Flagship

Kremlin confirms Prigozhin’s death

DNA testing confirmed that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, died in a plane crash near Moscow last week. U.S. officials said that an explosion on board was the most likely reason for the crash, although the Kremlin said rumors of foul play were an “absolute lie.” Moscow is keen to bring the powerful and effective, if currently “leaderless and exposed,” Wagner group under its own direct control, but faces difficulties: There was bad blood between the mercenary force and the regular military even before the latter was accused of murdering the former’s boss. “Wagner, in itself, as a structure, most likely won’t exist” in the long term, one former Russian politician told The New York Times.

Evergrande opens trading, loses value

Shares in Evergrande fell 80% after trading opened again on the crisis-hit Chinese real-estate company for the first time in 17 months. The firm’s value has dropped 99% since a crackdown on the hugely indebted property sector in 2020. Evergrande, owing more than $300 billion, declared bankruptcy in 2021 and suspended share sales, but would have faced delisting if it had not reopened trading. There are some signs of recovery — its losses were a mere $4.5 billion in the first six months of this year, half of what it lost in the same period last year, and revenues were up — but Evergrande’s problems have spread throughout the property sector, leading to firms collapsing and projects going unfinished.

Raimondo hopes to ease China tensions

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo arrived in Beijing, where she hopes to boost fraying business ties and tourism between the two countries. The meeting comes on the back of increasing challenges for U.S. firms operating in China and sharp criticism from Beijing over export restrictions on advanced chips imposed by Washington. However, the recent deterioration of the Chinese economy — last month the World Bank revised its GDP growth forecast down to 4.3% from 5.6% — gives the country an incentive to mend the ties and prevent a decline in trade. Ahead of her trip, Raimondo, the first commerce secretary to visit Beijing in seven years, said the restriction on U.S. chip exports to China “was not up for debate.”

Panama mulls Darien Gap solutions

Panama announced a raft of measures to crack down on migration across the Darien Gap as crossings reached a record level. “The toll it’s taking on us is irreversible,” the country’s security minister said, adding that Panama is considering closing its border with Colombia, which it claims has done little to stem migrant arrivals. More than 300,000 migrants have made their way across the Darien so far this year, up from fewer than 250,000 in all of 2022. More than 50,000 made the treacherous crossing in August alone. “Humanitarian organizations can’t keep up with the surge,” Doctors Without Borders warned.

EV leasing now most economical

Leasing an electric vehicle is the cheapest option for new-car buyers in the United States. Tax breaks and falling prices, lower maintenance and operating costs, and rising prices of gasoline have made EVs thousands of dollars cheaper per year than buying or leasing equivalent internal combustion cars, according to Forbes. The same has been true in China for a little while, The Washington Post reported: A price war, led by Tesla, has driven costs down hugely, and in June seven of the 10 best-selling cars in China came with a plug.

Zimbabwe election result questioned

Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa won reelection after a vote that opposition candidates and international observers said was marred by irregularities. Voting had to be extended last week as ballots arrived late to opposition strongholds. “We are rejecting the election as a sham,” Nelson Chamisa, the main opposition candidate, said, calling the ZANU-PF party’s win “a coup at the ballots.” Zimbabweans fear a second Mnangagwa term will lead to economic catastrophe. The country’s unbridled money-printing has sent inflation soaring close to 200%, while GDP per capita remains below 2012 levels. “If ZANU-PF wins, it means suffering is continuing,” a Harare-based cobbler told Al Jazeera.

Moms return to US workforce

U.S. mothers are reentering the workforce in large numbers, pushed by rising consumer prices and pulled by an increase in flexible working arrangements. Around 75% of mothers now work — the highest since records began in 1948 and beating the pre-pandemic figure of 74%. The pandemic disproportionately affected female workers, as they were more likely to be primary caregivers, more likely to work part-time, and more likely to work in badly hit sectors, such as restaurants and education, the Financial Times reported. But the post-pandemic labor crisis has driven more employers to offer flexible hours and remote work, plus higher pay, bringing mothers back — although some are also driven by need, as inflation pushed prices up.

French winegrowers paid to destroy surplus

France will pay its winegrowers $215 million to destroy their surplus wine, after collapsing demand and increased competition led to a glut. The wine industry estimates that 300 million liters of wine will go unsold this year, 7% of the total. French young people’s consumption of red wine fell by 32% over the last decade, the Financial Times reported, as they moved to beer and spirits or simply drank less. Sales in China, a key market, are also down. The government will compensate wine producers for distilling the alcohol from their wine for use in industrial or medical products: They will also offer farmers money to leave their land fallow or convert it to woodland.

