📌 Ukraine Advances, LA Olympics, More

Russia is evacuating residents from a second border area as Ukraine continues its week-long offensive inside the country.

A senior Ukrainian official said thousands of troops were engaged in the operation. Some 11,000 people in the Belgorod region have been moved, Russian state media reported.

Belgorod lies next to Kursk, where Ukrainian troops launched their surprise attack into Russian territory last Tuesday. Ukrainian forces have since advanced up to 18 miles inside Russia, the deepest incursion since Moscow's full-scale invasion.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine was taking the war into "the aggressor's territory.” He said Russia launched 2,000 attacks from Kursk this summer, and it deserved a response.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said a harsh response from Russia's armed forces "will not take long.”

The 2024 Summer Games, with their classical trappings and sheer visual beauty, raised an important question: How can LA top this?

A sneak peek into the 2028 Olympics was provided in Sunday night’s closing ceremony at Paris’ Stade de France. Instead of tradition, production values and pop culture were the focus.

Tom Cruise rappelled from the stadium’s rim to the field and roared off on a motorcycle. Snoop Dogg dropped a few bars. Billie Eilish performed remotely from a Southern California beach.

The next host city always gets 15 or so minutes near the end of each Olympic closing. These presentations often involve music and dancers, some colorful lights. They often get overlooked.

But LA28 needed to make a splash in Paris. The 2028 Olympics will cost around $7 billion—a figure likely to rise—and organizers have vowed to cover all expenses.

“The 2024 Games have been authentically French and Parisian,” said Casey Wasserman, LA28 organizing committee chairman. “We don’t have an Eiffel Tower,” “We’ve got a Hollywood sign. The 2028 Games will be authentically Los Angeles.”

Multiple agencies aim to curb practices such as long hold times to cancel subscriptions and overusing automated chatbots.

The effort, dubbed “time is money,” comes as part of President Joe Biden’s broader crackdown on corporations perceived to be profiting off customers in “tricky or deceptive ways.”

The administration accused companies of deliberately designing their business processes to be burdensome and time-consuming to maximize profits.

Gym companies were cited as one example, often making it possible to sign up for memberships with only one or two clicks but to cancel, had to hold for 30 minutes or required to visit.

Administrators singled out a typical example of consumers seeking help after buying a product only to deal with an unhelpful chatbot or having to navigate “a maze of buttons just to talk to a real person.”

The Federal Trade Commission has proposed a rule that would mandate that companies make it as easy to cancel a subscription or service as to sign up for it.

The US and South Korea will begin a large-scale joint military exercise next week.

The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise will be held Aug. 19–29 and include live field maneuvers, computer simulation-based command post exercises and related civil defense drills.

The drills will "reflect realistic threats such as missile threats, GPS jamming, cyber-attacks, and lessons learned from recent armed conflict,” both militaries said in a joint press release.

Some 19,000 South Korean troops will participate. There will be 48 field-training exercises, including amphibious landing and live-fire drills—up from 30 in last year's Ulchi Freedom Shield.

Pyongyang frequently condemns the allies' joint drills as preparation for an invasion and maintains that its nuclear and missile programs are a necessary form of deterrence.

Kim Jong Un announced last week that Pyongyang would deploy 250 new nuclear-capable missile launchers to frontline positions along the border with the South.

Children who often miss breakfast have lower life satisfaction, according to a global study of nearly 150,000 young people.

The study shows a near-linear relationship between a higher frequency of eating breakfast and greater life satisfaction in children and adolescents aged 10–17 in 42 countries.

Children who ate breakfast daily in Portugal had the highest life satisfaction; children from Romania who rarely ate breakfast had the lowest.

Senior author Lee Smith attributes the “consistent association between frequency of breakfast and life satisfaction” to several potential reasons.

“Consuming an adequate breakfast provides the necessary energy and nutrients for optimal cognitive functioning and enhances concentration, memory, and learning ability,” he said.

“Another reason,” he said, “could be the mix of vitamins and minerals that we get from our daily breakfast, and not regularly getting those may result in lower life satisfaction over time.”

Some inconsistencies were evident between countries, which the study said could be influenced by diverse cultures, lifestyles and socio-economic factors.

China began a 45-day mission Saturday to explore the underwater Magellan Seamounts between Japan and New Guinea.

The seamounts extend east from the Mariana Trench, the world’s deepest oceanic point. The site is expected to provide data on biodiversity, topography, ocean island volcanoes, mineral resources, and the effects of climate change and human activities.

Eighteen dives are planned for the mission crewed by 60 that includes researchers from China, Australia, Spain, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Colombia, reports say.

Deep-sea samplers, landers, and other equipment will be used alongside the Jiaolong, which can dive up to 4.35 miles to study the seamount biology and habitats.

In May, Jiaolong and its mother ship completed a 164-day, 35,418-mile journey across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, conducting 46 dives—its first mission in the western Atlantic.

Jordan Stewart, 19, Jordan travels thousands of miles a year riding buses to destinations as a passenger—but he comes right back.

From his home near Kelty in Fife, he buses across Scotland, making the 431-mile journey to London twice a month before getting straight back on the return bus.

Jordan, who is autistic, has a pass allowing him to book free tickets in Scotland, but he pays full price for further afield. He just returned from a three-day trip from Glasgow to Sofia, Bulgaria.

Jordan books two seats for comfort behind the driver to watch “the digital things” on the dash. “I have my extra seat for comfort, and I make sure I have lots of juice.” He said he was once stuck on board all night when there was a fatal crash.

Jordan has thousands of maps and timetables at home, and his bedroom is covered in coach information and leaflets. He dreams of becoming a coach driver, which he can apply for at 21.