North America’s largest commuter rail system was shut down on Saturday after unionized workers in the New York City area went on strike .

The Long Island Rail Road that serves the city’s eastern suburbs ceased operations on early Saturday morning after five unions representing about half its workforce walked off the job.

The two sides have been negotiating for months on a new contract, and the Trump administration had even interceded to try and broker a deal. But the unions were legally allowed to strike starting at 12.01am on Saturday.

Kevin Sexton, national vice-president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said no new negotiations have been scheduled.

“We’re far apart at this point,” Sexton said early on Saturday. “We are truly sorry that we are in this situation.”

Janno Lieber, the MTA chairman, said the agency “gave the union everything they said they wanted in terms of pay” and that to him it was apparent the unions always intended to walk out.

The walkout, the first for the LIRR since a two-day strike in 1994, promises to cause headaches for some sports fans planning to see the crosstown baseball rivals the New York Yankees and Mets battle this weekend or to watch the NBA’s New York Knicks playoff run at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. Both sports venues have dedicated LIRR stops.

If the shutdown continues past the weekend, the roughly 250,000 people who ride the system to and from work each weekday will be forced to find alternative routes into New York City from its Long Island suburbs.

For many, that likely means navigating the region’s notoriously congested roads.

“People are still going to commute, but if everybody starts driving now, the traffic is only going to get worse,” said Rich Piccola, an accountant who commutes into the city as he waited at Penn Station for a train home Thursday.

New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is urging Long Islanders to work from home if possible. The MTA has said it will provide limited shuttle buses to New York City subway stations, but that contingency plan wasn’t envisioned to handle all the riders the system normally carries on a workday.

And while remote work options greatly expanded during the Covid pandemic, many workers still need to show up in person, said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, a commuter advocacy group.

“You work in construction, you work in the healthcare industry, you work at a school or you’re about to graduate from school, that’s not always possible,” she said of telecommuting. “People need to get where they need to go.”

The most recent contract talks have stalled on the question of worker’s salaries and health care premiums.

The MTA has said the unions’ initial demands would have led to fare increases and affected contract negotiations with other unionized workers.

The unions, which represent locomotive engineers, machinists, signalmen and other train workers, have said more substantial raises were warranted to help workers keep up with inflation and rising living costs.

Some riders, while sympathetic to the union’s affordability concerns, worry they’ll bear the brunt of any pay raises.

If the unions get the pay increases they are looking for, “it will come at the expense of our riders who will see next year’s 4% fare increase doubled to 8%,” Gerard Bringmann, chair of the LIRR Commuter Council, a rider advocacy group, said in a statement. “Like the union workers, we too are burdened by the increase in the cost of living here on Long Island.”

With Hochul, a Democrat, facing re-election later this year, the pressure might be on the MTA to strike a deal to end the shutdown, said William Dwyer, a labor relations expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where commuter rail workers staged a three-day strike last year.

“She’s up for re-election, and Long Island is a critical vote for her,” he said. “So if there’s a significant fare hike, that does not bode well for her on election day.”

Divers in the Maldives have resumed their search for the bodies of four Italian scuba divers who drowned while exploring a deep underwater cave.

Due to rough weather on Friday, Maldivian authorities had temporarily suspended the high-risk operation to recover the bodies of the divers who, according to Italy’s foreign ministry, had “apparently died while attempting to explore caves at a depth of 50 metres (164ft)”.

Mohamed Hussain Shareef, the Maldives presidential spokesperson, said eight divers took part in Friday’s search, working in pairs, with a plan to continue the mission on Saturday.

In total, five Italians died in the scuba diving accident in Vaavu Atoll in the Indian Ocean archipelago on Thursday, Italy’s foreign ministry said.

The body of the fifth diver was found near the mouth of a cave shortly afterwards, and rescuers believe the remaining four divers are inside the same cave, which is divided into three large chambers connected by narrow passages.

Recovery teams had already explored two of the three chambers, but were hampered in their efforts to explore the third chamber.

The search resumed on Saturday, with two Italians – a deep-sea rescue expert and a cave diving expert – expected to join the recovery effort.

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said the Italian government “will do everything possible to recover the bodies of our compatriots”.

The deceased have been identified as Monica Montefalcone, an associate ecology professor at the University of Genoa, her daughter Giorgia Sommacal, marine biologist Federico Gualtieri, researcher Muriel Oddenino and diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti, whose body has been recovered.

The causes of their deaths is unknown and is being investigated.

Officials said the incident was the worst single diving accident in the Maldives, which has 1,192 tiny coral islands scattered across hundreds of miles of the Indian Ocean.

The University of Genoa said Montefalcone and Oddenino were on an official scientific mission to monitor marine environments and study the effects of the climate crisis on tropical biodiversity.

Montefalcone’s husband, Carlo Sommacal, said he believed an incident must have occurred and ruled out recklessness on his wife’s part. “Something must have happened,” he told Italian TV channel Rete 4.

