Western security officials say they believe that two incendiary devices, shipped via DHL, were part of a covert Russian operation that ultimately aimed to start fires aboard cargo or passenger aircraft flying to the U.S. and Canada, as Moscow steps up a sabotage campaign against Washington and its allies.

The devices ignited at DHL logistics hubs in July, one in Leipzig, Germany, and another in Birmingham, England. The explosions set off a multinational race to find the culprits.

Now investigators and spy agencies in Europe have figured out how the devices—electric massagers implanted with a magnesium-based flammable substance—were made and concluded that they were part of a wider Russian plot, according to security officials and people familiar with the probe.

Security officials say the electric massagers, sent to the U.K. from Lithuania, appear to have been a test run to figure out how to get such incendiary devices aboard planes bound for North America.

Read it all.

Exclusive | Russia Suspected of Plotting to Send Incendiary Devices on U.S.-Bound Planes – WSJ https://t.co/cNY7wdokRm

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) November 5, 2024

Norway is the first country in the world with more electric vehicles than gas-powered cars on the road, according to vehicle registration data the Norwegian road federation, known as OFV, released Tuesday.

Of the 2.8 million passenger cars registered in the country, 26.3 percent are fully electric, just edging out the share of gas vehicles. Diesel remains the most common vehicle type, making up more than a third of Norwegian vehicle registrations.

“The electrification of the passenger car fleet is keeping a high pace, and Norway is moving rapidly towards becoming the first country in the world with a passenger car fleet dominated by electric cars,” OFV Director Oyvind Solberg Thorsen saidin a statement. He predicted EVs will outnumber diesel cars by 2026.

Read it all.

Save you a click: Norway.
This country is now the world’s first to have more EVs than gas-powered cars https://t.co/WkVNxqxAlv

— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) September 18, 2024

From there:

I got up and turned on the TV, and there was just this big black hole in the World Trade Center. And there was just smoke billowing out of it. I called my sister Cathy I said, “You might wanna wake up, turn in your TV and take a look at what they’re showing.” The commentator’s saying that it’s an American Airlines plane. And I casually asked Cathy, I said, “Do you know where Betty is?” And she says, “Betty’s supposed to be flying out of Boston.” And I said, “Do you think Betty is on that plane?” We just didn’t know. So I left a phone call on her cellphone, just asking her when she’s landed or anywhere you’re on the ground, to just give us a call and tell us you’re okay. And there was no call from Betty. I called American Airlines, and it was only then that it was confirmed that Betty was on the flight.

I just want to add, through your passing, Betty, our family’s gotten very very close. Dad, who’s quite stoic, doesn’t really say a whole lot, man of the family, one day told us that he cries himself to sleep. Even to this day, he just keeps staying up watching TV, hoping somehow that you’ll reappear. And we’re all still waiting for that phone call from you to tell us that you’re okay. We just miss you a whole lot.

You may find the transcript of Betty Ong’s conversation reporting the hijacking from the American airlines plane here.

Today, we honor the memory of those lost on 9/11, and remember all the heroes who responded that day.#NeverForget pic.twitter.com/YyMGdyaH6U

— City of New York (@nycgov) September 11, 2024

Every weekday in New York City, close to one million bus riders — roughly one out of every two passengers — board without paying. The skipped fares are a crucial and growing loss of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is under severe financial pressure.

New York’s long-running fare evasion problem, among the worst of any major city in the world, has intensified recently; before the pandemic, only about one in five bus riders skipped the fare.

Yet public officials have done relatively little to collect the lost revenue from bus riders. Instead, they have focused almost exclusively on the subway system, where waves of police officers and private security guards have been deployed to enforce payment, even as fare evasion rates on trains are dwarfed by those on buses.

During the first three months of this year, 48 percent of bus riders did not pay, according to the latest available statistics from the transit authority, while 14 percent of subway riders evaded fares. Roughly twice the number of people ride the city’s subways as ride its buses.

Read it all.

Fare Evasion Surges on N.Y.C. Buses, Where 48% of Riders Fail to Pay – The New York Times https://t.co/VLrgiS8i7o

— Bernadette Hogan (@bern_hogan) August 27, 2024

The next time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.

Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer.

Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The situation is getting worse. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest. The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs around 40% more than its petrol-engine cousin, because of the battery that moves all those lithium ions from cathode to anode.

Read it all.

The Economist just published a deeply-researched story about car bloat, and it's very, very damning:

"For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles."

