The first-ever federal prosecution of a once and possibly future president threatens to be a fraught national experience that may harden beliefs and widen divisions in America’s already polarized political environment.

The 38-count indictment of former President Donald Trump and an aide alleges obstruction and mishandling of classified materials, including documents concerning nuclear programs and potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies. But even before the charges were unsealed, Democrats and many Republicans in Washington were reacting to the news as if commenting on entirely different events.

To Democrats and some Republicans critical of Mr. Trump, the 49-page indictment is indicative of the rule of law and the principle that no person is above it. They say Mr. Trump brought the charges on himself by taking classified documents and refusing to return them, despite being asked repeatedly to do so.

“The rule of law is central to the integrity of our democracy. It must be applied without fear or favor,” tweeted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Friday.

Many Trump supporters, on the other hand, question the legitimacy today of the very institutions that symbolize U.S. law and order. House Republican leaders publicly decried what they called the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice against President Joe Biden’s chief political opponent.

“This sham indictment is the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump,” said Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana in a statement after news of the indictment became public.

Thus Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy has become entwined with the nation’s entrenched political rifts. Perhaps that should not be surprising, given that one of the former president’s most consistent political messages has been that American institutions – the media, career politicians, the federal bureaucracy, even the FBI and the Department of Justice – are his adversaries.

Evan Vucci/AP

Former President Donald Trump listens as he speaks with reporters while in flight on his plane after a campaign rally at Waco Regional Airport, in Waco, Texas, March 25, 2023, while en route to West Palm Beach, Florida.

For Mr. Trump, politics may now be the best defense, says Jamil Jaffer, former Justice Department lawyer and executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

A case can’t truly be judged until all evidence is presented, but given what is publicly known at this point, it appears Mr. Trump did illegally retain documents he knew were classified.

“The rest of his legal defenses don’t seem particularly good right now based on the facts we’ve heard reported this far,” says Mr. Jaffer.

The indictment

Former President Trump is facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday afternoon.

The documents retained at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate dealt with a wide variety of sensitive military secrets, from information about U.S. military programs, defense and military capabilities of various foreign countries, and potential vulnerabilities to military attacks, according to the indictment.

Mr. Trump twice disclosed classified information from these documents in private meetings to people who lacked security clearances, the indictment alleges. In one instance, he disclosed a Pentagon plan of attack against an adversary nation – identified by media reports as Iran – with a writer and publisher working on a memoir for his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

In another, he waved a classified map of an unnamed country in front of an official from his own political action committee.

Mr. Trump “told the PAC representative he should not be showing the map to the PAC representative and to not get too close,” states the indictment.

Indicted with Mr. Trump as a co-conspirator is Waltine Nauta, the former president’s personal aide and valet. Mr. Nauta is accused in the indictment of conspiracy to obstruct justice and of lying to the FBI about his knowledge regarding the movement of boxes of papers that contained classified documents.

Prosecutors allege Mr. Nauta helped facilitate transport of the boxes from the White House to various storage sites at Mar-a-Lago. The boxes were kept at various times on the estate’s ballroom stage, in the business center, and in a shower and bathroom, according to the indictment. Eventually a storage room on the ground floor was cleared for the boxes.

In December of 2021, Mr. Nauta found several of the boxes fallen and their contents spilled on the floor, including a document that was clearly classified and marked for distribution to only the closest U.S.-allied nations.

Informed of the spill by text, another Trump employee replied, “oh no oh no,” the indictment says.

Mr. Nauta also allegedly helped move boxes out of the storage room in a shell game to hide them from Trump lawyers making an inventory as well as representatives from the National Archives. 

One of the most potentially damaging parts of the indictment may be the recollections of a Trump attorney regarding a meeting with the former president following a May 11, 2022, grand jury subpoena ordering production of all remaining classified documents in Mr. Trump’s possession.

Mr. Trump said at the meeting, as paraphrased by the attorney: “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes.”

He also allegedly said, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”

Reactions from GOP rivals

One aspect of the relative GOP unity behind Mr. Trump to this point may be surprising: A number of his rivals for the party’s presidential nomination are not taking the opportunity to criticize him for his alleged retention of classified information and obstruction of justice.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis joined the House GOP in echoing a general charge of “weaponization” of federal law enforcement, which he said in a tweet “represents a mortal threat to a free society.”

