Trade and Traffic Chaos as 750,000 commuters will have to find another route

Baltimore-bridge-tanker

Important Takeaways:

  • Baltimore bridge collapse to bring trade and traffic chaos
  • The tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge along I-695 in Maryland into the Baltimore harbor following a “ship strike” early Tuesday morning is expected to cause major economic disruptions to the area and across the country.
  • The port, a major route for shipping containers and cruise liners, is the deepest harbor in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, closer to the Midwest than other East Coast ports, with five public and 12 private terminals, according to the Maryland government website.
  • The I-695 is also a critical link for trucking and motor vehicles linking Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York and the disaster comes ahead of the upcoming Easter Weekend.
  • The port is the busiest in the U.S. for car shipments, handling more than 750,000 vehicles in 2023, according to data from the Maryland Port Administration. It is also the largest U.S. port by volume for handling farm and construction machinery, as well as agricultural products.
  • According to the ship tracking service Marine Traffic, there are currently eight bulk carriers and one vehicle carrier headed for Baltimore that are now waiting at anchor just off Ken Island, which is about 20 miles south of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

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Super-charged hurricane season ahead weather experts predict; warn “stay vigilant”

2024-Hurricane-Season

Important Takeaways:

  • Explosive Atlantic hurricane season predicted for 2024, AccuWeather experts warn
  • A super-charged hurricane season could spawn a near-record number of storms in the Atlantic this year, and forecasters may even run out of names for storms amid a frenzy of tropical systems.
  • There are signs that the first named system could spin up before the season kicks off as the calendar flips to June, a precursor of what’s to come.
  • “The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is forecast to feature well above the historical average number of tropical storms, hurricanes, major hurricanes and direct U.S. impacts,”
  • Last hurricane season featured 19 named storms, but there were only four direct U.S. impacts. Hurricane Idalia was the storm of the year, which slammed into Florida as a powerful Category 3 hurricane in late August
  • All signs continue to point toward the upcoming season being worse than the last
  • Warm water is fuel for tropical systems, and there will be plenty of warm water for fledgling systems to tap into and strengthen.
  • Not only will this promote frequent development, but it will increase the potential for systems to undergo rapid intensification, a phenomenon that has occurred in recent years with historic hurricanes.
  • “The Texas coast, Florida Panhandle, South Florida and the Carolinas are at a higher-than-average risk of direct impacts this season,” DaSilva said.
  • While these four areas are at an elevated risk for a direct strike from a tropical system, residents near other coastal locations should remain vigilant.

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Heightened Risk of Cyber-attack on Power Grid

Cyber-Attack-Power-Grid

Important Takeaways:

  • Cyber Threat to US Power Grids Escalating as Election Approaches
  • US power grids are facing heightened risks of cyber and physical attacks as the election nears, according to the nation’s top reliability regulator.
  • The increased threats come from state-backed hackers as well as the type of physical assault that happened at North Carolina substations in late 2022, said Jim Robb, chief executive officer of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which sets federal standards.
  • “We are anticipating a fairly active year on the security front,” Robb said at an Electric Power Supply Association conference in Washington on Tuesday.

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It’s costing $1Million a Week to keep migrants off the streets and money is running out

Border-Crossing-count

Important Takeaways:

  • Thousands of migrants could be released en masse onto the streets in days, causing chaos in southern border communities as support funding dries up, say officials.
  • Local governments and nonprofits in the region have long worked with U.S. border officials to take migrants to sites such as Casa Alitas, a Catholic-run shelter for migrant families in Tucson, Arizona, or the Regional Center for Border Health in Yuma.
  • The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disburses funds from the Shelter and Services Program to entities providing shelter, food, transportation, and support to people who have been processed and released from custody while awaiting the outcome of immigration proceedings. But that federal funding will run out on March 31.
  • The migrant releases and reduction in adequate shelter will sow more disorder at the border, said Diego Piña Lopez, the executive director of Pima County’s Casa Alitas—which is expected to stop most operations soon due to lack of federal funding
  • “I think that’s going to lead to a lot of chaos, and a lot more cost across the board for folks to get services, as many of the people coming through leave fairly quickly here,” Piña Lopez told The Arizona Republic.
  • Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher said the county cannot afford the roughly $1 million per week that previously would have been covered by federal funds to keep migrants off the streets in border communities.

