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      Maryland Passes 2 Major Privacy Bills, Despite Tech Industry Pushback

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      One bill would require apps like Instagram and TikTok to prioritize young people’s safety and the other would restrict the collection of consumer data.The Maryland Legislature this weekend passed two sweeping privacy bills that aim to restrict how powerful tech platforms can harvest and use the personal data of consumers and young people — despite strong objections from industry trade groups representing giants like Amazon, Google and Meta.One bill, the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act, would impose wide-ranging restrictions on how companies may collect and use the personal data of consumers in the state. The other, the Maryland Kids Code, would prohibit certain social media, video game and other online platforms from tracking people under 18 and from using manipulative techniques — like auto-playing videos or bombarding children with notifications — to keep young people glued online.“We are making a statement to the tech industry, and to Marylanders, that we need to rein in some of this data gathering,” said Delegate Sara Love, a Democratic member of the Maryland House of Delegates. Ms. Love, who sponsored the consumer bill and cosponsored the children’s bill, described the passage of the two measures as a “huge” privacy milestone, adding: “We need to put up some guardrails to protect our consumers.”The new rules require approval by Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a Democrat, who has not taken a public stance on the measures.With the passage of the bills, Maryland joins a small number of states including California, Connecticut, Texas and Utah that have enacted both comprehensive privacy legislation and children’s online privacy or social media safeguards. But the tech industry has challenged some of the new laws.Over the last year, NetChoice, a tech industry trade group representing Amazon, Google and Meta, has successfully sued to halt children’s online privacy or social media restrictions in several states, arguing that the laws violated its members’ constitutional rights to freely distribute information.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden renews call for Congress to fund Baltimore bridge rebuild as port nears reopening

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      The port of Baltimore could be partially open again by the end of the month as the US military and partners push to clear the collapsed bridge that blocked the main shipping channel after being rammed by a cargo vessel, and Joe Biden toured the disaster site on Friday.After getting a firsthand look at efforts to clear away the hulking remains of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, the US president reiterated his calls for Congress to authorize the federal government to cover the cost of rebuilding the bridge “through union labor and American steel”.Yet he also said his administration was “absolutely committed to ensuring that parties responsible for this tragedy pay to repair the damage and be held accountable to the full extent the law will allow”. And he made it a point to pay tribute to the six construction workers who were killed when the bridge collapsed as they fixed potholes on it.“Most were immigrants but … were Marylanders, hardworking, strong and selfless,” Biden said of the workers, who were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. “To all the families and loved ones who are grieving, we have come here to grieve with you.”Cranes, ships and diving crews worked to reopen one of the nation’s crucial shipping lanes as Biden prepared to deliver his remarks.Biden received updates from the US Coast Guard and army corps of engineers and got an aerial view of the wreckage.Eight workers were filling potholes on the bridge when it collapsed in the middle of the night on 26 March. Two were rescued, but the bodies of only two of the six who died have been recovered.Biden planned to meet privately with the families of the victims Friday afternoon.Officials have established a temporary, alternate channel for vessels involved in clearing debris.The army corps of engineers reported that it hopes to open a limited-access channel for barge container ships and some vessels moving cars and farm equipment by the end of this month and to restore normal capacity to Baltimore’s port by 31 May, the White House said.As much as $200m in cargo normally moves through Baltimore’s port per day, and it is the leading hub for importing and exporting vehicles.Of more immediate concern might be covering the costs of cleanup and building a new bridge.The Federal Highway Administration has provided $60m in “quick release” emergency relief funds to get started. Exactly how much the collapse will cost is unclear, though some experts estimate recovery will take at least $400m and 18 months.The White House announced on Friday it is asking Congress to authorize the federal government to cover 100% of the collapsed bridge cleanup and reconstruction costs, rather than seeking funding through a separate, supplemental funding request.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Engineers begin removing Baltimore Key Bridge’s mangled wreckage

