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Zelenskyy to headline UNGA meeting

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will headline the U.N. General Assembly this week, part of what Politico described as a diplomatic surge by Kyiv to win over fence-sitting developing countries that have yet to cut ties with Moscow and fully side with Ukraine. Zelenskyy — who rarely left the country in the early stages of the war — is expected to make a speech at the U.N. this week and meet with many so-called Global South leaders, while assuring restive Western officials that Kyiv’s military counteroffensive is going well. “The realization is setting in that this will be a long war,” one expert told Politico’s Nahal Toosi. Zelenskyy will reportedly promote his 10-point peace plan, and seek solutions for a global food crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion.

Beijing’s overtures to US and Russia

China’s top diplomat met the United States’ national security adviser to try to stabilize the two countries’ increasingly troubled relationship. Wang Yi and Jake Sullivan spent two days in Malta, the latest in a series of high-profile U.S.-China meetings and an effort to lay the groundwork for a possible summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November. Any good trans-Pacific vibes the talks might engender, however, will be undermined by the fact that Wang then traveled to Moscow to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. That meeting, similarly, is intended to prepare for a bigger one: Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to travel to Beijing to meet Xi next month.

WHO chief pushes China on COVID

The World Health Organization’s chief urged China to hand over all its information on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The disease is believed to have begun in Wuhan, either by jumping from animals to humans in a wet market, or through an accidental leak from a virology laboratory. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus traveled to Beijing in 2020 to convince Chinese leader Xi Jinping to allow WHO inspectors to investigate, but the government was unhelpful and the resulting report reached few firm conclusions. “We started discussions in private and then when they refused to cooperate, we made it public,” he told the Financial Times. The question is not just of historical interest, he argued: “If we know [the origin], then we can prevent the next one.”

Russian troops at Mexico parade

The participation of Russian troops in Mexico’s Independence Day military parade on Saturday sparked a diplomatic backlash. The event was “sullied” by “the bloodstained boots and hands of war criminals,” the Ukrainian ambassador to Mexico wrote on X. Mexico’s government has been ambivalent about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Despite claiming neutrality in the conflict, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has criticized the U.S. for providing aid to Ukraine, while declining to impose sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense has warned of a surge in Russian spies in Mexico. The country’s stance has not gone unnoticed in Moscow: “We value Mexico’s balanced approach,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said this year.

US unveils rapid-launch satellite

The U.S. military put a satellite into orbit within a day of receiving the order. As Washington becomes more reliant on satellites for communications and observation, the Pentagon has grown concerned that adversaries will destroy its orbital assets during a conflict. One way to guard against this would be to rapidly replace any lost ones. The Victus Nox spacecraft was built to be able to go into orbit at short notice: In a test, it was given a six-month window during which the order might come, Ars Technica reported, and was expected to be launch-ready within 24 hours, a target it met. Much real-time battlefield communication is via satellite now, and space support can make or break operations.

The reinvention of the carbon market

A new breed of startups is trying to reinvent the carbon market, long criticized as either snake oil or greenwashing. Carbon offsets have been accused of lacking oversight, allowing companies to pay trivial amounts towards ineffective schemes as a marketing ploy to let them carry on polluting. But newer models, with more transparency and better financial incentives, are being put forward, Prashant Rao reported in Semafor’s climate newsletter. The startups are also more focused on unambiguous removal of carbon from the atmosphere, through direct air capture or rock-weathering, rather than planting forests or other offsets which may have happened anyway. The U.N. says carbon removal is “unavoidable” to achieve net zero, and major corporations are backing it.

— Semafor’s climate newsletter is publishing daily this week, to cover the U.N. General Assembly and New York Climate Week. Sign up here.

West African coup nations sign pact

The leaders of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — which have all undergone coups since 2020 — signed a mutual defense pact over the weekend in an attempt to shore-up their regimes. After a coup deposed Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum in July, ECOWAS, a West African regional bloc, threatened to intervene in the country to reestablish the democratically elected government. Any such deployment would now trigger the military involvement of Mali and Burkina Faso. The three countries are also struggling to contain jihadist insurgencies across the region, as the coups have weakened their relations with neighbors and international partners on which the countries relied to contain the al-Qaida and Islamic State-linked groups.

Japan’s over-80s top 10% of the population

More than 10% of Japanese people are over 80 years old, government data showed. The number of octogenarians went up by 270,000 to 12.6 million, a new record. Japan has the world’s highest proportion of elderly people, driven by a combination of high life expectancy and low birth rates: There are also 36.2 million people over 65, 29.1% of the population. In second and third place are Italy and Finland, with 24.5% and 23.6% of their citizens over 65. The growing number of elderly citizens is placing an ever-greater economic demand on working-age people, and many of the older group live alone and are in need of support, Kyodo News reported.

