Syrian opposition calls on Hezbollah to stay out

BEIRUT (AP) — The Syrian opposition called on Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters from the country, as activists said regime troops supported by gunmen linked to the Lebanese Shiite militant group battled rebels Sunday for control of a string of villages near the Lebanon-Syria border.

Outside the capital, Damascus, activists said they had documented the names of 80 people killed in a government assault on the area over the past five days.

The Syrian National Coalition — the main Western-backed opposition group — warned that Hezbollah involvement in Syria's civil war could lead to greater risks in the area, and urged the Lebanese government to "adopt the necessary measures to stop the aggression of Hezbollah" and to control the border to "protect civilians in the area."

The statement, posted on the Coalition's Facebook page, coincided with a surge in fighting around the contested town of Qusair in Syria's Homs province near the frontier with Lebanon.

Over the past two weeks, the Syrian military, supported by a Hezbollah-backed militia, has pushed to regain control of the border area. The region is strategic because it links Damascus with the Mediterranean coastal enclave that is the heartland of President Bashar Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

The fighting also points to the sectarian nature of the Syrian conflict, which pits a government dominated by the president's Alawite minority against a primarily Sunni Muslim rebellion, and underscores widely held fears that the civil war could drag in neighboring states.

The pro-regime gunmen are members of the Popular Committees, which were set up last year in Syria with Hezbollah's backing to protect Syrian villages inhabited by Lebanese Shiites, although rebels accuse the fighters of attacking opposition villages in the area and fighting alongside government forces.

While Hezbollah confirms backing the Popular Committees, it denies taking part in Syria's civil war.

The fighting along the border region has flared in recent weeks, and on Saturday government forces captured the villages of Radwaniyeh and Tel al-Nabi Mando. On Sunday, regime forces shelled the villages of Abu Houri, Saqarigh, Nahriyeh and Ein al-Tanour in the Qusair region, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights activist group. It said at least four rebels were killed in the fighting.

Syrian state television said the army was trying to "uproot all the terrorists from the area." The government, which denies it is facing a popular uprising, describes the revolt as a foreign-backed plot and calls those trying to topple it "terrorists."

Lebanon's state-run news agency reported two shells fired from Syria landed Sunday in the border town of Hermel, causing material damage but no casualties. A day earlier, two mortar rounds landed in the town for the first time, marking an escalation in violence along the already tense frontier.

Inside Syria, the Observatory said it had documented the names of 80 people, including three children and six women, who were killed in the past five days in the areas of Jdaidet Artouz and Jdaidet al-Fadel west of Damascus.

One amateur video posted online showed seven bodies, some shot in the face, placed in black body bags on the ground. The videos appeared genuine and corresponded to other Associated Press reporting of the events depicted.

The U.S. has long called for Assad to leave power, but for months did not play an active role in backing the rebellion. Recently, however, Washington has grown more assertive, helping cobble together the Syrian National Coalition late last year in the hopes that it could unite the deeply divided opposition and provide a conduit for aid to rebels on the ground.

At a conference on Saturday in Istanbul that brought together the opposition leadership and its chief international supporters, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the Obama administration would double its non-lethal assistance to the Syrian opposition with an additional $123 million in supplies. That could include for the first time armored vehicles, body armor, night vision goggles and other defensive military supplies, officials said.

The additional aid brings total non-lethal U.S. assistance to the opposition to $250 million since the fighting began more than two years ago. Washington has refused so far to provide weapons to Syria's rebels out of fears they could fall in the hands of extremists.

The U.S. pledge was the only tangible, public offer of new international support at the meeting of the foreign ministers of the 11 main countries supporting the opposition and fell well short of what the opposition has been appealing for: weapons and direct military intervention to stop the violence that has killed more than 70,000 people.

"I can't tell you how quickly it will change things on the ground," Kerry said Sunday. "I can promise you that as soon as I return to Washington, I am going to press as hard as I can" to get it to the opposition within a matter of weeks. "This has to happen quickly, it has to have an impact," he said.

The Syrian National Coalition is seeking drone strikes on sites from which the regime has fired missiles, the imposition of no-fly zones and protected humanitarian corridors to ensure the safety of civilians.

On Sunday, Coalition president Mouaz al-Khatib submitted his resignation, according to a statement on the organization's Facebook page. The Coalition said it would take up the matter at its next meeting, without providing a date.

Al-Khatib, a respected Muslim preacher seen as a uniting figure and moderate, tried to quit his post in March, citing frustration over what he called a lack of international support and constraints imposed on the body itself. The Coalition rejected his resignation then, and he agreed to stay on until his six-month terms ends in May.

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Egypt justice minister submits resignation

The residents of West, Texas are recovering from a horrific industrial accident that took the lives of at least 14 people, many of whom were volunteer firefighters, and wounded hundreds of others, some severely. Most tragically of all, the blast, heard from up to 40 miles away, could have been prevented entirely had proper safety precautions been in place at the plant. The fact that they weren’t, and government agencies failed to act, is a simultaneous indictment of valuing money over people and the critical need for reform at agencies charged with the safety of workers and the environment.

This timeline of inspections, violations and fines at the West Fertilizer Company will shock you:

1985: Last Occupational Health and Safety (OSHA) inspection.

