Generations of Marylanders — longshoremen, sailors, steelmakers and crabbers whose livelihoods depend on the Port of Baltimore — watched in disbelief this week as an iconic symbol of their maritime culture collapsed into the Patapsco River.
The fatal collapse of the historic Francis Scott Key Bridge shook Baltimore to its core.
“What happened was kind of a farce,” said Joe Wade, a retired dock worker who remembers fishing near the bridge as a child. “I’m not mourning, but. . . I’ve been excited. “
Baltimore was a port long before it became a city, and long before the United States declared its independence from Great Britain. Many of the city’s brick urban spaces were built to house fishermen, longshoremen, and sailors. They earned a reputation for being pioneers and difficult guys. Not afraid of the rough seas and the long days.
It’s a cultural identity that persists in today’s sailors like Ryan “Skeet” Williams, who makes his living collecting crabs in the Chesapeake Bay.
“We’re tough and salty,” he said. You’re building your own life. “
Williams relied on the Key Bridge to connect his small maritime network out of Baltimore to Maryland’s East Shore, the lifeblood of the state’s strong fishing industry. Many of his friends and family used the bridge for their daily commutes.
Scott Cowan, president of Local 333 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, said the union represents another 2,400 people whose jobs are now on the line. Shipping through Baltimore Harbor will not resume until the underwater wreckage has been cleared.
“They say it was the port that built the city,” said Cowan, who followed in his father’s footsteps when he became a longshoreman decades ago.
Tuesday’s crisis marks the latest blow to a city whose rich history is lost in conversations about its most recent struggles: poverty, violent crime and population loss.
Six members of a roadworks crew were thrown to their deaths after a 985-foot (300-meter) freighter lost power and crashed into the bridge, removing a key feature of the Baltimore skyline and halting maritime traffic toward one of the busiest areas on the East Coast. harbours.
Subsequently, some experts wondered whether the aid columns on the stretch did not deserve to have been better protected from the giant container ships passing nearby. But Baltimore is an old city with aging infrastructure that occasionally receives little attention from national politicians.
Officials have promised to rebuild the Key Bridge, but it may only take years.
“This is not a bridge. It’s one of the cathedrals of American infrastructure,” U. S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at a news conference in Baltimore earlier this week. “So the road to normalcy may not be easy. It won’t be fast. ” It probably won’t be cheap. “
A Rich History: Francis Scott Key and Generations of Longshoremen Baltimore was a world leader in shipbuilding early in its history. It later became a major transportation hub with the addition of a rail line connecting the East Coast to the Midwest and beyond.
During the War of 1812, British forces attacked Baltimore in hopes of weakening its commercial and maritime prowess. But U. S. troops effectively defended Fort McHenry, south of Baltimore, and invaded. Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem after seeing an American flag waving defiantly. after a night of heavy bombardment.
More than 150 years later, construction began on a bridge that would bear his name.
The Key Bridge opened in 1977, spans 2. 6 kilometers in front of Baltimore’s harbor and allows citizens to cross the waterway without going through the city. It provided a direct link between two water-oriented, working-class communities that shaped World War II, when nearby metal generators produced cargoes from large warships to aid in the defense effort.
Baltimore’s history is filled with iconic characters, from debauched pirates and corrupt politicians to poet Edgar Allan Poe and jazz legend Billie Holiday. Regardless, the port has remained relatively constant.
It has made it possible for many other people to make a decent living by showing up and putting in hours, adding immigrants and other marginalized groups. And it has continued to be an economic engine, adapting and evolving even as other local businesses have closed their doors. due to the decline in commercial production.
It currently handles more cars and agricultural machinery than any port in the country. Last year alone, it dealt $80 billion worth of foreign goods, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a news conference earlier this week.
“The Key Bridge collapse is just one crisis in Maryland. The collapse of the Key Bridge is a global crisis,” he said. “The national economy and the world economy count on the Port of Baltimore. “
The loss of life falls on one of Baltimore’s working-class communities. The men who died in the collapse were filling potholes on a night’s work. While police temporarily halted traffic after the shipment sent a distress signal, they didn’t have time to alert the framing team: an organization of Latino immigrants actively pursuing the American dream.
Two survivors were rescued almost immediately, and divers recovered two bodies the next day. The other four patients are still missing and presumed dead.
