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Israel’s next election is formally a contest over who should govern, but the article argues that it is really a decision about whether the country can change course after years of war, political polarisation and growing international isolation. Binyamin Netanyahu offers voters continued military strength. His opponents promise repair. Neither side, however, has fully confronted the hardest choices that Israel faces.

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China’s leaders want more marriages and children, yet many of their policies make family life less attractive. The article argues that the Communist Party misreads the country’s demographic crisis as a failure of women to embrace traditional roles. By tolerating misogyny, sidelining women from power and leaving them poorly protected inside marriage, the state is aggravating the problem it hopes to solve.

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Donald Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to pursue enemies is the most visible sign of its politicization. The deeper danger, the article argues, is quieter: the department is losing experienced staff, abandoning important work, overwhelming itself with presidential obsessions and forfeiting the trust of judges. Those changes could weaken American law enforcement long after Trump leaves office.

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Donald Trump’s attempt to make peace with Iran has led into a strategic dead end. Washington offered unusually generous terms: Iran could regain hundreds of billions of dollars in trade and investment if it reopened the Strait of Hormuz and abandoned any ambition to build a nuclear bomb. Yet renewed fighting suggests that Iran’s hardliners value power, revenge and regional leverage more than economic relief.

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The Federal Reserve’s balance-sheet problem resembles a city built around a reservoir. Quantitative easing filled the financial system with liquidity; banks, markets and regulations then adapted to that abundance. Kevin Warsh, the Fed’s new chairman, would like to lower the waterline. The difficulty is that draining it too quickly could damage the system that grew up around it.

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Social media has changed who can give financial advice, but not the forces that shape it. Today’s “finfluencers” can reach millions without a television programme, a radio show or a wealthy clientele. Their best guidance is familiar: build an emergency fund, avoid scams, control expensive debt and invest for the long term. Yet once they move beyond those basics, their advice often reflects the characteristic financial habits of their own countries - sometimes correcting those habits and sometimes reinforcing them.

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Kevin Warsh wants to reshape the Federal Reserve, but he is beginning with advice rather than decrees. The new chair has assembled five public task forces to examine how the Fed communicates, manages its balance-sheet, uses alternative data, understands artificial intelligence and diagnoses inflation. The panels bring impressive expertise into the open. Their harder task will be turning divergent views into recommendations that the Fed’s consensus-driven leadership will actually adopt.

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China’s economy is weakening at an awkward moment. Its exports still look formidable, but the trade surplus that helped sustain growth may already have peaked. At home, meanwhile, fiscal policy is moving in the wrong direction: tax receipts are rising faster than spending, narrowing the budget deficit when weak demand calls for stimulus. The result is an accidental austerity that exposes the limits of relying on exports and high-tech industry.

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Oil markets are sending a misleadingly calm signal. Even after renewed fighting around the Strait of Hormuz, Brent crude remains well below its April peak. Yet the fuels people and businesses actually use - petrol, diesel and jet fuel - are scarce and expensive. The reason is that the global energy shock has shifted from oil wells to refineries: the world has enough crude, but too little capacity to turn it into usable products.

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The contest over global finance is shifting from currencies to the infrastructure that moves money. America still dominates that infrastructure through the dollar, its banks and firms such as Visa and Mastercard. Yet governments increasingly see dependence on American payment rails as a strategic vulnerability. Their response is to build national and regional alternatives - a trend that could weaken American financial power while making the global system more costly and fragmented.