Mr. Trump’s competitors are in an unprecedented and difficult situation, says Keith Gaddie, a political scientist at Texas Christian University. On one hand, they need him to be gone if any of them is to win the nomination. On the other, they probably need to run on a platform similar to his to become the nominee.

“One thing we shouldn’t be doing in analyzing this environment is looking to history for analogs, because they’re just not going to serve us,” says Professor Gaddie.

The Department of Justice also appears to be moving in its own way to fill some of the information vacuum that initially allowed Mr. Trump and his supporters to attempt to shape the public’s view of the indictment.

Prosecutors released the full 49-page indictment on Friday, several days prior to Mr. Trump’s scheduled appearance before a federal judge in Miami on Tuesday afternoon. And special counsel Jack Smith made a brief public appearance on Friday afternoon, speaking from his nondescript office in northeast Washington.

Mr. Smith defended his investigation and the ethics of those conducting it.

“Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced,” Mr. Smith said. “Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”

He said that defendants must be presumed innocent until proven guilty and that he would “seek a speedy trial in this matter consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused.” In a video about the indictment, Mr. Trump maintained, “I am an innocent man.”

Measured statements by the special counsel may help defend against the accusations of politicization and corruption that are now a staple of Trump supporters’ rhetoric. But if elected GOP leaders and Mr. Trump’s primary rivals continue to back the former president on this matter, a core of Republican voters likely will as well, says Jennifer Lawless, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

“I don’t think the Department of Justice can do anything at this point” to change GOP voter opinion, says Professor Lawless. “I think that it’s up to fellow Republicans to determine whether this crossed the line.” 

Brynn Anderson/AP/File

A police officer stands near the entrance of a residential building in 2021 in Atlanta. The city's police force created a targeted response to a rise in homicides – with an emphasis on rebuilding community trust, too.

Last summer, Atlanta Police Department Capt. Ralph Woolfolk accepted a devastating truth: Far too many Atlantans were killing each other, and they weren’t letting up.  

As murder rates spiked in 2020 and remained at levels not seen since the early 1990s, Captain Woolfolk, the head of the city’s homicide division, hatched a plan.

On an early July 2022 evening, a new task force fanned out across the city for the first time. The mission of Operation Heatwave was to use crime data and word on the street not just to identify trouble spots but also to pinpoint residents at particular risk of engaging in gun violence.

Spanning various agencies, the unit had a dual purpose: a hard line on “guns, gangs, and drugs,” but a gentler side, too. On every corner, the word went out: If you are not participating in the drug and gun trade, you will not be a target of stepped-up police activities. The central goal was to build trust – working with the community to lessen fear and improve life.

Nearly a year later, police here say Operation Heatwave has played a part in a historic drop in the city’s murder rate – 29% year over year, with nonfatal shootings down dramatically as well.

The new policing tactic is not the only cause – or even the major cause, some analysts say. Factors like an easing of the pandemic and political upheaval may play important roles. But Operation Heatwave’s early success fits into an encouraging trend: In big cities across the United States, murder rates have dropped dramatically in the last 12 months.

Reporting in The Atlantic, crime data researcher Jeff Asher has called it one of the largest annual percentage shifts in murder ever recorded. While up in some places and down in others, murders have declined 12.5%, on average, in 99 U.S. cities that have released updated 2023 data, according to his analysis. New York’s murder rate is down by 13%, and shootings in the city are down by 26%. Jackson, Mississippi; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Little Rock, Arkansas, are among the cities that have seen 30% decreases in murder.

Trends from early in the year often don’t hold up, Mr. Asher notes in another online post. But the development bears watching. It comes amid a broader evolution of policing in the post-George Floyd era as departments rethink tactics, attitudes, and even parts of their mission. In Atlanta, Operation Heatwave is offering early evidence that changes in policing can have a balming effect not just on police and community relations, but on levels of violence.

“Crime going up ... was more than a gentle reminder that there is a place where we need armed guardianship in America and in our world,” says Thaddeus Johnson, a criminologist at Georgia State University and a former Memphis police officer. “It’s really about putting officers in positions where we don’t force them to be adversaries.”