OSHA, the government agency charged with looking out for worker health, last visited the plant almost 30 years ago. One serious and two additional violations, for which the company was fined a whopping $30, were found during the site visit. Why the long delay? The United States has over seven million workplaces, and OSHA’s inspectors, of which there are only 2,000 to cover the whole country, can’t keep up due to a lack of training and funding.

The sequester has only made this worse, by limiting accessibility of critically-needed funds for hiring and training inspectors, holding more random inspections and keeping workplaces safe. Consequently, OSHA tends to inspect only when there’s been a complaint, which means that a worker has to be brave enough to file one. Even with anonymous whistleblower laws to protect them, workers are well aware of the risks of reprisal.

2006: Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) site visit and fines.

After receiving complaints about air quality at the site, government representatives noted that the company lacked permits for its two 12,000 gallon anhydrous ammonia (a flammable and toxic substance) tanks as well as for loading and storing dry components of fertilizer. A notice was issued to ask the company to get into compliance with the permits, which it did.

The EPA also expressed concerns about the West Fertilizer Company’s Risk-Management Program (RMP), required for such facilities. These concerns included worries that the plan was outdated, and that it had no documentation regarding what it intended to do in order to address safety concerns. A new plan was filed five years later to get in compliance. Amazingly, the plant claimed that it didn’t have any explosive or flammable materials on site, and didn’t list fire among potential safety risks in the workplace.

2007: Final TCEQ site visit.

The final followup visit regarding the earlier air quality complaint was also the last time workplace safety officials came to the site. Due to the plant’s comparatively small size, it was rarely inspected, with regulators focusing on getting inspectors to larger facilities and those that received complaints. It’s possible that TCEQ inspectors might not have visited the site at all in 2006 and 2007 if a member of the public hadn’t complained about an unpleasant odor.

2012: U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration fine.

Last year, the company was fined $10,000 for failing to have an adequate security plan in place for the transportation of hazardous materials. As is common with government fines, the amount was negotiated down by almost half: it paid just $5,250 after agreeing that it would embark on a course of corrective action to address the problem.

2013: Office of the State Chemist site visit.

Texas’ Office of the State Chemist focuses on materials blending, labeling and purity. Inspectors found no problems during a site visit in April, but they also weren’t looking for workplace safety violations, of which they undoubtedly would have found many. The fact that regulators visited the site 10 days before the explosion and didn’t notice anything that might draw concern highlights how harried many officials are as they work quickly to get from site to site, focusing on the obvious facets of their jobs without taking a step back. Chemists inspecting the plant should have been wondering about the conditions there.

Think this is bad? Ramit Plushnick-Masti and Jack Gillum, reporting for the AP, note that: “There were no sprinklers. No firewalls. No water deluge systems.” Without such basic fire suppression systems, once the plant started to go, it was almost unstoppable, and the fire spread quickly through the facility without any walls to keep it in check. This made the accident even more devastating than it could have been, and endangered the lives of first responders who arrived on scene to help victims.

An investigation is ongoing into the circumstances of this terrible event, but the outcome of that investigation is already obvious: overworked government agencies failed to catch a serious safety problem, and negligence on the part of a factory owner resulted in the development of hazardous conditions.

The question is: will he be held accountable, and will Congress take a critically-needed lesson here and increase funding to government agencies charged with our safety?

Related articles:

5 Reasons Panic Is Not the Right Response

Safety Inspections Save Lives, Don’t Hurt Business

Honor Fallen Workers, Fight for Job Safety on Workers Memorial Day

Read more: fertilizer plant explosion, negligence, occupational health and safety, west texas, worker safety, workplace accidents

Photo credit: Channel Four: The Bay Area's News Station

Report: Russian Officials Warned FBI Alleged Boston Marathon Bomber Was a "Radical"

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev | Photo Credits: FBI.gov; Glenn DePriest/Getty Images

Russian officials warned the FBI in 2011 that alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have subscribed to the teachings of "radical Islam," according to the Boston Globe. Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with police early Friday morning, is thought to have been the mastermind of the attack thatkilled three people and wounded about 170. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, who was taken into custody Friday night, remains in serious condition and unable to communicate at a Boston hospital.

While he was living in the U.S., Tamerlan traveled to Russia several times and stayed there for several months in 2012. "Suspicious activities" on his part caught the attention of Russian authorities who were monitoring militant Islamic groups in the Caucasus region in early 2011, the Globe reports. After receiving the warnings, the FBI interviewed the Tsarnaev family but found no ties to terrorism.

VIDEO: Stephen Colbert dedicates monologue to Boston Marathon bombings

"The FBI had this guy on the radar and somehow he fell off," a senior congressional aide with ties to the Boston Marathon investigation told the Globe.

Meanwhile, sources also tell the Globe that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev went about his routine activities at UMass-Dartmouth in the wake of the bombings, attending classes, going to the gym and sleeping in his dorm room as late as Wednesday night, as police were working to identify who staged the attack.

Martin Richard, 8-year-old Boston bombing victim, called for peace

"He was just relaxed," according to one of Dzhokhar's classmates, who saw him at a party Wednesday night.

Boston Marathon bombing: the blame game begins

Just days after the Boston Marathon bombing, the political maneuvering and blaming have begun. Some lawmakers fault the FBI for not following up on intelligence about one of the alleged bombers. Others want to prosecute the surviving suspect as an enemy combatant.