The world’s hottest video app will appear in court on Monday to fight for survival in its biggest market. America passed a law in April requiring that TikTok’s business in the country be sold to a non-Chinese owner within 12 months, or else face a ban. ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based owner, says it has no intention of selling; China’s government would probably not allow it anyway. So the app, which has 170m American users, is hoping to overturn the law.

TikTok will claim that the ban infringes its right to free speech. America’s government will argue that the app is a national-security threat, since its content—including news—could be manipulated by propagandists. If TikTok’s appeal fails it may yet do a deal with the next president. Kamala Harris broadly backs the government’s position, but Donald Trump, who once tried to ban the app, now says he wants to keep it online.

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, describes his general-election upset in June as a vote for “continuity”. Despite losing his party’s parliamentary majority, forcing him to rely on coalition partners to form a government, he has barely changed his cabinet. Facing imminent regional elections, his Bharatiya Janata Party is campaigning on a familiar platform of development and Hindu nationalism. Now the new government is trumpeting completion of an action plan for its first 100 days, a deadline which it reaches at the start of this week.

Mr Modi and his ministers started compiling the plan in March. They have indeed hit many targets, among them approving 3,000km of highway projects, expanding an affordable-housing programme and launching a new national pension scheme. Less well publicised are some tweaks to the plan since the election, which include ditching some privatisations and reviewing a controversial military-recruitment scheme. Continuity, perhaps. But compromise, too.

Italy’s final inflation figures for August, released on Monday, are attracting more interest than usual. Inflation had been the least of the problems of Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right government. The headline rate has dropped sharply from a peak of almost 12% year on year in late 2022. But after appearing to flatten out at around 0.8%, it jumped to 1.3% in July before easing slightly to 1.1% in August. Core inflation, which strips out energy (and fresh food), remained stable at 1.9% in August.

Italy still looks on target to meet the European Central Bank’s 2% target. Modest price rises, however, often reflect low GDP growth. The government’s estimate is for a rise of just 1% in 2024. Many independent forecasters think even that is optimistic. But in that respect, too, Italy is not so out of line with its peers. The ECB last week cut its forecast for growth in the euro zone to 0.8%.

On Monday Germany reintroduced controls for six months at land borders with France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. Checks at the borders with Austria, Switzerland, Poland and the Czech Republic are already in place. Police will have the powers to refuse entry, as permitted by European Union and national law.

With this attempt to curb illegal immigration, Germany’s interior ministry is trying to take the wind out of the sails of the hard-right Alternative for Germany party. It made big electoral gains at elections on September 1st in the eastern German states of Saxony and Thuringia. Olaf Scholz’s coalition government also wants to calm Germans’ angst after a fatal knife attack in the western city of Solingen by a Syrian asylum-seeker who had lost the right to stay in the country. Some of Germany’s neighbours, however, are highly critical of the border decision. The Austrian interior minister has already said that his country will not accept asylum-seekers rejected by Germany.

The Booker prize, for the best work of fiction in the English language, is “posh bingo”, wrote Julian Barnes, long before he won it himself after his fourth shortlisting. Judges can seem less like they are making analytical decisions than like they are picking names at random. Esteemed authors have missed out, including Martin Amis and Angela Carter. Doris Lessing won a Nobel prize, but never a Booker.

Yet judging literary prizes is hard. This year’s Booker longlist offers several riveting tomes: there is a dark retelling of Huckleberry Finn (Percival Everett’s “James”); a generation-spanning family saga (Claire Messud’s “This Strange Eventful History”); and a plunging investigation of the deep ocean (Richard Powers’s “Playground”). For the first time, the list features a Dutch author (Yael van der Wouden for “The Safekeep”) and a Native American one (Tommy Orange for “Wandering Stars”). On Monday the shortlist is announced. It is safe to say that a lot of good books won’t be on it.