World leaders gather on Tuesday for the annual summit of the UN General Assembly. As fighting escalates between Israel and Hizbullah, a Lebanese militia, several of the central characters will attend UNGA. They include Joe Biden; Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister; Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president; and Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president. None seems able to halt the spiral into a regional war.

Mr Biden will be making his final appearance at the UN at a time when America’s standing has been weakened by the wars in the Middle East. He can expect appreciation for his work to repair America’s relations with the UN , but disappointment at his inability to secure a ceasefire in Gaza. Many leaders worry about what Donald Trump could bring if he wins in November.

The Middle East crisis has also overshadowed the war in Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, will try to rally support for his “plan for victory”. But Russia is benefiting from a surge of the anti-Western feeling.

On Tuesday the Azerbaijani team in charge of COP29, which will be held in Baku in November, and the International Energy Agency, a global forecaster, will convene an “energy-transition dialogue” in New York. The meeting is the third in a series aimed at “building international consensus” on how to reach net zero. It is meant to help countries work towards commitments they made at COP28 last year, including the pledge to “transition away” from fossil fuels.

But even the dialogue’s hosts do not agree with each other. The IEA says that new coal or long-term oil and gas projects will prevent countries from meeting the goals of the Paris agreement , signed in 2015. Azerbaijan argues otherwise. Fossil fuels are more than 90% of the country’s exports; it plans to expand gas production by a third in the next decade. In July Elnur Soltanov, the COP29 chief executive, claimed that this could still be compatible with climate goals.

On Tuesday an American Senate committee will grill Lars Jorgensen, the boss of Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical firm, over the high prices of the company’s diabetes and obesity medications. The drugs, called GLP-1, are extremely popular. But according to KFF, a health think-tank, Americans pay around $1,350 a month for Novo’s slimming jabs, more than four times as much as Germans. Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont who leads the committee, believes that alternatives could be sold for as little as $100 per month. But they will not be available any time soon owing to patent protections.

Another solution to lowering prices is through insurance. Medicare, America’s public-health insurer for the elderly, is barred from covering anti-obesity medicines. But evidence is growing that GLP -1 drugs can help with diseases of the heart, kidney and liver. Mr Jorgensen will try to convince lawmakers (and insurers) that the drugs’ wider uses justify their hefty prices.

Last week America’s Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a percentage point. Central banks in Canada, Britain, Europe and New Zealand have also started easing. But Australia’s Reserve Bank is holding firm. In its latest monetary-policy decision, announced on Tuesday, the central bank left interest rates unchanged for a seventh meeting in a row.

Australia’s central bankers fear that inflation has not yet fallen close enough to their target of 2-3%. Prices rose at an annual rate of 3.5% in the year to July; core inflation—which strips out volatile energy and food prices—is higher at 3.7%. Australian unemployment, meanwhile, is still near record lows. In August Michelle Bullock, the Reserve Bank’s governor, warned that a rate cut would not happen anytime soon. Only one of Australia’s big four banks expects easing to start this year.

Sally Rooney has become the premier novelist of her generation by writing about “normal people”, to borrow the title of her second novel, which was published in 2018. But nothing about her career is normal. With her quiet stories of millennials stumbling through their personal lives, she has conquered both critics and consumers. Ms Rooney has sold more than 3m books in Britain and Ireland alone. Two of her novels have been adapted for television.

Her fourth, “Intermezzo” , comes out on Tuesday. The beautifully observed tale centres on two brothers in the period after their father’s death. Peter is a successful Dublin lawyer in a love triangle, and Ivan is a chess whizz who falls for an older woman. Ms Rooney’s characters are maturing as she does, focusing more on love than on their beliefs. But as with the author’s earlier creations, they often cause pain when they mean to be kind.