2026-07-30
13 分钟The Economist.
Hi there, it's Jason Palmer here, co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs podcast.
This is Editor's Picks.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist read aloud.
Enjoy.
Sun-baked morning in early July, with temperatures set to soar above 40 degrees Celsius, that's 104 Fahrenheit,
a mob in Nanterre, a Paris suburb, heaved against the doors of a little supermarket until they collapsed.
The sweat-stained hooligans were desperate shoppers,
pitted against each other for the last portable air-conditioning AC unit.
In another Lidl across town, two men came to blows.
French politicians had a row of their own over how much AC was too much.
At about the same time, in cities across Pakistan and Bangladesh, protesters blocked roads and surrounded
electricity offices during weeks of power cuts in temperatures as hot as 45 degrees Celsius.
In Chandpur, Bangladesh, in late June, residents allegedly assaulted an employee of the Rural Electrification Board.
In May, power cuts during a heatwave in India led to similar protests in some rural villages,
where residents complained they couldn't even run fans at night.
In places like Iraq and Sri Lanka, too, unrest has broken out over shortages of energy needed to keep cool.
As extreme heat breaks tempers and electricity grids, fights over AC,
or the energy that powers cooling tech, are threatening to break politics.
It's a decidedly modern problem.