THE WORLD IN BRIEF
America’s GDP grew by 5.7% in 2021, its fastest annual rate in almost four decades. GDP in the final three months of 2021 grew by an unexpectedly high 6.9% year-on-year compared with 2.3% growth in the previous quarter. Despite the record growth, analysts expect economic growth to slow in 2022 as it grapples with high inflation and yet more covid-19 cases.
The first doses were administered in the clinical trial of an experimental HIV vaccine developed by Moderna, using the same mRNA technology as their covid-19 jab. The trial, run in partnership with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, is the first time that humans have received an mRNA vaccine for HIV, according to the IAVI.
Air India, India’s national carrier, was officially handed over to the Tata Group, after the steel conglomerate bought the carrier for $2.4bn in October. The government has tried to flog the debt-ridden airline for years; recently it has been incurring losses of $2.6m a day. The handover to Tata is the government’s biggest divestment from state-owned companies since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014.
North Korea is thought to have fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast on Thursday. It is the sixth missile test the nuclear-armed country has carried out this month, one of its busiest ever for weapons testing. America, Japan and South Korea all roundly condemned the tests, which they say violate UN Security Council resolutions.
Woodside Petroleum, an Australian firm, will withdraw from Myanmar, following similar decisions by Total and Chevron last week. The oil companies have come under increasing pressure over their partnerships with Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, a state-owned firm that is controlled by the junta who seized power in a coup last year. Around 50% of Myanmar’s foreign currency comes from natural gas revenues.
Fact of the day: 114, the number of days it takes a container ship to sail from China to America, which is longer than ever. 
TODAY’S AGENDA
Europe talks to Russia
When it comes to Russia, European leaders have struggled to find a seat at the negotiating table. The most important talks over Ukraine have been conducted between Russia and America. The “Normandy format”, established in 2014 to bring together France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia, is largely moribund. On Friday Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, will try to redress this. In a phone conversation with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, Mr Macron will propose a “path of de-escalation” from the looming crisis.
The EU has warned Russia of “massive consequences” should it take further military action. But there are fractures within the club. Mr Macron’s suggestion that the EU should pursue its own talks with Russia has angered eastern Europeans who fear he is undermining NATO. Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, has infuriated Ukraine and other allies by refusing to allow German-made arms to be sent to the beleaguered country. If Europe wants Mr Putin to listen, it will need to find a single voice. 
Islamic State’s strength in Syria
That it was predictable made it no less of a disaster. On January 20th Islamic State stormed a prison near Hasakah, in north-east Syria, which housed some 5,000 detainees, many suspected of links to the group. It took almost a week for the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia, to wrest back control of the prison. Dozens of people were killed in the fighting. Scores of inmates escaped. 
The prison siege was a worrying sign of Islamic State’s resilience: though it no longer holds territory, it carries out 100 to 150 attacks a month in Iraq and Syria (most are far smaller than this). But it was also an avoidable crisis. Thousands of detainees in north-east Syria are foreign citizens whose governments refuse to repatriate them. Instead they remain in squalid, crowded camps and prisons, which have become hubs for radicalisation—and tempting targets for escape attempts.
Stockmarkets in turmoil
It has been a rocky start to 2022 for markets. The year-to-date fall in the NASDAQ composite, an American index of technology shares, is well into the double digits. The S&P 500 index is not far behind. Share prices are changeable hour by hour, with strong rallies giving way to fresh declines. 
Three factors explain the jumpiness. First, the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates soon. Jerome Powell, the Fed’s boss, has refused to rule out a rapid series of rises. Second, America’s economy will slow this year, perhaps sharply. This week the IMF shaved 1.2 percentage points off its forecast for annual GDP growth, to 4%. Third, American stocks are expensive. Only in the late 1990s have they been been valued more richly relative to earnings over the business cycle. How far the Fed goes and how far the economy slows both depend on how quickly inflation comes down. Expect further volatility.
France’s economic recovery
In the third quarter of 2021 French GDP very nearly recovered to pre-pandemic levels. But figures for the final quarter, due to be released on Friday, are expected to show that the rebound has slowed. Late last year France introduced light restrictions to manage a fifth wave of covid-19 infections; and global supply-chain problems continued to plague industry, particularly car-manufacturing. 
Luckily for Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, confidence is expected to return ahead of the presidential election in April, as covid-19 restrictions ease. The IMF forecasts GDP growth of 3.5% in 2022, backed by strong fiscal support and private-sector investment. One surprising upside from the French recovery has been an increase in the employment rate to above pre-pandemic levels. In theory, this ought to help Mr Macron. But the political extremes, which are particularly strong on the hard right, will do their best to play down all signs of a relatively robust recovery.
Footnotes: our defence editor on the future of warfare
Recent conflicts in Libya, Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh have shown how cheap drones can tear through tanks and other equipment. Shashank Joshi, our defence editor, explains in the latest Technology Quarterly how a revolution in sensors—from infrared cameras on drones to radar on satellites—is changing war. 
Shashank’s report was inspired in part by a publication from Britain’s Ministry of Defence last year. It concluded that war is increasingly “a competition between hiding and finding”, with finders getting the upper hand given the number and quality of sensors, and their ability to talk to one another.
That’s bad news for soldiers. If you move, you can be seen; if you are seen, you can be shot. In an essay for Joint Force Quarterly, T.X. Hammes, an American military scholar, compares this to the period between America’s civil war and the first world war when new technology, like the machine gun, made it harder and costlier to attack.
Drones can hoover up vast amounts of video footage. But armies face “massive technical hurdles”—like limited satellite bandwidth—to shunt around all the data they collect, says Jack Watling in a collection of essays published by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank. Moving data underwater is even harder. Shashank interviewed Owen Cote, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who explained why America might have an edge over China when it comes to hunting the other’s boats. 
Making sense of all this data can require help from artificial intelligence, as explained in this report on “battle networks” by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, an American think-tank.
Revolutions in warfare are often hard to
discern
until they are put into action. But it is clear that in an age of
ubiquitous
sensors, armed forces will need to think differently. Shashank’s reporting covers how electronic warfare and cyber-attacks will be used to blind the enemy;
decoys
and
deception
will be used to trick the sensors; and tactics may need to change, with
high-tempo blitzkrieg
perhaps giving way to a slower and messier way of war.

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