Flagship

Kyiv claims battlefield success

Ukraine expects to accelerate the progress of its counteroffensive after claiming to have pierced Russian defenses. “Everything is ahead of us,” the officer leading the southern part of the push told The Guardian. Despite the battlefield progress, however, Ukraine remains a long way from ultimate victory, experts at the London defense think tank RUSI said: Kyiv is suffering “an unsustainable rate of equipment loss,” and has limited numbers of capable top officers, while Russian forces are continuing to adapt their defensive tactics. The apparent successes also came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy began a major shakeup of his national-security leadership, notably replacing his defense minister — a respected politician whose ministry was plagued by corruption allegations.

Nobels uninvite Russia, Belarus, Iran

The Nobel Foundation reversed course and withdrew invitations to Russia, Belarus, and Iran for next month’s prize ceremonies. The initial invites drew backlash over Moscow’s full-scale war in Ukraine, and Belarus and Iran’s support for it as well as their own rights violations. The decision came as Russia declared Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and the co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, a foreign agent, Moscow’s latest move to suppress media freedoms. Though the Russian, Belarusian, and Iranian envoys are barred from the Nobel ceremonies for physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, and literature — which are held in Stockholm — they are still invited to attend the ceremony for the peace prize, which is awarded in Oslo.

End of cheap oil era hits Lagos

The end of Nigeria’s fuel subsidies removed Lagos’s famous traffic jams. The “boisterous — often chaotic — energy” of Nigeria’s biggest and most bustling city is subdued since the country’s president ended the subsidy when he took office in May, the BBC reported. Fuel costs have tripled, and “the yellow, fume-belching buses, pride of the city’s eternal hustle spirit, now idle at motor parks,” while passengers have been hit hard: “I was spending all my salary on transport” thanks to the higher prices, one cleaner said. Oil-rich Nigeria’s subsidy system was “riddled with corruption,” and much of the cheap oil was smuggled overseas, but the shock has hit the economy hard. “What Lagos has gained in tranquility,” said the BBC, “it has lost economically.”

Chinese phone showcases advances

A new smartphone from the Chinese tech giant Huawei spotlights the U.S.’s apparent failure to curb Beijing’s tech advancement. Though the company has not yet announced its full specifications, the Mate 60 Pro reportedly supports domestically developed 5G technology and contains advanced 7-nanometer chips, both of which Washington has sought to restrict China from obtaining. The device was pointedly unveiled during U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s visit to Beijing, and according to Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times “has been imbued by many Chinese netizens with a deeper meaning of ‘rising up under U.S. pressure’.”

Mexico restricts air traffic

Government air traffic restrictions at Mexico City’s international airport, Latin America’s biggest, have sparked an outcry from the aviation industry. The decree restricts the number of landings to less than three-quarters of the airport’s capacity. Although the authorities claimed the airport was reaching dangerous levels of saturation, critics allege the move is aimed at diverting traffic to a new airport, one of the government’s signature infrastructure projects which is fast becoming a white elephant. Despite costs soaring multiple times over budget, the Felipe Angeles airport remains largely unused, having less than 6% of the traffic of the main airport.

Billionaires reveals California city plan

The tech billionaires behind an $800-million model-city plan in Northern California revealed some details of their plan. The group has been buying land between San Francisco and Sacramento since 2018, and now owns 78 square miles — and is the largest single landowner — in rural Solano County. They launched a website, “California Forever,” late last week, promising “a new community and economic opportunity” for residents, with “safe, walkable communities,” well-paid local jobs, and well-funded public services. A local mayor suspects “a city for the elite,” the Associated Press reported, and some locals worry it would “spoil their quiet way of life.” But with housing in the Bay Area at ever more insane prices, a brand-new city close to San Francisco would attract a lot of interest.

Electric cars extend range

The next generation of high-end electric vehicles is promising a major range upgrade. Mercedes revealed a concept of its upcoming sedan with a 466-mile single-charge range, while BMW similarly says its latest prototype should manage 497 miles. EV ranges are steadily improving: In 2021, the average EV range was 219 miles, and the first commercial EV to break the 400-mile barrier was the Tesla Model S, in 2020. Now they are pushing 500. Much of the improvement is from reduced weight and better aerodynamics, although battery-tech upgrades have helped. The Mini Cooper, the British design classic made famous by 1969’s The Italian Job, will for the first time have an electric version this year, too.

