‘Coordinated arson attack’ brings French trains to a halt hours before Olympics opening ceremony

MicroWave@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 287 points – ‘Coordinated arson attack’ brings French trains to a halt hours before Olympics opening ceremony
politico.eu

Fires on French railway tracks have delayed journeys for 800,000 travelers in what the transport minister described as “coordinated attacks of malicious intent.”

A co-ordinated arson attack on the French rail system is turning the first weekend of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris into a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of travelers. 

French rail company SNCF announced on Friday its high-speed train system had been hit by "deliberate arson attacks to damage [its] facilities" causing delays and cancellations which are expected to last all weekend.

The disruptions are affecting trains heading East, North and West of Paris, and travelers have been asked to postpone their plans.

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Maybe after this all the various Russian teams will finally be banned completely. Country is full of cheaters anyway.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_Russia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Neutral_Athletes_at_the_2024_Summer_Olympics

Icarus is a great documentary about doping in general, but especially russia.

There's absolutely zero proof Russia is involved in this for now

Correct but they are also the ones that have already gotten caught trying to recruit people to do this exact thing.

If you have all the motive and a track record for doing shit exactly like this, of course you'll be the prime suspect.

Turns out Russia was responsible for amplifying the bed bug scare of Paris these past months, too.

I know this is terrible of me, but... I was originally not planning on watching the opening ceremonies. Now I'm going to scare-watch them.

The timing snuck up on me and I haven't figured out how to get viewing access to them (whether broadcast, subscription, or 🏴‍☠️). Any suggestions?

For the last Olympics, I connected my VPN to Canada because it was on the CBC for free. Hooray for public-funded media! And if I could send some money to the CBC's way and not have to do that, I would. Same with the UK TV license.

That said, none of my UK VPN addresses are working for UK TV anymore. I'm hoping the Canadian ones still work.

Edit: Seems to be working but it's not live streaming for another 1:45. Here's the link for the CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6443205

I use Private Internet Access as my VPN if that helps.

See? This is why it pisses me off so much when they talk about defunding CBC.

Conservatives talk about defunding the BBC in the UK too. I wish they'd just allow people from other countries to give them money instead.

Defunding public media is not about the money the government spends on it. It’s about eliminating journalism that is not accountable to corporate power and money. The control the wealthy already exert over publicly funded media is never enough, people with the kind of money where control of the media is a possibility want to be able to fire a reporter who pisses them off personally.

It's crazy how it really is always projection, isn't it? Their primary argument against public media is invoking the boogeyman of government censorship and/or propaganda (but that doesn't really happen unless all the country's media is controlled by the government and that's not what's happening with PBS/BBC/etc.), when it's really that they're butthurt that their own censorship and propaganda is being resisted.

PBS and NPR are not owned by the government, they are independent and the majority of their income comes from outside the federal government, only a minority comes from there.

Those who are owned by the government are USAGM, which owns several media outlets, but their target audiences are foreign.

lol the right wing is talking about defunding YLE in Finland all the time, coincidence?

RTS and SRF also free with swiss VPN

Or TF1 with french VPN

Or ORF with austrian vpn

Thanks! For my case, I'm assuming none of them are in English and I'm a dumb 'murcan who barely made it through French in high school, so I'm going to have to stick with Canada. But hopefully that will help others.

As a 'murcan who took Latin in high school (because SAT scores were a higher-priority goal than actually becoming bilingual, LOL) and is now learning French of my own volition, I think maybe the Olympics would be a relatively good candidate for watching in French. At least with the simpler/less-subjective sports (e.g. track and field, as opposed to e.g. gymnastics), it could be possible to follow along just with the infographics on the screen even if you struggle to understand the commentary.

(Also, thanks for the advice. I've got a PIA subscription that I really don't use enough, so this is a good push to finally figure out how to set it up properly.)

I like to watch national TV from other countries its fun way to get to know the language and culture

I used to do that when I was younger, but these days it's usually for something like the Olympics where I want to understand what's going on.

I do get a huge dose of Canadian pride though, so that's fun.

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How does this help their cause?

To weaken France's image, to sow chaos, to get security forces focused on other things while they try to get specific targets.

There have been reports about both Russia and Iran being potentially involved.
So far I've seen an article about a Russian getting arrested 2 days ago.

French newspapers don't mention any of those for now, the only mention is that the methodology is similar to previous far-left activism (source: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/live/2024/07/26/en-direct-attaque-massive-contre-la-sncf-reprise-progressive-du-trafic-un-tiers-des-trains-circuleront-vendredi-apres-midi_6258634_3224.html), which could be a disguise of course. As to why the far-left would do that, there are radical-ecologists that argue it is an unacceptable waste simply for entertainment, considering the climate crisis, for example. It could also be both, local activists helped by foreign influence, willingly or not.

there are radical-ecologists that

...are way too small in number and connections and frankly energy to pull off a covert stunt like that. This isn't like getting a bunch of people to live in treetops to make it complicated for the forest to give way to a chemical plant.

Sure there's folks with ideas like that but as all other urban guerillas it's doomed to fail. Embarrassingly so. The type of people willing to do these kinds of things aren't the kind of people who'd agree with anyone on anything much less trust another affinity group to not be moles. The higher the stakes you insist on the more isolated you are the less you can coordinate.

If this was a chain of attacks over a longer time-span, sure, then one group could have inspired another, but everything coordinated? Forget it.

What cause? We don't know who is responsible

So its just terror?

Lmao you absolute muppet. This is just Paris doing Paris things. The Olympics generally bring a lot of annoying and negative side effects to a city and region, in addition to (and often, because of) the increased tourism. Parisians and the French in general are famously unapologetic about engaging in direct action when they think their government is being a bunch of dumbasses, or they wish to express staunch displeasure with a policy or event that they strongly disagree with. This is just that.

If you think a bunch of trains running late for a day causes terror, you don't know the French rail system.

You mean one of the best railway in Europe ?

I don't know the other countries. I don't mean it happens everywhere every day, but a big storm can throw a few trees on the lines to the South and bench all trains on those lines for half a day easily. Anyway I also meant it's not terror, just irritation. Which is usual for French people. No one was harmed, people are just sour they can't go on vacation.

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No suggestion who or why, could be so many groups in France or from outside.

Does highlight one of the big problems with trains, one problem with the rails and the whole train network is fucked

Same goes for roads as well. Weren't there major congestion when that ship hit the US bridge?

He has a point though. Burn down one relay station and a whole region of switches and signals seizes to function. Collapsing a bridge is no equivalent to that.

That would've been the case in early times. Now everything is computer controlled. So redundancy should be built into the system. For example Japanese bullet trains run in one of the highest earthquake prone regions in the whole world. And they get hit by earthquake frequently. Yet the bullet train delays are messured in seconds! Not minutes, not hours, literally seconds. Not to mention that after more than 50 years of service that haven't been a single passenger fatality. Zero.

Redundancy or not, the cables that send those computer signals run alongside the tracks. Cut those and everything stops.

Yea but that's Japan. The culture there really is completely different. I wouldn't count on other metro services to be as well planned and run as theirs is.

I guess the equivalent would be burning down a traffic control building or something, taking out the traffic lights (assuming those are centrally controlled, i have no clue tbh)

But even that would be mostly solved by sending out all the lollipop people.

It's very different for roads, yeah there are of course bottle necks especially due to river crossings but rerouting is much easier.

Look I get people don't want to see trains as anything other than perfect but if we want trains to be popular and useful we need to live in reality rather than some delusional fantasy,

Wallace and Grommit seem to show otherwise, with the ability to lay new track ahead of the train in real time.