End of an era in Baltimore after bridge collapse leaves residents in disbelief

Published

1 year ago

March 27, 2024

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On the banks of the Patapsco river, hundreds of people from across Baltimore gather in the early evening sun.

Most are taking pictures with their mobile phones and can’t quite fathom what they are seeing. The Francis Scott Key bridge, a fixture of this city for half a century, had been destroyed in less than ten seconds.

Through the day, they had watched the pictures on television and seen the CCTV of the cargo ship hitting one of the bridge’s support pillars, collapsing the whole structure almost immediately. But many felt they needed to witness it for themselves.

“It’s unreal,” one woman said, “I actually can’t believe it is true, that it’s gone.”

Follow latest: Six missing workers ‘presumed dead’

Many of those who live on the banks of the river had been woken by the noise of the impact just before 1.30am. Jim Wood’s house overlooks the Key Bridge.

“The house shook a little bit,” he told me, “at first I thought it was a sonic boom from an aeroplane, I’ve never heard a sound quite like it, it lasted for six to ten seconds, and then, it was just indescribable.”

In the distance, a rib boat with flashing red lights circled the wreckage of the container ship and a rescue helicopter circled above. But as night fell, 18 hours after the collapse, any hope of finding survivors was officially extinguished.

Authorities declared this no longer a search and rescue operation. It is now the job of specialist divers to recover the bodies of the six people still missing, all of whom were working overnight on the bridge to repair potholes.

But with dangerous debris in the water, coupled with changing tides, it could take some time to complete.

Among those missing is Miguel Luna from El Salvador. At his house, a family member told me they are distraught as they wait for news.

Some of them were taken by police to a location in Baltimore where they could be with the other families of the missing. All of those unaccounted for worked for Brawner Builders.

At a nearby petrol station, their colleague, Jose Campos, is wearing an orange hat and a hoodie bearing the Brawner Builders name. He does not know where else to wait for news.

“My friends were working there, it’s a very hard day,” he told me. “My supervisor called me in the morning and told me they had rescued one of my colleagues but he was in a coma.

“I never imagined something this awful could happen. The path where the boat goes was supposed to be a safe zone.”

The ship had departed Baltimore harbour at 1.04am and was less than half an hour into a 27 day journey to Sri Lanka when it ploughed into the bridge.

Crew aboard the ship had issued a mayday call minutes before impact saying they had lost power and were heading for the bridge.

Officials on either side of the bridge reportedly stemmed the flow of traffic, potentially avoiding an even more deadly disaster.

“By being able to stop cars from coming over the bridge these people are heroes. They saved lives last night,” Maryland governor, Wes Moore, said.

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Some structural engineering experts claimed that the size and weight of the cargo ship, coupled with the position it struck the bridge, made a total collapse inevitable.

I asked the governor if he believed that was that case. “We’re still in the process of investigating exactly what happened,” he said, “so we don’t have any further details about whether or not it was inevitable but the bridge was actually fully up to code”.

While President Joe Biden promised to “move heaven and Earth” to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge as “soon as humanly possible,” Governor Moore accepted it would not be easy – or quick.

“This is going to be a long-term build,” he said. “We are going to rebuild in a way that remembers the people who this tragedy has impacted, and also do it in a way that honours the community that it serves.”

The people of Baltimore continue to visit the best vantage point in the city to see what remains of the bridge. There is an element of morbid fascination in it but also the sense that for many it represents the end of an era and a sheer disbelief that the bridge is no more.

US

Trump and Putin’s first meeting in years does not necessarily mean a ceasefire in Ukraine

Published

14 hours ago

August 8, 2025

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Trump and Putin's first meeting in years does not necessarily mean a ceasefire in Ukraine

It could be diplomatic dynamite.

The first meeting between a sitting US and Russian president in more than four years, following one of the bleakest periods in the history of their countries’ bilateral relations.

But a Putin–Trump summit does not necessarily mean there will be a ceasefire.

Ukraine war latest: Kremlin aide’s full statement on Trump-Putin talks

On the one hand, it could signal that a point of agreement has been reached and a face-to-face meeting is needed to seal the deal.

That has always been Russia’s stance. It’s consistently said it would only meet at a presidential level if there’s something to agree on.

On the other hand, there might not be anything substantive. It might just be for show.

It might just be the latest attempt by the Kremlin to diffuse Donald Trump’s anger and dodge his deadline to end the war by Friday or face sanctions.

It would give Trump something that can be presented as progress, but in reality, it delivers anything but.

After all, there has certainly not been any sign that Moscow is willing to soften its negotiating position or step back from its goals on the battlefield.

Tellingly, perhaps, it’s this latter view which has been taken by some of the Russian press on Thursday.

“Putin won” is the headline in Moskovsky Komsomolets regarding the Kremlin leader’s meeting with Witkoff.

The state-run tabloid quotes a political scientist, Marat Bashirov, who claims Putin “bought time” ahead of Friday’s deadline.

“It is noteworthy that in his rhetoric [on sanctions] Trump did not mention Russia at all,” the paper notes.

Komsomolskaya Pravda is similarly dismissive.

“Donald Trump has two simple interests in connection with Ukraine: to earn money for America, and political whistles and the Nobel Peace Prize for himself,” it says.

“Russia has its own interests,” it adds, “securing them is what Vladimir Putin will seek at a meeting with Trump.”