Advocates say their deaths take on greater significance in the context of the myriad difficult situations immigrants face in the United States. Men performed physically difficult jobs for low wages. They painted at night so as not to disturb Maryland travelers.
Not surprisingly, it was employees, already disenfranchised, who ended up paying the highest price, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Global Refuge, a Baltimore-based immigrant nonprofit. It’s almost inevitable that immigrants will worry about rebuilding the bridge, he added. .
Workers came to Maryland from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, with higher wages and greater opportunities for themselves and their families.
By settling in the Baltimore area, they added to a long history of immigration that played a key role in the city’s culture and commerce. This history is inextricably connected to the port.
Between the Civil War and World War I, Baltimore was one of the country’s biggest access problems for European immigrants. In 1868, an immigration pier opened in South Baltimore, not far from the historic battlefield that gave birth to the Star-Spangled Banner.
Many immigrants passed through the city on their way to the Midwest, but others stayed and put down roots. Those who lacked specialized skills or complex education worked on the docks and in railroad yards, along with African Americans who had come north to escape slavery. they are commemorated at the Baltimore Immigration Museum, which occupies a historic building built in 1904 to space out European immigrants.
“Baltimore has a real melting pot of cultures,” said local historian Johns Hopkins, who runs the nonprofit Baltimore Heritage.
In recent decades, Latin American immigrants have settled in and around Baltimore, and other cities have seen greater influxes, most likely because they are experiencing more powerful job growth.
CASA, a Maryland-based immigrant advocacy group, has been in contact with two of the families whose relatives are among those still missing. The two men, Maynor Suazo Sandoval and Miguel Luna, were husbands and fathers who left their home countries more than they did 15 years ago.
“These structure personnel are certainly essential,” said Gustavo Torres, the organization’s executive director. “At a time when there is so much hate against the immigrant community, we look to Maynor and Miguel’s quiet leadership and appreciate the way our societies are being built so that Americans can live comfortably. “
Many port employees and thousands of others used the Key Bridge as a base.
Together with their neighbors, they woke up Tuesday morning to the news of his disappearance and temporarily logged on to social media, still in disbelief. They watched video footage showing each and every detail of the catastrophic collapse, repeating the horrific series until it appeared. Despite each and every one, it all felt real.
Watching a major piece of their city’s infrastructure crumble like a toy has left some Baltimoreans with a sense of shock, shaken by the realization of what can happen.
In the days that followed, many locals stopped at viewpoints near the cave to read about the wreck and pay their respects. Some don’t forget seeing how the bridge took shape in the 1970s, leaning majestically over the water.
“I was there. It was a milestone,” said Niki Putinsky, who lived for years in a small residential community at the foot of the bridge. “I just didn’t think anything could knock him down like that. “
The entire city is in mourning, said Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, whose father moved to Baltimore as a young man to paint at the harbor. But there’s an explanation for why Baltimoreans are known for their courage and perseverance, Scott said.
“You can’t talk about Baltimore — past, supply and long term — without talking about the port,” he said. “And this will be the latest example of Baltimore’s recovery. It’s ingrained in us here. Let’s not give up, let’s forget about the noise and we carry this serious challenge on our shoulders.
The city of Riyadh will host the fourth Gulf Film Festival (GFF), under the patronage of Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Culture and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Film Commission, Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Farhan Al-Saud.
The festival, organized through the Film Commission in cooperation with the General Secretariat of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), will take place over several days, from April 14 to 18.
The British Museum on Thursday named the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Nicholas Cullinan, as its new director, as the 265-year-old establishment grapples with the obvious theft of a pile of items and increasing foreign scrutiny of its collection.
Former director Hartwig Fischer resigned in August after the museum discovered that more than 1,800 goods were missing in a blatant case of internal theft. Many pieces were submitted for sale online.
Mark Jones, former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, has been director ever since. Cullinan will update it this summer.
Cullinan has been director of the National Portrait Gallery since 2015, overseeing a primary renovation of the building next to Trafalgar Square in London. In the past he worked at the Tate Modern in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
His appointment was approved by the trustees of the British Museum and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Cullinan said it was an honor to be director of “one of the greatest museums in the world. “
He said he hoped to lead the establishment through “the maximum transformations, whether architectural or intellectual, that occur in any museum in the world, to continue to make the British Museum as engaged and collaborative as possible. “
The museum fired a former curator, Paul Higgs, over the lack of artifacts, and is suing him in High Court. Lawyers for the museum say Higgs “abused his position of trust” to borrow ancient gems, gold jewelry and other garage pieces over the course of a decade.
