Ukraine

• Ukraine's mighty 82nd Brigade - a 2,000-man air assault unit widely considered to be the strongest of its kind - deployed to southern Zaporizhzhia in the last few days. Its deployment should add a big boost to Ukraine's firepower on the front lines, but it had to be carefully timed so the unit could maximize its impact before tiring out.
• Ukraine sent a cargo ship through a new temporary corridor on the Black Sea for the first time, challenging Russia's threat to consider commercial vessels targets. Russia didn't intervene this time.

• Youth (age 16 to 24) unemployment in China probably rose for a seventh consecutive month in July. But we won't know for sure, because instead of releasing the July figures China stopped sharing data and said its survey methods "need to be further improved and optimized."
• Brushing the bad news under the rug only called more attention to it. One snarky netizen commented: "This [hiding the data] currently has been the only policy that really works to address the high youth unemployment."
• Disappeared data is particularly worrisome for foreign investors and executives, who rely on familiar metrics like this to manage the risks of doing business in such an unfamiliar system.

• North Korea acknowledged that Pvt. Travis King - the American soldier who defected from South Korea last month - was in the North, and boasted that he fled there to escape "inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination" in the U.S. army.
• King knows a bit about maltreatment and racism: he had just been released from a stint in South Korean prison on assault charges stemming from a bar fight and subsequent racist tirade against South Korean police.

• At least 17 Nigerien soldiers were killed in an ambush near the border with Mali. The assailants were jihadists; this had nothing to do with the ECOWAS intervention force the junta fears will come to restore Pres. Bazoum's government.

• The 444 Brigade and Special Deterrence Force (SDF) stopped fighting late last night after the SDF agreed to release the 444 Brigade's commander - who the SDF had detained - to a neutral third party. At least 27 people were killed in the two-day skirmish.

• Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast went public on the Nasdaq exchange yesterday, and share prices promptly surged 255% to a valuation of $85 billion - more than Ford or General Motors. VinFast has yet to make a profit.