Italian officials scrambling to pinpoint cause of deadly bridge collapse

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TODAY:

• While rescue teams sift through the rubble of a bridge collapse in Genoa, Italy, that has killed more than 30 people, people are asking: How did it happen?
• The political-economic rift between the U.S. and Turkey is intensifying, with the Turkish president calling on his citizens to abandon U.S. electronics.
• It appears that our evolutionary ancestors may have been smarter than we thought.
• Missed The National last night? Watch it here

Tragedy in Genoa

​It took almost four years to build the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy, but only seconds for it to crumble.

This morning, a huge section of the kilometre-long span gave way during a violent thunderstorm, sending dozens of cars and trucks tumbling into factories and homes some 50 metres below.

At least 35 people are dead, according to the latest report from the country's ANSA news agency, while five injured survivors have been pulled from the rubble and are in hospital in serious condition.

Aerial footage shows a several-hundred-metre-long gap in the bridge, with mountainous chunks of asphalt, concrete and steel support beams sitting atop the rubble of buildings and crushed vehicles.

Eyewitnesses report that a bolt of lightning struck the bridge just before it failed, and the heavy rains were accompanied by gusts of wind up to 65 km/h.

Speculation about the cause of the collapse is already focused on maintenance issues surrounding the aging span, part of the A10 highway, which opened to traffic in 1967.

"Those responsible will have to pay," Italian transport minister Danilo Toninelli told the national broadcaster.

Major repairs were carried out on the bridge, which spans a railway and a river in central Genoa, in 2016. Reuters reports that Autostrade, the private firm that runs the toll road, was working to shore up its foundation at the time of the collapse.

A spokesman for Autostrade said that the span was well monitored and supervised and that there was "no reason to consider the bridge was dangerous."

Others are seizing upon the tragedy to make a political point.

Matteo Salvini, Italy's interior minister and leader of the anti-EU Northern League, blamed the disaster on bean counters in Brussels.

"We should ask ourselves whether respecting these [budget] limits is more important than the safety of Italian citizens. Obviously for me it is not," he told Italian television.

More than 200 firefighters and rescue workers continue to comb through the rubble looking for more victims and survivors.

Several nearby homes and businesses have been evacuated over fears that the remaining sections of the bridge might also fail.

Erdogan strikes back

Turkey is hitting back at the United States with calls for national boycotts of American-made electronics and construction materials.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan upped the ante in a televised speech from Ankara this morning, calling for patriotic Turks to give up their Apple devices.

"If the U.S. has the iPhone, there's Samsung on the other side. And we also have our Venus and Vestel," said Erdogan, referring to rival South Korean and Turkish smartphones.

"They don't hesitate to use the economy as a weapon," he said, explaining his call to target U.S. manufacturers.

Such a boycott might prove personally difficult for Erdogan, who uses both an iPhone and an iPad, and fought off a 2016 coup attempt with a speech to the nation via FaceTime.

The Turkish president had already called on his countrymen and women to abandon the U.S. dollar, following Donald Trump's decision to double tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum last week.

And today, a group of merchants in Istanbul staged a demonstration, chanting "Damn America" and waving a banner proclaiming "we will win the economic war," before marching to a bank to exchange $100,000 US for Turkish lira. They did not heed onlookers' calls to burn the greenbacks.

The lira, which had plunged to historic lows against both the dollar and the euro since Friday, recovered slightly on the day. But with Turkey's currency down more than 45 per cent this year, there are still fears of a market contagion.

Reuters reports that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development — one of Turkey's biggest foreign lenders, with $8.31 billion US in outstanding loans, projects and equity stakes — has passed a stress test for a major writedown of its investments. Although the worst-case scenario the bank modelled — a 40 per cent drop in the lira's value — has already been surpassed.

Erdogan continues to reject calls to raise Turkey's interest rates, which are already at 17 per cent, even higher in an effort to prop up the currency.

But there is little sign that a political solution is on the horizon.

Trump, who is primarily upset that Erdogan's government continues to prosecute an American evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson, for his alleged involvement in the 2016 coup, isn't budging from his demand for the 50-year-old's immediate release.

A meeting in Washington on Monday between White House national security advisor John Bolton and Turkish ambassador Serdar Kilic failed to produce a breakthrough.