Higgs, who has worked at the museum’s branch in Greece and Rome for more than two decades, denies the allegations and addresses the museum’s legal claims.
Police are also investigating and no one has been charged.
The 18th-century museum in the Bloomsbury district of central London is one of Britain’s biggest tourist attractions, visited by 6 million people a year. They come to see a collection ranging from Egyptian mummies and ancient Greek statues to Viking treasures, scrolls containing the 12th century. Nineteenth-century Chinese poetry and mask created by Canada’s indigenous peoples.
The museum is facing increasing pressure from items from other countries from the era of the British Empire, adding the Parthenon Marbles, 2,500-year-old sculptures that were brought to Athens in the early 19th century by British diplomat Lord Elgin.
Greece has campaigned for decades for the marbles to be returned. The British Museum is barred by law from returning the sculptures to Greece, but its trustees have spoken to Greek about a compromise, adding a long-term loan.
Those efforts suffered a setback in November, when a diplomatic row erupted over the marbles and Prime Minister Sunak canceled a planned meeting with his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
The chairman of the British Museum, George Osborne, said that with Cullinan’s appointment, the establishment “confidently enters a new bankruptcy in the long history of the British Museum and returns on the right foot. “
The Saudi Ministry of Culture, represented through the Jeddah Historic District Programme, announced the finishing touch of the Jeddah Historic District Building Restoration Project thanks to the Crown Prince’s generous donation of SAR 50 million.
The recovery assigns the implementation of the directives of Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister.
The implementation was carried out in accordance with the unique design and unique urban layout of the Jeddah Historic District and its unique architectural elements, as some of Jeddah’s family-owned buildings possess archaeological monuments dating back 500 years.
Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Culture and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the King Salman World Academy for the Arabic Language (KSGAAL), Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan, presented the Arabic Language Month program in Beijing and Shanghai.
Organized through the academy between March 28 and April 26, the program is comprised of a series of clinical systems and activities organized in collaboration with various educational establishments to expand Arabic language training systems, instructor performance, and disseminate it more widely.
The program also includes visits and meetings with Chinese universities that offer Arabic-language education systems, as well as associations and centers interested in training and spreading the Arabic language in China, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Thursday.
The Secretary General of KSGAAL, Dr. Abdullah bin Saleh Al-Washmi, said that the academy is actively working to promote the Arabic language, especially through this program that will raise the profile of the academy and try to teach Arabic to foreigners, exercise teachers and their training skills. .
The academy, in cooperation with Beijing University of Languages and Culture, is expected to hold a clinical festival for Arabic language students, in three categories: recitation, storytelling and Arabic calligraphy.
The program lasts 4 weeks, 3 in Beijing and one in Shanghai, and as part of it a clinical colloquium and two panel discussions will be organized, clinical visits will be carried out, as well as 4 instructor courses, oriented to language development. Proficiency skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing), all focused on employing active methods in the training of Arabic as a secondary language.
The Arabic Language Month program in China is part of the “Scientific Programs on Arabic Language Teaching” task overseen through KSGAAL. Several editions of the program have been implemented in several countries, including India, Brazil, Uzbekistan, and Indonesia. The academy continues to offer this program as a component of its foreign painting on a linguistic and cultural level.
Also on Thursday, the Saudi Ministry of Culture awarded the Prince Mohammed bin Salman Award for Cultural Cooperation between Saudi Arabia and China to the King Abdulaziz Public Library branch in Beijing.
The prize will foster cooperation and cultural debate between Saudi Arabia and China by showcasing the achievements of both countries to the academic, cultural, media, literary and artistic communities.
It recognizes the contribution of Chinese and Saudi scholars, artists, linguists, and translators and awards a grant to the laureates to assist them in their work. This ensures collaboration and shared artistic production.
Following the announcement, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Culture Prince Badr and Peking University President Gong Qihuang met to highlight the university’s critical role in strengthening cultural collaboration between Saudi Arabia and China.
Prince Bader said, “The Prince Mohammed bin Salman Award for Cultural Cooperation is a basic pillar for building cultural bridges and strengthening ties between China and Saudi Arabia in the arts, literature and educational research. “
“I am very pleased to announce the start of the awards, which will celebrate the cultural heritage of our two countries and pave the way for an ongoing partnership, fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding,” he added.
