Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Getting across Europe is most often quicker and easier by air than by rail.

There are plenty of national networks, but international connections are patchy.

If the EU wants to meet its climate targets, then it's going to have to get its track together.

And everybody, on some level, loves a particularly good picture of themselves.

But in South Korea, people are spending serious sums to get what are called body profile photos.

And the obsession comes at more costs than that. First up, though.

Over the course of more than three hours yesterday, the leaders of the world's two superpowers

had what appeared to be a perfectly cordial online chat.

President Xi Jinping and Joe Biden exchanged smiles and waves and reassuring words that couldn't

have come at a better time.

This video chat mattered because the relationship has been in bad shape since the Trump

years and hasn't recovered.

David Rennie is the economist's Beijing Bureau Chief.

Low-level contacts have been very frosty, even as tensions build on everything from human

rights and Hong Kong and Xinjiang and Taiwan to the trade war that Joe Biden, to China's

great frustration, hasn't unwanned. We still have the same Trump tariffs,

still have some of the same export controls. So this was an attempt to try and stop this from

escalating further. And recent communications have been, as you say, frosty. How was it this time

around? Certainly the mood music was deliberately much warmer. The public remarks that were shown on TV,

...