Well worth your time: https://t.co/eHalcNkiBX pic.twitter.com/1RBfAooX6V

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) September 1, 2024

The American worker is making peace with a longer ride.

Big shifts in the way people live and work are making commutes of over an hour into the office more common—and even more palatable. Rising housing costs have prompted many to move farther away from city centers, while the staying power of hybrid work means they don’t have to drive into work every day. 

The share of super commutes—those 75 miles or longer—have grown the most and are up by nearly a third since 2020, according to new research from Stanford University. 

Craig Allender’s family of four felt they had outgrown their three-bedroom home in Novato, Calif., and wanted to upgrade. They found a five-bedroom one 30 miles north in Sonoma County where lower housing costs put a 3,000-square-foot house in reach. 

America’s Commute to Work Is Getting Longer & Longer: "The share of super commutes—those 75 miles or longer—have grown the most & are up by nearly a third since 2020, according to new research from Stanford University" https://t.co/dfQsXWei1x

— Jim Russell (@ProducerCities) June 4, 2024

Never has it been so cheap to inflict a world of economic pain.

That stark point was underscored last week by Maximilian Hess, a principal at London-based Enmetena Advisory, a political risk consultancy. Speaking to a webinar of supply-chain managers, he showed a slide of a canoe-size naval drone and said such jury-rigged weapons have the ability to redirect world trade.

“Nowhere is this more clear than in the conflict in the Red Sea,” Hess said, referring to attacks launched from Yemen toward commercial ships trying to use the Suez Canal.

Nearly six months into the Houthis’ relentless campaign to protest Israel’s war in Gaza, the economic fallout is widening. As ships sail around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, their unpredictable schedules are clogging major Asian ports, creating shortages of empty containers in some places and pileups in others. Delivery times to the US and Europe are getting longer, and freight rates are surging.

🌎 Ships Diverted From Red Sea Send Ripple Effects Across the Globe – Bloomberghttps://t.co/1A8HVOJVKX pic.twitter.com/6fFCf9asLJ

— Christophe Barraud🛢🐳 (@C_Barraud) June 3, 2024

The NTSB said the door plug was opened at Boeing’s Renton factory so a team from supplier Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan., could repair damaged rivets adjacent to the door plug on the 737 MAX 9 jet.

The fix required removal of insulation and interior panels at that location and the opening of the door plug. After the rivets were repaired, a Boeing team worked to restore the interior.

Federal regulations require that every manufacturing job that goes into assembly of an airplane be documented. And critical tasks have to be signed off by quality inspectors.

A month after the blowout, though, Boeing has not provided the NTSB with documentation about who opened and re-closed the door plug, how exactly it was done and with what authorization.

Read it all (my emphasis).

A Boeing 737 MAX 9 was missing key bolts when it was delivered to Alaska Airlines, the National Transportation Safety Board says in a preliminary report on Flight 1282's blowout over Portland. https://t.co/1ygq2zDdmg

— The Seattle Times (@seattletimes) February 7, 2024

In the year ahead, the use of biometrics — an individual’s unique physical identifiers, such as fingerprints and faces — will be expanded at airports in the United States and abroad, a shift to enhance security, replace physical identification such as passports and driver’s licenses, and reduce the amount of time required by travelers to pass through airports. Biometric technology will be seen everywhere from bag drops at the check-in counters to domestic security screening.

In the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is expanding its program allowing passengers to opt in for a security screening relying on a facial recognition match with their physical identification — a photo taken in real time is compared against a scan of a license or passport and assists the T.S.A. officer in verifying a traveler’s identity. This program is currently available at 30 airports nationwide, including Salt Lake City International Airport and Denver International Airport; the T.S.A. said it will expand to more than 400 airports in the coming years.

T.S.A. PreCheck travelers who are flying on Delta Air Lines may not even need to show their identification at all during bag drop and security, if they opt in to Delta’s digital ID program.

Read it all.

Will Passports Be Replaced by Biometrics? https://t.co/4uBMQ6D0JE pic.twitter.com/2nvuvuv7Z1

— Stephanie Maurice Zapata (@StephanieZapa12) January 19, 2024

International trade is constrained by eight primary maritime chokepoints, hard realities imposed by immutable geography. The United States has long recognized a vital national security interest in ensuring freedom of navigation through each of them. This strike helped protect those interests.

