Five Things to Know, Aug. 29, 2022

1.   Two guided-missile cruisers steamed through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, the U.S. Navy's first “routine transit” of the waterway since the Chinese military encircled the island for extensive military drills earlier this month.

2.   A Memphis native fighting alongside Ukraine soldiers is the latest American killed by Russian-backed militias in the hotly contested Donbas region of the besieged country, the State Department confirmed.

3.   The U.N. nuclear watchdog on Monday injected a ray of hope in the standoff over the Zaporizhzhia atomic power plant at the heart of fighting in Ukraine by announcing that its mission of top experts “is now on its way” to the facility even as renewed shelling in the area highlighted fears of a catastrophe.

4.   Russia said Monday it will launch sweeping war games drills in the country’s east that will involve forces from China — a show of increasingly close military ties between Moscow and Beijing amid tensions with the West over the Kremlin's action in Ukraine.

5.   A Department of Defense effort that began in 2015 to use science to solve one of our country’s prolonged mysteries has identified the remains of a Navy sailor from Athens, Tennessee, who died in the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor more than eight decades ago.