On the Stump, Donald Trump makes lots of eye-widening pledges. He will deport illegal immigrants by their millions; he will launch missiles at Mexico’s drug cartels; he will use the army to crack down on the “far-left lunatics” who run the Democratic Party. Yet Mr Trump’s tenure as president, whatever its merits or failings, was not the cataclysm that many Democrats had predicted. The economy hummed along, until the pandemic struck. There were no big foreign-policy crises. And although Mr Trump tried to steal the presidential election of 2020, he failed.

IN THE HISTORY of medicine, a few drugs tower above all others. Humira for rheumatoid arthritis; Prozac for depression; statins to prevent heart disease and strokes. All have helped patients far beyond doctors’ initial expectations and continue to benefit millions of people every day. A new class of drugs is set to join their ranks and has the potential to eclipse them all—GLP-1 receptor agonists.

There was no mistaking the feat of engineering. The bottom half of the biggest object ever flown—by itself as tall as a 747 is long—came hurtling out of the sky so fast that it glowed from the friction. With the ground rushing to meet it, a cluster of its engines briefly relit, slowing the rocket and guiding it carefully back towards the same steel tower from which it had launched just seven minutes previously. A pair of arms swang closed to catch it, leaving it suspended and smoking in the early-morning sunshine.

AMERICANS are fixated on whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will win the presidency on November 5th. But what the victor will actually be able to achieve depends in large part on which party controls Congress. Most new presidents have long coattails: not since George H.W. Bush was inaugurated in 1989 has one taken office without his party also controlling both chambers of Congress. But this year the race for congressional control looks as close as the presidential one, putting the normal outcome in doubt. If the election of 2024 is as much of a nail-biter as expected, the prospect of divided government—and with it the shelving of much of the new president’s agenda—looms large.

Among the banks, law firms and luxury hotels of central London, a piece of Palestine is rising. Born in an adjacent falafel joint, Palestine House has spread over five floors. Each depicts a different period of Palestinian history. The walls of one recreate the wooden latticework of a traditional inner courtyard; another, the smashed rubble of Gaza. Palestinian flags and banners protesting against genocide decorate the walls and pavement outside. By the end of the year Osama Qashoo, its founder, plans to open a journalists’ club, a radio station, a startup hub, an exhibition hall and a cultural salon in the building. “Each bomb Israel drops on Gaza is an amplifier,” says Mr Qashoo, an exile from the West Bank city of Nablus: “We are the carriers making sure Palestine’s story lives.”

“WE HAVE RESTORED deterrence,” declares Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military-intelligence service, referring to the credibility Israel’s security services lost on October 7th 2023, when Palestinian radicals ran rampage across southern Israel, killing more than 1,100 people and kidnapping some 250. This has been regained by Israel’s devastating assault on Hizbullah, a Lebanese militant group that has been bombarding northern Israel for the past year, displacing some 60,000 civilians. In just two weeks Israel has killed and injured many Hizbullah operatives using booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, assassinated several of its leaders in bombing raids and sent troops into southern Lebanon to destroy the tunnels, bases and rocket-launchers Hizbullah has been using in its attacks.

JEWS TRADITIONALLY mark the new year by eating an apple dipped in honey, an expression of hope that sweet times lie ahead. As Israeli families prepared to ring in the year 5785 on the evening of October 2nd, many must have hoped that it would at least be less bitter than 5784, which began with an atrocity. On October 7th 2023 Hamas, a militant Palestinian movement based in Gaza, burst through barriers walling Gaza off from Israel, massacred more than 1,100 people and took a further 250 hostage. During the year that has followed, Israel has not only fought non-stop with Hamas in Gaza, but also exchanged rockets with Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. As the year drew to an end, on September 30th, it sent troops across the border into Lebanon, to battle Hizbullah, a Lebanese militia that has been bombarding northern Israel. The next day Iran, a patron of both Hamas and Hizbullah, launched a salvo of 181 missiles at Israel. As The Economist went to press, the region was awaiting the inevitable Israeli riposte. Israel is now fighting wars on several fronts, with no end in sight to any of them.

PERHAPS IN HIS final days he reflected on the irony. Last year Hassan Nasrallah had not been eager to start a war with Israel. Hizbullah’s leader felt dragged into it by Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, who had declined to consult his allies before his men attacked Israel on October 7th. But Nasrallah joined the war anyway: his own rhetoric left him little choice. Almost a year later, that decision would cost him his life.

WHEN AN ISRAELI bomb killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, last week, it did not just decapitate a fearsome militia that has driven some 60,000 Israelis from their homes with frequent rocket attacks. It also dealt a hammer blow to Iran’s “axis of resistance”, a constellation of proxy forces that Iran has for decades used to attack both Israel and Western interests in the Middle East. In addition to its current assault on Hizbullah, Israel’s year-long dismemberment of Hamas in Gaza has vastly diminished Iran’s capacity to cause trouble if threatened. Those defeats, in turn, may be prompting Iran to fall back on its other main form of deterrence: its nuclear-weapons programme.