“It humanizes the officers for the public, and it reminds officers that it’s not us versus them,” he adds. “It makes them engage the public differently. We’re all human beings.”

View from Atlanta

In Atlanta, the new policing strategy has led to more intelligence bubbling up from neighborhoods, breaking through a “no snitches” culture, police say. The result is a virtuous cycle that, residents say, has rebuilt some of the trust lost over years of conflict between police and African American communities, much of which came to a head in 2020.

“I tried to engineer processes that were focused on blending hot-spot policing with target-based policing – that’s the premise for Operation Heatwave,” says Captain Woolfolk.

Once targets have been identified, often through street intelligence, the department deploys undercover and special teams in a 1,200-foot radius, focusing on those who have been deemed the most potentially dangerous individuals.

“We’re not taking people selling dope or doing nuisance [crimes]. And we have seen an impact as a result of that,” he adds. “Cultivating our relationship with the community remains a top priority for us at all times. Our mission is to save the kids we can, move them toward the right resources and tools, and the ones that are adamant about doing criminal street gang activity and violence” will be arrested.

SOURCE:

Datalytics YTD Murder Comparison; Gun Violence Archive

|

Jacob Turcotte and Karen Norris/Staff

Criminologists are quick to note that there are many potential explanations for the drop in murders nationwide. Throughout U.S. history, times of political upheaval and public distrust have led to spikes in murder. A slow return to normal after the pandemic may have brought back traditional restraints on lawlessness.

For example, declines are also happening in cities that have not added police officers or shifted strategies. Jeffrey Fagan, a crime expert at Columbia Law School, likens the rise and fall of the murder rate to “an epidemic, and [it] behaves as such,” he says in an email. “Police and incarceration are minor actors in these episodes.”

But new research on focused deterrence – the strategy heart of Operation Heatwave – suggests that focusing aggressive policing only on the most at-risk individuals while promoting community-led violence prevention can be effective.

“Focused deterrence works because it focuses us on the right people, and that’s not looking at people’s race or ethnicity or things like that, you look at the data,” says David Harris, a police expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Analyzing data correctly and vigorously “can identify for us the several hundred people ... in any large city who may end up on either end of a gun. Then the question is: What do you do?”

Like many cities, Atlanta has struggled with that question. The city was rocked by violence during the 2020 social justice protests. Police shot an unarmed man, sparking more retribution and fear. Individual police officers struggled with questions of how to do their jobs.

“Everyone was afraid, so how can you police in that climate?” says Professor Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. “How do you approach a traffic stop? How do you continue to police, even if you’re doing it the right way? How do you make room for mistakes in a job? Now, these departments are learning how to do more with less officers while keeping them safer. That’s what it should be about.”

Across the U.S., demands to defund the police gradually gave way to police departments using pandemic funds to hire more officers to address rising crime. But many departments appear to be learning lessons.

“Police can’t be everywhere all the time. They don’t see everything, they don’t know everything,” says Professor Harris, author of “Good Cops: The Case for Preventive Policing.” “That means you must have the cooperation of the people you are trying to serve.”

“You don’t get cooperation and information without having some trust built up. That is a difficult thing to do, it takes time,” he adds. “But for the police departments that are putting in the work, they are getting to the point where the community is out there for them.”

Gloria Leonard’s doorbell

Atlanta resident Gloria Leonard still sees too much crime. She became the president of a local neighborhood association when the previous president was shot and killed in his front yard.

“There is a lot of murdering going on,” she says.

Her relationship with the police has often not been good. “Sometimes [officers] want to act bad and talk to you in any kind of way, and I think, ‘I’m not talking to you like that, so hold up.’”

But when Ms. Leonard recently reported that her doorbell camera had captured footage of a car break-in, an officer quickly responded. After seeing the video, he said, “I’ll be right back; I think I just saw that guy.”

His quick search of the area failed to find the suspect, but Ms. Leonard was still impressed. The officer’s posture was friendly and attentive. And another request she made – to have cops cruise through the neighborhood at different times of the day – was granted.

“You are our eyes and ears out here,” she recalls the officer saying. “We can’t do this without you.”