Trump remains angry that a deal he believed he had struck with Erdogan for Brunson's release didn't go off as planned.

And since Friday, the global markets have been paying the price.

Our not-so-dumb ancestors

Neanderthals are having a renaissance.

A spate of new research suggests that the ancient hominids, long dismissed as man's less-intelligent competitor — 19th-century biologists originally suggested naming them Homo stupidus — was in fact far more sophisticated and accomplished than believed.

This week, a Russian scientist proclaimed that a small piece of rock crystal, found in a Siberian cave, was purely decorative, indicating that Homo neanderthalis had a sense of style.

"Evidently, it was brought from outside. It bears no signs of usage but it was broken off some larger piece deliberately," Ksenia Kolobova, a professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the Tass news agency about the find at Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai Mountains, a site that was inhabited 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. "Neanderthals brought a very beautiful crystal but never used it in any way. So, we can speak about increased cognitive abilities: a beautiful object caught their eyes and they brought it home."

The news follows a study published in early May in the journal PLOS One, where an international team of experts found that marked-up flint flakes found in a Crimean cave in 1924 near the bones of a Neanderthal child were purposefully engraved by skilled craftsmen some 35,000 years ago. There had long been debate about whether the scratches were simply accidental, but new microscopic analysis and 3D modelling prove that they were the work of a steady, practised hand. And indeed, such practices may have been widespread, as similar stones have been found at 27 sites scattered across the Middle East and Europe.

All of which pales a bit against the findings, announced last February, that several well-known cave paintings in Spain are in fact much older than previously believed — dating back 20,000 years before the arrival of Homo sapiens in Western Europe — and must therefore have been the artwork of Neanderthals.

There are also new indications of technological sophistication among the prototypical cavemen.

A paper published in the journal Nature last month revealed evidence that Neanderthals living in what is now France regularly used flint and hard stones to spark fires 50,000 years ago, proving not just a quest for but a mastery of fire.

Another group of scientists have reconstructed the hunting techniques used by Neanderthals 120,000 years, namely close-quarters stalking of deer that were then brought down with wooden spears, which they say indicates careful planning, concealment and collaboration — all indicative of a higher intelligence than has been credited.

As it turns out, the crucial difference between Homo sapiens thriving and Neanderthals dying out may have been adaptability rather than smarts. Humans prospered because they could hack both extreme heat and cold, says a new study, allowing their population to spread widely and put down roots far more easily than our ancient rivals.

Which is nicer than the new findings about Homo erectus, another extinct species of human.

They died out because they were lazy, says an Australian study, pursuing "least-effort strategies" like one generic tool for all tasks.

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A few words on …

An unelected snake in Ottawa.

Quote of the moment

"You know, [I was] just trying to get that last bit of cell service in, so I'm not fully paying attention to what the pilot is saying about our flight, like where we're going."

- Winnipeg resident Christopher Paetkau explains the chain of events — including some last-minute text messages — that led him to board a plane to Iqaluit instead of Inuvik on Sunday, flying almost 3,000 km in the wrong direction.

What The National is reading​

• At least 26 dead in highway bridge collapse in northern Italy (CBC)
• Westminster car crash treated as terror attack (BBC)
• Sonar finds missing Saskatchewan plane on lake bottom after 59 years (CBC)
• Cars across Sweden burned in coordinated arson attack (Deutsche Welle)
• Vaping may not be as safe as previously thought, says study (Irish Times)
• Thailand tackles its bad boy Buddhist monks (Asia Times)
• Heat wave has Germany running out of beer bottles (NPR)
• A horse was neglected by its owner. Now the horse is suing (Washington Post)

Today in history

Aug 14, 2003: The great North America blackout

It was just after 4 p.m. ET when the electrical grid serving most of northeastern North America suddenly went dead. There was chaos from Chicago to New York City, and virtually all of Ontario was without power, too. A subsequent investigation would determine that some overgrown trees knocked a powerline out in Ohio and started a chain reaction that took some 100 generating stations offline. On the plus side, the star-gazing was never better.

The great blackout of 2003

21 years ago

Duration 8:51

The CBC's Peter Mansbridge is there when more than 50 million people go without electricity as a massive power outage reduces Ontario and the eastern U.S. to a crawl. Aired on The National Aug. 14, 2003.

That's all for today.

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