Half of these eight global chokepoints are dispersed widely. Only one each can be found in Europe (the Strait of Gibraltar), in Africa (the Cape of Good Hope), in East Asia (the Straits of Malacca), and in the Americas (the Panama Canal). Unfortunately, the other half of these critical chokepoints are all concentrated in a relatively small region where southwestern Asia meets Europe and Africa: the Bosporus Strait, the Suez Canal, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz. This area also happens to be the most important single source of the energy required to sustain global economic growth. Those two facts explain why US presidents keep rediscovering the need to focus disproportionately on the Middle East, despite their often-heartfelt desires to do otherwise.

Today, the greatest threat to these chokepoints is Iran and its proxies. The regime in Tehran has long threatened to shut down Hormuz and repeatedly attacked shipping in the area. Most recently, it even threatened to shut down Gibraltar. The Houthis, Iran’s partner and proxy in Yemen, had repeatedly attacked ships transiting the Bab. The Biden administration recognized the threat, laid the diplomatic predicate, assembled the multilateral coalition, deployed the assets, issued clear warnings, and then took action. This is what professional policymaking looks like. One hopes that the right lessons will be learned in both Sanaa and Tehran.

Read it all.

The US can no longer afford to underestimate the threat posed by the Houthis, much less the threat posed by the wider network that supports Iranian malign behavior, writes @ACMideast’s @WillWechsler.

Read more. ⬇️ https://t.co/OX8fyHaik7

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) January 12, 2024

The world is at “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, according to the leading global energy watchdog, which for the first time has forecast that demand for oil, natural gas and coal will all peak before 2030.

The International Energy Agency projected that the consumption of the three major fossil fuels will start to decline this decade because of the rapid growth of renewable energy and the spread of electric vehicles.

“We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era and we have to prepare ourselves for the next era,” IEA head Fatih Birol said of the projections, due to be published next month in the body’s World Energy Outlook. “It shows that climate policies do work.”

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Today the Episcopal Church commemorates John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, 1830

Rector of Trinity Wall Street, 3rd Bishop of New York (1816-30) and founder of General Theological Seminary, he helped promote the extension of the Episcopal Church in Central & Western New York pic.twitter.com/wIkunzNNCd

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) September 12, 2023

Car insurance is a growing burden for Kalisa Hobbs.

Hobbs, who lives near the northern shore of Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain, said the cost of her auto coverage jumped almost 30 percent this year when State Farm added hundreds of dollars to her annual premium, raising it to $1,806. “I’m not going to go hungry or homeless, but like everybody else I live on a budget, and when that budget gets interrupted, it’s difficult,” said Hobbs, 56, who works as a communications manager at a paper mill. “It’s just on my credit card, and I’ll pay it off when I can.”

Hobbs has been swept up in a larger trend affecting hundreds of thousands of American drivers: soaring car insurance rates, with some states seeing increases above 50 percent in the past year.

Premiums have kept climbing even as other types of inflation have cooled. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, car insurance for U.S. drivers in July was 16 percent more expensive than in July 2022, and 70 percent more expensive than in 2013.

Read it all.

The value of claims submitted has risen because repairs and replacements have become more expensive, companies say.

And natural disasters make things worse. https://t.co/8QJ6slriE6

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 6, 2023

As a lay chaplain to ports, Ruth Campbell’s area of care stretches from Southend to Silvertown in east London. It ranges from small jetties to the giant ports of London Gateway, where the container ships arrive, and London Tilbury.

Around 10,000 ships come up the River Thames every year –with cruise ships alone carrying up to 800 crew. Some stay only for five hours before heading back out – and others up to a week while their ships are unloaded.

Many crew will have had little or no contact with their families over a nine month period with some having missed key family occasions and milestones.

Ruth’s role will very often mean carrying WiFi routers on board to help seafarers make contact with their families and friends.

Read it all.

How chaplains are helping seafarers – a testimony for Sea Sunday. 🌊

Read more about the chaplaincy to the tens of thousands of ships that dock at UK ports with crew on board who have spent months at sea.👇🏽https://t.co/kSzmPZBqsn

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) July 9, 2023

A former airline pilot who saw the ‘face of Christ’ in the people he met after landing in some of the poorest areas of the world has been ordained a deacon.

[The] Rev Joshua Pollard worked for easyJet and then Virgin Atlantic over 11 years after qualifying as a pilot when he was 21 years old. He flew to European destinations and later on long haul routes all over the world, including the Caribbean, the US, Africa and India.

