On Friday the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, a 50-member coalition of the country’s international supporters, meets again at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Ukraine wants to speed up deliveries of air-defence systems. On Tuesday Russian Iskander ballistic missiles hit a military academy and a hospital in the central town of Poltava. It was the deadliest attack of the year so far, killing at least 51 people. The next day another strike killed seven people in Lviv to the west. Volodymyr Zelensky, the president, noted that Western air-defence systems were no use “sitting in storage”.

Meanwhile, Russia continues its slow, costly advance on Pokrovsk , an important logistics hub. But there are signs that Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region is forcing the Russians to redeploy forces from the front line, including some earmarked for the Pokrovsk offensive. Ukrainian analysts expect Russian troops to reach Pokrovsk by mid-September, but claim they will struggle to capture it.

Michel Barnier (pictured) begins his first day as France’s prime minister on Friday. The appointment on Thursday of the 73-year-old centre-right politician, formerly the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, was a surprise. It took President Emmanuel Macron two months, and endless talks, to find a figure who might survive in the country’s new hung parliament, dominated by three minority blocs.

Mr Barnier now faces a task as tough as those Brexit negotiations. He needs to form a government and put together a budget by October. Yet France’s public finances are worsening; savings will be necessary. The budget deficit is expected to reach 5.6% of GDP in 2024, well above the EU ’s limit of 3%. Meanwhile the left-wing alliance in parliament will make Mr Barnier’s job as difficult as it can. It won more seats at the general election in July than any other bloc, and is enraged that the post has gone to the centre-right. Street demonstrations are planned for Saturday.

Investors always closely watch America’s monthly jobs report. When new numbers come out on Friday they will pay even more attention than usual. Worries have been mounting about the health of the economy, unsettling global markets. Last month, unanticipated weakness in the jobs report for July contributed to a big sell-off in stocks. If that occurs again with August’s data, the sell-off may well be even worse.

Analysts believe that the economy added 160,000 jobs last month, up from 114,000 in July. Moreover, they think the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2% from 4.3%. Such figures would help inspire confidence that the American economy remains resilient and that July’s soft patch was an aberration. But weaker figures would be alarming and could persuade the Federal Reserve to start its interest-rate cutting cycle this month with a big reduction.

In recent years America’s antitrust regulators have waged war on big tech. The saga continues on Friday, when Judge Amit Mehta is expected to hold a hearing on what to do with Google, the owner of the world’s dominant internet search engine. Last month he ruled that it had illegally maintained its monopoly, in particular by paying billions of dollars to Apple and other companies to be the default search provider on their devices.

But don’t expect a clear steer on what will happen to Google. Even America’s Department of Justice, which brought this case against Google, is not sure what to do. Possible remedies range from the draconian, such as splitting up Google, to the probably inconsequential, such as telling it to stop making such payments. Whatever the remedy, Google is sure to appeal. Once things are finally settled in a few years, the decision may no longer matter in an ever-faster moving industry.

Mormonism is America’s homegrown religion. Yet less than 2% of the country’s population belong to it. This is in part because it has fostered controversial practices. (In the 19th century the church taught that polygamy was central to salvation.) In recent years discussion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has spread on social media. Some Mormon housewives have gone viral on TikTok, a video-sharing platform, with clips of domestic work and daily scriptures.

In 2022 some were the centre of a scandal. A TikToker revealed that one popular group of Mormon housewives were “swinging” (exchanging husbands). On Friday Hulu will release a docuseries about the affair—“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives”. It tells the story of the scandal and its aftermath. The women challenge traditional gender roles prevalent in Mormon culture by disregarding many of the church’s rules. No doubt viewers will be gripped.