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When Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross held up a can of Campbell’s soup in a CNBC interview to make the case that the Trump administration’s steel and aluminum tariffs were “no big deal,” the canning industry begged to disagree — and they were hardly alone.

President Donald Trump’s strong-armed trade policies have set off an intense scramble among industry groups, companies and foreign countries seeking exemptions from tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on imported aluminum. The push comes ahead of a round of new penalties expected to be slapped on China by week’s end.

The Can Manufacturers Institute, which represents 22,000 workers at manufacturers across the nation, estimates the steel and aluminum tariffs will harm their industry and consumers alike. The institute says there are 119 billion cans made in the U.S., meaning a 1 cent tariff would lead to a $1.1 billion tax on consumers and businesses.

“Secretary Ross has made cans a poster child to dispel concerns about the costs of tariffs,” said Robert Budway, the institute’s president. He said his organization was concerned Ross “is already predisposed to deny our petitions.”

Trump’s one-two punch on trade has set in motion a deluge of requests to the Commerce Department for exclusions for certain steel and aluminum products. Foreign countries, meanwhile, complain the U.S. trade representative’s office has not provided specific guidance on gaining exemptions before the steel and aluminum tariffs are implemented on Friday.

Countries in the dark

“Typically, the countries are determined before tariffs are announced,” said Josh Zive, senior principal at the law firm Bracewell LLP. This time, countries don’t know whether they will end up being targeted or exempted — “that’s weird and no one knows what to make of it.”

The Trump administration, which has said steel and aluminum imports threaten U.S. national security, has already given Mexico and Canada a reprieve — provided they agree to a revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The European Union, South Korea, Australia and Brazil are among the groups and countries seeking the exemptions.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said tariffs are “sometimes necessary tools” to protect national security or fight unfair trade practices. But he said the administration’s approach is producing “chaos, uncertainty and an alienation of our closest allies.”

Emily Davis, a spokeswoman for U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, said the U.S “is engaged in discussions with several countries to determine if means other than tariffs can be arranged to address our national security concerns.”

Companies that buy imported steel and aluminum can request tariff relief from the Commerce Department, especially if they rely on types of imported steel and aluminum that aren’t available from domestic U.S. producers.

Expect a deluge: Steel and aluminum producers have 30 days to make their exemption requests. Commerce expects 4,500 requests for relief and 1,500 objections — and it is supposed to reach decisions in 90 days.

Commerce has said it intends to reach decisions on a company-by-company basis, not by making across-the-board exemptions for individual steel and aluminum products. That decision has created anxieties that certain companies could get tariff relief while others would be forced to pay tariffs on the same product — perhaps because in the time between the two requests domestic U.S. production has ramped up to fill shortages.

“The big thing is, it’s arbitrary,” said Mary Lovely of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The government is becoming the matchmaker between the purchaser and the supplier.”

“It’s a real question to me whether they understand the magnitude of the requests they are going to get,” Zive said of Commerce. “How they’re going to get through them in 90 days is difficult to understand.”

Industry officials said other aspects of the exemption process will burden companies. Manufacturers are unclear whether companies will qualify for refunds if they end up getting exemptions after they’ve begun paying the tariffs. And since Trump set no timeline for ending the tariffs, the companies will need to reapply for the exemptions annually.

Stocking up

Companies, meanwhile, have been trying to beat the tariffs by stocking up on imports. Steel imports rose 15 percent last year and another 17 percent in January.

The steel and aluminum tariffs may only be the opening salvo.

Administration officials said Trump is expected to announce $60 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports by Friday on a wide array of consumer goods, from apparel to electronics, and even on imported parts for products made in the U.S.

Ross, appearing before a House budget panel on Tuesday, faced questions about the trade moves, with lawmakers warning the tariffs could lead to retaliation from foreign countries and wreak economic havoc for consumers.

“I worry that now we’re engaged in a trade war which is further going to alienate us from our adversaries,” said Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican who chairs the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

Representative Derek Kilmer, a Washington state Democrat, noted that the decision to exclude aluminum and steel producers on a company-by-company basis — rather than by individual products — could create the possibility that some companies will gain a huge advantage over their competitors if they win exemptions.

