Hezbollah chief commits to victory in Syria

By BASSEM MROUE | Associated Press – 14 hrs ago

BEIRUT (AP) — The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah warned Saturday that the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime would give rise to extremists and plunge the Middle East into a "dark period," and vowed his Shiite militant group will not stand idly by while its chief ally in Damascus is under attack.

In a televised address, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said Hezbollah members are fighting in Syria against Islamic extremists who pose a danger to Lebanon, and pledged that his group will not allow Syrian militants to control areas that border Lebanon.

Nasrallah's comments marked the first time he has publically confirmed his men were fighting in Syria, and were his first remarks since Hezbollah fighters have become deeply involved in the battle for the strategic Syrian town of Qusair near the Lebanese frontier.

Hezbollah has come under harsh criticism at home and abroad for sending fighters to Syria to fight along Assad's forces. In his speech, Nasrallah sought to defend the group's deepening involvement, and frame its fight next door as part of a broader battle against Israel.

He also portrayed the fight in Syria as an "existential war" for anti-Israel groups including Hezbollah.

"Syria is the back of the resistance, and the resistance cannot stand, arms folded while its back is broken," Nasrallah told thousands of supporters from a secret location though a video link.

"If Syria falls into the hand of America, Israel and takfiris, the resistance (Hezbollah) will be besieged and Israel will enter Lebanon and impose its will," Nasrallah said. Takfiri Islamists refers to an ideology that urges Sunni Muslims to kill anyone they consider an infidel.

"If Syria falls in the hands of America, Israel and the takfiris, the people of our region will go into a dark period," he said in a speech to mark the anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. "If Syria falls, Palestine will be lost."

Syria, along with Iran, has been the main backer of Hezbollah and much of the group's arsenal consisting tens of thousands of rockets is believed to have come through or from Syria.

AP Exclusive: New cause for ex-radical Olson

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Sara Jane Olson, the Minnesota woman who served seven years in prison for her involvement in high-profile 1970s radicalism, is edging back into public life — this time voluntarily — as she and a friend petition the Obama administration to reduce disparities in prison sentences for crack and powder cocaine.

Olson returned to Minnesota after her 2009 parole from a California prison, and lives with her husband in the same St. Paul home where she was arrested in 1999. Once known as Kathleen Soliah, Olson spent 25 years as a fugitive after joining the short-lived Symbionese Liberation Army, the small group best known for the 1974 kidnapping of California heiress Patty Hearst.

Captured in 1999, Olson finally pleaded guilty to helping place pipe bombs under Los Angeles police cars and participating in a bank robbery near Sacramento in which a woman was killed. Deeply private since her release, Olson said she decided to talk to The Associated Press because of strong convictions about her new crusade, which she said is motivated in part by her own time in prison.

"I don't really like to talk about my personal experience in terms of my family and all that," Olson said in an interview on Friday. "But when I was there, at some point I did adjust to it and I said, 'I have to learn something from this.'"

Olson and her friend and next-door neighbor, Mary McLeod, filed the White House petition Thursday asking the president to exercise executive clemency for prisoners serving time under now-discarded sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine. In 2010, Congress cut those sentences to align more closely with those for powder cocaine, but that only applied to new sentences going forward. The women's petition says that left more than 5,000 prisoners still serving time longer than the new rules would require.

"There's just no good argument for that continuing to be the case, so we said let's see what we can do," said McLeod, a retired attorney who moved into the house next door while Olson was in prison. The petition was McLeod's idea, and one of Olson's adult daughters is helping.

The interview occurred in McLeod's living room; Olson, now 66, looks fit, with long white hair and a deeply lined face. She is quick with statistics and opinions about the cause.

"The war on drugs is a politically convenient peg on which to hang a lot of things, and that has been done by a lot of politicians," Olson said. She and McLeod, as many critics have done, said the differences in crack and powder cocaine sentences stem from stereotypes of crack as a drug for poor black people while powder cocaine is for rich white people.

In the petition, the women ask the White House to establish a panel to review individual cases of the prisoners in question, and then make recommendations to President Barack Obama about which of them deserve to be released. That would mimic the 1974 process by which President Gerald Ford commuted sentences of large numbers of Vietnam draft evaders.

Anyone can file a petition to the White House, but it requires 100,000 signatures in 30 days to trigger an actual White House review. And that's no guarantee of action, either. Olson and McLeod are trying to circulate it widely in activist circles, and have posted it on Change.org, an online petition platform. Two days after its posting, the petition — one of more than 100 on the White House site https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/ was nearing 100 signatures.

