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.

For years, the European Union has been wrestling with a growing problem of migration across

the Mediterranean. Our investigation reveals one of its solutions, propping up the Coastguard

of Libya whose methods wouldn't fly inside the EU.

And America's gun owners remain mostly white and mostly male, but our correspondent

finds a growing number of gun enthusiasts among women, ethnic minorities, and LGBT groups.

Good for fans of inclusion, bad for fans of gun control.

But first, we're taking you to Beijing.

So I am currently in the security checks about to go into the Burdenest Stadium fully opening

ceremony.

David Renny is our Beijing bureau chief. At the Winter Olympic Games earlier today, he

successfully battled with monumental COVID restrictions without even crossing into the so-called

closed loop of athletes, support staff, and journalists.

We've all been given color coded Beijing Olympic face masks to wear against COVID so that

we're all wearing the same red and blue face masks as we go in. We've been in various

different security checks and COVID tests for several hours already. And I think that

reflects the extraordinary high stakes. This is an Olympics taking place in the middle

of a pandemic in a country which has decided to try and crush COVID completely. And in

the midst of that pandemic, they've admitted about 30,000 foreigners into China for the

Olympics. And so if you add together China's obsession with order at the best of times,

you end up with this extraordinary mixture of police and medical checks and security and

...