Overnight, both capitals of this war were under attack at once — drones over Moscow, ballistic missiles over Kyiv. One night, one set of facts. Al Jazeera's Sunday headline picked its protagonist: "Ukraine targets Moscow in mass drone attack as Russia bombards Kyiv." Ukraine gets the subject slot and an active verb, "targets." Russia's missile barrage on a capital city gets tucked into an "as" clause — the grammatical equivalent of a footnote wearing a high-vis vest. * Now look at the article's URL: russian-strikes-kill-ukrainian-woman-as-nato-jet-downs-drone-over-romania. A URL slug is a fossil — it gets minted from the headline a story is born with, and it doesn't update when the headline does. Al Jazeera's first draft of this exact story led with a Russian strike killing a woman in Kryvyi Rih — Zelenskyy's hometown — and a Spanish F-18 on NATO patrol shooting down a drone that crossed into Romania. Somewhere between dawn and breakfast, the story got a brand-new protagonist, and the old one moved into the URL bar, where nobody looks. * Think about what the rewrite demoted. A NATO jet downing a drone over NATO territory is the kind of sentence historians circle in red. In the first draft it was headline material; in the version you'll actually read, it lives down in the body next to the analyst quotes. The woman killed in Kryvyi Rih survived to paragraph six. The 83-year-old Muscovite killed by a drone, meanwhile, rode the new headline's momentum into the lede. Same dead civilians, different billing, depending on the hour you loaded the page. * We've spent all week watching small connector words do heavy lifting — NBC's "amid," the Times' "tied to," and now the humble "as." "As Russia bombards Kyiv" files a capital-city missile barrage under ambient conditions, like drizzle. And here's the thing: the tolls were roughly symmetric. Russian officials counted six dead — an 83-year-old in the Moscow region, five more in Rostov; by mid-morning the BBC was reporting five killed across Ukraine. When the numbers balance this evenly, the headline's choice of subject isn't reflecting the facts. It's doing all the work itself. * Every desk made its own call on the same night. The Guardian: "'Massive' Ukrainian drone attack on Russia kills at least six, says Moscow" — Ukraine the doer, with Moscow's body count wearing a says-tag. The BBC went the opposite way: "Kyiv market hit in wave of Russian strikes, as Moscow governor describes 'massive' drone attack" — a market "hit" by a wave (waves don't have commanders), Moscow's claim held at arm's length with "describes." None of these is a lie. All of them are a choice. Read all three and you learn the night had no fixed shape — only editors. * Al Jazeera's RSS standfirst, for the record, promotes the Russian mayor's scoreboard: "Russian authorities report 201 Ukrainian drones downed overnight in the Moscow region." The Defence Ministry's 822-drones figure gets printed with a straight "said." To be fair, AJ's attribution verbs are symmetric — Ukrainian officials also just "said" — so this isn't a says-crime. It's a casting decision. We once wrote that RT knows exactly what to call a bomb when it lands in Moscow; it turns out the pull of a Moscow dateline bends more compasses than RT's. * On nights when both capitals burn, the only real editorial decision is who gets to be the subject of the sentence. Al Jazeera made one choice at dawn and the opposite one by breakfast, and the facts never changed underneath. When a headline can swap protagonists without a single new fact, the protagonist was never a fact. It's a setting.