This week in The Economist

Despite the deckchairs on the cover of our summer supplement in last week’s print edition, our journalists have not activated their out-of-office replies. There is no print edition this week, but we continue to publish leaders, news stories, analysis and columns on our app and website. One person in particular has kept us busy this week: Donald Trump. The former president was indicted (again) on August 1st, this time for plotting to overturn the result of the election in 2020. As well as examining the charges against Mr Trump, we wrote about how the Republicans have closed ranks around him. Our Lexington columnist argues that only politics, not the law, will stop Mr Trump in 2024. And our leader explains why the indictment has in effect turned every American voter into a juror.

Plenty of other stories have gripped us this week. Ukraine’s counter-offensive has not made the progress against Russian forces that the country’s generals (and many of its allies) had hoped for. Our reporter near the southern front line met the soldiers trying to breach Russian defences, and we profiled the volunteer weaponsmiths 3D-printing bombs for Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia is turning to increasingly desperate measures to recruit soldiers, forbidding conscripts from leaving and making it harder to hide inside the country.

Investors may be hoping for a summer lull after a frantic first half of the year. Markets have spent months in party mode as the chances of a “soft landing”, in which central bankers succeed in quelling inflation without quashing growth, seem to have risen in many countries. We picked out five lessons for investors in a year of surprises. We also explored the future for Alphabet, asking if there’s more to the tech giant than Google search, and Volkswagen, which some think faces Nokia-style doom. And our Schumpeter columnist discovered what corporate consiglieri can learn from America’s most profitable law firm.

Finally, we examined what attitudes the world’s people share, and what they disagree on, through an in-depth, interactive analysis of the World Values Survey, the world’s biggest social-research exercise. You might think that growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance. In fact, even as the world is getting richer, large parts of it seem to be going backwards. Authoritarian countries, such as China, would have you believe that this means any talk of universal values is bunk. We argue the opposite: liberalism, which draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry, remains the best way to bring about progress.

Our weekly edition returns as usual on August 10th.