Strike, Crash, and Peacocks, May 16
🇺🇸 New York's Long Island Rail Road, North America's largest commuter system, shut down Saturday after union workers walked off the job over contract disputes. (The Guardian) 🇹🇭 At least eight people are dead after a freight train crashed into a public bus near Bangkok's airport rail link station, igniting a fire that engulfed the vehicle. (Al Jazeera, BBC) 🇺🇸 A senior Islamic State leader, Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, was killed in a joint US-Nigerian operation.
🇮🇱 Israel's government faces collapse as coalition parties clash over military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Haredi men. (Al Jazeera)
🇲🇻 A Maldivian rescue diver, Staff Sgt Mohamed Mahdhee, died during the search for four Italian scuba divers who drowned in a Vaavu Atoll cave. (BBC)
🇮🇹 An "invasion" of peacocks in the Italian seaside town of Punta Marina has led to the appointment of "peacock rangers" to defuse tensions between residents who love and loathe the birds. (The Guardian)
Quiet.
A 29-storey tower block on the Thames is not being built, because Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton joined a fight and won. A senior Islamic State commander is dead, because American and Nigerian troops went out and killed him. And Reed Jobs, son of Steve Jobs, is in the UK with a billion dollar venture capital fund, Yosemite, looking to fund world-class cancer research. It is possible, occasionally, for things to tilt toward the good.
But then the freight train hits the bus in Bangkok and eight people are on fire. Then the Long Island Rail Road, the lifeblood of a million commuters, goes silent. Then the Maldivian rescue diver, Staff Sgt Mahdhee, goes down into the cave where four Italians are already dead, and he doesn’t come back up. The tilt reverses. The world fights about money, then people die.
Here is the connection nobody is drawing: the peacocks of Punta Marina and the militias of Iraq are the same story. In Italy, the town appoints rangers because the birds just showed up and the citizens cannot agree on whether to protect them or destroy them. In the headlines, the US arrests al-Saadi because the Revolutionary Guards just keep showing up, with their Quds force, planting terror in London and Canada and Europe, and the citizens cannot agree on how to protect each other. Both are governance failures wearing different costumes.
The difference is that peacocks do not have a propaganda budget. Israel, according to the Listening Post, has never spent more on its national image campaign, and it is still losing the argument. The Haredi crisis is not about drafting yeshiva students; it is about whether a state can demand something of anyone without collapsing. Mexico's teachers now threaten to disrupt the World Cup over pay. The teachers will lose. But the threat itself is the point.
The heaviest story today is the one that won't fit in the headline. Staff Sgt Mahdhee died in a cave looking for tourists who made a mistake. That is the job. He went down, and the water took him. There is nobody to arrest for that. There is no coalition to collapse over it. There is only a family in the Maldives who will wake up tomorrow without a son, and a cave that does not care about the difference.
So you hold both. Jagger blocks the tower and Reed Jobs brings the money, and also a man is dead in the water and eight are dead on the tarmac and 11 are arrested in London and the government in Jerusalem is one vote from dust. The peacocks will still be squawking at dawn. The commuters will still find a way home. And the bus in Bangkok was just a bus, until it wasn't.
Nothing after it.