Flagship

EU heavyweight chaos

The European Union’s traditional heavyweights France and Germany grappled with political challenges, the former hit with a credit ratings downgrade and the latter a government confidence vote. French leaders have struggled to pass a budget in the face of far-right opposition, with a third prime minister picking up the pieces from President Emmanuel Macron’s summer snap elections that saw centrist and moderate parties lose huge support. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, meanwhile, faces a confidence vote he is certain to lose, paving the way for February elections that will likely see him ousted from power. The verdict on his rule has not been pretty: “It wasn’t all bad,” was the best Die Zeit could come up with.

China’s global impact

New data signaled a further slowdown in China’s economy. Retail sales were below expectations and a real-estate slump deepened, adding pressure on policymakers whose pledges of fiscal and monetary stimulus to bolster flagging growth in the world’s second-largest economy have been met with skepticism by markets. The stakes are enormous, and global: Officials have tightened domestic security in response to worries that unemployment and other economic problems such as a heavy debt burden and a flailing property sector could spark social unrest, while the Australian government projected falling tax revenues as a result of lower mining profits due to reduced demand from China.

Rates in spotlight

A raft of global central banks — including the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan — will this week set interest rates. Policymakers in Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan, and the UK will also determine the path of their domestic borrowing costs, though analysts will focus in particular on decisions in Washington and Tokyo. In the former, the Fed is expected to reduce rates by 0.25 percentage points, but experts are changing their projections for the central bank’s future policy, betting on a slower pace of rate cuts. In the latter, economists are divided over whether officials will raise interest rates in the face of faster-than-expected inflation and upward revisions to economic growth.

AI’s shifting geopolitics

The global artificial intelligence rivalry centers around the US and China, but “middle powers” are reshaping the geopolitics of AI, analysts said. The European Union, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE all have their own “distinct strengths,” Boston Consulting Group said in recently published analysis. The EU has talent and a startup ecosystem, the Asian nations are crucial for hardware and have concentrated tech ecosystems, while the Gulf powers benefit from huge pools of capital and cheap energy. “Relying solely on… companies in the US or China could pose serious challenges,” BCG said in a note. “A more multipolar supply,” it continued, “increases complexity” but creates “critical optionality.”

India’s Russia trade boost

India moved to strengthen economic ties with Russia, increasing oil purchases and relying on Moscow to upgrade its own infrastructure. A major Indian refiner last week signed what Reuters described as the biggest-ever energy deal between the two countries, while The Indian Express noted a new maritime route opened this year was helping bolster bilateral trade. India has also awarded a contract to a St. Petersburg firm to build new long-distance passenger train carriages. Some Western officials have voiced frustration over Delhi’s continued trade with Moscow despite opprobrium tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. India counters that it enforces international sanctions but remains reliant on Russia for military goods, and argues that such trade anyway reduces Beijing’s sway over Moscow.

Trump’s isolationism opposed

Foreign and domestic leaders pressed US President-elect Donald Trump to reconsider his isolationism, a last-minute push ahead of his inauguration next month. Ukraine — reliant on the US for military support — has used “desperate stabs at diplomacy” and “fanciful expressions of flattery” to win over Trump, The New York Times reported, with one Ukrainian lawmaker nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Writing in Foreign Affairs, the outgoing Senate Republican leader called on Trump to “reject the myopic advice” to abandon Kyiv, which he warned would “compound the threats from China, Iran, and North Korea.” Ultimately, Trump may have little choice: Challenges such as Syria’s revolution, for example, may be “too important to ignore,” a Guardian writer noted.

Trump’s Venezuela options

US President-elect Donald Trump named a longtime foreign-policy adviser his special-missions envoy, tasking him with a particular focus on Venezuela and North Korea. Richard Grenell’s brief will be among the most complex in government: Trump made efforts to end Pyongyang’s nuclear program a priority in his first term, and ties with Caracas have long vexed Washington. Outgoing President Joe Biden — like Trump before him — recognized an exiled leader as Venezuela’s legitimate president, only for the incumbent Nicolás Maduro to survive. Washington’s prior options of ramping up pressure on Caracas or moving to normalization may each do more harm than good, an expert wrote in Americas Quarterly: “New circumstances demand a new strategy.”

Syria refugees’ fraught choice

Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow has triggered huge uncertainty for millions of Syrians who fled his regime but are now considering whether to return home. Some six million Syrians are elsewhere in the Middle East and parts of Europe, driven abroad by the civil war, and while many have sought to return home, “euphoric optimism has been offset… by the uncertainties of what may await them,” Bloomberg noted. As one expert warned, returnees may face violence, as well as a devastated economy and homes that may have been destroyed, to say nothing of questions over the provision over basic services as winter sets in. Most importantly, “flooding Syrians back makes the odds of a successful transition in Syria even longer.”