So many of the things that brought Emily Pipe joy before the pandemic have now just seemed to lose their spark.

She used to be a classic extrovert, says Ms. Pipe, a public school teacher in Delaware who works with preschoolers with disabilities. She’d charge her mental batteries with friends and social activities during the weekends and engage with colleagues at work, where there was a spirit of collaboration and common purpose. 

“Now I’m at home on weekends, recharging my battery for work on Mondays,” says Ms. Pipe, who adds she’s seemed to become “fully introverted,” preferring to stay home and scroll through TikToks. And while teaching before the pandemic had its own challenges, they didn’t compare with those she experienced during the shutdown and ever since. 

Now, being in the classroom “is lonely,” says Ms. Pipe, who has been grappling with depression and anxiety. The spirit of collaboration at work has been replaced by a sense of isolation from other teachers. Students remain disoriented and distracted, and school administrators, she says, have not quite grasped the needs of the post-pandemic classroom or provided the support teachers like her now need.

The life changes worry her. And, she wonders, is she losing both her friends and her attention span?

In some ways, there’s a wide swath of Americans who have been feeling as if they’ve been in a proverbial funk since the pandemic wound down. For many, its disruptions have altered not only their daily rhythms but also their emotional equilibrium, even if a sense of crisis and instability has waned.

Michael Klein, a clinical psychologist in Massachusetts who works as a business consultant, remembers the creative energies he felt in the local coffee shop before the pandemic. That’s where he wrote most of his book on the challenges of running a family-owned business.

Wong Maye-E/AP/File

People walk inside the Oculus, part of the World Trade Center transportation hub, at the start of a workday in New York, Sept. 11, 2019. A March 2023 study found that 64% of Americans don't feel a sense of belonging at their place of work.

“It just hasn’t quite returned for me – that kind of creative spirit I used to find in places like these,” says Dr. Klein. “I think there’s also this very odd combination of we go to something communal, but we’re really anxious to be together.”

Dr. Klein, who coaches businesses on how to manage more cohesive teams of employees, thinks that while people are out and about more, many are still reckoning with the aftereffects of the pandemic years.

“COVID kind of ended with a whimper, and I don’t think we’ve quite processed the trauma of it all, even though it was this incredibly communal experience in a weird way,” says Dr. Klein. “I mean, worldwide we were going through the same kind of panic and fear and anxiety and uncertainty, but we knew we weren’t alone.”

“Now we’re left with, OK, so now what?” he says. “All of the sudden, it’s, OK, back to work, back to normal. So I think it’s appropriate to say, what’s going on? We’re all kind of feeling that we’ve been through this major traumatic event where millions of lives were lost, we’re more divided than ever, and we don’t really know what to go back to, since we can’t quite go back to life as it was.”

Disrupted sense of belonging

Much of what people are feeling may simply be part of natural emotional responses to life’s inevitable vicissitudes, both personal and professional, an extended case of inward-turning blues. 

But there are deeper fears as well as the nation’s political divisions reach Manichean proportions, disputes among neighbors become cause for deadly gun violence, and even turning into the wrong driveway or ringing a doorbell has proved dangerous. 

Such anecdotes, too, are then highlighted in the swirl of digital information in our ever-present screens, making many Americans, feeling besieged with mistrust and fear, become more and more wary of those around them.

“What we’ve been seeing with the kinds of rising narratives and around division and divisiveness is a challenge,” says Kim Serrano, director of the Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council in Washington, D.C. “There’s been an intense focus on what sets us apart.”

This intense focus has disrupted what Ms. Serrano and her colleagues identify as a sense of belonging. In March, her center and the nonprofit Over Zero, which works to counteract identity-based violence, released a new study that found a wide majority of Americans say they don’t feel that they belong within their various social arenas. This includes 74% who say they don’t feel they belong in their local communities, and 64% who say the same of their places of work.

Jae C. Hong/AP/File

A jogger runs along a trail in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, May 3, 2021. In May 2023, a report from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy highlighted that during the pandemic, people tightened their groups of friends and cut time spent with them, continuing pre-pandemic trends.

