The Economist Latin America November 12, 2022

The Democrats fared better than expected in America’s midterm elections. The Republicans were on course to capture the House of Representatives, but with just a small majority. It was not clear which party will control the Senate, and may not become so until December, when Georgia holds a run-off. Republicans lost several winnable races after nominating extreme and eccentric candidates favoured by Donald Trump. Joe Biden said it was “a good day…for democracy”. In the governors’ elections, Brian Kemp, a Republican, beat Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, in Georgia. Ms Abrams had lost in 2018, too. Then, she denied that she had done so; this time, she admitted defeat. In New York Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, held off a late surge by a Republican candidate who accused her of being soft on…

Meta laid off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce, amid falling revenues from advertising and e-commerce. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whats-App is also considering other cost-cutting measures, and suggested it would close offices. In a separate filing it said it expects losses to grow significantly next year at its Reality Labs division, at a time when investors are already frustrated with Meta’s focus on creating a metaverse at the expense of the rest of the business. Mark Zuckerberg said he took full responsibility. The company’s market value is now around $270bn, down from $1trn in September 2021. The great tech shake-out Meta was not the only big tech company to announce job cuts. Stripe, an online payments firm, is letting go of 14% of its workforce, and Lyft,…

SHORTLY BEFORE the midterm elections, Donald Trump held a rally in Ohio. “Our country is becoming third-world,” he told voters. Later he hinted—is threatened a better word?—that he would soon announce he was running for president again. What could possibly go wrong for a party with such a figurehead? Or for one whose primary voters are so keen to relitigate the 2020 election that they chose a slate of candidates in key Senate seats chiefly for being the true keepers of the Trump flame? Quite a lot, it turns out. The most important result of the 2022 midterms, for America and for the West, is that Mr Trump and his way of doing politics came out of them diminished. This will disappoint all those people, including the autocrats in Beijing and…

The Democrats fared better than expected in America’s midterm elections. The Republicans were on course to capture the House of Representatives, but with just a small majority. It was not clear which party will control the Senate, and may not become so until December, when Georgia holds a run-off. Republicans lost several winnable races after nominating extreme and eccentric candidates favoured by Donald Trump. Joe Biden said it was “a good day…for democracy”. In the governors’ elections, Brian Kemp, a Republican, beat Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, in Georgia. Ms Abrams had lost in 2018, too. Then, she denied that she had done so; this time, she admitted defeat. In New York Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, held off a late surge by a Republican candidate who accused her of being soft…

Meta laid off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce, amid falling revenues from advertising and e-commerce. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whats-App is also considering other cost-cutting measures, and suggested it would close offices. In a separate filing it said it expects losses to grow significantly next year at its Reality Labs division, at a time when investors are already frustrated with Meta’s focus on creating a metaverse at the expense of the rest of the business. Mark Zuckerberg said he took full responsibility. The company’s market value is now around $270bn, down from $1trn in September 2021. The great tech shake-out Meta was not the only big tech company to announce job cuts. Stripe, an online payments firm, is letting go of 14% of its workforce,…

IMAGINE A VICTORIOUS Ukraine in 2030. It is a democratic nation, preparing to join the European Union. Reconstruction is almost complete. The economy is growing fast; it is clean and diverse enough to keep corrupt oligarchs at bay. All this is underpinned by stout Ukrainian security. Defence against another invasion does not depend on the Kremlin’s goodwill, but on the sense that renewed Russian aggression would never succeed. Today, as Russia’s tattered army appears to retreat from Kherson in the south, an end to the fighting still seems far off (see Europe section). But news that Ukraine and its backers are starting to outline their views of the future makes sense, because the coming months will determine what is possible at the decade’s end. It means thinking about how to rebuild…