Like many other members of the Lebanese community in the suburb of Boston where he grew up, Peter Makhlouf goes to Beirut every summer to visit family. Recently the annual trip has acquired an extra purpose. “At some point [the women] all started to do cosmetic procedures,” he says. They began with little tweaks, such as getting their lips plumped or teeth whitened. Then came cheekbone-lifts, nose jobs “and so on”. The plastic pilgrimage has become so common that Mr Makhlouf, who is 29, says he no longer knows “anyone who hasn’t gotten plastic surgery”.

The long battle to topple Bashar al-Assad may have ended this week, but the air-raids did not. The day after Syria’s dictator of 24 years fled, no fewer than three foreign armies bombed targets inside the newly liberated country. America pounded the remnants of Islamic State, a jihadist outfit that once ruled much of Iraq and Syria, lest it take advantage of the chaos to regroup and expand. Turkey sent warplanes to help a proxy force battling a Kurdish-led militia it accuses of aiding terrorists. And Israel bombed anything that might conceivably be used against it in a hypothetical future conflict, from suspected chemical-weapons facilities to the Syrian navy’s handful of decrepit warships.

THERE WAS joy and horror and anguish all at once. Many of the detainees freed from Saidnaya, the most notorious prison in Syria, were husks: skeletal frames, vacant stares. They staggered out of cells where dozens of people had been packed into reeking, pitch-black chambers. On the walls of one someone had scribbled in Arabic, “Take me, already.”

NEW YORKERS who wished to gamble used to be limited to a series of peculiar options: a lottery run by the state, raffles run by charities, casinos run by Native Americans, slot machines run by racetracks, horse-betting run by local governments—or a trip outside the state to a more permissive spot such as Atlantic City, New Jersey. In recent years, however, it is New York that has become more permissive. The state’s first ordinary, commercial casinos started opening in 2016, although none in the area around New York City. In 2022 it became legal to bet on sporting events online. Next year or the year after the state is due to issue three licences to operate a casino in or near the Big Apple.

IN THE COMING months, Mumbai will open a new airport and start to redevelop its largest slum. To the north, in the state of Gujarat, the first phase of what is billed as the world’s biggest copper smelter will become fully operational. Northwards still, near Pakistan’s border, power generation will start at a wind-solar plant that, when finished, will be the world’s largest green-energy site. Near India’s southern tip, meanwhile, a new port will open in Kerala with sufficient depth to create the country’s first global transshipment hub. And in nearby Sri Lanka, the port of Colombo will inaugurate a new terminal designed to compete with a Chinese-operated one next door.

In early November, on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Putin gave a speech meditating on the patterns of history. The communist takeover of Russia, he said, was one of the “milestones…that determined the course of history, the nature of politics, diplomacy, economies and social structure”. The war he started in 2022 by invading Ukraine, he implied, was another such moment.

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“THEY’RE DYING, Russians and Ukrainians,” lamented Donald Trump last year. “I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done…in 24 hours.” In January Mr Trump returns to the White House. Can he put an end to the largest war in Europe since 1945? The odds are stacked against him. He will need to overcome Russian recalcitrance, Ukrainian indignation and European disunity. “It’s like Christopher Columbus trying to see over the ocean, thinking he is headed for India,” says Konstantin Gryshchenko, a former Ukrainian deputy prime minister and foreign secretary. The fear is that Mr Trump will push through a bad deal for appearances’ sake.

“Sure, you might say something silly once in a while, as I do, but that way people know it’s really you!” As part of a plea for “political & company leaders” to join him in holding forth on X, his social network, Elon Musk has repeatedly stressed that such posts offer an unusual and engaging authenticity. We have taken him at his word. What do his tweets say about him?

During his victory speech on election night, Donald Trump touched on most of the standard topics for such occasions. He thanked his supporters and his staff. He praised his wife and children. He pledged to keep faith with voters. But mostly, he talked about Elon Musk. Fully 17% of his remarks—as much time as he spent sketching out his plans for his presidency—were devoted to the “super-genius” who had taken a break from managing his various businesses to help Mr Trump’s campaign. He banged on about Mr Musk’s generosity, his efficiency and, most of all, the technological prowess of his firms: “That’s why I love you, Elon.”

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.