TROUBLED WATERS: A massive floating crane capable of lifting 1,000 tons arrived yesterday at the scene of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse at the mouth of Baltimore harbor. Despite its lifting capacity, the crane is not able to lift the bridge wreckage as it is. Engineers will have to figure out how to cut the girders into pieces so they can be safely pulled away. 

  The heavy lift crane, the Chesapeake 1000, will be only part of a flotilla of work vessels required to clear away the collapsed bridge. Maryland Governor Wes Moore said the Chesapeake will be joined by 10 other cranes, 10 tugs, nine barges, eight salvage vessels, and five Coast Guard boats.

  Moore declined to offer a timeline for the job. “It is not going to be days or weeks or months,” he said. “This is going to take time.”

ORANGE ALERT: Lawyers for Donald Trump appealed the ruling by the judge in the Georgia election interference case that allowed prosecutor Fani Willis to stay on the case. They’ve been trying to have her removed as a matter of conflict of interest because she had an affair with Nathan Wade, the lawyer she hired to run the trial.

  “The trial court was bound by existing case law to not only require Wade’s disqualification (which occurred) but also to require the disqualification of DA Willis and her entire office,” the filing says. The lawyers argue in their brief that because Wade was disqualified, Willis should be also because her “conflict creates a stain on the judicial process, impairs Defendants’ right to a fair proceeding, and requires her disqualification here.”

  In Trump’s increasingly caustic attacks on President Joe Biden, yesterday he posted video featuring an image of the President hogtied riding on the back of a pickup truck. The video shows two moving trucks decorated with Trump flags and decals with the second vehicle carrying the image of Biden.

  Asked about it, a spokesman for Trump told The NY Times that, “Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”

THE WAR ROOM: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky told The Washington Post that his forces might have to start retreating from Russian invaders if more US military aide does not arrive soon. “If there is no US support, it means that we have no air defense, no Patriot missiles, no jammers for electronic warfare, no 155-milimeter artillery rounds,” he said. “It means we will go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps.”

  “If you need 8,000 rounds a day to defend the front line, but you only have, for example, 2,000 rounds, you have to do less,” Zelensky explained to reporter David Ignatius. “How? Of course, to go back. Make the front line shorter. If it breaks, the Russians could go to the big cities.”

  Zelensky suggested that he might have to begin major retaliatory attacks against Russia’s energy grid. He said, “If there is no air defense to protect our energy system, and Russians attack it, my question is: Why can’t we answer them? Their society has to learn to live without petrol, without diesel, without electricity … It’s fair.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Actor Louis Gossett Jr., who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a drill instructor in the 1982 “An Officer and a Gentleman,” died in Santa Monica, California yesterday at 87.He also won an Emmy for the landmark 1977 television series “Roots.”

  At the time, Gossett was only the third Black actor to win an Academy Award. 

THE SPIN RACK: It’s been one year that Russia has been holding Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, accusing him of espionage. The paper marked the anniversary yesterday with a mostly-blank front page under the headline, “His Story Should Have Been Here.” — A fertilizer spill in Iowa this month killed close to 800,000 fish along 60 miles of rivers in two states, in one of the region’s most ecologically damaging chemical spills in years. The river banks are littered with dead fish. — Investigators have used what they call advanced forensic technology to identify one of the unknown sailors killed aboard the battleship USS California during the Japanese attack on pearl Harbor. He’s been identified as 19-year-old David Walker, a mess attendant from Norfolk, Virginia. — Applications to Harvard dropped this season in what appears to have been a reaction to the University’s tepid response to the October 7^thHamas attack on Israel, subsequent turmoil on campus, and the resignation of the school’s president. Applications were down about five percent.

BELOW THE FOLD: The California legislature has formed a committee to create happiness in the celebrity state. Suggestions are flowing in for things the legislature is never going to do. 

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