The Prince Mohammed bin Salman Award for Cultural Cooperation contains four main categories: cultural studies and studies, adding intellectual, literary, historical, artistic and social studies; artistic and artistic works, adding literature, visual and musical arts, short films and technical or clinical creativity; Translations between the two languages, adding works identified with ISBNs in the fields of culture, history, literature and the arts; and Cultural Personality of the Year, awarded to an individual from a country who has made a remarkable contribution to culture through creativity, wisdom, and leadership.
The additional categories (Young Researcher, Young Creator, and Young Translator) are designed to inspire young Saudi and Chinese people to interact in intercultural communication.
Applications are accepted from Saudi and Chinese Americans and governmental, private, and non-profit institutions. They can be submitted by completing the nomination form, which will be available on the award’s website.
The Prince Mohammed bin Salman Award for Cultural Cooperation will culminate in an annual rite celebrating the shared cultural ability of the two nations and the category winners.
For the first time in 27 years, the U. S. government is changing the way it classifies other people based on race and ethnicity, an effort that federal officials say will count more than citizens who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African descent should be counted. .
The revisions to the minimum categories on race and ethnicity, announced Thursday through the Office of Management and Budget, are the latest effort to label and define the rest of the United States. This evolutionary process reflects changes in social attitudes and immigration, as well as the preference of other people in an increasingly varied society to see themselves reflected in the figures produced by the federal government.
“You can’t underestimate the emotional effect this has on other people,” said Meeta Anand, senior director of census and knowledge equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “That’s how we see ourselves as a company. . . . You see a preference in other people to identify and reflect themselves in knowledge so that they can tell their own story. “
As part of the revisions, consultations on race and ethnicity that in the past were done separately in the bureaucracy will be consolidated into a single consultation. This will give respondents the option to choose multiple categories at the same time, such as “Black,” “Native American,” and “Hispanic. “Research has shown that a huge number of Hispanics don’t know how to answer the racial question when asked separately because they perceive race and ethnicity to be similar and decide for “another race” or not. Not responding to the query.
A Middle East and North Africa category will be added to the possible options for questions about race and ethnicity. People from countries such as Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and Syria have been encouraged to identify as white, but will now have the option to identify themselves in the new group. The results of the 2020 census, which asked respondents to specify their origins, suggest that another 3. 5 million people identify as being from the Middle East or North Africa.
“It feels smart to be seen,” said Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat whose parents are Iranian. “When I was a kid, my circle of relatives would check the ‘white’ box because we didn’t know what other box reflected our circle of relatives. To have such representation is significant. “
The adjustments also hit the federal bureaucracy on the now broadly pejorative words “black” and “Far East,” as well as the terms “majority” and “minority,” because they do not reflect the nation’s complex racial and ethnic diversity. Officials. Reviews also inspire the collection of detailed knowledge about race and ethnicity beyond minimum standards, such as “Haitian” or “Jamaican” for someone who marks “black. “
The adjustments to the criteria were developed over two years through an organization of statisticians and federal bureaucrats who prefer to stay out of the political fray. But the revisions have long-term implications for legislative redistricting, civil rights laws, fitness statistics and even politics. as the number of other people classified as white decreases.
Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee for president for the Republican Party, recently alluded to arguments made by others who claim that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration to weaken white power. As president, Trump tried unsuccessfully to disqualify other people who were in the U. S. The U. S. illegally filed for the 2020 election.
The push for racial and ethnic conversion grew under the Obama administration in the mid-2010s but came to a halt after Trump took office in 2017. It was revived after Democratic President Joe Biden took office in 2021.
The adjustments will be reflected in decennial census knowledge collection, forms, surveys and questionnaires released through the federal government, as well as state governments and the personal sector, as businesses, universities and other teams follow Washington’s lead. Federal agencies have 18 months to come up with a plan for how they will put the adjustments into effect.
The first federal criteria on race and ethnicity were developed in 1977 to provide consistent information to all agencies and provide numbers that could help enforce civil rights laws. They were last updated in 1997, when five minimum racial categories were delineated: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white; Respondents can simply decide for more than one race. Minimum ethnic categories were grouped into non-Hispanic, Hispanic, or Latino.
The interagency organization that worked on the most recent revisions noted that categories are socio-political constructs and that race and ethnicity are explained biologically or genetically.