“People used to ask me ‘can you see heaven when you are pilot?’ and I would answer ‘frankly no’,” he said.

“Wherever I was going – and sometimes we were flying to some pretty tough and poor places, with people living in real hardship – it was through the people that I could see the face of Christ.

“It was not so much seeing heaven in the skies as in the faith of the people that I met once I had landed.”

Read it all.

Pilot swaps a life in the skies for parish ministry

A former airline pilot who saw the ‘face of Christ’ in the people he met after landing in some of the poorest areas of the world has been ordained a deacon.

Read more ➡️ https://t.co/EORb8Sof4y

— Canterbury Diocese (@CanterburyDio) June 30, 2023

GASTON COUNTY, N.C. — Nothing remains of the hilltop home that once stood at the end of this gravel road in western North Carolina. The house burned to the ground months ago.

Children’s bikes and firewood piles litter the yards of a half-dozen ranch homes down the hill that are next in line to be erased from the landscape. The company that will soon own them plans to have these homes torched, too. It is only interested in what lies beneath.

A hint of that prize sits a few steps into the forest, where craggy outcrops stand in the shade of tall loblolly pines. Look closely and you’ll see the rocks are marked with sparkling pinstripes of pale green.

Those pinstripes are evidence of lithium, a lightweight element used to power electric vehicle batteries. And that green is gold to Piedmont Lithium, the company planning to tunnel 500 feet into the earth here to mine the lucrative mineral.

Lithium is expected to fuel America’s transition away from gasoline-burning automobiles. In the process, that harvest could generate $3.9 billion for this rural community in five years, according to Piedmont, which penned an agreement with EV giant Tesla in January.

Along a certain stretch — where North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia meet — lithium is quickly becoming king: It pushes up through the ground, oozes through recyclers’ shredding machines and will soon travel through the backwoods on aging rail lines. New mines — as many as three separate operations by 2030 — are only part of the story. Welcome to the Lithium Belt.

Read it all.

Lithium is driving today’s clean energy transition just as fossil fuels drove the industrial revolution. But what is the trade off to the environment in the Southeast?
Fascinating read from @ClareFieseler on a journey across the Lithium Belt. https://t.co/b6OKcqPB9j

— Glenn Smith (@glennsmith5) May 21, 2023

The Argonne National Laboratory in the US has essentially cracked the battery technology for electric vehicles, discovering a way to raise the future driving range of standard EVs to a thousand miles or more. It promises to do so cheaply without exhausting the global supply of critical minerals in the process.

The joint project with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) has achieved a radical jump in the energy density of battery cells. The typical lithium-ion battery used in the car industry today stores about 200 watt-hours per kilo (Wh/kg). Their lab experiment has already reached 675 Wh/kg with a lithium-air variant.

This is a high enough density to power trucks, trains, and arguably mid-haul aircraft, long thought to be beyond the reach of electrification. The team believes it can reach 1,200 Wh/kg. If so, almost all global transport can be decarbonised more easily than we thought, and probably at a negative net cost compared to continuation of the hydrocarbon status quo.

The Argonne Laboratory in Chicago is not alone in pushing the boundaries of energy storage and EV technology. The specialist press reports eye-watering breakthroughs almost every month. America, Europe, China and Japan are all in a feverish global race for battery dominance – or survival – and hedge funds are swarming over the field.

Read it all(registration or subscription).

The @argonne National Laboratory and @illinoistech have achieved a breakthrough in the energy density of battery cells that could push EVs beyond 1,000 miles on a charge, and potentially, eventually, power trucks, trains and mid-haul aircraft.https://t.co/qZOFi28aOW

— Andrew Westrope (@andrew_westrope) March 8, 2023

Elizabeth’s brother Tim’s daughter Elena got married in Mobile, Alabama, over the weekend–KSH.

Good Morning Mobile, Alabama! Today it will be Partly Cloudy today! With a high of 77F and a low of 55F. It's currently Clear with a temp of 60 . Sunrise on October 31, 2022 at 07:06AM and sunset on October 31, 2022 at 06:04PM . pic.twitter.com/9yPayU2rYn

— Southern Weather (@TravelWeather1) October 31, 2022

A looming US railway strike has already halted shipments of a critical fertilizer ingredient at a time when American farmers need it the most.

Rail officials are no longer shipping ammonia, an important component of about three quarters of all fertilizer, because it would be dangerous if the hazardous material was stranded during a potential rail strike, according to the Association of American Railroads. Ammonia is used in explosives as well as being an essential nutrient for plants.