"It takes a certain amount of guts. You'd think after her experience with the criminal justice system, she'd run in the other direction," said Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor who followed Olson's case and is also acquainted with the sentencing disparity issue. "But notwithstanding the nature of her crimes, she was a very intelligent person and it strikes me she still has some of that cause burning in her."

Olson said she did volunteer work in women prisons even before her 1999 arrest. But once in prison, she said she experienced firsthand the toll of heavy drug sentences on prison populations. She said that's what brought most of her fellow inmates behind bars. "Most of them were addicts," she said.

"They had us eight women to a room. There were 80-year-old women, already going through dementia, sharing space with an 18-year-old, and you're supposed to all get along?" Olson said.

Before her arrest, Olson was well known among Twin Cities' liberal activists and as a sometime-actress in local theater. She declined to share many details about her life now, but did reveal she's a grandmother. She also wouldn't talk about her 1970s radicalism or her years as a fugitive. In a written apology before her sentencing, Olson described SLA members as "young and foolish." Among the group's victims was a mother of four killed in the Sacramento-area bank robbery.

"I just intend to focus on issues like this because I've been there and I feel kind of on a mission to do what I can to help people get out and recover their lives, for those who can," Olson said. "I'm fortunate to be out, and I can be one of many people that can reach people."

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Ohio doctor charged in pregnant woman's death

FILE - In this Feb. 21, 2013 file photo, Dr. Ali Salim waits for deputies to escort him from the courtroom after he pleaded not guilty to charges of killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child in Delaware, Ohio. Salim was arrested in February and charged with kidnapping, raping and killing Deanna Ballman by injecting her with heroin, as well as killing her unborn child, to be named Mabel Lilly. Salim has pleaded not guilty and is on house arrest on $1 million bond. His trial is scheduled for Sept. 3. (AP Photo/Andrew Welsh-Huggins, File)

NEW ALBANY, Ohio (AP) — The personal ads that Dr. Ali Salimplaced on Craigslist — and police say he posted hundreds of them — made one thing clear: He wanted "no drama."

He didn't always get his wish.

One woman told police she was accosted at Salim's house. Another said she was sexually assaulted. Another woman left after she said Salim insisted she pose in her underwear while he painted the digestive system on her abdomen.

The final drama, police and prosecutors say, occurred July 31 whenDeanna Ballman, nine months pregnant with two young children at home, disappeared after answering one of Salim's ads. Ballman's body was found the next day in the backseat of her car on a country road a few miles from Salim's house.

After a six-month investigation, Salim was arrested in February and charged with kidnapping, raping and killing Ballman by injecting her with heroin, as well as killing her unborn child, to be named Mabel Lilly.

Salim has pleaded not guilty and is on house arrest on $1 million bond. His trial is scheduled for Sept. 3.

Ballman told her mother she was responding to a housecleaning ad. Investigators say that's not the whole story.

"That's not quite what we've found," said Delaware County Prosecutor Carol O'Brien.

Salim, 44, who is single, is originally from Pakistan where he earned his medical degree at King Edward Medical College at the University of the Punjab in 1993, according to Ohio medical board records. He did his residency at West Virginia University and worked most recently as an emergency room physician in Mt. Vernon, a small city in east-central Ohio.

The Ohio medical board has revoked Salim's license because of the criminal charges. He had no medical disciplinary cases as a doctor and no previous criminal record. He is a permanent U.S. resident with a green card.

Salim did well: He lived in a $305,000 house in New Albany, a tony Columbus suburb, and owned expensive cars, including a Porsche and Infiniti. He drove his vehicles fast: Records obtained by The Associated Press found at least 15 speeding tickets since 2000.

Salim's life was full of drama in the months before his encounter with Ballman, according to police records obtained by the AP, prosecutors' statements and interviews with Delaware County sheriff's investigators.

In September 2010, Salim told police his house had been burglarized with the help of a female heroin addict he'd been trying to help get treatment. He refused to cooperate with investigators despite losing three TVs, two laptops, $500 in cash and credit cards, and the case was placed on inactive status, according to a Columbus police report.

In April 2011, a woman who answered one of Salim's Craigslist ads called 911 to report an assault at Salim's address. "I came to a gentleman's house, and he accosted me," she said.

Eight months later, in early December, aspiring model Gabrielle Roush answered what she thought was a legitimate modeling ad: $400 to let Salim paint the human digestive system on her abdomen for what he said was a work assignment.