Biles reestablishes dominance

Simone Biles won a record eighth U.S. all-around gymnastics title. Biles took her first national win in 2013, aged just 16, and equaled Alfred Jochim’s record of seven titles, which had stood for 88 years, in 2021. But she pulled out of five of her six events at that year’s Tokyo Olympics, later explaining she had “the twisties,” a gymnast’s mental block comparable to “the yips” in golf. She has not said whether she will compete in the Paris Olympics next year but is expected to go to Antwerp for this year’s world championships, hoping to add to her 25 world medals, including 19 golds.

Villeneuve teases Dune: Part Three

Denis Villeneuve wants to turn his Dune films into a trilogy, using Dune Messiah, the sequel to Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, as the source material. Last year’s Dune: Part One, which covered roughly half of the first novel, was a success, and allowed Villeneuve to make Dune: Part Two, now delayed until spring next year by the writers’ strike. But a trilogy “would be the dream,” Villeneuve told Empire. Herbert disliked that Dune readers thought the protagonist, Paul Atreides, was a hero: He wrote Messiah to make it clear that Atreides’s story was a warning. There are “words on paper,” Villeneuve said, although he has no intention of going into the later, much weirder, novels that followed.

• Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong meets his Vietnamese counterpart Pham Minh Chinh in Hanoi.
• Burundi President Évariste Ndayishimiye meets his Congolese counterpart Felix Tshisekedi in Kinshasa.
• The second and final day of London’s Notting Hill Carnival takes place.

Trading places

Economists will tell you that immigration is usually a good thing, economically. But doesn’t that have a corollary: That emigration is a bad thing for the countries the migrants leave? No, argues the econ blogger Noah Smith.

There are several reasons: For instance, if a poor country has constrained resources, the people leaving leave more for those who remain. But most importantly, the poorer country can sell things to the richer country. As that country grows richer and more populous, its demand for the poorer country’s goods and services increases, and having immigrants from the old country increases trade links between them.

An uprising of uprisings

Why are there so many coups d’etat in the Sahel region of Africa? Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, and Sudan have all had their governments either successfully overthrown or seen serious attempts in recent years. Niger is the most recent.

Ken Opalo, a scholar of African politics, says the region has seen a buildup of armed forces in the face of security threats, such as insurgencies and terror. So the militaries are large and powerful. But also, their democracies have failed to deliver improved living standards, because the international community has aspired to “client states” rather than stable ones. “You can’t eat the idea of democracy,” he writes.

Blindsided

The Blind Side was an Oscar-winning feelgood 2009 movie, based on a non-fiction book by Michael Lewis, about a wealthy white woman, Sandra Bullock, who adopts a poor Black boy who goes on to become an NFL superstar. Recently, the real-life star, Michael Oher, sued the real-life woman, Leigh Anne Tuohy, and her husband, alleging that they enriched themselves at his expense.

The reaction says a lot about how the morality tales society tells itself have changed, says the sportswriter Ethan Strauss. These “depictions of softening race relations” are excoriated in the media now, who prefer a “cynical, pessimistic” view in which white liberal acts of kindness are just that, an act — as in the (also Oscar-winning) Get Out. “The media, in effect, traded one simplistic racial parable for another,” says Strauss.

The first trailer of Cat Person, a film based on a New Yorker short story that went viral in 2017, was released. Kristen Roupenian sparked a huge social-media debate about modern dating, gender, and power with her fictional piece about a college student and her short-lived relationship with an older man. CODA’s Emilia Jones and Succession’s Nicholas Braun play the protagonists in the adaptation, which debuts in October. A reviewer in Polygon wondered whether the movie will be able to spark the same conversations as the original work, saying that the trailer suggests it loses a lot of the nuance with “a sharp shift in tone from the story.”

• Warner Bros. Discovery’s search for an outsider to run CNN has taken it to two high-profile veterans of the BBC.
• Bitter disputes over the outcome of Zimbabwe’s general election are looming after President Emmerson Mnangagwa was declared winner.
• A YouTuber’s attempt to bring together one person “from every country on Earth” for a competition is the latest viral moment to highlight the fraught political nature of maps in pop culture.