Cyclone batters Indian Ocean

A cyclone wrought devastation on the French territory of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, leaving huge numbers dead while wrecking infrastructure and housing. Officials put the death toll at several hundred — Le Monde described apocalyptic scenes — but warned that reaching a precise figure would be difficult because about a third of the island’s population is made up of people who live on the margins after fleeing nearby Comoros, and the local Muslim tradition of seeking to bury the dead within 24 hours would add further complexity to the task. Scientists have ascribed the intensity of storms such as the one that hammered Mayotte in part to climate change, with warming temperatures raising the risk of more extreme weather.

Le Corbusier site for sale

A mixed-use development designed by the legendary architect Le Corbusier in a ritzy Paris neighborhood is up for auction, a century after it was first built. The three-storey Miestchaninoff House-Studio was commissioned by two mainstays of the French capital’s art scene, and went up in 1925 but has thus far never been on sale. It features an “eye-catching cylindrical turret, expansive decks, and curved staircase inside,” Artnet said, evoking the “sunny, vacation feel” of a cruise ship, similar to the one on which Le Corbusier is famed to have fallen in love with the singer Josephine Baker. The 4,300-square-foot structure is on sale for €4.95 million, or about $5.2 million.

• Sri Lanka’s president visits New Delhi in his first foreign trip since taking office.
• The leaders of 10 northern European countries, including Norway and the UK, meet for talks in Tallinn.
• The Confederation of African Football names the African Footballer of the Year.

A garden in winter

“I love December,” writes the English painter Deborah Vass. “There is a quality of light that only exists in the days leading to the Winter Solstice.” In her newsletter, Still Sketching, Vass discusses paintings that catch her attention: This time, Winter Garden by Evelyn Dunbar, an image of the artist’s family home seen through the leafless trees and bare vegetable patches of the garden on a grey December day. “Garden paintings in art rarely show gardens out of season,” notes Vass. “More often they celebrate burgeoning midsummer, but here we see the bones of the garden.”

Vass, a gardener herself, notes that the work “is also about those moments before dusk slips into dark, when the gardener retreats inside after a hard day’s digging, to warm against the chill.” Dunbar, who was little known in her lifetime but has been rediscovered, spent eight years on the painting, likely because the hours of good light are so short in December. The garden is no more, “buried beneath concrete and a housing estate,” but is preserved in Dunbar’s “wonderful drawings and paintings.”

Sherry trifles

Sherry, the sweetened fortified wine, is originally Spanish, vino de Xeres. But it has for centuries been associated with Britain, and in particular with British grannies, because Britain has traditionally had a sweet tooth when it comes to wine. “Since Shakespeare’s times wines shipped to Britain have been sweetened and fortified,” the drinks writer Henry Jeffreys notes. He quotes a Victorian wine merchant who said he always sweetened any dry wine destined for England, “because I know that if I sent the wine in its natural state I should be certain to have it returned.”

And as long as that has been true, “there have been sherry hipsters complaining that they weren’t authentic,” among them Charles Dickens: Sherry is “among the most-maligned styles of wine.” But, Jeffreys writes in his newsletter Drinking Culture, the fact remains that a nice sweet sherry is delicious, especially during a cold British Christmas: “Not only does it taste good but it warms you up and it goes brilliantly with all kinds of Christmassy things… When the temperature is dropping and your wood fire is struggling to heat your draughty Victorian house, then it’s time to reach for the sweet sherry.”

A year to remember

Not everyone will remember 2024 with fondness, so perhaps it’s worth looking back at some of the unmistakably good things that happened. The science writer Saloni Dattani, on her Substack Scientific Discovery, highlights five medical breakthroughs of the year. Among them: Lenacapavir, a long-acting HIV drug which only needs injecting twice a year. Existing HIV treatments are very effective, but require daily pills, and that’s difficult in sub-Saharan Africa, the most-affected region, where supplies can be short.

The others: Omalizumab reduces allergic reactions to food, and was approved by US regulators this year. Around 150 people die from food allergies annually in the US alone. Xanomeline-trospium successfully reduces the symptoms of schizophrenia, without the grim and debilitating side-effects of other antipsychotics. Tirzepatide, the latest weight-loss drug, is more effective than Wegovy, and could help millions battle obesity. And osimertinib extended the life of people with advanced lung cancer by almost three years. These aren’t one-offs, says Dattani: “They’re a few striking examples in a continuing stream of medical innovation,” part of why we live longer than ever before.

Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson and translated by Saskia Vogel. This translation of a 2018 novel follows three generations of the Indigenous Sami people of Norway as they try to preserve a way of life challenged by modernity. It will “take you inside a world and an experience that you couldn’t otherwise access, and make you ache for it,” a writer wrote in The Paris Review, which named it one of its Best Books of 2024. Buy Ædnan from your local bookstore.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is open to collaborating with the incoming Trump administration to foster an AI “Manhattan Project,” Semafor’s Reed Albergotti scooped. In the interview, Pichai pushed back on the idea that AI development is slowing, or that Google lagged behind on chatbots. “If you’re Pichai, you’re betting on that upward trajectory and you need your company to be at the upper right, relative to competitors,” Albergotti wrote.