China had its hottest August in over 60 years. The north of the country suffered damaging rainstorms; the south endured persistent heatwaves. The bad weather helped to push up vegetable prices by nearly 22% compared with a year earlier. But despite this, inflation remained subdued: consumer prices overall rose by just 0.6%. The hot weather was offset by cool demand.

That weakness was also evident in other economic indicators released on Saturday. Industrial production grew by 4.5% year on year in August, slower than expected, and retail sales expanded by just 2.1%, before adjusting for inflation. China’s new property prices also suffered their sharpest decline in nine years. China’s government still hopes to reach this year’s official growth target of 5% with the help of exports, which have remained surprisingly strong. But the government needs to do more to revive homegrown demand, especially by stabilising the property market. Not even China’s leaders can control the weather. But they share some of the blame for the country’s subdued economic climate.

FIFA, football’s governing body, has done an impressive job taking football around the world, having hosted World Cups on six continents. But it has never put on a tournament in Uzbekistan. That honour goes to another sport—futsal—a form of five-a-side football popular in Portugal, Spain and Latin America. Its smaller ball and pitch rewards players with a deft touch, clever tricks and serious sprinting ability. Its popularity is growing: this year four teams (Afghanistan, France, New Zealand and Tajikistan) are making their World Cup futsal debut.

FIFA has previously hosted the tournament in Guatemala and Lithuania, as well as in traditional powerhouses such as Spain and Brazil. For Uzbekistan, hosting is a coup. The country’s futsal team qualified for the two previous World Cups, but it won just one of its six matches. Until now, Uzbek football has been better known for its corruption scandals than competitive triumphs. A successful tournament would help its standing in global football.

American television executives are fond of importing British television shows and giving them a stateside flavour. The results have been mixed. For every hit American adaptation, such as “The Office”, there have been umpteen flops (see “Fawlty Towers” and “The Inbetweeners”). Some things, it seems, are quintessentially British.

The producers of “Have I Got News For You”, which launches on CNN on Saturday, will be hoping the satirical news show is not one of them. There are some differences between the iterations. One is the host: a different celebrity presents each instalment of the British show, but Roy Wood junior (pictured), a stand-up comedian, will front every episode of the American version.

Another is competition. The run-up to a presidential election seems the ideal time to launch a topical panel show, but America already has a wealth of late-night talk shows covering current affairs. CNN has news for viewers, but they may well prefer to hear about it elsewhere.

Crowds fill the Royal Albert Hall in London, waving Union Jacks and singing along to patriotic hymns. That is how the Last Night of the Proms, the conclusion of an eight-week classical festival that takes place on Saturday, is usually celebrated. But recently the grand finale has struck a discordant note. Last year the sight of EU flags waving along to the rhythmic march of “Rule Britannia” sparked a backlash from Brexit supporters. This year, organisers warned vaguely that flags related to “protest” or “hatred” would be prohibited; some have speculated that this directive is aimed at Palestinian flags.

“Rule Britannia” itself is a point of contention. Critics point to its associations with colonialism and slavery. Before the Proms in 2020 the BBC announced it would cut the lyrics , before reversing the decision after a fierce backlash. Angel Blue is the soprano set to sing the anthem’s high notes this year, promising both musical and political drama.

Ginni Thomas is well-bred and speaks with a sunny, Midwestern lilt. She wears a twinset and pearls, a blonde bob and a broad smile. She hates communism but loves liberty, free enterprise and small government. You would not guess that someone so genteel could be so perennially aggrieved.

Mrs Thomas, whose ultra-conservative husband, Clarence Thomas, sits on America’s Supreme Court, once described her younger self as “shy and reticent and retiring”. Now, in her upbeat way, she speaks of herself as a warrior. She wages her war against bureaucrats, Democrats, welfare recipients, lobbyists, the mainstream media and the Black Lives Matter movement. She also wages it against anyone who would clip her husband’s wings, or her own. Such fighting spirit has landed Mrs Thomas at the centre of a row over judicial ethics.

Last week ProPublica, an investigative outlet, reported that Mrs Thomas had praised the lobbying of a conservative-Christian legal group against a proposed stricter code of conduct for Supreme Court justices. On September 9th Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator who supports the proposed code, demanded that Justice Thomas recuse himself from cases involving those Christian lawyers. It is hardly the first suggestion that Mrs Thomas’s activism presents a conflict of interest for her husband.

In 1986 Ginni met Clarence at a conference. Their upbringings could hardly have been more different. Mrs Thomas was born to a well-off family in Nebraska, and raised among white-picket fences and overwhelmingly white faces. Justice Thomas grew up dirt poor in Georgia speaking Geechee, the language of the black Gullah people. Yet their shared convictions—intensely sceptical of government intervention and anti-discrimination programmes—made for a match.

The couple’s crucible came during Justice Thomas’s confirmation hearing in 1991. Anita Hill, a former subordinate, accused him of sexual harassment. On national television she recounted how he spoke to her about his sex life and about a porn star named Long Dong Silver. He denied it all; his wife shepherded him through the ordeal.

Her activism expanded during the presidency of Barack Obama. But after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Mrs Thomas’s activity grew unhinged. She attended the pro-Trump rally in Washington that preceded the Capitol insurrection, though she left before the violence. Yet by text she fulminated to Mark Meadows, then Mr Trump’s chief of staff, about the “greatest Heist of our History”. “Release the Kraken,” she wrote, “and save us from the left taking America down”.

Earlier this year Justice Thomas refused to recuse himself from a case about whether Mr Trump should be immune from prosecution over his attempts to overturn the election result. That was true to form: the justice has long denied that his wife’s activism is in conflict with his judicial role. He claims that they discuss neither her politics nor his court work—a restraint on Mrs Thomas’s part that is absent from her public life.