He added that his wife, an experienced diver who had survived the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 while diving off Kenya, “had two lives – one on land and one in her environment, the water”.

He described her as a disciplined diver who carefully weighed risks before each descent and recalled her telling him at times: “This one I can do, you can’t.”

Diving at 50 metres exceeds the maximum depth recommended for recreational divers by most scuba certifying agencies. Depths beyond 40 metres are considered technical diving, which requires specialised training and equipment. The recreational diving limit in the Maldives is 30 metres (98ft), and experts have warned that cave divers could easily become disoriented or lost, particularly when sediment clouds reduce visibility.

The Italians were passengers onboard a 36-metre luxury yacht the Duke of York, whose operating licence was suspended “indefinitely” on Saturday by the Maldivian ministry of tourism and civil aviation, pending the outcome of an investigation. A website link related to the ship was not working on Saturday.

Shareef said investigators were looking into why the group went below the officially permitted depth of 30 metres.

Greenpeace Italia, the environmental organisation, paid tribute to Montefalcone as a passionate advocate for marine protection, and said it would miss “her professionalism and her advice immensely”. It recalled the “special light she had in her eyes” when speaking about the wonders of the sea and the importance of protecting them.

Federico Bruni was sitting on a bench, eating a piadina romagnola (flatbread sandwich) and minding his own business, when a peacock strutted up in the hope of a few crumbs. High-pitched squeals emanated from the direction of a disused military barracks across the road. “That would be the call to love,” Bruni said. “The male peacocks are courting the female ones – we’re in peak mating season.”

As another couple of peacocks wandered by, their iridescent trains sweeping the pavement behind them, this could be mistaken for a wildlife park. But the scene is Punta Marina, a seaside town on the Adriatic coast of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region that has been colonised by the birds, to the delight – or despair – of its approximately 1,000 residents.

The birds have made their home in the gardens of abandoned properties and perch on rooftops and fences, or peak out from trees. They carefully navigate the traffic, sometimes tapping their beaks on the windows of parked cars after catching their reflection. The Guardian saw one shamelessly leaping over the gate of a block of flats and doing a poo on the entrance steps.

They don’t bother Bruni, who frequently comes to his holiday home in Punta Marina. “It’s no different to seeing a cat, really, they’re part of the fabric of the town,” he said.

Others are less welcoming. “There are too many of them,” said Francesco, who preferred not to give his surname. “They jump over the wall and on to my balcony, leaving excrement. But the main issue is the mating – the screams are keeping people awake.”

His relative Marco said: “Each time I come to Francesco’s home, I tread on peacock poo outside. It’s unhygienic; the peacocks need to be contained.”

Some say the peacock, a bird of Indian origin, was introduced to the European continent by Alexander the Great, or even before. Their populations are well established in parts of Europe, especially in England and Spain, and although some have been reported in Italy, their presence in Punta Marina is especially notable.

Historically a symbol of immortality, peacocks feature in many of nearby Ravenna’s prized Byzantine mosaics, and over the centuries they became status symbols, once adding colour to the resplendent gardens of Emilia-Romagna’s wealthy residents.

How they settled in Punta Marina is a mystery – although there are reports they were brought in as pets by a resident more than 20 years ago.

“I heard that a male peacock, left to his own devices after the woman died, crossed paths with a female one in the old military barracks – they mated and it all began from there,” said Ilaria Sansavini, who owns a shop selling fresh pasta. She said she was strongly in favour of the birds. “This is their season of love and they should be left alone.”

For a long time, the peacocks lived in the sprawling pine forest behind the town. But then came Covid in 2020, and for months the peacocks roamed free while people were in lockdown. The occasional human they came across gave them food, enticing them to return.

There is no official data on their numbers in Punta Marina, but the population was estimated at 10 in 2018, 40 in 2023 and about 120 today.

Rosario Balestrieri, an ornithologist at the Naples-based Anton Dohrn zoological station, said: “The pine forest serves as a preferred habitat and nesting refuge … but supplementary feeding actively provided by the local population has encouraged steady population growth.”

While people were used to the birds’ more prominent presence at this time of year, the mating period, a recent social media post from a disgruntled female resident imitating the mating scream has gone viral, creating a media frenzy.

A local police officer said some resulting reports – depicting an “invasion” of peacocks forcing people away from the town because of a possible threat to public health – were wildly exaggerated.

Still, the high profile tensions have left Ravenna city council, which in recent years has been grappling with how to manage Punta Marina’s peacock population, with a dilemma. An attempt to move them in 2022 was opposed, and after that, Clama, a voluntary animal rights association, was enlisted to protect the peacocks and encourage harmony.

Clama has produced leaflets and put up signs to teach residents and tourists about the birds, saying they absolutely must not be fed.