Verstappen wins 10th straight Grand Prix

Max Verstappen won the Italian Grand Prix — his 10th straight victory, beating Sebastian Vettel’s decade-old record. Verstappen is utterly dominant this season, with 12 wins: The only other driver to win any races at all is Verstappen’s Red Bull teammate Sergio Pérez, with two. But Verstappen’s procession to the drivers’ championship, and Red Bull’s to the constructors’, was not the biggest story to come out of Monza, argued the BBC’s chief F1 writer Andrew Benson: Instead, that was Ferrari, the local fans’ favorite, taking third place on the podium after a brave, battling performance: “Ferrari did not win, but they produced their best performance of a difficult year.”

Burners stranded as Nevada desert floods

Thousands were stranded at Burning Man after torrential rains turned it into a mud bath. The festival, famous for its ethos of gift-giving and self-reliance, is in the Nevada desert: The downpour mixed with the desert dust and the mud made the exit roads impassable. Some people, including the comedian Chris Rock, made the six-mile trek to the nearest town, but about 70,000 people remained stuck as of Sunday night, according to a local sheriff. Authorities were investigating one death, but many partied on: The New York Times reported one musician playing a three-hour set to a typical Burner crowd “dressed in G-strings and Jedi garb,” although unusually “their feet were bare or in plastic bags, instead of platform shoes and boots.”

Farewell to Windows WordPad

WordPad, the no-frills word processor that’s been packaged with Windows since 1995, is being discontinued. A note on the Microsoft website was the only requiem for the veteran of many late-1990s high-school projects: It had hardly been updated for years and is now “barely usable for its intended purpose,” according to the tech blogger Paul Thurrott. “There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision,” Thurrott said, since WordPad is “anachronistic” and anything you’d realistically want to do on it you could do on the free web version of Word — or Google Docs, of course. But older readers may still want to mark its passing, perhaps by pasting a clipart sad face into a .rtf file.

• The Africa Climate Week conference opens in Nairobi.
• The U.K. Parliament reconvenes after its summer recess.
• The U.S. marks Labor Day — notably, separate from International Labor Day, which is held on May 1. Historians attribute the U.S. choosing September because of May Day’s association with an 1886 bombing and the political left.

Building a new world order with BRICS

The West wants to downplay the recent expansion of the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) economic group. And yes, the newly enlarged group, now including Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, is politically disparate and arguably united only by resentment of U.S. hegemony.

But underestimating it would be risky, argues Thomas Fazi in UnHerd. The new-look bloc will represent almost half the world’s population and, in purchasing-power terms, 37% of its GDP — more than the G-7. Its member countries are growing faster than the rich world. And while much of the G-7’s wealth is financial, BRICS countries have the manufacturing base and, crucially, the resources, notably oil. The bloc “has become a full-blooded geopolitical actor that can longer be ignored,” says Fazi.

The price of everything and the value of nothing

Some people earn more than other people. In Friedrich Hayek’s terminology, they have greater economic value. But “value is not the same as merit,” writes Virginia Postrel. Value is simply the outcome of supply and demand: Some skills happen to be in demand at a given moment, and people who possess those skills will earn well.

“We shouldn’t confuse economic success with just deserts,” Postrel writes. Some people are lucky to be born with in-demand talents, and they are economically rewarded for it, but a tendency to assume higher earnings means greater merit makes that a source of friction. “America would be less riven by conflict” if people recognized that there is “no necessary connection between merit and success.”

History that can’t be repeated

Flagship readers might be aware of the “replication crisis” in science: The realization that the results of many classic studies, notably in psychology but also in medicine and elsewhere, do not stand up to scrutiny. What they might not be aware of, writes the historian Anton Howes, is that the study of history faces a similar crisis.

Anecdotes in historical works get picked up and repeated, but — when you actually trace them back to their sources — often are based on mistranslations, poorly sourced, or simply made up. “Take the oft-repeated idea that more troops were sent to quash the Luddites in 1812 than to fight Napoleon,” says Howes. “Utter nonsense … [but] Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.”

Godzilla Minus One will take the giant radioactive monster back to where it began: In a postwar Japan devastated by the atomic bomb. It’s a prequel to 2016’s Shin Godzilla, a reboot of the franchise by three Japanese directors which satirized U.S.-Japanese relations and the horrors of nuclear war. A newly released trailer gives “a glimpse of the film’s post-war setting, as Japan reckons with the devastation left in the wake of surrender,” reported Gizmodo. Godzilla’s “status as one of the most fearsome monsters of the silver screen is still as potent now as it was 69 years ago.” Godzilla Minus One will reach theaters at the end of the year.

• Why the Gabon coup is different from other military African takeovers.
• African governments are clamping down on TikTok over “inappropriate content.”
• Why the first auction for offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico was a bust.