There can be a lot of ambiguity within concepts like belonging, however, and their “belonging barometer” measures a range of emotional experiences, Ms. Serrano says. “When we’re thinking about finding belonging, it’s not like a light switch, you know. It’s not like you just feel it or you don’t. There’s actually a lot of people who are experiencing uncertainty and ambiguity, so it’s really more of a spectrum.”

At the more serious end of the spectrum, medical experts have reported that there is a deeper kind of emotional malaise many Americans are experiencing, and they describe it as a growing “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” within the country. 

In May, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a report on this national epidemic, which preceded the pandemic but was then exacerbated by it.

In the 2023 report, Dr. Murthy describes how he embarked on a cross-country listening tour during his first tenure in this position in 2014, when he says he didn’t view loneliness as much of a public health concern. 

“I heard stories from my fellow Americans that surprised me,” he writes. “People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant. Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word ‘lonely,’ time and time again, people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, from every corner of the country, would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,’ or ‘if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.’”

The effects of these emotions have a direct impact on people’s physical health, the report found, including greater risks for disease, impaired cognitive functions, or suicide and self-harm.

The most effective solutions to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, however, are what his report emphasizes as “the healing effects of social connection and community.”

“We are called to build a movement to mend the social fabric of our nation,” Dr. Murthy writes, adding that “it will take all of us” working together.

“Our individual relationships are an untapped resource – a source of healing hiding in plain sight,” he says.

“I’ve been sort of saying this is a problem for quite a long time,” says Darcia Narvaez, professor emerita of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. “So the report wasn’t a surprise to me. It was great to see that the government is paying attention to it. And it’s interesting, the report had such a pastoral tone, right? Yeah, it’s calling us back to our human nature. What helps us thrive is relationships, right? And connectedness. Feeling like we belong, like we matter, like we have something to contribute to the social community.”

The challenge is how, however. Dr. Narvaez, an expert in child development and parenting, brings an indigenous or kinship worldview to her studies, and she’s found that as early as childbirth, American social practices like separating infants from their mothers immediately after birth, a disconnection from the natural world, and a relentless focus on capitalist production has in various ways helped create a lonely society.

Noah Berger/AP/File

Circles designed to encourage social distancing line San Francisco's Dolores Park, May 21, 2020. According to a May 2023 report by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Americans spent 20 minutes a day with friends in 2020 – down from an hour daily two decades ago.

The epidemic of loneliness and isolation, too, is often borne unequally among economic and racial groups, says Jeffrey Gardere, associate professor of psychology and behavioral medicine at Touro University in New York. 

During the pandemic, professionals and office workers were mostly able to transition to working from home, while essential workers, mostly lower-paid members of the working class and including higher proportions of Blacks and Latinos, experienced the dangers and disruptions of COVID-19 in a more significant way – just as they are within the ongoing epidemic of loneliness and isolation.   

The traumas experienced by those more economically secure are different in many ways, and some of the phenomena of Americans turning inward are privileged, even if the emotional difficulties are real.   

“We really need to be careful – and I found that with myself – that in our solitude and our comfort and our kind of detaching a little bit from society, being able to have that respite, that alone time to reevaluate our lives, that we don’t go too far with that,” says Dr. Gardere. Like many professionals in New York, he found a house in the country in Connecticut while maintaining an apartment in Manhattan, where he’s lived most of his life.

There’s a risk “where we begin to forget or lose the skills of being with other people, or start getting really anxious when it comes to being with others and connecting back in society with friends and at gatherings,” he says. “Those things are very important. They’re almost like booster shots to keep us healthy emotionally as we live this sort of hybrid life.”

“Keys to human connection are simple”

Hannah Schlomann, a program analyst whose firm works closely with the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, says while she was able to work pretty seamlessly at home during the pandemic, she found it difficult to reconnect with people in the same way as before. 

“I spent so much time on Zoom, I’ve kind of forgotten how to do eye contact with people,” says Ms. Schlomann, who still works full time from her high-rise apartment in Washington. “Yeah, because you don’t look anyone in the eye anymore. And so I found that I had to kind of retrain myself once we started getting back into activities, and say, no, you need to look at that person and actually, like, interact when you’re offline.”

Larry Watkins, a retired general contractor who lives most of the year in a small community near Lake Lure, North Carolina, says there’s been a discernible hunger to reconnect with neighbors in the remote development of about 1,500 people 25 miles from the nearest town. 

