What You Missed While the President Was Yelling

In a week dominated by a single, all-consuming political story, it’s easy to lose track of the other, often equally significant, events shaping our world. While the nation’s attention was justifiably focused on the President’s chaotic and unconstitutional moves in Washington, D.C., other stories—of geopolitical absurdity, of industrial tragedy, of heartbreaking violence, and of technological endings—were quietly unfolding in the shadows. Here is a look at what you might have missed.

China’s Naval ‘Oopsie’ in the South China Sea

In the tense and heavily militarized waters of the South China Sea, a moment of high drama devolved into sheer, humiliating incompetence. According to the Philippine Coast Guard, a Chinese warship, while aggressively chasing a Philippine vessel near the disputed Scarborough Shoal, “performed a risky manoeuvre” and ended up plowing directly into one of its own, much larger, Chinese coast guard ships. Video released by Manila showed the vessel firing water cannons before making a sudden, disastrous turn. The collision, according to Commodore Jay Tarriela, inflicted “substantial damage” and rendered the Chinese warship “unseaworthy.”

The incident is a perfect, if darkly comedic, microcosm of Beijing’s increasingly reckless behavior in the region. For years, China has engaged in a campaign of harassment against its neighbors, using water cannons and, in a recent skirmish, even swords and spears to enforce its territorial claims. This latest “oopsie” is the predictable outcome of that aggression. In a telling example of state-controlled narratives, China’s official statement on the confrontation accused the Philippines of “forcibly intruding” but conveniently neglected to mention the part where they rammed their own ship.

A Predictable Tragedy at a Pennsylvania Steel Plant

An explosion at the Clairton Coke Works, a massive steel plant outside Pittsburgh, left two workers dead and ten others injured on Monday. But as the AP reported, this was not a random, unpredictable accident. It was the latest tragedy in a long and damning history of corporate negligence and regulatory failure at this specific facility.

This is a plant with a clear and documented pattern of safety failures. A maintenance worker was killed in a blast in 2009. Another explosion in 2010 injured 20 employees. Another worker was burned to death in 2014 after falling into a trench. And as recently as February of this year, a problem with a battery caused a “boom” that injured two more workers. This history is compounded by a failure of accountability. After the 2010 explosion, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined U.S. Steel, but the company successfully appealed and had the fines reduced. Monday’s tragedy was not a fluke; it was the predictable result of a corporate culture that has repeatedly failed to protect its workers and a regulatory system that has failed to force them to change.

The Austin Mass Shooting No One Is Talking About

In what has become a horrifyingly routine American story, a gunman opened fire outside a Target store in Austin, Texas, on Monday, killing three people, including one child. The shooting, which took place in the middle of back-to-school shopping, would have once dominated the national news cycle for a week. Now, it is a tragic footnote.

The police chief’s immediate pivot to the shooter’s “history of mental health problems” is a familiar and often misleading deflection. As research from Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry has shown, only 5% of shooting deaths in the U.S. are committed by people with diagnosed mental health disabilities. The real story, as one Texas State Senator noted, is that mass shootings have become our “national nightmare played out in communities every day,” a crisis of gun violence so common that it no longer even registers as a major headline.

The Final, Fading Sound of the Internet’s Childhood

Finally, in a story that will resonate with anyone over the age of 40, a piece of the internet’s childhood has officially died. AOL has announced that it is pulling the plug on its dial-up internet service. For a generation, the iconic “Beep, bop, boop, boooopp, scrsssshh…” was the sound of the future arriving. The company’s ubiquitous free-trial CDs are now artifacts in the Smithsonian.

While it’s easy to be nostalgic, the end of this era is not without real-world consequences. As of last year, over 163,000 American households, primarily in rural areas, still relied on this service. For them, this is not the loss of an artifact, but the loss of a lifeline, a stark reminder of the “digital divide” that still leaves many Americans behind. It is a quiet end to an era, a final, fading dial tone for the internet we once knew.

All of these stories are important in their own way. All of these stories deserve more attention than they’re getting. All of the people in these stories matter. This is what happens when the media gives too large a voice to an embicile with an agenda.