End of an era in Baltimore after bridge collapse leaves residents in disbelief
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.
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New angle shows moment bridge hit
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.”
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Bridge collapse: How did it happen?
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”.
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Timeline of Baltimore bridge collapse
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
Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney apologises to Donald Trump over anti-tariff advert featuring Ronald Reagan
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has apologised to Donald Trump over an anti-tariff advert featuring a clip of Ronald Reagan.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea, he also said he had reviewed the commercial and told Ontario Premier Doug Ford not to air it.
“I did apologise to the president,” Mr Carney said on Saturday, confirming earlier comments made by the US president on Friday.
“I told [Doug] Ford I did not want to go forward with the ad,” he added.
The private conversation with Mr Trump happened at a dinner hosted by South Korea’s president on Wednesday.
The commercial, commissioned by Mr Ford, included a quote from Republican former president Ronald Reagan saying that tariffs cause trade wars and economic disaster.
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TV advert deepens trade rift between Trump and Canada
Mr Trump said the advert was misleading and, in response, announced that he was increasing tariffs on goods from Canada and halting trade talks with Canada.
In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”
It prompted the Ontario premier to pull the ad.
On Friday, the US president expressed his irritation at the advert but also told reporters he had accepted Mr Carney’s apology.
“I like him [Carney] a lot but what they did was wrong,” he said.
“He apologised for what they did with the commercial because it was a false commercial.”
But, critically, he added that the US and Canada will not restart trade talks.
Mr Ford has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s tariffs and trade policies, which are hurting Ontario’s carmakers and steel industry.
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The ad by the Ontario government has a voiceover of Ronald Reagan criticising tariffs on foreign goods while saying they cause job losses and trade wars.
The video uses five complete sentences from a five-minute weekly address recorded in 1987, but edited together out of order.
The ad does not mention that the former US president was explaining that tariffs imposed on Japan by his administration should be seen as a sadly unavoidable exception to his basic belief in free trade as the key to prosperity.
Meanwhile, Mr Carney said his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday were a turning point in relations after years of tensions.
He also met Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the sidelines of the summit.
US
Donald Trump announces dramatic drop in US refugee intake, with most of them white South Africans
The US is drastically cutting the number of refugees it will allow into the country to 7,500, and giving priority to white South Africans.
The new figure, announced on Thursday in a memo in the Federal Registry, the official journal of the US administration, is a dramatic reduction from last year’s 125,000, set by former president Joe Biden.
No reason was given for the decrease, but the note said the admission of the 7,500 refugees during the 2026 fiscal year was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest”.
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The notice posted to the register’s website said the 7,500 admissions would “primarily” be allocated to Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”.
It is half the 15,000 total set for 2021 during Donald Trump’s first term in office at the height of the COVID pandemic, which reports said was the previous lowest refugee admissions cap.
Refugee rights groups were quick to condemn the proposal, with International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) president Sharif Aly, saying that by “privileging Afrikaners while continuing to ban thousands of refugees who have already been vetted and approved, the administration is once again politicising a humanitarian programme”.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Global Refuge, said: “Concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the programme’s purpose as well as its credibility.”
Human Rights First president, Uzra Zeya, called it a “new low point” in US foreign policy, which will “further destabilise front-line states that host over two-thirds of the world’s nearly 43 million refugees, undermining US national security in tandem”.
US President Donald Trump showed South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa printed-out articles in the Oval Office. Pic: AP
In May, Mr Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House, claiming white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.
A video purporting to show burial sites for murdered white farmers was played but was later shown to be scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years.
The South African government has vehemently denied that Afrikaners and other white South Africans are being persecuted.
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In January, the US president suspended the US Refugee Admissions Programme (USRAP) to, in his words, allow US authorities to prioritise national security and public safety.
During the Oval Office meeting, Mr Ramaphosa said only that he hoped that Trump officials would listen to South Africans about the issue, and later said he believed there is “doubt and disbelief about all this in [Mr Trump’s] head”.
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