A member of the community’s board of directors, Mr. Watkins began noticing that there was an increased demand for common spaces, so he decided to renovate a 980-square-foot storage room, cleaning it out and painting it, thinking it could meet the need for a space for people to socialize. Other members of the community quickly got wind of the project and started donating furniture, pendant lights, kitchen cabinets, even a stove and microwave.

Before the pandemic, community gatherings were never very large, says Mr. Watkins. “If we got 15 or 20 people that was a rousing success,” he says. During the “soft opening” for the renovated community space on St. Patrick’s Day, around 50 people attended, he says. “It was a complete cross section,” from retirees like him who have lived there for years to 30-somethings with families who had moved in just a couple months prior. 

It is efforts like these that can help tap into the healing effects of social connection and community, according to Surgeon General Murthy. 

“They can help us live healthier, more productive, and more fulfilled lives,” he writes. “Answer that phone call from a friend. Make time to share a meal. Listen without the distraction of your phone. Perform an act of service. Express yourself authentically. The keys to human connection are simple, but extraordinarily powerful.”

It’s been a week since the east Indian state of Odisha witnessed one of the worst rail accidents in the nation’s history. Rescue crews have gone home and train services have resumed, but the country is still reeling. 

As the shock wears off, attention has shifted to safety standards in the state-run Indian Railways, which ferries millions of people every day. Many opposition leaders have called for the resignation of India’s railways minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw.

The accident is also humbling for the much-touted rail modernization drive by the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In recent years, the government has built high-altitude bridges, inaugurated state-of-the-art stations, and even announced India’s first bullet train. But Alok Kumar Verma, who retired from the Indian Railways Service of Engineers in 2016, calls these projects “sheer propaganda.” In reality, he says, the railway network is being neglected, with disastrous consequences.

What went wrong in Odisha?

Last Friday, near Bahanaga Bazar station in Odisha’s Balasore district, the Coromandel Express passenger train was routed onto the wrong track, causing it to collide with a parked freight train instead of passing it safely. The Coromandel Express hit the freight, which was carrying a heavy payload of iron ore, at 80 mph. The impact derailed many of the express train’s coaches, which then careened onto an adjacent line, hitting another passenger train that was heading in the opposite direction. 

The three-train pile-up killed nearly 300 people and injured about a thousand. Many victims’ bodies were damaged beyond recognition, and hospitals resorted to DNA tests to help relatives identify loved ones. 

Rafiq Maqbool/AP

Savita Devi shows a photograph of her husband, whose body she has been unable to identify after Friday's train accident, at a hospital in Bhubaneswar, India, June 6, 2023.

Mr. Vaishnaw has said that “a change in the electronic interlocking system” used to guide train movement caused the accident, adding that details would be revealed only after a full investigation by the commissioner of railway safety. It’s not clear whether the accident resulted from human error, technical glitch, or sabotage. What is clear is that this is India’s most severe rail accident since two trains collided near Agra in 1995. 

Since then, India has improved rail safety. In 2020-21, there were 22 serious accidents, down from 840 in 1970-71. Yet, in 2021, more than 16,000 people died in railway accidents. Globally, India still “ranks very low” when it comes to rail safety, says Mr. Verma, adding that it’s comparable to lesser-developed countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Nigeria. 

Why does India have such a poor track record on rail safety?

According to Mr. Verma, the root cause is congestion. Ideally, tracks should be running at 70% capacity to factor in maintenance, he explains, but on some of the country’s busiest routes, they’re operating well beyond capacity. 

Running too many trains eats into the maintenance time, compromising safety. “We don’t have the line capacity; our routes are highly choked,” he says. “This is a very alarming and worrying situation.”

Another issue is overcrowding. Samir Zaveri, a rail safety activist in Mumbai, notes that general, non-air-conditioned coaches are often well over capacity, and it’s not uncommon for people to ride in train bathrooms. When there is an accident, crowded carriages mean more casualties. 

Still, rail accidents of Friday’s magnitude are rare, in India and elsewhere. The last one was in 2002 in Tanzania, in which 281 people died. India’s deadliest rail disaster happened in 1981, when a train fell into a river in the eastern state of Bihar, killing an estimated 750 passengers.