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Logistics providers hustle to redirect imports and exports

Baltimore-Port-Delays

Important Takeaways:

  • Logistics providers are urgently working to update clients on the status of their imports and exports after the Port of Baltimore was shut down.
  • “Our first priority is engaging clients to make plans for containers that were originally routed to Baltimore that will be discharged at other ports on the Eastern Seaboard,” explained Paul Brashier, vice president of drayage and intermodal for ITS Logistics.
  • “These diverted volumes will impact the ports of New York/New Jersey, Norfolk and the Southeast and we have to prepare trucking and transload capacity to get that freight to its intended network,” Brashier said.
  • More than 52 million tons of foreign cargo, worth some $80 billion were transported out of the port last year, according to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore.
  • Last year, the port handled 847,158 cars and light trucks, according to data from the port. It was the 13th consecutive year that Baltimore led all U.S. ports in the import of cars and light trucks. Other top imports include sugar and gypsum.
  • Top exports out of Baltimore include coal, natural gas, aerospace parts, construction machinery, agricultural components and soybeans. It is the second-busiest port for coal exports after Hampton Roads, Virginia, according to Wolfe Research.

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Megachurch won’t preach the gospel on Easter? No reference to resurrection, Calvary, or the blood of Jesus

Megachurch-no-Easter

Important Takeaways:

  • Megachurch Won’t Mention ‘Blood of Jesus’ on Easter Sunday Invitations
  • A North Carolina megachurch says they will not mention words like Calvary, resurrection of phrases like “blood of Jesus” to promote Easter Sunday services.
  • “I’m not going to say the word ‘Calvary,’ I’m not going to say the word ‘resurrection.’ I’m not going to say the ‘blood of Jesus.’ Right? I’m not going to say any of these words that makes someone feel like an outsider,” said Nikki Shearer, the digital content creator for Elevation Church. “This is really an important guiding principle.”
  • Elevation Church is pastored by Steven Furtick and has more than 25,000 members attending at multiple locations across the state.
  • Why not just be honest and upfront with people? Let them know what Easter is really about and why it’s important for them to hear the message?
  • I mean at some point Elevation Church does present the Gospel message to their unchurched visitors, right? At some point the non-Christians are told about the resurrection of Christ, right? And at some point, the visitors are made aware that the “blood of Jesus” was the price that was paid for our sins, right?
  • If not, the Elevation Church Easter service is nothing more than a self-help sermon…

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“Americans under 30 feeling worse about their lives”; researchers say smartphones may be the cause

Depression-under-30

Important Takeaways:

  • 1 big thing: Kids are dying inside
  • A shocking number of American kids are sad, suicidal and stuck on small screens sucking away their zest for life.
  • Rates of depression and anxiety among American adolescents jumped by more than 50% in multiple studies between 2010 and 2019, writes Jonathan Haidt, a leading expert on the spike in teen mental illness. Those numbers were relatively stable in the 2000s.
  • The suicide rate for kids between 10 and 14 tripled between 2007 and 2021, according to the CDC.
  • The share of high school girls who seriously considered attempting suicide jumped from 19% in 2011 to 30% in 2021.
  • The pandemic is often cited as a driver of the teen mental health crisis. But it was brewing long before then
  • A growing body of research links the acceleration of the crisis to one of this century’s biggest events: the arrival of the smartphone.
  • “Smartphones and social media fundamentally changed the way teens spend their time outside of school,” says Jean Twenge, a psychologist and author of the book “Generations.”
  • In the early 2000s, middle- and high-school kids saw friends in person about three times a week. Now, that’s closer to 1.5, according to data from the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future project.
  • At the same time, screen time has skyrocketed. Teens spend an average of 4.8 hours every day on social media apps, including TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to Gallup.
  • For the first time, the U.S. fell out of the top 20 in the World Happiness Report, released Tuesday. Gallup cited “Americans under 30 feeling worse about their lives” for the steep drop