At this stage, the most likely location is the United Arab Emirates. Putin met the country’s president in the Kremlin today, and afterwards said it would be a “suitable location”. It felt like a strong hint.

And the UAE certainly makes sense.

It’s played mediator for a number of the prisoner swaps between Russia and Ukraine; it has good relations with the US (and was one of Trump’s stops on his recent Middle East tour); and most importantly for Moscow, it’s not a member of the International Criminal Court. So Putin doesn’t have to worry about being arrested.

But if NBC’s reports are correct, that a Putin-Trump summit is conditional on the Russian president meeting with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then the summit may not happen at all.

Until now, Putin has refused to meet Zelenskyy, despite numerous demands from Kyiv, because he views him as illegitimate.

The Kremlin said the prospect of a trilateral meeting between the leaders was mentioned by Witkoff on Wednesday, but the proposal was left “completely without comment” by Russia.

US

OpenAI releases long-awaited GPT-5 AI chatbot upgrade

Published

14 hours ago

August 8, 2025

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OpenAI releases long-awaited GPT-5 AI chatbot upgrade

GPT-5, the long-awaited upgrade to the ChatGPT AI chatbot, has been released by its maker OpenAI.

It has been one of the most highly anticipated launches in Silicon Valley after OpenAI’s first offering ChatGPT – powered by its GPT-3 model – kick-started the current AI boom in late 2022.

“GPT-3 sort of felt like talking to a high school student,” said Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive.

“GPT-4, maybe it was like talking to a college student. But with GPT-5, now it’s like talking to an expert, a PhD-level expert in anything, any area you need, on demand.”

At the launch event, OpenAI claimed the new chatbot, which will be released to all ChatGPT users on Thursday, was more than a simple upgrade to its previous offerings.

According to OpenAI, the new model exceeds the chatbot competition from the likes of Google, X and Antropic on “benchmarks” – standardised tests used to rank models.

OpenAI claims it has been designed to be easier and more natural to communicate with, better at writing prose and advanced computer code, solving academic questions from mathematics to law, assisting with healthcare-related questions, as well as being safer than its predecessors.

“It’s an incredible superpower on demand,” claimed Mr Altman.

The model is also more intelligent in how it uses its own brain power – and therefore an expensive computing resource – according to OpenAI.

It is a hybrid of previous chatbots and slower, more computing-intensive “reasoning” models like OpenAI’s Deep Research.

Based on a user’s request, the model will decide how much “thinking” is required before answering, rather than requiring the user to switch between different models.

Although AI enthusiasts who had been expecting GPT-5 to represent “artificial general intelligence [AGI]” will be disappointed.

Despite this being OpenAI’s stated goal, Mr Altman billed GPT-5 as a “major upgrade” to GPT-4 and a “significant step along the path to AGI”.

But they’re clearly not there yet.

A real test of GPT-5 will be whether it sells.

OpenAI is projected to spend $8bn (£6bn) this year, on top of $5bn (£3.7bn) last year, and while it is expected to make a profit this year, the business case for increasingly powerful AI models is still not clear to many investors.

Given a single training run for GPT-5 is rumoured to have cost $500m (£373m), there will be an expectation the new model is significantly more useful to business users.

Despite a very slick demonstration of its coding skills at the launch presentation, where it built an online language learning game in seconds, GPT-5 will have to prove its worth for professional coding.

Many in the tech industry prefer Anthropic AI’s Claude model to write code. OpenAI and its investors will be hoping GPT-5 changes that.

AI experts will also be testing GPT-5’s tendency to “hallucinate”, an issue OpenAI claims to have improved with GPT-5.

But erroneous or bizarre answers are a problem that dogs all large generative AI models.

“Shiny things are always fun to play with, and I fully expect GPT-5 to be the shiniest so far,” said Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist at New York University and AI commentator.

“But that doesn’t mean that it is a critical step on the optimal path to AI that we can trust,” Mr Marcus added in a post.

US

Ex-Superman Dean Cain to join ICE ‘ASAP’ to ‘save America’

Published

14 hours ago

August 8, 2025

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Ex-Superman Dean Cain to join ICE 'ASAP' to 'save America'

Dean Cain has been branded the “worst superman ever” as he announced he will join the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “ASAP”.

The 59-year-old, who was cast as Superman in the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, announced he had joined the team amid the federal agency’s unprecedented immigration raids.

He told Fox News on Wednesday his recruitment video on Instagram had gone viral and since then, “I have spoken with some of the officials over at ICE and I will be sworn in as an ICE agent ASAP”.

“You can defend your homeland and get great benefits,” he said in the Instagram post where he appealed for his followers to join ICE.

Speaking with the Superman theme song in the background, he said “hundreds of thousands of criminals” had been arrested since US President Donald Trump took office.

He then told his followers they would get a series of benefits if they joined ICE, including a $50,000 (£37,407) signing bonus and student loan repayment.

“If you want to help save America ICE is arresting the worst of the worst and removing them from America’s streets,” he said, before adding: “I voted for that.”

ICE agents are under pressure from the White House to boost their deportation numbers in line with Mr Trump’s campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration.

Cain’s post on Instagram received some backlash, with one user commenting: “Worst superman ever”.

Another said: “Shame on you Dean – that’s the most un-Superman thing you could possibly advocate.”

One fan turned against him and said: “Until I saw this I was such a fan. What a sad human being you must be.”