“Russia CAN only be forced into peace,” Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, told the UN Security Council this week. Mr Zelensky has been touring America, glad-handing the great and the good and talking up his “victory plan” to end two and a half years of war with Russia. As usual, he asked for more military, financial and diplomatic support to help face down Russia’s relentless attacks. President Joe Biden obliged, announcing a new consignment of weapons for Ukraine. But Donald Trump, the Republican candidate to replace him, is much less amenable. Mr Zelensky clearly worries that Ukraine, not Russia, may be forced into an unpalatable peace. With his army gradually losing ground, his people’s enthusiasm for the war flagging and Western support in doubt, Mr Zelensky is in a bind.

Regina Jackson and Saira Rao achieved a degree of fame at the height of the backlash in 2020 after police killed George Floyd, an unarmed black American accused of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 note. For a hefty fee, rich white women would hire the pair to help them confront unconscious biases at dinner parties that featured such ice-breakers as, “Raise your hand if you’re a racist.” Guests may often have broken down in tears when told that their claims to be colour-blind were simply another brick in the edifice of white supremacy, but there was lots of interest. The two women were featured in many news reports and made a film about their dinners, “Deconstructing Karen”, in which a guilt-stricken participant confesses, “I am a liberal white woman. We are absolutely the most dangerous women.”

GABRIEL STERLING is preparing for trouble: “Do we have concerns? Yes. Do we have backup plans? Sure. I don’t want to get too deep into them, because I don’t want people to have backup plans to our backup plans.”

Zhao jian’s article was online for just a few hours on August 16th before censors erased it. To Western readers the content would have appeared anodyne, but to a Communist Party official it was laced with dangerous ideas. Mr Zhao, a respected economist, argued that it was hard to grasp why China’s government was not making more effort to stimulate the economy. The most serious economic downturn in a generation had caused uncertainty about the future to “coil around the hearts of the people”, he wrote. “The logic and constraints of decision-makers cannot be understood by the market.”

IT IS HARD to see past the human tragedy of the war in Sudan. Perhaps 150,000 people have died since fighting began last year and more than 10m have fled their homes. Millions could perish in the world’s worst famine for at least 40 years. These are reasons enough to care about the conflict. But the collapse of Sudan, at the intersection of Africa and the Middle East, with seven fragile neighbours and some 800km of coast on the turbulent Red Sea, has alarming geopolitical consequences, too.

IT IS OFFICIAL: for only the third time in the past 20 years, the UN has declared a full-blown famine. The declaration concerns a refugee camp called Zamzam, on the outskirts of the city of el-Fasher in Sudan. As long ago as April, Médecins Sans Frontières, a charity, estimated that every two hours a child in the camp was dying from starvation or disease—and since then the situation has got worse.

SCARCELY A MONTH ago, Democrats were awaiting their convention in Chicago as one might a four-day root canal. Despite losing the confidence of his party after a disastrous debate performance, the 81-year-old president, Joe Biden, was due to formalise his seemingly doomed candidacy—and perhaps drag many other Democrats down with him. But then, on July 21st, despair gave way to ecstasy, as Mr Biden dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice-president. She became the de facto nominee within 24 hours. The dreaded ordeal was suddenly transformed into a raucous coronation.

Zeke Hernandez was worried. His 12-year-old son, Lucas, had not grown for two years. The family paediatrician told him to eat more, but it didn’t work. Eventually, after a battery of tests, another doctor diagnosed Lucas with celiac disease, which was damaging his small intestine. The solution was to stop eating wheat.

REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS do not agree on much, but both parties want to help America’s “left-behind”. Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden enthusiastically pursued policies to boost the economic fortunes of people who have, in some sense, struggled amid globalisation and deindustrialisation. Both Mr Trump and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, promise that if elected in November they will do more of the same. On the face of it, their efforts seem to be working. The left-behind are doing better than they have done in years. But there is a catch. The manufacturing jobs that once sustained them are still in decline.

As we explain in our analysis of Pennsylvania’s economy, strong economic fundamentals will not be sufficient to propel Kamala Harris to the White House. Still, the health of the economy in the swing states should give Democrats some confidence in the final months of campaigning. Most have performed well in recent years relative to national benchmarks.

Kamala Harris has all but erased Donald Trump’s polling lead in America’s six swing states, which is testament to the excitement generated by her late entrance into the presidential race. On August 6th she will speak at a rally in Pennsylvania, the most crucial of the swing states, alongside her new running-mate, who may well be Josh Shapiro, the state’s governor. Judging by her past speeches, she will warn that Mr Trump wants to ban abortion, is a threat to democracy and only cares about the rich. Underlying it all will be another message—that the American economy is the world’s strongest, and that the country remains a place of opportunity.