“If they know it’s easier to come and snack on a sandwich in the town rather than having to forage for their own food in the pine forest, then of course they will keep coming back,” said Cristina Franzoni, a volunteer with Clama, adding that people who fed the peacocks could be fined. “They feed them because they love peacocks, but unfortunately in doing so they upset the neighbours who don’t.”

“Peacock rangers”, who can be called on to clean up poo from the streets, homes or the wheels of cars have been recruited to defuse tensions, while the council is planning the first official peacock census.

Other Italian regions have offered to “adopt” the birds, but Franzoni said removing them was not the solution and would cause “trauma”. She said: “We need to try to live with the animals instead of making them victims of our choices – they didn’t choose to come here, we brought them here and so must respect them.”

The arrest by US authorities of an alleged Iraqi commander of an Iranian-backed militia group now accused of responsibility for 18 terrorist attacks in the UK, Europe and Canada since the beginning of the Iran war is an astonishing development – yet not the least bit surprising.

According to a complaint unsealed on Friday in a federal court in Manhattan, Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi is allegedly responsible for organising – among other operations – a string of recent firebombings of banks and other targets in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, an arson attack against a synagogue and a shooting at the US consulate in Toronto in March, as well as – most recently – a wave of attacks on mainly Jewish targets in the UK including places of worship and charities.

Most notably perhaps, al-Saadi, 32, is accused of involvement in the stabbing of two Jewish men in north London in April.

The detailed complaint provides no details of the London attack but cites recorded conversations between al-Saadi and an FBI informant and an undercover FBI agent, in which he appeared to have referred to operations in Europe while trying to set up new attacks on Jewish targets in the US.

Al-Saadi also allegedly posted claims of responsibility for attacks on Snapchat and Telegram in the name of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI), a supposed Islamist militant group, the complaint said. He was reportedly detained in Turkey, though the details are unclear.

In a development few observers anticipated, the individual allegedly responsible for a wave of frightening if nonlethal violence across a dozen countries is now in solitary confinement in a federal jail in Brooklyn.

That a senior official in an Islamist militia in Iraq – which was formed and supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – is the prime suspect is also no huge revelation for investigators and analysts. It has long been suspected that the IRGC – more specifically its Quds Force, which specialises in clandestine operations overseas – was responsible for the attacks that have caused concern and fear in recent weeks.

Iran has a long history of such unconventional operations, all designed to divert, distract and destabilise current or potential enemies. For decades, Tehran’s key tactic had been to work through loyal proxies overseas – or those the proxies themselves can recruit. This provides several layers of cover obscuring the original instigator of the violence.

One clue indicating IRGC involvement was that HAYI was unknown before the war in Iran, appearing for the first time in early March on social media channels associated with Iran-backed Islamist militia in Iraq. Its posts claiming responsibility or showing imagery of attacks were made so soon after each operation that it was clear their author was very close to whoever had organised them – possibly even the same individual. Some posts appeared before attacks, suggesting targets that were then hit.

Al-Saadi allegedly posted many under his own name, which would appear a flagrant breach of security “tradecraft”.

Another potential clue was the nature of the attacks, which was familiar to European security services, who have reported for several years that Iran has relied on criminal networks to recruit low-level “disposable” operatives motivated by the opportunity to earn relatively small amounts of money. Many appear to have a limited understanding of the nature of their target and no knowledge of their ultimate paymaster.

A former drug dealer detained in France in 2024 after conducting surveillance on a Jewish businessman’s home in Munich said he had been recruited via Snapchat by a former cellmate to help with a “fraud case” and paid €1,000 (£870).

In Paris in March, a 17-year-old arrested on suspicion of an abortive effort to bomb a Bank of America branch told police he had been recruited via a Snapchat group where he usually got commissions to deliver drugs.

A “Mr Big” had said he wanted to intimidate the unfaithful girlfriend of a friend and offered between €1,000 and €1,400 to the teenager and two other recruits if they ignited a firework in front of the woman’s home and filmed the scene, according to a police statement obtained by Le Monde.

In conversations in April with a man he took to be a senior figure in a Mexican cartel but was working for the FBI, the complaint said, al-Saadi offered $10,000 for attacks on a synagogue and Jewish community centres which he also wanted recorded. In an earlier conversation, he had described how things in Europe were “going well” and said he did not need help there.

Al-Saadi smiled throughout his initial court appearance but did not speak.

Through his lawyer, he called himself a political prisoner and a prisoner of war and said he was being persecuted by US authorities for his relationship with Qassem Suleimani, the former Revolutionary Guards leader who led the Quds Force and was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.

Al-Saadi may now find himself in the same position as many of those who were hired to commit attacks over recent months claimed by Hayi. They were recruited specifically to be deniable as well as disposable.

So far, there has been no reaction from Tehran to al-Saadi’s arrest or the allegations contained in the justice department’s complaint.

Al-Saadi was not required to enter a plea. He will remain in jail but could request bail.