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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.

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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.