LIBYA

Two dams that everyone knew were failing burst in the night, and a Mediterranean city is washed into the sea

Engineers had warned for years that the dams above Derna needed repair. A decade of war meant nobody repaired them. When the storm came, they broke, and took a quarter of the city with them.

Torrential rain from Storm Daniel overwhelmed two ageing dams above the coastal Libyan city of Derna late on the night of September 10, and when they burst, a wall of water several metres high swept through the sleeping city and carried whole neighbourhoods, with the people in them, into the Mediterranean. The death toll is uncertain in the way that only the worst disasters are: authorities and aid agencies have counted more than 11,000 dead and list thousands more missing, and the true number may never be known, because so many were swept out to sea and because Libya, split between two rival governments and a decade of chaos, has no single authority able to count its own dead.

What makes Derna unbearable is that it was foretold, in writing, by name. A hydrologist at a Libyan university published a paper in 2022 warning that the two dams above the city were in poor condition, that maintenance had lapsed, and that a large flood could cause "a catastrophe" for Derna's residents. Funds had been allocated for repairs years earlier and, in a country carved up by militias and rival administrations, never spent as intended. The dams had not been properly maintained since before the 2011 revolution. So the warning existed, precisely, with the city named, and the maintenance that would have answered it was eaten by the same disorder that then left no one able to sound an alarm or manage an evacuation when the water came. This paper has written the sentence too many times this year: the warning was on paper, and it did not reach the people in the houses. Derna is that sentence written in its most terrible form.

DIPLOMACY

Canada accuses India of an assassination on its soil, and two democracies square off

Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, told his parliament on September 18 that his government was pursuing "credible allegations" that agents of the Indian government were behind the murder of a Canadian Sikh separatist leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, shot dead outside a temple in British Columbia in June. India rejected the accusation as "absurd," expelled a Canadian diplomat in retaliation for Canada expelling an Indian one, and suspended visa services for Canadians. The rupture is extraordinary: a Western democracy publicly accusing another large democracy of carrying out an extrajudicial killing on its territory, and doing so with, it hinted, intelligence shared by its allies. For India, courted all year by a West that wants it as a counterweight to China, the episode is a test of how much its friends will overlook. For the Sikh diaspora in Canada, Britain and beyond, it is a chilling suggestion that the reach of the state does not stop at the border.

AMERICA

The autoworkers strike all three carmakers at once, and Washington cannot keep its own lights on

The United Auto Workers began an unprecedented simultaneous strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis on September 15, a "stand-up" strike that starts at a few plants and threatens to spread, demanding big pay rises and protection as the industry shifts to electric vehicles that need fewer hands to build. President Biden joined a picket line, the first sitting president known to have done so. Meanwhile Congress lurched toward a government shutdown at the month's end, as a faction of House Republicans refused to fund the government their own party had agreed to fund, and the Fed, meeting on September 20, held rates steady but signalled through its projections that it expected to keep them high well into next year, longer than markets had hoped.

IN BRIEF

Karabakh empties; women's seats; a senator dies

Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive on September 19 and forced the ethnic-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to capitulate within a day, ending three decades of self-rule and beginning an exodus of virtually the entire Armenian population toward Armenia in the days that followed, one of the fastest displacements of a people in recent memory. India's parliament, in its new building, passed a long-delayed bill reserving a third of legislative seats for women, though its provisions will not take effect until after a census and redistricting, likely years away. And Dianne Feinstein, the California senator who broke barriers for women in American politics across three decades, died on September 29 at 90, having stayed in office through visible decline.

The Column

An assassination, an alliance, and the price of being courted

India spent the year being wooed by the West as the great counterweight to China. This fortnight a Western ally accused it of murder. I want to think about what that costs, and who pays it.

By Meera Anand

This column has spent much of the year defending the idea of India as a serious and rising power, a convener, a builder, a place whose engineers land rovers on the Moon for the price of an advertisement. So I want to be equally honest about the story that broke this fortnight, because a person who only writes the flattering half is not a commentator, he is a brochure. Canada's prime minister stood up in his parliament and accused the government of my country of orchestrating the murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. India called it absurd. I do not know what happened outside that temple in British Columbia, and neither, yet, does the public. But I know what the accusation costs, and who pays it, and that is worth writing about even before the facts are settled.

