Architect Renzo Piano has offered a new bridge design for his beloved hometown of Genoa to replace the one that collapsed last month, killing 43 people, saying it must be built to last 1,000 years and be “simple, solid … but not banal.”

Piano joined city and regional officials on Friday to present the plans for the new bridge, which officials hope to have operational by November 2019. Piano said it would likely be built in steel and recall the shape of a ship in a nod to Genoa’s maritime tradition.

“A bridge that falls is terrible, because a bridge is a symbol,” Piano told a press conference in Genoa. “Bridges shouldn’t fall. They can’t fall. They’re a symbol that unifies, that brings things together.”

Prosecutors this week announced 20 people were under investigation for the disaster, which also forced some 600 people from their homes underneath the bridge, and that the list could grow.

Italian news reports have documented evidence, including technical studies that show officials were well aware of the bridge’s fragility and had scheduled maintenance work, but took no measures to reduce or divert traffic in the meantime.

Among those under investigation are officials from the private company that controls the bridge, Autostrade per l’Italia; including its chief executive, Giovanni Castellucci, who was on hand Friday alongside Piano to present the new bridge plans.

Castellucci has said the company takes responsibility for the bridge’s collapse, but is not guilty.

Liguria regional president Giovanni Toti said he hoped to persuade the government to skip the lengthy public bidding process that would normally accompany such a huge public works project, saying Genoa cannot wait.

He said crews must work quickly but securely to remove the remains of the reinforced concrete Morandi bridge and give Genoa a new bridge that memorializes the pain of the disaster, unifies the now-divided city and “looks to a great future.”

Demolition and rebuilding plans, however, are very much on hold since the disaster site is still off-limits and an active crime scene.

Piano, who is so revered in Italy that he was named a senator-for-life by the Italian president, has said he was donating his design to his hometown. But his offer has sparked a backlash, with some professional groups saying his “offer” was robbing other architects of the chance to bid for the project.

Consumer lobby Codacons said Friday that Piano’s gift was fine, but urged the government to follow the regular norms for competitive bidding for the project.

Autostrade’s board has already approved an initial 500 million euros ($576 million) in funding to help victims and finance the new bridge.
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U.S. and European Union officials are considering new ways to penalize Russia after concluding economic sanctions have not influenced Moscow’s behavior. The sanctions were imposed after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula in 2014 and were extended after a Russian-made nerve agent killed one person and sickened three more in Britain. Observers say Russia’s economy has suffered because of sanctions, but that has not deterred Russian President Vladimir Putin. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.]]
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China accused Britain of “provocation” after a Royal Navy warship sailed near islands claimed by Beijing in the disputed South China Sea. 

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying said Britain had “violated international and Chinese laws” when the HMS Albion sailed by the Paracel Islands on Aug. 31. 

“The Chinese Navy legally verified the ship and warned it to leave,” Hua told a news briefing Thursday. 

Vietnam and Taiwan also claim the islands, also known as Xisha in Chinese and Hoang Sa in Vietnamese.

Reuters news agency, which first reported the story Thursday, said Albion’s maneuver was an assertion of freedom of navigation. The U.S. Navy has also sent ships and planes to the disputed area to conduct Freedom of Navigation Operations. 

Britain and France announced in June that they would send ships to the region for similar exercises.

China claims a large swathe of the South China Sea, extending from its southern coast almost to Malaysia, a much larger area than the internationally recognized territorial limit of 22 nautical kilometers (12 nautical miles).

China’s claim is contested by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. 
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U.S. lawmakers and former diplomats on Thursday urged tougher sanctions against Russia but stressed the need to craft measures that will get the Kremlin’s attention without harming the United States or its European allies.

“There is no question [Russian President Vladimir] Putin must pay for his actions, and the United States has the ability to impose real costs against Moscow,” the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Republican Mike Crapo of Idaho, said at a hearing.

“We seek real and immediate changes in Russian behavior,” said the committee’s top Democrat, Sherrod Brown of Ohio. “We’re not yet seeing it.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul urged lawmakers to put more pressure on Russia during Thursday’s hearing.