Krishn Kaushik/Reuters

The train traffic management system inside the Bahanaga Bazar railway station control room is pictured on June 5, 2023. India's rail minister blamed the accident on “a change in the electronic interlocking system” used to guide train movement.

Yet Mr. Zaveri, who lost both his legs in a rail accident more than three decades ago, says all these accidents, regardless of size, stem from lax attitudes toward safety. In Mumbai, where he lives, deaths occur every day on the crowded suburban rail network. 

“But nobody bothers about it,” he says. “There is no value for human life in India.”

How can India build safer railways?

India is already pouring money into revamping its railways – capital expenditure last financial year was around $23 billion. But experts say leaders have prioritized flashy projects over systemwide improvements. 

India has recently flagged off, for example, 18 new semi-high-speed trains that can go up to 110 mph. But due to poor track conditions, these trains are actually running at much lesser speeds. Mr. Zaveri compares it to driving a luxury car on a bad road. “What is the use?” he says.

When it comes to modernizing India’s infrastructure, “safety should be part of the culture,” says Subodh Jain, a former member of the Railway Board’s engineering department. He says that, whatever the investigation finds, the Odisha tragedy was at least in part due to a lack of vigilance. “Behind each such major accident, there must have been 300 incidences where you compromised with the safety rules and were able to get away with it,” he says. 

Mr. Verma agrees. “There has to be accountability,” he says.

Instead of focusing on adding new trains, Mr. Verma wants the Indian Railways to upgrade existing track networks to remove bottlenecks, and also build new routes to reduce congestion. In Mumbai, Mr. Zaveri has lobbied for emergency medical assistance at every station so that victims can get help immediately. 

Mr. Verma laments that the railway has been left behind even as airports and highways in India see explosive growth. For long journeys, the rail system is the only affordable option for millions of Indians, especially poor migrant workers like many of those who died in Friday’s accident. “It is the lifeline of the nation,” says Mr. Verma.

REUTERS

People sweep a street in Bucha, outside Kyiv, March 30, the first anniversary of its liberation from Russian occupation.

The wonders of Ukraine’s resilience never cease to amaze. The latest example is the flotilla of boats rescuing some 16,000 people stranded in floodwaters after the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River. “We are strong, we are resistant,” one rescuer, Svitlana Plokha, told The Guardian, explaining that “everyone got together when the invasion started.”

The massive response has inspired the humanitarian work of Martin Griffiths, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator. “The people of Ukraine have shown extraordinary resilience – our urgent humanitarian task is to continue to help them,” he said.

Ukraine’s economy shows “remarkable resilience,” states the International Monetary Fund. The Ukrainian military keeps bouncing back on the battlefield. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s highly visible leadership almost defines the spirit of recovery.

“He proved to the whole world that we stand up for our values,” Andriy Shaikan, a university rector in the president’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, told Agence France-Presse.

The country’s ability to spring back helps explain why world leaders will soon gather in London for the second Ukraine Recovery Conference. Even as the war with Russia rages, President Zelenskyy insists the country begin to rebuild. Donors and investors are eager to listen to the government’s plans. “The Ukrainian people are not going to allow themselves to be broken,” said the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, host of the June 21-22 event.

The best example of an unbowed nation is the phoenixlike rebuilding of Bucha, a suburb of the capital, Kyiv. In the early days of the invasion, Russian forces killed hundreds of civilians and left much of the city in ruins. Bucha became a symbol of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Now Bucha is a reconstruction site, with a new hardware store to help residents rebuild. Malls have reopened. Famed philanthropist Howard Buffett is building Ukraine’s first kitchen factory. Some Israeli investors, after discovering a high demand for gyms in Ukraine, are investing in a sports complex for Bucha. “Ukrainians are trying to get back to normal and rebuild their lives, partly through sports,” one investor told The Jerusalem Post.

Bucha’s rise from the ashes helps show Ukraine can win the war. It has turned out that the country’s most valuable resource is the bonds of affection among the Ukrainian people. As Oleksandra Azarkhina, deputy minister of infrastructure, told The Guardian, “rebuilding is also part of our resistance.”