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Florida Panthers celebrate beating the Edmonton Oilers in game seven of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final at Amerant Bank Arena.
Hard Numbers: Panthers win first Stanley Cup, Liberals lose in longtime stronghold, Dali set free, Deadly South Korean fire, Tories can’t cash out, Rising German Islamophobia
2: The Florida Panthers won their first Stanley Cup Monday night after beating the Edmonton Oilers 2-1 in the Panthers' hometown of Sunrise, Florida, outside Miami. It was a devastating blow for Canadian fans, who had watched the Oilers claw their way back after the Panthers established an early 3-0 series lead. The incredible tiebreaker ended with the Panthers on top – and with the Stanley Cup staying in the US for the 31st consecutive year.
30: Conservative candidate Don Stewart’svictory Monday in Toronto-St. Paul’s, a Liberal stronghold for over 30 years, signals significant voter discontent with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s handling of issues like the housing crisis, inflation, and the war in Gaza. This upset raises questions about Trudeau’s leadership and suggests huge vulnerabilities for the Liberals ahead of next year's election as similar vote swings could jeopardize what were once assumed to be “safe” seats.
3: Almost three months after the cargo ship Dali crashed into and collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, the ship is nowheaded to Virginia for repairs. The Dali lost power on March 23, causing it to veer off course into the bridge, claiming the lives of six construction workers, and destroying the Baltimore bridge, a $1.9 bil and four-year restoration project.
22: A fire in a lithium battery factory outside of Seoulkilled 22 workers, mostly Chinese migrants, and injured eight on Monday. Authorities suspect the fire – one of the country’s deadliest in recent years – erupted because of an explosion in the plant containing roughly 35,000 batteries and have opened an investigation.
5: Insider betting is a no-no. A fifth Tory is now under investigation for allegedly placing bets on the date of the July 4 UK election – before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made the announcement. The allegations mean more negative press for the beleaguered Conservative leader, who is facing calls to suspend the party figures being investigated.
1,926: Islamophobic crimes more thandoubled in Germany last year, according to the lobbying group Claim – totaling 1,926 criminal cases, more than 1,000 over 2022. Claim noted a significant spike in Islamophobic-motivated crimes following the Oct. 7 attack, with over 60% of 2023’s attacks falling in the last three months of the year.
Detectives pose in front of the truck used in the Toronto Pearson International Airport gold heist as they give details of the arrests made one year on in Brampton, Ontario, on April 17, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Police make a golden catch, Canada hikes capital gains tax, Haiti names transitional council, Boats wait on Baltimore, Indigenous groups eye energy investments
22.5 million: Police have cracked the case of the biggest gold heist in Canadian history, arresting six people in the $22.5 million caper that involved the theft of a container at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport last year. Two of the suspects were employees of Air Canada.
⅔: No gains, no pain! Canada’s new federal budget increases the tax rate on capital gains from one-half to two-thirds for some payers. The measure, which applies to businesses and individuals whose capital gains earnings exceed $250,000, is projected to net about $19 billion over the next five years.
7: Haiti on Tuesday named the 7 voting members of a transitional council that is charged with selecting a successor to Prime Minister Ariel Henry. Henry, who was unable to return to violence-wracked Haiti following a trip last month to secure international aid, has pledged to resign once the council picks a new PM. The council’s mandate runs until 2026, but it is still unclear when it will actually take power. Last month, Canada dispatched troops to Jamaica to help train an international policing mission for Haiti.
3: After a boat crash brought down a bridge at the entrance to Baltimore’s harbor last month, interrupting shipping at one of North America’s busiest ports, the city opened two alternative shipping channels to accommodate cargo boats. Shipping giant Maersk has said those aren’t deep enough, but there is intrigue afoot: The company also said it had seen unconfirmed reports of a third channel set to open later this month that would be deep enough, and that it was waiting for local authorities to confirm. The ball’s in your port, Baltimore.
3.6 billion: The Canadian government will make available up to $3.6 billion in preferential loan guarantees for indigenous groups that want to invest in natural resources projects. Those projects could include, for example, massive energy transport projects like the Trans Mountain or Coastal GasLink pipelines, as well as a range of renewable energy projects.
A view of the Dali cargo vessel which crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge causing it to collapse in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., March 26, 2024.
It’s not just Baltimore with a bridge problem
Six people are still missing after a cargo ship collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday morning, crumbling the 1.6 mile long bridge in a matter of seconds.
Its aftermath will make waves far beyond Baltimore. Here’s how.
Supersized shipping. The 964 foot container ship, MV Dali, was being steered by a pilot specialized in the port when it lost power and hit one of the bridge’s main pylons.
The collapse draws attention to a pressing problem in the US supply chain: cargo ships – central to the modern economy – have gotten exponentially bigger as US bridges are aging.
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge was built between 1972 and 1977 the average container ship carried between 500-800 twenty-foot shipping containers – known as TEUs in the shipping business. But advances in engineering allowed ships to balloon to an average of 4,000 TEUs by 1985. Since then, carriers have continuously scaled up capacity, and Dali, manufactured in 2015, had a capacity of 10,000 TEUs. According to bridge experts, no bridge pylon could survive being hit by a vessel of this size.
The continuous growth has pitted ports against each other to attract bigger vessels. The expansion of the Panama Canal in 2016 upped the stakes, with ports along the East Coast racing to dredge their harbors to accommodate the larger ships now traveling through the canal.
The Port of Baltimore expanded to accommodate supersized ships in 2013. Since, it has grown into the 9th-busiest port for receiving foreign cargo.
Aging bridges. Meanwhile, the Francis Scott Key bridge has remained largely unchanged since the 1970s.
Although Maryland’s Governor Wes Moore said the bridge was “fully up to code,” the bridge scored a six out of nine safety rating on its last federal inspection in 2022. The bridge was downgraded because of concern about its reinforcement columns, though experts said Dali’s size and the way it hit the pylon made collapse inevitable.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge is not alone. Of the 617,000 bridges across the United States, 42% are at least 50 years old. About 300,000 were given the same “fair” safety grade given to Key Bridge, while another 42,000 were in “poor” condition. Nationwide, 178 million trips are taken across structurally deficient bridges every day.
This is a global problem. Tuesday’s crash was the second time this month that a container ship hit a major road bridge. On Feb. 22 in Guangzhou, a port in southern China, a much smaller vessel carrying stacks of containers hit the base of a two-lane bridge, causing vehicles to fall. From 1960 to 2015, there were 35 major bridge collapses worldwide due to ship or barge collisions. 18 of those collapses happened in the United States.
The political fallout. The Biden administration has said that the federal government will pay the entire cost of reconstructing the Port of Baltimore.
President Joe Biden’s generosity is likely to fend off Republican accusations that the collapse occurred because his administration has not spent enough on infrastructure -- an issue that could become more important in the 2024 election in the aftermath of this tragedy, as well as the collapse of an interstate overpass in Philadelphia last summer.
It is unclear how much reconstruction will cost, but to actually get the country’s bridges up to snuff, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association estimates Biden would have to spend $171 billion. At the current rate of investment, it will take nearly 75 years to repair them all.
Of Biden’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, just $110 billion went to roads and bridges. This spending helped more than 43,000 bridges improve their ratings under the Biden administration. But because entropy is inescapable in a country as large as the US, during the same time, nearly 70,000 bridges deteriorated.