The racial and ethnic categories used by the U. S. government at the time.
In 1820, the category “Free Colored People” was added to the decennial census to reflect the increase in the number of loose blacks. In 1850, the term “mulatto” was added to the census to reflect other people of combined origin. American Indians were not explicitly counted in the census until 1860. After years of immigration from China, the “Chinese” were included in the 1870 census. There was no formal inquiry about Hispanic origin prior to the 1980 census.
Not all with the most recent revisions.
Some Afro-Latinos believe that combining questions about race and ethnicity will reduce their numbers and representation in the data, although previous studies by the U. S. Census Bureau have shown that they are not the only ones that have been able to find a solution to the problem. UU. no have found significant differences between Afro-Latinos’ responses when the questions were asked separately or together.
Mozelle Ortiz, for example, is of mixed Afro-Puerto Rican descent. She believes the changes could be just that identity, though other people may choose more than one answer once questions about race and ethnicity are combined.
“All of my lineage, that of my Black Puerto Rican grandmother and all non-white Spanish-speaking peoples, will be erased,” Ortiz wrote to the interagency group.
Others are dissatisfied that certain groups of other people, such as Armenians or Arabs from Sudan and Somalia, have not been included in the examples used to define other people of Middle Eastern or North African descent.
Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, said that while she was “incredibly happy” with the new category, that enthusiasm was tempered through the omissions.
“It doesn’t reflect the racial diversity of our community,” Berry said. “And that’s not true. “
Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Culture Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Farhan Al-Saud and China’s Minister of Culture and Tourism Sun Yeli signed a memorandum of understanding to breathe life into cultural cooperation and outstanding relations between the two countries.
Signed in Beijing, the agreement aims to deepen collaboration in the cultural sectors, adding Chinese museums, cultural heritage, performing and visual arts, classical crafts and cultural entities, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Wednesday.
The MoU outlines a comprehensive framework for cooperation, emphasizing the exchange of experiences, policies, and programs for mutual understanding and appreciation.
Both parties are committed to facilitating cultural exchanges, at joint festivals and events, and to participating in artist residency schemes to inspire artistic exchange and maintain cultural diversity.
The new partnership indicates a shared commitment to preserve, celebrate, and foster a deeper understanding of each other’s cultures. Saudi Arabia and China will enrich the cultural landscape and cultural ties through combined execution in spaces such as heritage preservation and the sale of artistic innovation.
The MoU also emphasizes cooperation in the virtual cultural industry, encouraging dialogue, exchange of experiential knowledge and collaboration between institutions and professionals from both countries.
In addition, it highlights measures to prevent the illegal import, export and trafficking of works of art, reflecting a mutual commitment to safeguarding cultural treasures.
Passersby in Beijing in winter or early spring would possibly stumble upon teams of locals playing with birds. Players blow plastic marbles into the air through carbon tubes so that the birds, of the migratory wutong species, can catch them and bring them back. in exchange for a gift.
This is a Beijing culture that dates back to the Qing Dynasty, which ruled between the 17th and early 20th centuries. Today, only 50 to 60 people in Beijing still practice it.
Xie Yufeng, a 39-year-old cook, is one of them. On Tuesday afternoon, Xie met up with some friends near the Workers’ Stadium, where locals gather in the evening to dance tandem, practice tai chi or play Chinese yo-yo.
Xie and his friends brought their winged playmates, usually wutong birds, with their unique yellow beaks and flying south from northeastern China to Beijing in autumn to escape the harsh winter.
Taming the birds and them in the game of bead catching can take 4 to five months, Xie said. Players teach the birds how to search, first by throwing seeds into the air and then replacing them with plastic beads. Every time the birds collect the pearls, they are rewarded with a snack. In the past, pearls were made of bone.
“To do this well, patience is the ultimate quality of a player,” Xie said.
The culture is believed to have taken root in the capital with the arrival of the Qing Dynasty, a Manchu organization that took over Beijing in the mid-17th century.
It is believed that the Manchu nobles, who lived in and around the Forbidden City, popularized bird trapping as a pastime.
Today, other people in Beijing’s classic alleys, called hutong in Chinese, still keep birds in cages and maybe even take the entire cages out to walk around.
Wutong bird owners release them in late spring and allow them to return to the northeast, only to capture or buy new ones the following fall.