But Roush, accompanied by her future father-in-law, turned down the job after Salim insisted she be in the house alone while he worked.

"He said, 'As long as you don't cause drama, you can do this for me,'" recalled Roush, 21, a college student in Columbus, whose meeting with Salim and call to police came long before Ballman's death and Salim's arrest.

The following July, a woman was sexually assaulted at Salim's house, according to a report she filed with police a month later, after Ballman's death.

Ballman, 23, was a supply specialist with a National Guard military police unit in Colorado who had just moved back to Ohio after separating from her husband. She had her own apartment east of Columbus and was still trying to buy furniture for her children's bedrooms.

The family reported her missing July 31, telling police about the housecleaning ad. At 3:30 p.m. that day, Deanna Ballman called her mother, Lori Ballman.

"Deanna stated that she felt dizzy and did not feel well. Deanna then stopped talking. Lori stated a male with a foreign accent then got on the phone asking what he could do to help. The call was then lost," according to the missing-person's report.

Lori Ballman also told investigators she heard the sound of a woman's voice in the background speaking another language. Investigators say they've never located this person. O'Brien, the Delaware County prosecutor, says it's not clear how Deanna Ballman's car got to the country road.

Compounding the family's struggle, Ballman's 19-year-old brother, James, died in an accidental shooting in February. Deanna Ballman's children are in foster care in Colorado, her mother said. Ballman was a high school graduate and devoted mother who hoped eventually to go to college to be a dentist, her mother said.

Lori Ballman helped her daughter gather cleaning supplies the day she disappeared, but she believes now that was a cover story for something darker she can't quite bring herself to name.

"That's the only reason I can think she told me she was going housecleaning, because she was humiliated," Ballman said.

Investigators say only that Deanna Ballman answered a personal ad. A cursory review of Craigslist finds Salim was not alone in placing such ads, dozens of which, many of them suggestive, abound for the Columbus area. In one, on May 14, a married man said he was looking for a "discreet relationship." Another, the same day, was seeking "a woman who is pregnant and horny as hell."

Salim's lawyer goes a step farther and bluntly calls Ballman an "unfortunate victim" who died as a result of prostituting herself to feed a drug habit.

"Regrettably, she caused her own demise and Dr. Salim had nothing to do with it," said attorney Sam Shamansky.

The rape charge against Salim alleges he assaulted her knowing her ability to resist "was substantially impaired." Capt. Kevin Savage of the Delaware County Sheriff's Office says there's no evidence Ballman was a drug addict. But, like the prosecutor, he hints that Ballman's reasons for going to Salim's home have yet to come out.

"I don't think she knew she was going to be overdosed with heroin and subsequently die, but I think she knew what she was responding to," Savage said.

2 rockets hit Lebanese Hezbollah stronghold

A Lebanese investigator takes pictures at a balcony where a rocket struck an apartment in a building at Chiyah district, south of Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday May 26, 2013. Rockets slammed Sunday into two Beirut neighborhoods that are strongholds of Lebanon's Hezbollah group, wounding at least 4 people, Lebanese security officials and media said. Tensions have been running high in Lebanon, and Syrian rebels have threatened to retaliate against the militant Shiite Hezbollah group for sending fighters to assist President Bashar Assad's forces in Syria. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

BEIRUT (AP) — A pair of rockets slammed into a car dealership and a residential building in strongholds of Lebanon's Hezbollahmilitia in southern Beirut on Sunday, wounding four people and raising fears that Syria's civil war is increasingly moving to Lebanon.

Lebanon's sectarian divide mirrors that of Syria, and Lebanese armed factions have taken sides in their neighbor's civil war.

There was no claim of responsibility for Sunday's attack. However, a Syrian rebel commander threatened earlier this week to strike against Hezbollah strongholds in retaliation for the militia's military support for Syrian President Bashar Assad. Hezbollah is a Shiite Muslim group, while most of the rebels are Sunnis.

Street fighting between rival Lebanese groups has been relatively common since the end of the country's 15-year civil war in 1990, but rocket or artillery attacks on Beirut neighborhoods are rare.

The rockets struck hours after Hezbollah's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, vowed to help propel Assad to victory in Syria's civil war and warned that the Syrian leader's overthrow would give rise to extremists.

One rocket struck a car dealership in the Mar Mikhael district on the southern edge of the capital, wounding four Syrian workers and damaging two cars, according to Lebanese security officials and witnesses.

Another rocket hit the second floor of an apartment building in the Chiyah district, about two kilometers (one mile) away. It damaged the facade and a door leading to a living room, but no one was wounded.