“For crimes, there must be punishment. I urge you to do more.”

The United States has imposed a series of punitive measures against Russia in recent years over its alleged human rights violations, Moscow’s involvement in Ukraine and Syria, its meddling in U.S. elections, and Russia helping North Korea evade international sanctions.

“Whatever economic effects these sanctions have had over the last year, it has escaped no one’s attention that Russia is still in Crimea, and the Kremlin still exercises violently destabilizing activities in Ukraine and Syria,” Crapo said.

Experts told the committee that existing sanctions have inflicted pain but have not crippled Russia.

“Russia may not be thriving, but it is surviving,” said Rachel Ziemba, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Attempts to impose significant economic shock may require more increasingly blunt measures.”

Heather Conley, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Eurasian affairs, agreed.

“Russia is economically stable. Our economic sanctions have little effect on either the regime’s economy or its behavior,” she said. “This is not a regime that is tiring. It is a regime that is ready for the long haul.”

But McFaul argued sanctions have not failed entirely.

“Putin is annoyed by these sanctions,” the former ambassador said. “Putin is trying to overturn them and has been courting President [Donald] Trump precisely to do that. If they didn’t matter, why would he be putting so much energy into it?”

Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked for specific suggestions for further sanctions that would effectively punish Moscow but not produce negative unintended consequences.

“Getting this right matters, and anything we do to punish Russia that also punishes Europe actually accrues to Russia’s benefit,” Corker said.

“We should go after Putin’s cronies,” former State Department sanctions coordinator Daniel Fried said. “The Russians [oligarchs] park their money in Miami, New York and London. We shouldn’t let them do it. We should expose this.”

Fried discouraged broad sanctions against Russia’s energy sector, arguing they could drive up global energy prices and, paradoxically, improve Russia’s finances.

A bipartisan Senate proposal would impose an array of sanctions on Russian business interests if Moscow is found to have meddled in upcoming U.S. elections, a concept that was endorsed at the hearing.

“The U.S. Congress and President Trump must sign into law sanctions that would trigger automatically in response to future belligerent behavior,” McFaul said. But he added, “Future sanctions should primarily be targeted at the Russian government and its proxies, not the people of Russia or the private sector.”

Brown called on Congress and the president to send a “more powerful and direct message” to Putin and those within his circles.

“If you continue cyberattacks against us, you and your government will pay a heavy economic, diplomatic, political price.”
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Russia has again denied involvement in the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter, and said Britain’s accusation that Moscow played a role was unacceptable.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke to reporters Thursday, saying, “Neither Russia’s top leadership nor those in the ranks below, nor any official representatives have anything to do with the events in Salisbury.”

Britain charged two alleged Russian agents in absentia Wednesday with the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, a southern English city. British Prime Minister Theresa May has accused the Kremlin of plotting the March 4 attack.

Peskov also said Russia “has no reasons” to investigate the suspected agents who were charged because Britain has not asked for legal assistance.

Separately, Canada, France, Germany, Britain and the U.S. issued a joint statement applauding the charges brought against the two suspects. They also expressed faith in the findings of British investigators.

“We have full confidence in the British assessment that the two suspects were officers from the Russian military intelligence service, also known as the GRU, and that this operation was almost certainly approved at a senior government level.”

In New York, the British updated the U.N. Security Council on the latest developments.

Ambassador Karen Pierce said British police carried out a “painstaking and methodical” investigation involving more than 250 detectives who reviewed as part of their work over 11,000 hours of closed-circuit television footage and took 1,400 statements.

“This is evidence has been sufficient for our independent prosecuting authorities to bring criminal charges in relation to the Salisbury attack and issue European Union arrest warrants,” Pierce said.

The two alleged Russian agents are no longer in Britain, and Pierce said they would take every step to extradite them should they travel outside of Russia.

Russian envoy Vassily Nebenzia dismissed British accusations as an “unfounded and mendacious cocktail of facts” and accused London of unleashing  “a disgusting anti-Russian hysteria”.

He reiterated that Russia has never developed, produced or stockpiled the nerve agent Novichok, which was used in the Salisbury attack.
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