August 2024: Paris at both ends and five Saturdays
Paris held both ends of August 2024. The Olympics closed there on Sunday 11 August; the Paralympics opened again on Wednesday 28 August, with 4,400 athletes parading up the Champs-Elysees. Between those two ceremonies the month ran 31 days, from Thursday 1 August to Saturday 31 August, counting 22 business days and nine days of weekend. Its five Saturdays carried the summer rota.
The count
The extras stacked at the week's end: Thursday, Friday and Saturday each landed five times, and everything else four. Fridays ran from Friday 2 August to Friday 30 August, and Saturdays from Saturday 3 August to Saturday 31 August. The month spanned ISO weeks 31 to 35.
A new moon arrived on Sunday 4 August. First quarter came on Monday 12 August, the full moon on Monday 19 August and last quarter on Monday 26 August. Three phases of four landed on Mondays.
Paris runs the month
Those Games finished at the Stade de France with the United States and China tied at 40 golds apiece. Tom Cruise left the stadium roof on a rope, flag in hand, pointing the Games towards Los Angeles 2028.
Seventeen days on, the city did it again. The Paralympics opened on Wednesday 28 August along the Champs-Elysees to Place de la Concorde, the first ceremony in Paralympic history staged outside a stadium. The sport ran on into September, with the whole city for a venue.
A Saturday of engineers and lawyers
Monday 5 August brought the market shock. Japan's Nikkei dropped 12.4 percent, its worst day since 1987, and markets slipped across Asia, Europe and the Americas. The same day, Sheikh Hasina resigned as prime minister of Bangladesh, ending 15 years in power.
Saturday 24 August kept the engineers and the lawyers busy. NASA said Boeing's Starliner would come home from the space station with no crew aboard; its two astronauts would wait roughly eight months for a SpaceX Dragon flight in 2025. In Paris, Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov was arrested at Le Bourget airport.
The month's quieter records were its own. Black Myth: Wukong arrived on Tuesday 20 August and shifted 10 million copies inside three days, helping Steam to a record above 37 million concurrent players. Oasis announced a reunion on Tuesday 27 August, 15 years after the split, and Britain began limbering up for the ticket queue.
The month's losses
England saw its worst riots in more than a decade in the first days of the month, after the Southport stabbings at the end of July. Hundreds were arrested as the disorder subsided. On Friday 9 August a regional flight came down at Vinhedo in Brazil with all 62 aboard killed, the deadliest air disaster there since 2016.
August 2024 ended on a Saturday, which is the polite way for a summer month to go: quietly, at the weekend.