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Regional Banks could be in real trouble as Commercial Real Estate melts down

Commercial-Real-Estate

Important Takeaways:

  • In case you’ve still got money in a bank, Bloomberg is warning that defaults in commercial real estate loans could “topple” hundreds of US banks.
  • Leaving taxpayers on the hook for trillions in losses.
  • To set the mood, a new study predicts that nearly half of downtown Pittsburgh office space could be vacant in 4 years. Major cities like San Francisco are already sporting zombie-apocalypse downtowns, with abandoned office buildings baking in the sun.
  • So what happened?
  • The Fed’s yo-yo interest rates first flooded real estate with low rates and cheap money. Which were overbuilt.
  • Then came the lockdowns, which forced millions to figure out new workday patterns.
  • These days, everyone talks about hybrid models of working, some in-person and some remote… In any case, even a 30 percent reduction in the footprint of office space once the leases are renewed could topple the entire sector.
  • The restaurant and retail sectors of downtown feel the pinch, with more closures all the time. Adding to the pressure are absurd levels of inflation and ever-riskier streets on matters of personal security. Put it all together and there is ever less reason to slog to the office.
  • When the Fed panic-hiked interest rates in the 2021 inflation, that put trillions of commercial real estate underwater even without other factors. Add to that crime, inflation, plus remote work, and you have a dangerous mix that could toppled cities as we know them.
  • That crisis only stopped when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell effectively bailed out every bank in America with sweetheart loans written on fictitious asset values along with unlimited taxpayer guarantees through the comically underfunded FDIC.
  • Without those government pre-bailouts, one paper last year by researchers at Stanford and Columbia estimated that 1,619 US banks – about a third of them – could be at risk of failure.
  • The problem is that nothing was actually fixed. In fact, it’s getting worse. For the simple reason that as the months roll by there’s more and more debt coming due.
  • And that brings us to Crombie, who notes that there’s $929 billion of commercial real estate debt coming due in the next 9 and a half months.

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Francis Scott Key Bridge collapses after disabled cargo ship runs into pillars. Search and rescue underway

US-TRANSPORT-INCIDENT

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘Mass Casualty Event’: 1.6 Mile Baltimore Bridge Collapses After Being Struck by Cargo Ship
  • The major Beltway Bridge over the Patapsco River has collapsed after being hit by a large cargo ship, sending vehicles travelling on the bridge tumbling into the water.
  • Now the BBC notes “an unclassified memo” from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) states it has confirmed the ship “lost propulsion” before hitting the bridge.
  • So evidently the ship was, as nautical parlance has it, ‘not under command’, meaning “at the mercy of winds and seas” — and in this case, inertia. What we do not know is whether this state of having “lost propulsion” means the engine ceased to function, or if the coupling taking the energy from the engine to the propeller was damaged. In either case the ship was disabled at a critical moment and in a critical place and collided with enormous force.
  • The search for survivors continues, but the cold water presents a serious challenge. One person is in hospital and two others are said by the Baltimore fire department to have been rescued. Up to a dozen others — mainly from the road repair crew working on the bridge at the time of the strike — may still be in the water.

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Rapper ‘Diddy’s’ homes in LA and Miami raided by Homeland Security in connection with human trafficking

Sean-Diddy-Combs-640x480

Important Takeaways:

  • US official confirms to Fox News raids on Diddy’s homes are connected to a federal human trafficking investigation
  • The raid that occurred at the music mogul’s mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood.
  • “Investigators said across the coast, the music mogul’s Miami home was also raided Monday,” noted FOX.
  • “SkyFOX flew over Combs’ home Monday afternoon and showed federal agents conducting their investigation at his home.,” it added. “FOX 11’s ground crew at the scene said the home was registered to Bad Boys Films, which is a division of Bad Boy Entertainment, along with one of Combs’ daughters.”
  • People were seen coming out of the house and were subsequently detained.
  • Homeland Security expert Hal Kempfer told the outlet that there have been allegations of Combs drugging young women and the agency has been investigating crimes in multiple states.

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