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The proposed merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery is more than a fight over the future of Hollywood. It has become a test of how antitrust enforcement is changing as American politics grows more partisan and state governments take on a larger role.

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Mykhailo Fedorov entered Ukraine’s defence ministry as a proven moderniser and left after only six months. His removal shows why changing a military during wartime is not merely a technical problem. Fedorov could expose waste, accelerate procurement and design ambitious personnel reforms, but he could not overcome a command structure that distrusted his methods or build the political alliances needed to make disruption last.

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Red Bull looks like a drinks company, but its real product is a carefully engineered identity. The energy drink itself is easy to imitate. What rivals struggle to reproduce is the world of speed, daring and elite performance that surrounds it - from Formula One and football to record-breaking stunts. That brand machine has kept growing even after the death of founder Dietrich Mateschitz, though the same strategy now attracts mounting scrutiny.

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SK Hynix has gone from near-collapse to the front of the artificial-intelligence boom. Once a struggling second-place memory-chip maker, it now leads the market for the high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, that feeds data to advanced AI processors. Its recovery shows how patient technical bets and a collaborative culture can let an underdog overtake incumbents. It also exposes the danger of expanding at the top of a notoriously cyclical market.

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Europe says it wants larger companies capable of competing with American and Asian giants. Its leaders call for deeper integration, more investment and new “European champions”. Yet scale cannot be created by declarations or a common incorporation regime alone. In practice, it requires mergers across national borders - and dealmakers willing to push through the political resistance those mergers provoke.

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Eli Lilly has become the first pharmaceutical company valued above \$1trn, a status usually reserved for technology giants. Its rise rests largely on Zepbound and other GLP-1 medicines, which have turned obesity treatment into one of the industry’s biggest new markets. Yet chief executive Dave Ricks is using that success to pursue a broader ambition: remaking Lilly from a conventional drugmaker into a company built around prevention, direct relationships with patients and reusable technological platforms.

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China’s property slump has forced local governments to rethink a development model that once seemed inexhaustible. For years, cities raised cash by selling land for new construction. With home prices down and developers retreating, that source of revenue has collapsed. Officials are now looking inward: cataloguing public property, repairing neglected sites and trying to earn more from assets the state already owns.

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The European Union’s carbon market was designed to make pollution expensive without prescribing exactly how firms should cut it. That elegant idea is now colliding with industrial politics. As carbon permits become scarcer and costlier, governments fear that the policy meant to clean up European production will instead push factories, jobs and investment elsewhere.

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The Strait of Hormuz is both a weapon and a trap. Iran can threaten one of the world’s most important oil routes, while America can punish Iran for doing so. Yet neither side can achieve its real goal through force: Washington cannot bomb the waterway open, and Tehran cannot earn money from a passage that ships are too frightened to use.

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Europe is spending far more on defence because its leaders increasingly believe that Russia’s war could spread beyond Ukraine. Yet budgets and weapons are only part of deterrence. The harder question, Nathalie Tocci argues, is whether societies at peace can develop the psychological readiness to fight before a crisis forces it upon them.