Vatican knew about Holocaust in 1942, letter claims

Pope Pius XII, head of the Catholic Church during World War II, knew about the Holocaust as early as 1942, newly discovered correspondence suggests. The Vatican has long argued that it could not verify reports of Nazi atrocities, and so was unable to denounce them. But historians have debated Pius’s legacy, and whether he stayed shamefully silent, or used diplomatic backchannels to save lives. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published a December 1942 letter from a German Jesuit priest to Pius’s secretary, detailing the murder of up to 6,000 Jews and Poles daily in a single death camp. Pius XII is being considered for sainthood, but the campaign was paused in 2005 until his archives were made public.

Polynesia’s rugby prowess

Fiji, a tiny island nation with a population under 1 million, beat two-time world champions Australia 22-15 in the men’s Rugby World Cup. It was Fiji’s first victory over the Wallabies in 69 years, but Polynesian nations have long been powerhouses in rugby. Fiji took the rugby sevens gold at the 2016 Olympics; Samoa and Tonga are regularly ranked in the world top 10. The islands are obsessed with rugby, and produce a lot of muscular, explosive players who play an improvisational, fast-running game. This leads bigger countries to poach Polynesian-born players, such as England’s Mako Vunipola and Manu Tuilagi, and Australia’s Taniela Tupou. New Zealand’s famous haka pre-match ritual, and its Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian equivalents, are drawn from Polynesian ceremonial dances.

• The EU Court of Auditors will publish a report on the sustainability of offshore wind energy.
• Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will open the Clinton Global Initiative meeting, an annual event attended by world leaders, CEOs, and celebrities.
• Some Hindus observe the Teej festival, commemorating the union of the Goddess Parvati and Lord Shiva, marked by a period of religious fasting.

A long-awaited breakthrough

Edward Jenner created the first vaccine, for smallpox, in 1796. The malaria parasite was identified in 1880. Why did it take another 141 years for those two breakthroughs to come together with a vaccine for malaria, despite the disease killing 600,000 people a year? The researchers Saloni Dattani, Rachel Glennerster, and Siddhartha Haria set out to answer that question in an epic piece on Works in Progress.

The answers are sometimes scientific — malaria, caused by a parasite, is harder to vaccinate against than a bacterium or virus — and sometimes economic: It’s very hard to make vaccines profitable, and it’s only in recent years that the financial instruments to do so have become available. But those hurdles have been cleared now. “It may have taken us 141 years to get a malaria vaccine,” they write, “but it doesn’t have to take anywhere near as long for the next one. We can start making up for lost time.”

Fake environmentalism

Biofuels are often listed under “renewables,” and the vague implication is that they’re an environmentally friendly option. But are they? The environmental scientist Hannah Ritchie points out that the U.S. is the second-largest producer of cereals in the world, and nearly half of it goes to making biofuels. (Most of the rest goes to feeding animals.)

But the biofuels are not carbon-neutral — if anything, they have increased rather than decreased emissions — and they need a lot of land. Growing those crops to make biofuels takes an area the size of Britain. If that land was dedicated to solar farms instead, it could provide three times the U.S.’s entire electricity demand. Rather than running gasoline cars off biofuels, says Ritchie, we could use solar power and EVs with a fraction of the land and environmental cost.

License to thrill

The U.S. may have its problems, but one thing it gets right is that you can, if you pay for it, have any license plate you want on your car. In the U.K. and many other countries, that’s not possible: They have to be valid combinations of numbers and letters, so, for instance, one plumbing company has vans with plates DRA1N and W4TER. “I propose that all countries should follow the Americans,” says the policy writer Tim Leunig, “and allow any 7 characters, so long as the result is not rude.”

After all, the plates make people happy, but they also raise money for the government. In fact, why not go one step further? “Allow the heart emoji as well,” he says. “A heart is at least as memorable as any letter or number so it works in terms of vehicle recognition.” I ❤️ JESUS, I ❤️ ELON, I ❤️ TACOS: Someone somewhere will pay for all of these.

Four short stories by Roald Dahl have been adapted into films by the director Wes Anderson. One film a day will be released on Netflix next week, starting with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar on Wednesday. The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison will follow. Anderson, famed for his distinctive visual style and offbeat characters, previously brought Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox to screen. The filmmaker struggled to tell these latest stories “without using Dahl’s magical words,” Tudum, Netflix’s in-house publication, reported, until he decided he didn’t have to: The actors relay the author’s words directly to the audience while also acting them out. “It’s a new perspective on Anderson’s signature aesthetic,” the outlet said.

• In Virginia, Republicans are running on what worked in 2021. But Democrats say that the Dobbs decision changed everything.
• A pair of Princeton researchers are calling out some in the AI industry, but they aren’t doomsayers. They’re more afraid of shoddy software than robots going rogue.
• Ukraine’s first lady will speak at Georgetown University about the impact of the war on schools and access to education.