A security official said rocket launchers were found in woods in a predominantly Christian and Druse area in suburbs southeast of Beirut. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

An ongoing battle in the Syrian town of Qusair on the Lebanese border has laid bare Hezbollah's growing role in the Syrian conflict. The Iranian-backed militia and Syrian troops launched an offensive against the town last weekend. After dozens of Hezbollah fighters were killed in Qusair over the past week and buried in large funerals in Lebanon, Hezbollah could no longer play down its involvement.

Col. Abdul-Jabbar al-Aqidi, commander of the Syrian rebels' Military Council in Aleppo, appeared in a video this week while apparently en route to Qusair, in which he threatened to strike in Beirut's southern suburbs in retaliation for Hezbollah's involvement in Syria.

"We used to say before, 'We are coming Bashar.' Now we say, 'We are coming Bashar and we are coming Hassan Nasrallah,'" he said, in reference to Hezbollah's leader.

"We will strike at your strongholds in Dahiyeh, God willing," he said, using the Lebanese name for Hezbollah's power center in southern Beirut. The video was still online on Youtube on Sunday.

Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Ammar said the incident targeted coexistence between the Lebanese and claimed the U.S. and Israel want to return Lebanon to the years of civil war. "They want to throw Lebanon backward into the traps of civil wars that we left behind," he told reporters. "We will not go backward."

Interior Minister Marwan Charbel blamed "saboteurs" and said: "We hope what is happening in Syria does not move to Lebanon."

Nasrallah's speech Saturday offered the clearest public confirmation yet that the militia is directly involved in Syria's war. Nasrallah's remarks were also the first since Hezbollah fighters have pushed to the front lines of Qusair.

In his televised address, he said Hezbollah members are fighting in Syria against Islamic radicals who pose a danger to Lebanon, and pledged that his group will not allow Syrian militants to control areas along the Lebanese border. He pledged that Hezbollah will turn the tide of the conflict in Assad's favor, and stay as long as necessary to do so.

"We will continue this road until the end, we will take the responsibility and we will make all the sacrifices," he said. "We will be victorious."

Lebanese Sunnis sympathetic to the Syrian opposition have also been fighting in Syria alongside the rebels. Nasrallah urged both sides to fight for their side in Syria "and leave Lebanon out of it."

The fighting next door has repeatedly spilled over the border. For the past week, Assad's opponents and supporters have been clashing in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, using mortars, grenades and machine guns to attack densely populated areas.

Syria's main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, slammed Nasrallah's speech as an "an attempt to pit the Lebanese people against their Syrian brothers and sisters who have revolted against the brutal dictator."

In a statement Sunday, it said his speech "has the potential for serious ramifications in the region."

"It explicitly declares Iranian interests as superior to the basic, inherent rights of people across the region," the statement said.

Thousands of bridges at risk of freak collapse

Chart shows the percentage of problematic bridges by year

SEATTLE (AP) — Thousands of bridges around the U.S. may be one freak accident or mistake away from collapse, even if the spans are deemed structurally sound.

The crossings are kept standing by engineering design, not supported with brute strength or redundant protections like their more modern counterparts. Bridge regulators call the more risky spans "fracture critical," meaning that if a single, vital component of the bridge is compromised, it can crumple.

Those vulnerable crossing carry millions of drivers every day. In Boston, a six-lane highway 1A near Logan airport includes a "fracture critical" bridge over Bennington Street. In northern Chicago, an I-90 pass that goes over Ashland Avenue is in the same category. An I-880 bridge over 5th Avenue in Oakland, Calif., is also on the list.

Also in that category is the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River north of Seattle, which collapsed into the water days ago after officials say an oversized truck load clipped the steel truss.

Public officials have focused in recent years on the desperate need for money to repair thousands of bridges deemed structurally deficient, which typically means a major portion of the bridge is in poor condition or worse. But the bridge that collapsed Thursday is not in that deficient category, highlighting another major problem with the nation's infrastructure: Although it's rare, some bridges deemed to be fine structurally can still be crippled if they are struck hard enough in the wrong spot.

"It probably is a bit of a fluke in that sense," said Charles Roeder, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington.

While the I-5 truck's cargo suffered only minimal damage, it left chaos in its wake, with two vehicles catapulting off the edge of the broken bridge into the river below. Three people involved escaped with non-life threatening injuries.

The most famous failure of a fracture critical bridge was the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis during rush hour on Aug. 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring more than 100 others. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the cause of the collapse was an error by the bridge's designers — a gusset plate, a key component of the bridge, was too thin. The plate was only half of the required one-inch thickness.