Ross vowed that “the process will be open and transparent” and that Commerce was working to “minimize the amount of inconvenience that any of the affected parties will suffer as a result of the process. We’re gearing up to be fast, to be fair and to be practical.”
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Americans may become accustomed to the political turmoil swirling around President Donald Trump, but it remains an open question whether that turmoil will ultimately help or hurt Trump and his Republican allies, especially in an election year. 

Last week, it was Trump’s firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and an apparent Democratic victory in a special congressional election in Pennsylvania — a sign of a possible wave in the November midterm elections.

This week, it was a series of presidential tweets criticizing the Russia probe, followed by a controversial Trump statement of congratulations for newly re-elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump also added former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova to his legal team. DiGenova has alleged that elements of the FBI and the Department of Justice have been out to frame Trump in connection with the Russia probe.

​Mueller’s fate

Trump ignored shouted questions Tuesday from reporters at the White House who asked whether he wanted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia probe.

Earlier, House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, told reporters at the Capitol that he had received “assurances” that firing Mueller was “not even under consideration.”

The latest back and forth over the Mueller investigation came after several days of presidential tweets complaining about the probe, including one blasting it as a “total WITCH HUNT with massive conflicts of interest.”

The tweets sparked new fears that Trump might try to have Mueller fired. Some Republicans warned that an attempt to fire Mueller could put Trump’s presidency in jeopardy. 

“I think anything directed at firing Mr. Mueller blows up the whole town, and that becomes the end of governing and the presidency as we know it,” cautioned Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Cabinet shuffle

The renewed focus on the Russia probe came in the wake of last week’s firing of Tillerson. That, in turn, raised the prospect of more administration changes. 

“There will always be change, and I think you want to see change. And I want to also see different ideas,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

Trump’s allies see Cabinet and staff changes as a sign that he is feeling more in control at the White House. 

“You know, what I think the president is realizing is that after 15 months in office, he is more comfortable,” Republican Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, told ABC’s Good Morning America.

But Trump’s critics see the turnover as the latest indication of endless turmoil.

“Americans just don’t like chaos,” said Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress.

Gude acknowledged that Americans elected Trump to “shake things up.” But he said that so far, the drawbacks have outweighed the benefits. 

“Actually, just being a chaotic leader where people are leaving left, right and center, and there seems to be no driving theory behind who stays and who goes — that is the kind of thing that the American people will probably not like.”

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato also saw the recent moves as evidence of the president asserting his leadership. 

“It signifies to me that Donald Trump believes that he can run the whole shebang, and that he can do it from Twitter,” Sabato said via Skype, “whether it is declaring new policy, or arranging for the firing of a secretary of state, or any number of other things.”

Midterm momentum

Another warning sign on the political horizon for Trump and Republicans was last week’s apparent Democratic victory in a special congressional election in Pennsylvania, a district Trump won by 19 percent in 2016.

That has sparked hopes among Democratic leaders of a wave election in November that could strip Republicans of their congressional majorities.

“I feel pretty confident that we are going to win. We are going to win big. We are going to win a lot of seats. And that is going to be good for the American people,” said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California.

Many analysts see the midterms shaping up as a referendum on Trump.

“I expect that the midterm elections are going to be a bloodbath for Republicans,” said Jim Kessler of Third Way, a centrist Democrat group. “I really think it is going to be bad.”

Republicans fear that Trump’s historically low approval ratings, still hovering near 40 percent, will pull down GOP candidates in November and boost Democratic turnout.

“Well, the president is now at about a 41 percent job approval rating.That is not very good,” said John Fortier of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

But Fortier argued there is still time for Trump to improve his political standing before November. 

“If he were able to up that [his approval], with the economy being a little better, maybe it will get better as we get closer to the summer,” he said. “Those would be things that would help the president’s party.”

The political stakes in this year’s midterm elections are huge. If Democrats win back a majority in either the House or the Senate, or both, they would have the means to block much of Trump’s legislative agenda in the two years leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
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U.S. President Donald Trump appears increasingly willing to defy some of his top generals, as his administration grapples with how best to deal with Iran.

Trump is facing a May deadline to recertify the Iran nuclear deal, and signaled again Tuesday that he is not afraid to pull the U.S. out of the agreement unless other signatories are willing to make major changes.