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      Crews of engineers have begun the dangerous and intricate job of removing the mangled wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge from the Patapsco River outside Baltimore, as top federal government and Maryland state officials stressed Sunday that the health of the US national economy depended on it.Officials took to the political talkshows Sunday to praise the emergency teams that have now amassed in the Patapsco and have started the delicate process of cutting and lifting steel debris from the north side of the destroyed bridge. Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, said the operation was extremely complex.“We have a ship that has nearly the size of the Eiffel Tower that is now stuck within the channel that has the Key Bridge sitting on top of it,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. He added that the bridge collapse, which occurred six days ago when the 985ft cargo ship the Dali lost power and crashed into the structure, was not a local but a national economic catastrophe.“This port is one of the busiest most active ports inside of the country. This is going to impact the farmer in Kentucky, the auto dealer in Ohio, the restaurant owner in Tennessee,” he said.Some 15,000 people are estimated to rely on the Port of Baltimore directly for their livelihoods, with a further 140,000 jobs indirectly affected. The port handles the shipping of more cars and light trucks than any other in the US, and it is also a major hub for agricultural equipment.Last year, more than 1m cargo containers passed through it. That amounted to more than 50m tonnes of foreign cargo, worth about $80bn.Pete Buttigieg, the US transportation secretary, was unable to give CBS News’s Face the Nation a timeline for the removal of the stricken bridge or for its rebuilding. He noted that the original bridge took about five years to construct, though that was not an indication of how long it will take to replace.Buttigieg said that it was possible the Biden administration may have to turn to Congress for approval of federal funds, which are expected to meet up to 90% of the costs of recovery. So far only $60m has been provided from an emergency pot held by the Federal Highway Administration.Asked by CBS News why any skeptical lawmakers should vote for what promises to be a multimillion-dollar project, Buttigieg said: “The pitch is: your district could be next. And this has historically been bipartisan.”James Clyburn, the influential Democratic congress member from South Carolina, underlined that point on NBC’s Meet the Press. “The fact of the matter is, all of us, every state in the nation, all 50 of us, will take our turns needing this kind of assistance,” he said.Clyburn added: “It may be gust storms in some places, it may be a flood, or here in this part of the country, hurricanes. We all are subjected at one time or another to some kind of calamity.”Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, who is Black, addressed the ugly wave of conservative social media attacks against him since the bridge disaster erupted. He was trolled by a user on X as “Baltimore’s DEI mayor”.Asked about the abuse on CBS News’s Face the Nation, Scott said that the backlash was coming from those who were “too afraid to use the N-word”. He added: “I am a young Black man, a young Black mayor. I know how racism goes in this country.”Moore, the state’s Black governor, has also been caught up in the rightwing backlash that has sought to connect the bridge collapse to progressive politics and initiatives promoting the concept of DEI (short for diversity, equity and inclusion), especially after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPhil Lyman, who is running for governor of Utah, posted on social media after the disaster occurred that “this is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the well-being and security of citizens.”Unlike Scott, Moore refused to respond to the trolling Sunday. Asked by CNN whether he thought the attacks were racist, he replied: “I have no time for foolishness. I’m making sure we can get closure and comfort to these families … I have no time for foolishness, and so I’m not going to delve into it.”The rescue operation has been taken up a notch by the arrival on location of a massive crane that can lift 1,000 tonnes, along with six other floating cranes also now at the site of the disaster. According to Associated Press, the clean-up teams also now include 10 tugboats, nine barges and eight salvage vessels.A top priority of emergency workers is to address the human tragedy of the bridge collapse. Eight construction workers were working on the bridge in the early hours of Tuesday when the disaster happened. Only two of them survived.The bodies of two workers, Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, who were trapped underwater in their vehicle, have been recovered. Four other workers, who are presumed to have died, have yet to be found.Scott said that a fund set up to help the families of those who died has reached over $300,000. “We will support them throughout this, and that could mean ongoing trauma care in the future,” he said.Beyond the lives lost, the main structural priority at the site of the collapsed bridge is first to open a channel for smaller boats to be able to enter and exit the port. The main goal of allowing big ships in and out is expected to take much longer.Recovery operations are being hampered by the murkiness of the water in which the wreckage is partially submerged. Sunken metal beams also increase the perilousness of the work. More

