Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado attends a protest against the official results of the 28 July presidential elections in Caracas, Venezuela, 3 August 2024. (Keystone/EPA/Henry Chirinos)

Venezuela opposition's María Alejandra Aristeguieta: Trump falling for old playbook. María Alejandra Aristeguieta is a member of the Venezuelan opposition, which has been sidelined by Donald Trump despite its role in helping prepare the dramatic US capture of president Nicolás Maduro. She shares her surprise at the US president’s choice to work with Maduro’s successors and warns that he may be falling for an old playbook.

🛠️WHEN GDP DOESN’T ADD UP. A UN-appointed high-level expert group will meet for the second time this Thursday and Friday at the Palais des Nations. The group has been tasked with fixing what many economists now admit is a blunt tool – gross domestic product.

World Bank’s former chief economist Kaushik Basu, inequality specialist Nora Lustig, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz and Indonesia’s former trade minister Mari Pangestu are among the 16 experts tackling “over-reliance and the limits” of GDP in tracking progress towards the 2030 sustainable development goals.

Reality check. GDP is an excellent speedometer for economic activity, but a poor dashboard for how a society is doing. It can’t tell if people are safe, healthy, educated or happy.

In a report published in November, the experts exposed some of its blind spots, like unpaid housework, the digital boom, environmental degradation and the well-being of future generations.

The fix. They are proposing a “universal framework” built around three pillars – well-being, equity and inclusion, and sustainability. Rather than starting from scratch, they are seeking inspiration from existing initiatives from New Zealand’s well-being budgets to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness framework.

The hurdle. Designing better metrics may be the easy part. The hardest bit will be convincing economic growth hardliners – at a time when the leader of the world’s biggest economy is at war with sustainable development goals.

The group is expected to present its final report to the General Assembly in September, but before then, they’ll brief chief statisticians and member states on their work this afternoon.

— Michelle Langrand

The League of Nations archive reading room will, of course, remain open to researchers. But putting the collection online is expanding research possibilities worldwide. (Mark Henley/Panos Pictures for Le Temps)

The League of Nations archives go online, reopening history to the world. In 2022, a major digitisation effort reached completion: the entire archive of the League of Nations was placed online. Long mostly accessible to western scholars, the collection is now open to historians worldwide — a shift that could gradually reshape how the institution is studied and understood.