“A lot of bad things are happening in Iran,” the president said during a visit to the White House by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“The deal is coming up in one month, and you will see what happens,” he added.

Trump has long been critical of the 2015 Iran deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which aimed to contain Tehran’s nuclear program and block the country’s pathway to building nuclear warheads.

In January, Trump said he was waiving nuclear sanctions against Iran for the “last time,” demanding U.S. lawmakers and Washington’s European allies “fix the deal’s disastrous flaws.”

But since then, top U.S. military officials have pushed back, repeatedly describing the deal as mostly beneficial, even as they continue to voice deep concerns about Tehran’s aggressive behavior across the Middle East.

“As I sit here today, Iran is in compliance with JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action],” the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, General John Hyten, told lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

“From a command that’s about nuclear [threats], that’s an important piece to me,” he said. “It allows me to understand the nuclear environment better.”

Hyten’s comments follow those made to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week by the commander of U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. operations in the Middle East.

“The JCPOA addresses one of the principle threats that we deal with from Iran so, if the JCPOA goes away, then we will have to have another way to deal with their nuclear weapons program,” said CENTCOM’s General Joseph Votel.

“Right now, I think it is in our interest,” Votel added. “There would be some concern [in the region], I think, about how we intended to address that particular threat if it was not being addressed through the JCPOA.”

Both Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, have argued that staying in the deal is in the best interest of the U.S.

But despite having expressed confidence in his military advisers and officials early in his presidency, Trump has slowly been pushing aside those who have argued in favor of keeping the deal, most recently firing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

“When you look at the Iran deal, I think it’s terrible. I guess he thinks it was OK,” Trump told reporters last week after announcing Tillerson’s removal. “I wanted to break it or do something, and he felt a little bit differently.”

‘Destabilizing influence’

The man tapped to replace Tillerson, current U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo, has gained a reputation for favoring a much tougher approach to Iran.

“The deal put us in a marginally better place, with respect to inspection, but the Iranians have on multiple occasions been capable of presenting a continued threat,” Pompeo said during an appearance in Washington last October.

“The notion that the entry into the JCPOA would curtail Iranian adventurism or their terror threat or their malignant behavior has now, what, two years on, proven to be fundamentally false,” he added.

Those concerns, both from the U.S. intelligence community and from defense officials, have only grown.

Top defense officials have criticized Iran for what they described as malign and destabilizing activities in places such as Iraq, Syria, Yemen and even Afghanistan.

“They [Iran] are not changing their behavior,” Mattis warned during a visit to the region last week. “They’re continuing to be a destabilizing influence.”

Other defense officials said such concerns cannot be discounted when contemplating U.S. policy toward Iran.

“We are taking a comprehensive look,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Dana White told reporters last Thursday.

“We remain in the agreement, but we want our partners to understand that Iran is the source of chaos and confusion in the region,” she said. “Everywhere you look, Iran is there.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump has agreed to an unprecedented face-to-face meeting with North Korea’s Leader Kim Jong Un to discuss the country’s nuclear program. But activists say that North Korea’s human rights violations should not take a back seat at the talks. VOA’s Korean service spoke with a North Korean defector who discusses her experiences growing up in North Korea. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has more.
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El Salvador, a Central American country, wrestles with one of the region’s biggest challenges: the rise of criminal gangs like MS-13. Gangs test the government’s policies on policing, detention and crime-prevention initiatives. Different camps debate whether to invest more in strong-hand punitive approaches, social interventions or a combination. Cristina Caicedo Smit has the second of three reports about MS-13.
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A senior U.S. official will head to Taiwan for what State Department officials say is to “reaffirm long-standing U.S. policy toward and support for Taiwan.”

Alex Wong, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, is scheduled to visit Taiwan March 20-22 after meetings in Singapore.

While in Taiwan, Wong will deliver remarks at the American Chamber of Commerce’s annual Hsieh Nien Fan dinner, an opportunity for the American business community to meet with Taiwanese officials to facilitate further interaction in the year ahead.

Wong will also hold discussions with Taiwanese officials on a wide range of matters, according to the State Department.

“It makes sense that the Trump administration is willing to strengthen ties with Taiwan. No one should be surprised,” Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at Center for International and Strategic Studies, told VOA on Monday. “China’s growing political, military, and economic pressure on Taiwan is a threat to Taiwan’s security and harmful to U.S. interests.”