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      Tangled in Steel With No Way Out: How the Crew Stuck in Baltimore Is Faring

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      Twenty-two seafarers from India find themselves not only trapped in the ship that struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, but also in an unexpected spotlight.Even from miles away, the destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is a jarring visual: Chunks of steel jut above the water like metallic icebergs. Twisted gray beams protrude in crooked positions. From a park near Fort McHenry, visitors can see the giant cargo ship that struck the bridge and remains lodged in the wreckage.Less visible, however, are the 22 crew members from India who have remained on the ship, named the Dali, since the disaster on Tuesday.Little is publicly known about them other than that they are seafarers who embarked on a journey aboard the 985-foot-long cargo ship that was on its way to Sri Lanka, carrying 4,700 shipping containers, when it lost power and struck the Key Bridge, causing the structure to collapse.Since the accident, which killed six construction workers, the crew members have found themselves in an unexpected spotlight. While keeping the ship operable, they are answering a deluge of questions from officials investigating the nighttime catastrophe, as the evidence of what occurred lays around them in mangled ruins stretching across the bow and deck.While officials investigate what could have caused the tragedy, another question has emerged this week: What could the crew members, who have limited access to the outside world, be going through right now?“They must feel this weight of responsibility that they couldn’t stop it from happening,” said Joshua Messick, the executive director of the Baltimore International Seafarers’ Center, a religious nonprofit that seeks to protect the rights of mariners.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Close-Up View of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse

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      From roughly 100 yards away, the site of one of the worst bridge collapses in the country’s history is haunting. Maroon containers larger than a car sat twisted and crushed. Massive beams of steel warped into crooked arches. Pillars of jagged concrete poked out from the water — a tomb of wreckage that dimly reflected on the gray-toned river. From roughly 100 yards away, deep into the Patapsco River in Baltimore, the site of one of the worst bridge collapses in the country’s history is a haunting scene. The U.S. Coast Guard allowed The New York Times to ride aboard a response boat on Saturday afternoon to witness up close the destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which was struck by the cargo ship Dali on Tuesday, killing six men, all construction workers who were working on filling potholes on the bridge.As the 45-foot-long Coast Guard vessel neared the scene of the disaster, a service member who had made several trips to the site braced passengers for the view to come. “It’s still shocking every time.”The Coast Guard boat initially neared the cargo ship on the rear side, the stern, which was spared from much of the impact of the collapse. Two people could be seen walking along the starboard, though it was unclear if they were investigators or crew members, all of whom are from India and have remained on the ship to keep it operable. An anchor that the crew members had used in desperation to keep the ship from hitting the bridge was visible, submerged in calm water. A thin and yellow boom floated around the ship to contain spills. It looked similar to crime-scene tape. The gray and red shipping containers were stacked up to nine rows high, partly shielding for a moment the wreckage that lay behind it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Crews at Site of Bridge Collapse Work on Removing First Piece of Debris

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      The governor of Maryland said that the search for missing victims would resume when the conditions for divers improve.Crews in Baltimore on Saturday were working on pulling the first piece of wreckage out of the water after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a tangible sign of progress in the daunting effort to reopen the busy waterway.Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath of the U.S. Coast Guard said at a news conference that his crew was aiming to lift the first segment of the bridge “just north of that deep draft shipping channel.” He added, “Much like when you run a marathon, you’ve got to take the first few steps.”The bridge was a critical transportation link to one of the largest ports in the United States, and the collapse is costing the region and the country millions of dollars the longer it is out of operation. More than 8,000 workers on the docks have been directly affected, Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland said.Mr. Moore said cutting up and removing the north sections of the bridge “will eventually allow us to open up a temporary restricted channel that will help us to get more vessels in the water around the site of the collapse.”Officials overseeing the cleanup added on Saturday that salvage teams will use gas-powered cutters to systematically separate sections of the steel bridge, which will then be taken to a disposal site.The work was occurring less than a week after a giant container ship known as the Dali suffered a complete blackout and struck the bridge, killing six construction workers and bringing the bridge down into the Patapsco River.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Baltimore Investigation Turns to Ship’s Deadly Mechanical Failure