FOR DECADES the world’s corporate titans have seen China as an essential place to do business. Chinese firms, it turns out, were no different. Their domestic market was vast and growing at a dizzying pace, so they had little reason to hunt for customers abroad. China’s colossal manufacturing sector, meanwhile, with its legions of cheap workers, made producing goods elsewhere unnecessary. In spite of the fuss in much of the rich world about Chinese investment, Chinese firms have a comparatively small global footprint.

In 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments engineered a silicon chip with a single transistor. By 1965 Fairchild Semiconductor had learned how to make a piece of silicon with 50 of the things. As Gordon Moore, one of Fairchild’s founders, observed that year, the number of transistors that could fit on a piece of silicon was doubling on a more or less annual basis.

The first television broadcast of an Olympic games was in 1936, when around 160,000 people within transmitting range of the stadium in Berlin were able to tune in. The action was shot on three cameras, only one of which could capture live footage—and only when the sun was out. At the next summer games, in London in 1948, the BBC suggested that perhaps it should pay the organisers for the right to broadcast the event, and offered 1,000 guineas (about $40,000 at today’s prices). The Olympic committee sportingly said there was no need.

RARELY HAS so divisive a figure been so honoured by America’s political class. On July 24th Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, will deliver his fourth address to a joint session of Congress—more than any other foreign leader, including Winston Churchill.

It was as recently as March that Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, excoriated Mr Netanyahu as an “obstacle to peace” and called for new elections to remove him. The snub was all the sharper, given that Mr Schumer, Congress’s most prominent Jewish member, thinks of himself as a shomer or “protector” of Israel. Three months later the shomer yielded, joining other congressional leaders in inviting Mr Netanyahu to give his oration. “America’s relationship with Israel is ironclad and transcends one person or prime minister,” he explained. President Joe Biden, a friend to Israel but long exasperated by Mr Netanyahu, will receive him at the White House, too.

AFTER ALMOST 300 days, planning for the end of the fighting in Gaza is beginning to seem otherworldly. Politicians and generals have been talking about what might happen when the shooting stops since the start of the war in October. Diplomats have spent months shuttling around the Middle East, trying to broker a ceasefire. Yet the moment has not come—and even if it does, the obstacles to lasting calm in Gaza are daunting.

When many Western officials talk of the “day after”, they have a specific scenario in mind. It starts with buffing up the Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs parts of the West Bank, so that it may return to Gaza and govern there as well. Israel would commit to ending its half-century occupation and creating a Palestinian state. That would allow Saudi Arabia, the most influential Arab country, to normalise ties with Israel. A ruinous war could give way to a lasting regional peace.

Kebita Naima was a month pregnant when men with guns burned her home and stole everything she had. Terrified, she fled her village in eastern Congo. With a dozen relatives she walked for a week, hoping to reach Uganda, the calmer country next door. “We had nothing, no food at all,” she recalls—only water from streams and wild fruit. When she crossed the border she was “so weak and so hungry”.

That journey, and the months of deprivation that followed, affected her unborn daughter, Ms Kebita suspects. Sitting outside her home in Lobule, a village in northern Uganda, she notes how the girl, Amina, now 11, is noticeably slower than her younger brother, Mubaraka, who was better nourished both in the womb and in infancy. He started to talk a year earlier than his sister, and to walk nearly two years earlier. “He always wants to know things. He sees older kids climbing trees, and he wants to join in,” says his mother.

Just as muscles need food and exercise to grow strong, the brain needs good food and stimulation to develop properly. The first 1,000 days after conception, known as the “golden window”, are crucial. From the third trimester to the second birthday, a million synapses a second are formed in a well-nourished brain, creating the foundation on which “all learning, behaviour and health depend”, notes Meera Shekar of the World Bank. In a malnourished one, fewer connections are created. And if the brain is chronically deprived during this period, the damage is irreversible.

WHY HAVE Americans born in the 1940s, like Donald Trump and Joe Biden, had such a stranglehold on American power, and why do they cling on to it so tightly? To answer this, our US editor has interviewed dozens of prominent Americans born in the same decade. The result is a new six-part podcast series that begins this week. It is called “Boom! The generation that blew up American politics”.

Born around the same time as the atom bomb, they grew up in a country that was pre-eminent in technological, military and economic terms. Fear of mutually assured destruction lurked in their childhoods, but it was mostly blocked out by comforting domesticity. People form their political views between their mid-teens and mid-20s. For this group that time was the late 1960s, a decade of possibilities cut short by war, assassinations and street violence. Episode 1 focuses on 1968, the origin story of America’s extreme partisanship.