Pope Francis’s funeral will take place on Saturday morning in St Peter’s Square, the Vatican has confirmed, and his body will be placed in St Peter’s Basilica tomorrow for public viewing. The Papal conclave, where cardinals will meet to elect a new pontiff, must begin between 15 and 20 days after the Pope’s death. US stocks tumbled and the dollar weakened yesterday after Donald Trump ramped up his attacks on the chairman of the Federal Reserve. The US president described Jerome Powell – whom he appointed during his first term – as a “major loser” for refusing to cut interest rates amid concerns that the Trump administration’s tariffs will lead to inflation. Wild chimpanzees have been filmed sharing alcohol-laced breadfruit, suggesting that human pub culture may have evolutionary roots. The boozing beasts in Guinea-Bissau chose the most over-ripe – and therefore alcoholic – fruit, and bonded over sharing it between them. 🦍🍻

A world of rival “fortresses”

For all the shock expressed over Donald Trump’s policies, says Yuval Noah Harari in the FT, they actually fit a very consistent and clearly defined world view. The US president sees everything as a “zero-sum game” in which all transactions – the movement of ideas, goods and people – involve winners and losers. His ideal world is a “mosaic of fortresses” where countries are separated by financial, military, cultural and physical walls. In this “Trumpian vision”, the only way to prevent disputes between rival fortresses is for the weak to do whatever the strong demand, meaning all wars are the fault of the weak. That’s why Trump blames Ukraine for the Russia invasion: in his view, Kyiv is weaker so it should have surrendered. The same logic applies to his plan for annexing Greenland – if he ends up having to conquer the territory by force, Copenhagen will bear “sole responsibility”.

One obvious problem with this approach is that everyone has to divert resources from economic development to defence. Another is that there is no clear method for determining “relative strength”. In 1965, the US was convinced it was much stronger than North Vietnam; in 1914, both Germany and Russia thought they could win the conflict by Christmas. Who in the current trade war between China and the US should “do the sensible thing and surrender in advance”? The good news is that the Trumpian vision is not some mystifying novelty – it was how the world worked for thousands of years before the rise of the liberal world order. The bad news is we know exactly where it leads: “a never-ending cycle of empire-building and war”.