growth is also slowing.

That prompted the Reserve Bank of Australia to hold interest rates at 4.1% when it met on Tuesday. But analysts expect at least one more hike in the coming months. Core inflation (which strips out volatile food and fuel prices, as well as holiday travel) remains above the central bank’s target of 2-3%. The labour market remains tight and house prices, against the odds, are rebounding.

The bank’s governor, Philip Lowe, says he wants to “keep the economy on an even keel”. But much more tightening and it could start to list. For many Australians, that would be a new experience. Barring a brief downturn during the pandemic, when wages were anyway subsidised, the country’s last recession ended over 30 years ago.

This week the National Education Association holds its annual meeting in Orlando, the “backyard” of Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. It is America’s biggest labour union’s first fully in-person conference since 2019, and will include a “Freedom to Learn” rally. The union opposes Mr DeSantis’s education policies, which they say curtail teachers’ and students’ rights. New laws in Florida that block discussion of race and sexuality have led teachers to reconsider how they teach the history of slavery, and school libraries to ban books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

But Mr DeSantis seems to be digging in. The Republican presidential hopeful pitches himself as a defender of “parental rights”—against, implicitly, those of teachers. Other Republican governors have also accused teachers of indoctrinating pupils with critical race theory. At least eight states have enacted new so-called school-choice laws this year, such as giving residents vouchers they can use to pay private-school tuition, bypassing public education altogether.

The aborted mutiny of the Wagner mercenary group on June 24th temporarily shook the foundations of the world’s 11th-largest economy. The rouble fell sharply, before edging up again. The share prices of several of Russia’s largest companies wobbled. A slew of economic data released on Wednesday, including on retail sales and industrial production, will not yet reflect the turmoil of recent days. But the future looks more uncertain than it did before.

For now, many of Russia’s respected technocrats—including those leading the central bank and the economy ministry—remain in charge. That rules out any madcap policies, such as money-printing. But Wagner’s revolt has brought the conflict with Ukraine home in a way that a war on foreign soil never could, damaging consumer and business confidence. Russia still looks likely to avoid recession: the latest data puts year-on-year growth at around 1.5%. Yet if there is more instability, that could change quickly.

Having just been through a real crisis, America’s banks now face a hypothetical one. On Wednesday the Federal Reserve will publish the results of its annual stress tests, designed to see how lenders would fare in dire economic circumstances. This year, it subjected them to some of its toughest scenarios yet, including a 38% plunge in housing prices. Analysts think the test will show that big banks are well capitalised, allowing them to return cash to shareholders through stock buybacks.

But the stress tests have themselves been tested recently, and found wanting. The Fed failed to include sharply higher interest rates as a potential problem last year. Markets had little forewarning that rates—not an economic slowdown—could spark a regional-bank meltdown, as they did in March, leading to the failure of First Republic and other lenders. This year’s test, which began before that tumult, also excludes pressure from higher rates. The Fed, unlike the rest of America, would benefit from extra stress.

On Wednesday Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, will greet Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. They will discuss NATO’s renewed effort to bolster its eastern flank in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The bloc has recently taken several steps in this direction. On Monday Mr Stoltenberg travelled to Lithuania to observe “Exercise Griffin Storm”, a NATO exercise, with Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister. While there Mr Pistorius announced that Germany would station a brigade permanently in Lithuania, provided the Baltic state supplies the required infrastructure for around 4,000 soldiers. The decision—which Germany had been previously reluctant to make—was warmly welcomed by Gitanas Nauseda, Lithuania’s president.

Estonia already has warplanes and troops from other NATO countries on the ground. More could now follow. The next, much-heralded, summit of the alliance will be held in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, starting on July 11th.

There were positive signs on Wednesday that Italy’s inflation rate has settled on its downward trajectory. Provisional inflation figures showed that consumer prices rose at an annual rate of 6.4% in June, down from 7.6% in May, mainly owing to a drop in energy costs. Core inflation, which excludes energy and fresh food, was also down, from 6% to 5.6%.

Inflation is a sensitive issue in the country. Giorgia Meloni’s government has been complaining for months about the European Central Bank’s efforts to dampen price rises by ratcheting up borrowing costs. Higher interest rates both throttle economic growth and make it more costly for Italy to service its huge, though shrinking, public debt of more than 140% of GDP. Before the release of the latest inflation data, Ms Meloni took another swipe at the ECB, calling its interest-rate rises a “simplistic” approach.

On Wednesday a court in Paris will rule on whether a Russian performance artist, Pyotr Pavlensky, and his partner, Alexandra de Taddeo, breached privacy laws in a French sexting case. The lawsuit was brought by Benjamin Griveaux, a former government minister who abandoned his political career after Mr Pavlensky posted online two private sex videos he had made. Mr Griveaux had sent them to Ms de Taddeo during a brief liaison. She later started a relationship with Mr Pavlensky.

The French usually believe that the public interest stops firmly at the bedroom door. Mr Pavlensky—who once nailed his scrotum to the ground in Moscow’s Red Square (a metaphor for society’s “apathy, political indifference and fatalism”, he later said) and was granted asylum in France after being accused of sexual assault—judges this attitude to private life hypocritical when it concerns politicians. He “stole” the videos from Ms de Taddeo’s phone, he said, as part of an art project he called “Pornopolitique”. Mr Griveaux’s lawyer called it “revenge porn”.