Wong’s visit will come just days after U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act. The legislation encourages unrestricted two-way travel for officials from the United States and Taiwan. It is also seen as a move to facilitate direct official U.S. contacts with the self-ruled island, which were cut in 1979 when Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

The informal relations between the United States and Taiwan are governed by the Taiwan Relations Act that was passed by Congress in April of 1979.

As part of the deal, the United States imposed unwritten rules, including prohibiting higher-level American officials from meeting with their Taiwan counterparts, and preventing top Taiwan officials from coming to Washington, D.C.

According to the Taiwan Travel Act, relations between the United States and Taiwan “have suffered from a lack of communication due to the self-imposed restrictions that the United States maintains on high-level visits with Taiwan” since the enactment of the Taiwan Relations Act.

While U.S. and Taiwan officials have already been traveling back and forth to meet, the visits were usually kept low profile to avoid diplomatic repercussion.

China reacted angrily to the bill.

Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Saturday: “We urge the US side to correct its mistake, stop pursuing any official ties with Taiwan or improving its current relations with Taiwan in any substantive way.”

The Chinese Embassy issued a statement saying that certain clauses of the legislation “severely violate the one-China principle, the political foundation of the China-US relationship.”

The move is likely to weigh heavily on US-China ties, which are currently under strain after Trump announced new import tariffs on steel and aluminum.

China claims democratically-ruled Taiwan is part of its territory. China’s relationship with Taiwan took a turn for the worse since the 2016 inauguration of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who has refused to endorse Beijing’s view that the island belongs to it.
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A top White House lawyer says President Donald Trump is not considering firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, after the president accused him of political bias in a series of tweets Sunday.

“In response to media speculation and related questions being posed to the administration, the White House yet again confirms that the president is not considering or discussing the firing of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller,” White House Lawyer Ty Cobb said.

Trump assailed Mueller, accusing him of political bias in his investigation of Trump’s 2016 election campaign links to Russia and whether the president obstructed justice in trying to thwart the probe.

“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added … does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!” Trump said in one of a string of Twitter remarks over the weekend recalling his defeat of Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton and his negative view of the investigations in the year and a half since then.

Trump failed to note that at least at one point Mueller was a registered Republican voter and is generally viewed in Washington as an apolitical prosecutor, whose investigation of the Trump campaign is supported by Democrats and key Republicans who voiced their support on Sunday news shows for Mueller’s handling of the probe.

On Saturday, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd suggested that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel, “bring an end” to Mueller’s investigation, resulting in media speculation about Trump’s next move regarding the probe.

Trump also attacked two former ousted FBI officials, former director James Comey, fired by Trump last May, and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, dismissed at Trump’s urging late Friday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, 26 hours before McCabe was set to retire and collect his full pension. Trump contended that Comey’s and McCabe’s personal written recollections of their conversations he had with them are fabricated.

Trump said he “spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?” In another tweet, Trump referred to the one-time FBI chief as “Sanctimonious James Comey” and said he made McCabe “look like a choirboy.”

Sessions dismissed McCabe after concurring with an internal Justice Department investigation that McCabe “had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions,” a news leak McCabe said Comey knew about while they served together at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The president contended “The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary” and the Democratic National Committee, “and improperly used” by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!”

On Sunday, Senator Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a key Trump supporter, told CNN that Mueller “needs to be able to do his job without interference.” Graham said that if Trump were to attempt to fire Mueller it would be “the beginning of the end of his presidency.”

Congressman Trey Gowdy, another South Carolina Republican, told Fox News, “I think the president’s lawyer does a disservice when he says that and frames the investigation that way … Russia attacked our country, let special counsel Mueller figure that out.”

Gowdy was part of the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee that concluded a week ago that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, but said in the television interview, “You should want Special Counsel Mueller to take all the time and have all the independence he needs to do his job.”

Trump said, “As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded, there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. Drain The Swamp.”

McCabe, in a statement after his firing, called his ouster “retribution,” saying, “I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of [former FBI Director] James Comey.” U.S. news accounts said he had written contemporaneous accounts of his conversations with Trump.

