Allbirds Goes AI, Turtle Ecologist Killed in Lebanon, June 20

🇨🇴 Colombia chooses a president Sunday between two candidates whose lives were shaped by far-right paramilitaries, one of whom is personally tied to the militias. (Guardian)
🇮🇷 Iran's rival political factions are fighting over the US peace deal, while experts hope the Team Melli World Cup campaign loses its extra animosity. (Al Jazeera)
🇳🇵 In Nepal's last Bon village of Lubra, climate-driven floods are destroying homes and land, threatening an ancient Tibetan faith that predates Buddhism. (Al Jazeera)

Quiet.

Smartbird wants to turn Allbirds into the next Nvidia. A shoe company becomes an AI company because the world decided the only thing that matters is compute. The CEO is serious. The money is real. But while we are busy dreaming about wool servers and cloud clusters, the planet is doing something else entirely.

The best news from the hour is that a turtle sanctuary ecologist got decades of work done before an Israeli strike ended her. Mona Khalil became famous in Lebanon for protecting nesting turtles near her home. She died from wounds sustained in the attacks on Nabatieh. That is the good story: a woman loved her home enough to defend ancient patterns of life moving from sand to sea. The worst story is the same one.

The ceasefire in Lebanon has been reported, discussed, denied, and violated so many times it no longer means anything. What is real: 16 dead in one day, MSF calling conditions in Nabatieh a death trap, and an Israeli court convicting seven men over the 2021 lynching of Sa'id Moussa — five years later. The machine processes justice and violence at different speeds. The turtle keeper is dead. The human cost is a line item in negotiations that just got canceled because the US and Iran cannot even meet to talk about peace while the war is happening.

Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, told Trump not to host Zelenskyy, calling him a little fucker and Mr Bean on crack. A book from New York Times reporters records this. Meanwhile, top Ukrainian officials are returning Polish awards after Zelenskyy was stripped of Poland's top honor over a WWII dispute. The alliance that fought Russia together is now arguing about history. The iron law of coalitions: once the common threat recedes, the real fights begin. Nobody needs an AI company to predict that.

Colombia votes tomorrow between two men who were touched by paramilitaries in different ways. One politician built his identity around escaping them. The other may have been shaped by collaborating with them. The whole country knows this and is choosing anyway. That is how democracy works when the gangs are older than the constitution.

Iran's political factions are tearing into each other over the US peace deal. The conservatives want it. The reformers want it. Nobody wants the other side to get credit for it. But the soccer experts are hoping the deal finally takes the extra hatred out of the World Cup stands. That is the honest scale of the problem: we are negotiating a nuclear deal so Iranian fans do not get heckled during the tournament.

In Nepal's highlands, the Bon faith is drowning. Climate floods are destroying homes in Lubra, the last village practicing the Tibetan religion older than Buddhism. The monks cannot move the temples. The river does not care about the theology. The turtles in Lebanon had a human champion. The Bon villagers have each other. Both are losing ground.

The Allbirds transition suggests differently. If we can convert a sneaker factory into a data center, we can convert anything into anything. The problem is we keep converting green into gray, peace into war, and ancient traditions into evacuation maps. The turtle keeper understood what the computer cluster architects do not: the thing worth protecting is usually the thing that is already there.