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      The Dali reported a power blackout and steering problems before hitting the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. The disastrous mechanical failure so far has not been explained.Just minutes before the cargo ship Dali was set to glide under Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, the ship’s alarms began to blare. The lights went out. The engine halted. Even the rudder, which the crew uses to maneuver the vessel, was frozen.As a frantic effort to restore the ship was underway, the pilot soon recognized that the aimless vessel was drifting toward disaster, and called for help.The cascading collapse of the vessel’s most crucial operating systems left the Dali adrift until it ultimately collided with the Key bridge, knocking the span into the river and killing six people. But as crews this week were still sorting out how to disentangle the ship and recover the bodies of those who died, investigators were also turning to the most central question: What could have caused such a catastrophic failure at the worst possible moment?Engineers, captains and shipping officials around the world are waiting for that answer in an era when the industry’s largest ships can carry four times as much cargo as those just a few decades ago, navigating through congested urban ports under bridges that may carry tens of thousands of people a day,Already, a few key questions are emerging, according to engineers and shipping experts monitoring the investigation, and most of them point to the electrical generators that power nearly every system on the 984-foot vessel, not only the lights, navigation and steering, but the pumps that provide fuel, oil and water to the massive diesel engine.The “complete blackout” reported by the pilot is hard to explain in today’s shipping world, in which large commercial vessels now operate with a range of automation, computerized monitoring, and built-in redundancies and backup systems designed to avert just such a calamity. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      US Senate candidate apologizes for using racist slur while trying to say ‘bugaboo’

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      A Maryland Democratic congressman running for US Senate has apologised for using a racist slur during a hearing on Capitol Hill.Speaking during a House budget committee hearing, David Trone said: “So this Republican jigaboo that it’s the tax rate that’s stopping business investment, it’s just completely faulty by people who have never run a business. They’ve never been there. They don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.”“Jigaboo” is a derogatory and offensive term for a Black person. The Oxford English Dictionary says the word is of unknown origin, its first documented use found in a song from 1909.Trone apologized in a statement to the Washington Post. “While attempting to use the word ‘bugaboo’ in a hearing, I misspoke and mistakenly used a phrase that is offensive,” he said.“Upon learning the meaning of the word I was deeply disappointed to have accidentally used it, and I apologise.”Merriam-Webster defines “bugaboo” as “an imaginary object of fear”.In 2009, the rapper Jay-Z discussed with the Guardian his use of the N-word in his music, saying: “If you eliminate [it, racists will] say ‘monkey’ or ‘jigaboo’.”The word “jigaboo” has recently been an occasional source of controversy.Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to whom Trone was speaking on Thursday, is Black. She declined to comment to the Post.In Maryland, Trone leads Democratic polling regarding the party race to contest the US Senate seat now filled by the retiring Ben Cardin.Trone’s closest competitor, Angela Alsobrooks, a state politician, is Black. She also declined to comment.In early polling, Trone and Alsobrooks trail Larry Hogan, the probable Republican nominee for Senate, a moderate who was a popular governor until 2023, when he was succeeded by Wes Moore, a Democrat and the first Black governor of the mid-Atlantic state.Trone said the word he used “has a long dark terrible history” and “should never be used any time, anywhere, in any conversation.“I recognise that as a white man, I have privilege. And as an elected official, I have a responsibility for the words I use – especially in the heat of the moment. Regardless of what I meant to say, I shouldn’t have used that language.” More