His firing, barely a day ahead of his 50th birthday on Sunday, could cost McCabe thousands of dollars in retirement benefits.

 
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Just ahead of Kenya’s disputed 2017 election, video clips started spreading on social media of a slick-looking CNN broadcast asserting that President Uhuru Kenyatta had pulled far ahead in the polls. But the CNN broadcast was fake, splicing together real coverage from CNN Philippines with other footage with the network’s iconic red logo superimposed in the corner.

It happened with a BBC video, too, and with a photo purportedly of Kenyan security forces killing protesters that was actually from Tanzania, and with thousands of spurious blog posts and other false reports that flooded the popular messaging app WhatsApp, fueling further divisions and turmoil in an election that morphed into a major political crisis.

So the U.S. government is gearing up to fight fake news — not at home, where it’s the subject of heated debate following the 2016 presidential campaign, but in Kenya, where America has sought to nurture a vibrant but volatile African democracy.

“Information is, of course, power, and frankly, fake news is a real danger,” U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Robert Godec said in an interview, adding that it had eroded confidence in Kenya’s real news media. “It’s being weaponized. It’s undermining democracy in Kenya.”

Godec kicked off the awareness campaign this past week with an email to the 47,000 members of the State Department’s Young African Leaders Initiative asking them to pledge to prevent the spread of fake media by pausing to verify the source and validity before passing information along to others through social media. For a while this week, the hashtag (hash)StopReflectVerify was the No. 2 trending hashtag on Twitter in Kenya, where the U.S. Embassy pushed it to its 256,000 followers.

In addition to offering resources for discriminating between fact and fake, the campaign involves three-day training sessions for public affairs officials in Kenya’s counties, encouraging local governments to be more responsive and forthcoming so that journalists on deadline can fact-check information they hear. Though it’s starting in Kenya, the program is expected to expand, with an Africa-wide international fact-checking day and a global, virtual event on World Press Freedom Day in May anchored out of Nairobi.

The focus on fighting fake news in Kenya stands in contrast to what’s happening in the United States, where President Donald Trump uses the term to denigrate credible news outlets that publish critical coverage about him or his Republican administration. Trump has also continually downplayed the role that false information from illegitimate sources may have played in affecting the outcome of the election. Last month, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians accused of using a network of fake social media accounts and targeted political messages to stir up turmoil in the 2016 race.

The campaign also comes as the U.S. has been warning Kenya’s government about worrisome restrictions on the legitimate news media. The group Human Rights Watch has said Kenyan officials try to stop critical coverage by threatening, intimidating and harassing journalists. The United States was particularly concerned in February when Kenya shut down major broadcasters after opposition leader Raila Odinga held a mock inauguration on television.

In Kenya, the fake news problem has also raised fears about violence being stoked by false facts that often mushroom on social media before they can be stopped.

At election time, a fake but realistic-looking U.S. diplomatic cable circulated that appeared to show embassy officials predicting instability, celebratory violence, “severe unrest and a massive breakdown of law and order” if Odinga were to defeat Kenyatta in the election. The U.S. Embassy quickly tweeted its own version of the cable with the word “FAKE” slapped across it in bold red font.

Yet there are risks for the U.S. in appearing to tell people what to believe, say or not say in Kenya, a former British colony. So the embassy is taking pains to show it’s a locally driven operation, partnering with groups like AfricaCheck, a fact-checking website similar to the U.S. site Snopes.com.

“We’re not asking them to believe any particular thing,” Godec said. “We’re just saying, don’t take everything you see on your phone via WhatsApp as the truth because it may not be.”

 
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They had just finished up lunch, and set off to run a humdrum errand: a drive to the travel agency to pick up airline tickets for their annual visit to their beloved homeland Cuba.

Osvaldo Gonzalez and Alberto Arias, friends and business partners, happened to pass under a Miami bridge that Thursday afternoon, the road bustling with fellow drivers also out on the most ordinary and unthreatening of life’s tasks.

A teenager was driving her friend to the doctor’s office to pick up some medicine. A father of three was heading home from work. A woman on her way to a nail salon was stopped at a red light. Seconds – inches – would soon separate those who would live from those who wouldn’t.

Sweetwater police Detective Juan Llera was at his office a few blocks away, when he heard what he thought was a bomb exploding.

