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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Argentina’s Javier Milei will meet tech executives including Tim Cook and Sam Altman in California this week, marking the libertarian president’s fourth trip to the US in five months as he seeks to build hype for his economic reforms.

Milei will spend Tuesday to Friday in San Francisco, meeting business leaders including the Apple and OpenAI chief executives, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, the president’s office said on Monday.

His spokesperson said the trip was designed “to position Argentina in the world once again”. The Latin American country’s tech sector is one of the region’s largest.

Milei has travelled extensively since taking office in December, courting the global spotlight via friendships with rightwing figures such as Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, who he met at the carmaker’s Austin factory in April, and giving fiery conference speeches defending his free market “anarcho-capitalist” beliefs.

By the end of June he will have completed eight foreign tours — a record for Argentine presidents in their first six months in office, per newspaper La Nación. None have been within South America.

Opposition politicians have criticised Milei’s travel, and three lawmakers have asked police to investigate his officials for using public funds on a trip to a far-right political conference in Spain, which they argue was made in a personal capacity.

For many Argentines, roughly half of whom approve of Milei’s government, his global profile has been a “novelty”, said Cristian Buttié, director of pollster CB Consultora.

“We are not used to Argentine presidents being famous internationally; for young voters the photos with Elon Musk have a certain allure,” he said. “But the question is: will that fame benefit Argentina, or will it just benefit Milei?” 

Analysts said international businesses were likely to hold off on investing in Argentina, which is suffering its worst economic crisis in two decades. Annual inflation was running at 289 per cent in April and economic activity was down 8.4 per cent in March compared to a year earlier.

Milei has slashed government spending to halt the use of money printing and bring down inflation. But he has yet to secure longer term reform in congress, where he controls fewer than 15 per cent of seats.

“Many, many years of a volatile investment climate have [badly damaged] Argentina’s international reputation,” said Kezia McKeague, managing director of McLarty Associates, which advises multinationals operating in Argentina. “You don’t change that in six months.”

“There is a great deal of excitement in some sectors, but companies aren’t ready to pull the trigger yet,” she said.

Negotiations are dragging on in the Senate over Milei’s first two bills, which include measures to cut the fiscal deficit and an incentive scheme for investments in mining and other sectors.

Musk and Milei discussed lithium, the key electric vehicle battery metal of which Argentina has some of the world’s largest reserves, when they met in April, according to the president’s team. But Musk did not announce any new investment.

The government also has yet to lay out its plan for removing Argentina’s strict currency controls, which limit companies’ ability to take profits out of the country, and whether or not it will pursue Milei’s controversial campaign pledge to replace the peso with the US dollar.

“There is a lot of inconsistency . . . which makes it impossible to plan investments,” said Fabio Rodriguez, director at consultancy M&R Asociados. “That’s what I’d want to hear about if I were an investor meeting with Milei, rather than socialism and capitalism and freedom.”

An 81-year-old man who investigators say terrorized a southern California neighborhood for years with a slingshot has been arrested, police said.

While conducting an investigation, detectives “learned that during the course of 9-10 years, dozens of citizens were being victimized by a serial slingshot shooter”, the Asuza police department said in a statement.

The man is suspected of breaking windows and car windshields and of narrowly missing people with ball bearings shot from a slingshot, the statement said. No injuries were reported.

The man was arrested on Thursday after officers served a search warrant and found a slingshot and ball bearings at his home in Asuza, about 25 miles (40km) east of Los Angeles, police said.

The Azusa police Lt Jake Bushey said on Saturday that detectives learned that most of the ball bearings were shot from the suspect’s backyard.

“We’re not aware of any kind of motive other than just malicious mischief,” Bushey told the Southern California News Group.

The man was scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has ridiculed Rishi Sunak’s “teenage ‘Dad’s Army’” plan to revive national service, as a Tory minister distanced himself from the policy and a Conservative peer hit out at the UK prime minister.

In Starmer’s first major speech of the campaign on Monday, he sought to reassure voters that his party could be trusted with Britain’s security while claiming Sunak was engaged in political stunts.

Starmer attacked the “desperation” of Sunak’s £2.5bn-a-year plan to revive compulsory national service — which was abolished in 1960 — with 18-year-olds having to do work in the community or with the military.

He said it amounted to “a teenage ‘Dad’s Army’ paid for by cancelling levelling-up funding and money from tax avoidance that we would use to invest in our NHS”.

Steve Baker, Northern Ireland minister in Sunak’s government, also signalled doubts about the national service plan, which has been criticised in a region of the UK where serving with the British army is a highly political issue.

Baker posted on X that it was a Tory policy, not a government one.

“A government policy would have been developed by ministers on the advice of officials and collectively agreed. I would have had a say on behalf of NI [Northern Ireland],” he wrote.

“But this proposal was developed by a political adviser or advisers and sprung on candidates, some of whom are relevant ministers.”

In a further indication of Conservative disarray, Lord Zac Goldsmith said on X that the prime minister had “damaged the Party almost beyond repair and all but guaranteed the majority of his MPs will lose their job next month”.

The Conservative peer added that “the hope is that when Sunak disappears off to California in a few weeks there are at least some decent MPs left around which to rebuild”.

Tory headquarters also acknowledged it had “in error” sent Conservative MPs an email that blamed them for failing to “get behind” the campaign and disclosed personal information, according to a report in the Times.

Sunak’s manifesto pledge to make all 18-year-olds take part in a year-long military placement or to carry out 25 days of compulsory “volunteering” in the community is his biggest policy statement to date.

But Starmer attempted to draw a distinction between his offer of “stability” and Sunak’s approach to government, which he said amounted to “a new plan every week, a new strategy every month”.

Speaking in West Sussex, he vowed to put “country first, party second”, in an attempt to reassure floating voters that he had buried the legacy of left-wing former leader Jeremy Corbyn.

He acknowledged that voters still had questions about Labour and whether his party had changed enough for voters to trust him with their money and with the country’s borders and security.

“My answer is yes, you can, because I have changed my party permanently,” he said.

The Labour leader’s speech was an attempt to establish himself in the minds of voters, many of whom have reservations about him: Starmer is less popular than his party.

YouGov polling last week found that 34 per cent of people had a favourable view of the Labour leader compared with 53 per cent holding a negative view.

Starmer told his audience he grew up in Oxted, a village on the Surrey/Kent border that was “about as English as it gets” but that his family experienced real hardship growing up.

He said that in the 1970s, when inflation was out of control, his family had the phone disconnected because they could not pay all their bills, adding that this informed his belief in the need for economic stability.

Conservatives have focused on Starmer’s record of ditching policies, including many of the left-wing ones he espoused in 2020 when running to succeed Corbyn as Labour leader.

Richard Holden, Conservative party chair, said: “Once again Keir Starmer stood up to tell the country absolutely nothing. In this wearisome and rambling speech there was no policy, no substance, and no plan.”

Starmer, asked whether he stood by the promise he made to axe student tuition fees, said that was still “an option” and there was “a powerful case for change” to the ways students and universities were funded.

But he said a Labour government would face difficult choices and his priority would be the NHS.

Starmer also defended Labour’s plan to end the VAT tax break for private schools, but said the money raised would be used to appoint 6,500 more teachers to state secondary schools.

“I understand the aspirations of those who work and save to send their children to private schools,” he said, before adding that he also understood the aspirations of those, like himself, who sent their children to state schools.