Graphic detail

ANOTHER day, another grim statistic. On September 2nd a three-year-old boy was found drowned on a beach in Turkey after a boat carrying migrants capsized in a failed attempt to reach the Greek island of Kos. The boy, from Kobane in northern Syria, died along with his 5-year-old brother and their mother. Their father survived; a further nine people did not. So far more than 2,600 migrants are known to have died crossing the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe in 2015, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

This year 350,000 migrants have arrived in Europe by sea compared with 219,000 during the whole of 2014, itself a record year.

THE gambling industry is set to win a bit less money from the world's punters this year. Gross winnings (total take minus payouts, excluding expenses) are forecast to dip by 2.6% to $488 billion, according to H2 Gambling Capital, a British consultancy, partly because of China's corruption clampdown in Macau, where revenues have been tumbling. The industry's winnings are, of course, the punters' losses. Asia is home to the unluckiest punters on a per-adult basis. Australians gamble (and lose) the most: an estimated $1,130 for every adult in the country, owing to a highly penetrated bricks-and-mortar market and a high propensity to gamble.

NOT since the second world war has Europe faced refugee flows of such complexity and scale as this summer's migrant crisis. The protests reported on September 1st involving hundreds of migrants at a railway station in Budapest—after Hungarian police barred their ongoing travel into Europe—were just the latest in a series of recent flashpoints from Calais to the Macedonian border.

Against this backdrop, much has been made of the comparative acceptance rates of asylum applicants by different European Union member states.

BIG demonstrations planned to take place in Malaysia's cities on August 29th and 30th—only one of many difficulties facing its prime minister, Najib Razak—are earning the country of 30m attention. Formed in 1963 from a confection of sultanates previously under British rule, Malaysia sits at the heart of South-East Asia, split into two parts either side of the South China Sea. A peninsula bordering Thailand is home to most of its people; the states of Sabah and Sarawak, meanwhile, perch on the north coast of the island of Borneo.

ON AUGUST 22th, at least 11 people were killed and many more injured when a vintage-1950s Hawker Hunter jet crashed on to a dual carriageway on the south coast of Britain during a display at Shoreham airshow. It follows a summer of carnage across Europe. The same weekend, a pilot died in another airshow crash in Switzerland. And earlier this month, three members of the bin Laden family were killed when their private jet crashed and exploded when landing at a British airport in perfect conditions.

The spate of crashes has worried many still yet to fly off on their summer holidays.

OVER the past 100 years, mankind has made great leaps in eliminating diseases and learning how to keep people alive. The life expectancy of a person born in America in 1900 was just 47 years. Eighty years later that figure had increased to 70 years for men and 77 years for women. But since then progress has slowed: a boy born in America in 2013 is expected to live just six years longer than his 1990 cohort. And not all of his twilight years will be golden.

AS A global city, New York offers visitors sights they won’t see anywhere else in the world. In the summer months, at the peak of tourist season, the city also offers visitors some fairly distinct smells. As the city heats up, smells of litter and waste become especially pungent. One might expect complaints about dog fouling to peak in summer accordingly. Yet, just the opposite is true. A look through the city's open data programme reveals that 311 calls (that is, non-emergency calls to city authorities) about dog mess actually peak in late winter, and decline steadily over the rest of the year.