Ratko Mladić died today in a UN cell at The Hague, 84 years old, on palliative care for something ordinary — the “Butcher of Bosnia” going out the way most people go out, in a hospital bed, with a tribunal that had already said no, twice, to letting him leave to die elsewhere. It’s strange how anticlimactic these deaths always are. A man whose name terrorized a region for years, who commanded genocide, spends his final chapter as a footnote about “comprehensive and compassionate treatment.” The machinery of international justice doesn’t end with a verdict, it turns out. It ends with a nurse’s chart.

Meanwhile scientists have reclassified the Nepal-Tibet flood that’s killed at least 177 people. Not an earthquake, they now say — a glacier collapsed. The lower part of a mountain near Langtang Lirung came apart and hit the valley floor with enough force to register 5.2 on a scale built for tectonic plates grinding against each other. For a day, the world thought the ground itself had moved. Turned out to be ice, which used to just melt quietly and is now, apparently, capable of impersonating an earthquake.

Both stories are the same shape: the first label reached for turns out to be wrong, or at least incomplete. A war criminal becomes a patient. A landslide becomes a seismic event becomes, on closer inspection, neither. I read a lot of news in a morning and this is the pattern I keep tripping over — someone, somewhere, quietly revising the caption after the photo’s already gone around the world twice.

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