The Debate

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Paris this Thursday for a special visit. Modi is the guest of honour at the July 14 military parade on the Champs-Élysées, but his visit is also expected to deepen ties with New Delhi's oldest strategic partner in the West, with a deal worth over €5 billion for India to take delivery of 26 French Rafale fighter jets.

US President Joe Biden laid out his vision in Vilnius and threw down the gauntlet to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, who is now further isolated by a NATO summit that strengthens the Alliance at Russia's border. That summit came in the wake of wavering Russian support for Putin's Ukraine campaign.

NATO is no longer brain dead. Emmanuel Macron, who authored that quip back in 2019, can thank Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine for that. But now that it's back to its original mission of containing Russia, can the Alliance keep up?

Too old, too out of touch, gaffe-prone – the president of the United States has his critics. But has Russia's invasion of Ukraine put 80-year-old Joe Biden back in the saddle? The veteran Cold warrior sat down with the new British king on Monday, before flying to the NATO summit, where Washington's all-in attitude has been crucial for Kyiv and has put US might back at the heart of Europe's defence strategy.

News junkies can be forgiven for not having heard of gallium and germanium until now. That's all about to change. If our growing general knowledge of the periodic table seemed timed with the visit to Beijing of the US Treasury Secretary, that's because China is announcing controls on exports of key rare minerals that only it produces; minerals essential for microchips as well as electric vehicles and fibre-optic cables.

It's an easy way to get clicks when the world's richest man challenges the ninth richest to a cage fight. But it's actually win-win for them if the owner of Twitter and the founder of Facebook have us debating whether we are Team Musk or Team Zuckerberg, instead of the outsized power the pair enjoy thanks to the concentration of popular, mostly unregulated social media platforms in the hands of a few.

It's almost as if it never happened. The unrivalled master of the Kremlin for 23 years has emerged from a moment of wavering with the leader of an aborted march on Moscow now sidelined and forced abroad, Russian troops on the frontlines in Ukraine who continue to hold their own and a public opinion that's either staying out of it or still squarely behind Vladimir Putin.

How can France pick up the pieces? From the anger over a police shooting and its attempted cover-up, to the riots and destruction that have left a local mayor's wife in hospital, has the violence now drowned out the legitimate outrage over what sparked it? There is no justification for looting and destruction, nor for the targeting of law enforcement with firecrackers. Why are so many of those in the street so young? Was the escalation avoidable? We ask about the state's response.

After two nights of rioting, battle lines are drawn over Tuesday's police shooting of Nahel, the 17-year-old driver who tried to flee the scene in Nanterre, west of Paris. One officer faces potential murder charges. The fact that he is even in custody is a rarity in France. Tensions over policing and France's unresolved issues with its banlieues, its working-class suburbs, are coming to the fore.

A continent away from the Kremlin, a host of African strongmen are now waiting for the chips to fall in Moscow. Russia's foreign minister took to the airwaves on Monday to immediately insist that it's business as usual for the Wagner Group's ties to the continent. Why the haste? It turns out Yevgeny Prigozhin's outfit is much more than guns for hire: it's influence and a cash cow.