While the average consumer rarely thinks about fertilizer, it can make or break crop production. Global food prices have touched records in recent months as inflation ripples through economies and hunger levels rise. The cost of growing food in the US is set to rise by the most ever in 2022.

Any rail disruptions would come at a time of peak demand. After the latest crop is harvested, North American farmers will need to apply fertilizer to replenish nutrients in the soil that are lost during the growing season. The chemicals are already scarce because plants have shut down in Europe due to the energy crisis there, and the war in Ukraine is hampering shipments.

Read it all.

NYT top #economy #railstrike #labourmarket #unions #workers pic.twitter.com/VY2djSuG3i

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) September 14, 2022

Paul Baumann, receiver general at Westminster Abbey, said the Queen’s platinum jubilee in early June had “created a buzz” around the church, in which 39 coronations have taken place since 1066, providing a “priceless advertisement” for visitors from around the world.

“If they’re going to go somewhere for their first trip after the pandemic, it strikes me that the place most Americans reach for first is the UK,” said Baumann. He added that the UK had “shaken off” the bad publicity it received early on in the pandemic when it was derided as “plague island”.

“Europeans . . . were first to return, and now we’re seeing Americans returning to London in significant numbers, and that’s particularly important because they prioritise going to visitor attractions and are big spenders,” said Bernard Donoghue, chief executive of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, adding that sterling falling by 13 per cent against the dollar since the start of the year had been a boon to tourism from the US.

Read it all.

US tourists drive rebound in foreign visitors to London’s top attractions https://t.co/Y1KzAQrN63

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) July 16, 2022

The Holy City is once again topping a travel list.

On Tuesday, Travel + Leisure announced that Charleston had taken the top spot on its “Top U.S. Cities” list as part of its World’s Best Awards 2022.

According to Holy City Sinner, this is the 10th consecutive year Charleston has been listed as number one.

“There’s a reason people keep going back to Charleston: the city expresses the perfect balance of Southern charm, knockout food and drinks, and walkability. Many readers also found the city’s history to be a draw. Others appreciated the simple pleasures of strolling the side streets of downtown,” the publication wrote of The Holy City.

Read it all.

On Tuesday, @TravelLeisure announced that Charleston had once again taken the top spot on its "Top U.S. Cities" list as part of its World’s Best Awards 2022:https://t.co/YgM11x2RXl#chsnews

— ABC News 4 (@ABCNews4) July 12, 2022

Somewhere in an English village — amid the cul-de-sacs and pubs, vegetable patches and garden gnomes, the GP’s surgery and the miniature steam railway — lies the spot where the Virgin Mary came down from heaven.

Walsingham, Norfolk, is a sleepy place (though not as sleepy as the neighbouring village of Great Snoring). Nonetheless, it was here in 1061 that the Virgin supposedly appeared to Richeldis de Faverches, a Saxon noblewoman. Mary instructed her to build a replica of the house at Nazareth where archangel Gabriel had brought the news that she was to bear the Son of God.

You might wonder if there were more urgent prophecies to relate to a Saxon in the England of 1061 — but, in any case, the noblewoman set about following her instructions. It is said that one night, while she prayed, the building materials she had provided miraculously assembled themselves into the “Holy House” of Walsingham.

For half a millennium, Walsingham thrived as a centre of pilgrimage, alongside Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago. English kings came to pray here. The Milky Way became known as “The Walsingham Way” because its celestial sweep recalled the movement of pilgrims towards the bright star of its shrine. Walsingham, so the saying went, was “England’s Nazareth”.

Read it all (subsciption).

Somewhere in an English village — amid the cul-de-sacs and pubs, vegetable patches and garden gnomes, the GP’s surgery and the miniature steam railway — lies the spot where the Virgin Mary came down from heaven… https://t.co/pWEzTvkEYH

— FT Weekend (@ftweekend) May 24, 2022

Archie Norman, chair of Marks and Spencer, said this week: “Some of the descriptors, particularly of animal products, have to be written in Latin and in a certain typeface.” Every sandwich containing butter, he said, requires an EU vet certificate, which means employing 13 vets and budgeting for 30 per cent more driver time.

Six-mile queues at Dover and 18-mile lines at Calais this year were caused by post-Brexit checks, worsened by small numbers of lorries with the wrong paperwork.

We can expect more delays in September, when a new security system may require drivers to leave their vehicles for facial or body scans, and more again next year when trucks will be inspected at the new inland border at Sevington, near Ashford, Kent.