The accusation lands in the middle of the most flattering year India has had on the world stage in a generation. The G20 in Delhi, the Moon landing, the courtship by an America that wants India as its counterweight to China, the red carpets in Washington and Paris. The whole strategy of that courtship rested on a bet the West was making, mostly quietly: that India's size and trajectory and shared wariness of Beijing were worth overlooking the harder questions about the direction of its democracy. Trudeau's accusation makes that bet explicit and uncomfortable, because you cannot both hold India up as a fellow democracy against authoritarian China and wave away an allegation that it behaves, abroad, the way authoritarian states do. The other allies went quiet, which told you how much they did not want to choose.

Here is the part that I, sitting in Bengaluru, actually chew on. The pitch India makes to the world, the pitch my whole industry is downstream of, is that it is a place of rules: a democracy, a rule of law, a safe and predictable partner, unlike the alternative. That pitch is an asset worth more than any single deal, because it is the reason a company in California will trust a company in Bengaluru with its customers' data and its critical systems. Trust is the product. And an accusation like this one, true or not, is corrosive to exactly that asset, because it invites the world to wonder whether the rules-based story is the real one or the export version. I want it to be untrue, and not only for the obvious moral reason. I want it to be untrue because the story of India as a place of rules is the story my livelihood, and a lot of my country's future, is built on, and it is a story that a state which reaches across borders to kill its critics does not get to tell.

So I hold this one uneasily, without the tidy resolution the Rahul Gandhi story got last month. The facts are not in. The alliance is real and India's rise is real and the pride in the rover is real. And so is the question Canada just forced into the open, the one the courtship was designed to avoid: what, exactly, is the West overlooking in the partner it has decided it needs, and what happens to the rules-based story when the answer stops being possible to overlook. I do not have the ending. I only know that the value of being trusted is enormous and slow to build and quick to lose, and that a country selling itself as the reliable democracy cannot afford too many fortnights like this one.

The Ledger

Overshadowed this fortnight by flood, strike and diplomacy. The autoworkers' fight, like the actors' before it, carries an automation subtext: the electric transition needs fewer workers, and the union knows it. Every labour negotiation now has a machine in the room.

Data centers & power

Derna is a maintenance-and-infrastructure catastrophe, and its lesson generalises brutally: the unglamorous upkeep of critical physical systems is exactly what gets cut first and kills most when it fails. The AI build-out is pouring load onto physical infrastructure with the same maintenance politics.

Rates

Fed holds at 5.25-5.50 percent but its projections show rates staying high through 2024. Ten-year Treasury yields at 16-year highs. The "higher for longer" reality is now priced in bond markets, painfully.

Real estate

Mortgage rate 7.19 percent (September 21). The frozen market is starting to crack the homebuilders and the commercial-property owners who must refinance at these rates. Watch the office loans.

India tech

The Canada rupture is a reputational risk to the "India as reliable rules-based partner" story that the technology-services industry depends on. Trust is the sector's real product, and this is the kind of story that erodes it.

What we called wrong

In No. 4, writing about Turkey's earthquake, we treated building-code failure as a specifically Turkish story of amnesties. Derna shows the pattern is universal: the deferred maintenance of critical infrastructure, warned about in writing, unfunded until it kills. We should have drawn the general lesson then.

The Back Page

The paper nobody read

There is a document I cannot stop thinking about this fortnight. In 2022, a hydrologist named Abdelwanees Ashoor, at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Libya, published a study of the two dams above Derna. He found them in poor repair, warned that they had not been properly maintained, and wrote, in the sober language of an academic paper, that a large flood would threaten the city and that the dams required "periodic maintenance." He named the risk. He named the city. He published it where such things are published, in a journal, for anyone who cared to read. A little over a year later the dams burst in exactly the way he described and a quarter of Derna was swept into the sea, and his paper became, overnight, one of the most quietly devastating documents I have ever heard of: a precise warning, correct in every particular, that reached no one who could act on it in time. This is the thing about warnings that the disasters of this year keep teaching. They are almost never missing. They are sitting in a paper, a report, a filing, a risk register, written by someone who saw it coming and did their job and told the truth, and then filed it into a world too broken or too busy or too broke to do the boring, expensive, life-saving thing the warning asked for. Somewhere right now there is a paper about the next one. Somebody has already written it. The question is only whether anyone will read it before the water comes.