Because the bridge's key structures lacked redundancy, where if one piece fails, there is another piece to prevent the bridge from falling, when the gusset plate broke, much of the bridge collapsed.

Mark Rosenker, who was chairman of the NTSB during the I-35W bridge investigation, said the board looked into whether other fracture critical bridges were collapsing. They found a few cases, but not many, he said.

"Today, they're still building fracture critical bridges with the belief that they're not going break," Rosenker said.

Fracture critical bridges, like the I-5 span in Washington, are the result of Congress trying to cut corners to save money rather than a lack of engineering know-how, said Barry B. LePatner, a New York real estate attorney and author of "Too Big to Fall: America's Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward."

About 18,000 fracture critical bridges were built from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s in an effort to complete the nation's interstate highway system, which was launched under President Dwight Eisenhower, LePatner said in an interview. The fracture critical bridge designs were cheaper than bridges designed with redundancy, he said.

Thousands of those bridges remain in use, according to an AP analysis.

"They have been left hanging with little maintenance for four decades now," he said. "There is little political will and less political leadership to commit the tens of billions of dollars needed" to fix them.

There has been little focus or urgency in specifically replacing the older "fracture critical" crossings, in part because there is a massive backlog of bridge repair work for thousands of bridges deemed to be structurally problematic. Washington state Rep. Judy Clibborn, a Democrat who leads the House transportation committee, has been trying to build support for a tax package to pay for major transportation projects in the state. But her plan wouldn't have done anything to revamp the bridge that collapsed.

National bridge records say the I-5 crossing over the Skagit River had a sufficiency rating of 57.4 out of 100 — a score designed to gauge the ability of the bridge to remain in service. To qualify for federal replacement funds, a bridge must have a rating of 50 or below. A bridge must have a sufficiency rating of 80 or below to qualify for federal rehabilitation funding.

Hundreds of bridges in Washington state have worse ratings than the one that collapsed, and many around the country have single-digit ratings.

Clibborn said the Skagit River crossing wasn't even on the radar of lawmakers because state officials have to prioritize by focusing on bridges with serious structural problems that are at higher risk of imminent danger.

Along with being at risk of a fatal impact, the I-5 bridge was deemed to be "functionally obsolete," which essentially means it wasn't built to today's standards. Its shoulders were narrow, and it had low clearance.

There are 66,749 structurally deficient bridges and 84,748 functionally obsolete bridges in the U.S., including Puerto Rico, according to the Federal Highway Administration. That's about a quarter of the 607,000 total bridges nationally. States and cities have been whittling down that backlog, but slowly. In 2002, about 30 percent of bridges fell into one of those two categories.

Spending by states and local government on bridge construction adjusted for inflation has more than doubled since 1998, from $12.3 billion to $28.5 billion last year, according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association. That's an all-time high.

"The needs are so great that even with the growth we've had in the investment level, it's barely moving the needle in terms of moving bridges off these lists," said Alison Premo Black, the association's chief economist.

There is wide recognition at all levels of government that the failure to address aging infrastructure will likely undermine safety and hinder economic growth. But there is no consensus on how to pay for improvements. The federal Highway Trust Fund, which provides construction aid to states, is forecast to go broke next year. The fund gets its revenue primarily from federal gas and diesel taxes. But revenues aren't keeping up because people are driving less and there are more fuel-efficient cars on the road.

Neither Congress nor the White House has shown any willingness to raise federal gas taxes, which haven't been increased since 1993. Many transportation thinkers believe a shift to taxes based on miles traveled by a vehicle is inevitable, but there are privacy concerns and other difficulties that would preclude widespread use of such a system for at least a decade.

Transportation spending got a temporary boost with the economic stimulus funds approved by Congress after President Barack Obama was elected. Of the $27 billion designated for highway projects under the stimulus program, about $3 billion went to bridge projects, Black said.

States are looking for other means to raise money for highway and bridge improvements, including more road tolls, dedicating a portion of sales taxes to transportation and raising state gas taxes. Clibborn, the Washington state lawmaker, has proposed a 10-cent gas hike to help pay for projects, though the effort has been held up by a dispute over how to rebuild the Columbia River bridge connecting Vancouver, Wash., and Portland, Ore.

"We can't possibly do it all in the next 10 years," Clibborn said. "But we're going to do the first bite of the apple."

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Lowy reported from Washington, D.C. AP Writers Manuel Valdes and Gene Johnson contributed to this report.