The metaphor of supply “chains” makes the process sound orderly and smooth, but from the first this journey along them was more like an adventure through a wild ecosystem in which we were a prey, dashing between safe habitats such as lorry parks and filling stations, hunted by authorities, legislation and customs rules that sought to charge, delay or stop us.

It was not that the trucks had any deficiency to bother the police or the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, which regulates haulage in Britain. It was that many drivers loathe and avoid the DVSA, and checkpoints of all kinds in all countries. 

“They’re not on your side. They’re out to get you. It’s like they want to punish you for doing your job,” Ian said. “They want to fine you and take your money.”

Read it all.

Stunning read on the lonely life of the longdistance lorry drivers. Proud to have as our @ftweekend essay @HoratioClare https://t.co/9l6t6nLE0u

— Alec Russell (@AlecuRussell) May 20, 2022

The vital nature of the railways has transformed the way they are run. When the war started on February 24th, the system’s management triggered a secret plan worked out in advance for a national emergency. Female staff with families were evacuated abroad. Train drivers were recalled from retirement. Meanwhile a core management team packed suitcases for an as yet unclear period on the road. That central team has been in charge of strategy for the past 22 days, making decisions from aboard randomly chosen trains to avoid being hit by the Russians. Operational decisions have mostly been delegated to station managers, who work with military police around the clock to ensure as safe a passage for staff and passengers as they can.

Petro Stetsuk, the controller at Kyiv’s central station, is but one of a number of war heroes keeping the railways running. The former head of Ukraine’s transport police and a 30-year veteran of the railways, 60-year-old Mr Stetsuk has been camped alongside the tracks for the past three weeks. It has been a constant battle, fought alongside a slimmed-down staff of 60 railway workers. They have repaired the station after it was damaged by a falling rocket; turned the station’s east vestibule into a soup kitchen, field hospital and psychological clinic; and put more than 2m frantic fellow Ukrainians on evacuation trains to the west. Passenger flows are now less than the highs of late February, when close to 80,000 flowed through the station daily. But the work continues to be taxing. “My main job is keeping my people calm so they can make good decisions,” Mr Stetsuk says. He laughed: “Plus, of course, finding the train drivers, the carriage assistants, preparing the trains, calling the end stations, and making sure people aren’t blown up en route.”

Read it all.

I spent some time talking to the little heroes of Ukraine’s rail system — the brave drivers and staff moving refugees, the wounded and essential supplies. https://t.co/YuydE5BVMY

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) March 18, 2022

Every year that Southern Living has published rankings for its annual South’s Best Awards, Charleston has topped its list of best cities.

This latest win, announced last week, can’t be called consecutive, though. Charleston’s last time at No. 1 on the list was in March 2020, just days before cities started going into COVID-19 lockdown.

At the time, it wasn’t clear yet how the virus would affect South Carolina, and tourism leaders said the nod from Southern Living might have come at an ideal time: Air travel was already dropping off, but the visitor industry was still hopeful that tourists would continue to make shorter road trips. Southern Living readers were primarily in Charleston’s “drive market.”

Read it all.

Charleston’s “secret to holding the top spot” on Southern Living’s list of best cities in the South, according to the magazine, is its “commitment to reinvention,” with new hotels and restaurants popping up frequently on the peninsula.https://t.co/OirAMRzEYF

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) March 14, 2022

Take the time to listen to it all. It is simple but inspiring.

When America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released data this month showing that consumer price inflation had surged to 7 per cent, many investors were shocked. No wonder: this marks the fastest jump since 1982.

But here is another number that should spark concern: 17 per cent. That was the annual inflation rate for overall trucking costs last month, according to a (deeply buried) section of the bureau’s data. For the long-haul trucking sector, the number was even scarier: 25 per cent.

That is bad news for business — and consumers — given that almost three-quarters of freight in America is moved by trucks. Or to put it another way, if you want to understand what lies behind that scary 7 per cent inflation number, don’t just track raw material, energy or cross-border shipping costs; watch those oft-ignored truckers too.

Read it all.

Gillian Tett: if you want to understand what lies behind that scary US 7 per cent inflation number, don’t just track raw material, energy or cross-border shipping costs; watch those oft-ignored truckers too https://t.co/pjoTTvixvr pic.twitter.com/NVm8tsQ0Lb

— FT Opinion (@ftopinion) January 21, 2022