It was not a bomb; it was a bridge, a structure every American has passed under hundreds of times. But in an instant, this 950-ton span under construction at the Florida International University collapsed, and with no time to act or to flee, the cars that just so happened to be below it were pancaked under the rubble. Six people died.

“Imagine,” said Amauri Naranjo, who has known Gonzalez since before he left Cuba in the 1980s, “a longtime friendship that survives even with the sea between us, and it ends because of something like that.”

Gonzalez and Arias, who together owned a party rental and decoration business, were among the dead. Their bodies were found Saturday inside their white Chevy truck as rescuers for days painstakingly dug through the debris of the fallen pedestrian bridge at Florida International University. Hope for a miracle rescue faded as the names of the six dead became known, and those left living grappled with the senselessness, the suddenness of it.

Many others had been saved by mere seconds.

Dania Garlobo was driving to work at a nail salon when the green light changed to yellow and a man in a white Mercedes tried to make it through the light, but stomped on the brakes just as the bridge fell in front of him.

“He was almost caught underneath. I couldn’t believe it,” Garlobo said. She watched the bridge smash into the street below in what seemed like an instant.

“How is it that a strong bridge falls down like a piece of board?”

Llera had sped to the scene, arriving within minutes. In the mayhem, he found a man lying unconscious on the street and started performing CPR. He could barely feel a pulse, but someone with the medical staff from the university came by and said, “you are keeping him alive. Keep going.” And so he did, and the man was alive when they rushed him away.

Llera checked in at the hospital but could get no information. He thought the man had lived. He’d hoped they could shake hands one day.

But on Sunday morning, he studied a picture on the news of a young man in a crisp red shirt.

He has been identified by police as Navarro Brown, a 37-year-old employee with Structural Technologies VSL, listed among those killed. He had died at the hospital.

“I feel like the bad guy won this time,” the officer said as he processed the news Sunday afternoon.

The families of the dead and the injured asked for privacy as they try to make sense of their sudden, inexplicable loss.

“It’s a pretty magical thing to find your soul mate in this world,” Brandon Brownfield’s wife, Chelsea, wrote on Facebook on Sunday. “Like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle, our crazy curvy edges matched and we fit together like no one else could.”

The Brownfields had three young daughters, and the family moved to Florida several years ago for his job at Maxim Crane Works, according to a fundraising page a friend started for the family that had raised more than $50,000 in a few days. He was driving home from work when the bridge collapsed.

“I now have to find the words and the answers to tell my girls that their Daddy is not coming home,” his wife wrote on Facebook.

Investigators are still trying to figure out what caused the bridge to crumble. Cracking had been reported in the concrete span in the days before and crews were performing what’s called “post-tensioning force” on the bridge when it flattened onto the busy highway.

Inside one car there, one teenager was killed and one walked away with minor injuries – a fate decided by which seat they happened to be sitting in.

Richie Humble, a 19-year-old student, had not been feeling well earlier in the week. On Thursday, a friend, 18-year-old Alexa Duran, the nicest person he said he ever knew, gave him a ride to his doctor’s office to pick up some medication. They stopped at a red light, under the bridge.

“I heard a creak, a long creak,” Humble told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “I looked up, and in an instant, the bridge was collapsing on us completely. It was too quick to do anything about it.”

Once he realized he was alive, he also realized that he couldn’t get to his friend. As he called out for her, getting no response, a group of men outside the car started yelling at him to try crawling out of the car. They pried open the door to free him.

He sat on a curb as rescue workers checked out the cuts on his leg and slight facture in a vertebrae. He remembers asking, “What do I do?”

“Everyone has to pick up the pieces,” he said the rescuer responded. “Life doesn’t stop.”

Duran’s uncle Joe Smitha was preparing for a colonoscopy that Thursday afternoon when he heard a bridge had collapsed near her school. She was not answering her phone, but he said he was not worried. His kids sometimes didn’t answer their phones right away.

“I said, ‘What are the odds that out of the thousands of people in Miami that she would be one of six or eight people caught under the bridge at a red light?”’ Smitha said.

But then, after he awoke from anesthesia following the procedure, he learned she had been one of those six people caught under a bridge at a red light.

 
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