STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• After collapse of Washington state’s Interstate 5 bridge, should drivers worry?
• No, says top U.S. bridge engineer, but they should be “wary”
• All bridges must be inspected every two years; new technology offers extra protection
• President Obama takes action to speed up bridge improvements

Like millions of other Americans, Dan and Sally Sligh packed up their vehicle and headed out for a Memorial Day weekend trip. As they crossed the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River outside Seattle, Washington, the bridge gave way and their pickup truck plunged into the frigid waters.

Luckily, everyone survived Thursday’s incident.

When a bridge fails, such as the I-5 bridge in Washington state, it raises questions about the safety of millions of travelers. Where are America’s risky bridges? Are interstate bridges being properly inspected? What will it take to make the nation’s bridges safer?

We shouldn’t be worried, but we should be wary: that’s the message from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which puts out a “report card” on the safety and maintenance of U.S. bridges.

Right now, America’s got a C+.

via How safe is that bridge you’re driving over? – CNN.com.

British security officials are drawing comparisons between the Woolwich killers and the Boston bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, arguing they represent a new generation of jihadists either born in the West or raised there. This new generation, security officials say, are difficult to identify in advance because their attacks are often opportunistic and, if directed by other jihadists, done so subtly.

“All four appeared to be on the periphery of jihad, possible wannabes, but escaped closer scrutiny because they didn’t appear to be dangerous,” a UK intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “They are not directly managed but they are inspired—[and] monitoring inspiration is no easy feat. How can you predict the ones who are going to act, who are going to go off and do something like this? We are going to have to rethink our criteria for monitoring, to pick out these natural born killers.”

A further challenge for security services on both sides of the Atlantic to identify these “natural born killers” is the low-tech nature of the attacks, leaving less of a footprint to follow before an attack: in the case of Boston, rudimentary pressure-cooker bombs; and in the case of the gruesome attack in Woolwich, southeast London, meat cleaver, knives, and machetes.

The Woolwich attack comes straight out of Al Qaeda’s terror playbook. The group’s former chief propagandist, the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki who was killed in a drone strike two years ago, had long urged supporters to launch lone-wolf attacks like this or the Boston bombings.

The two suspects—British-born Michael Adebolajo and 22-year-old Nigerian-born Michael Adebowale, also a Muslim convert—appear to have been radicalized by the Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, which was banned by the UK government in 2010 for alleged links with terrorism, officials said.

Al Muhajiroun—the Emigrants—was founded in Saudi Arabia by Omar Bakri Muhammad, a jihadist preacher originally born in Syria. Al Muhajiroun, which campaigned for the imposition of sharia law in the UK, initially attracted notoriety for a 2002 conference celebrating the 9/11 attacks. The group’s recruitment and propaganda activities on Britain’s university campuses, distributing anti-Jewish hate literature and offering to train militants, also raised alarms as did incendiary speech by the group’s founder who once vowed that Muslims would give the West “a 9/11, day after day after day.”

Known as the “Tottenham Ayatollah,” the radical preacher oversaw the International Islamic Front, an organization that allegedly trained and sent British Muslims to fight in Chechnya and the Balkans. For several years, Muhammad was also the conduit for statements from Osama bin Laden.

via The London Killers’ Terror Network – The Daily Beast.

Statistics obtained from Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry by the campaign group Human Rights Watch reveal the number of women and girls convicted of ‘moral crimes,’ which include running away from home has increased by 50 per cent in the last year from 400 to 600.

Many of the 600 women jailed in the last year are victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse whose only crime was to run away from their assailants, the group said.

It called on the Afghan government to enforce its own Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW), and to stop its judges punishing female victims.

Although it is not a crime in Afghanistan for women to run away, the group said the country’s judges, including members of its Supreme Court, regard women who run away from their homes as criminals. Many of them who flee rapes and other assaults have been charged with seeking sex outside marriage, known as Zina in Afghanistan.

Those jailed for Zina include women and girls who have been raped or forced into prostitution, the group said.

via Sharp rise in jail terms for Afghan rape and abuse victims – Telegraph.

CNN

SUE OGROCKI/Associated Press – Rescuers pulled a child from the rubble of an elementary school in Moore, Okla., Monday and passed her to a triage center after a massive tornado tore through the Oklahoma City suburbs.

“Death toll lowered.”

NEW: Authorities revise death toll downward to 24, including nine children

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Boston Globe

At least 91 people died, including 20 children, after massive tornado hit near Oklahoma City. The death toll is expected to rise.

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Washington Post

The Oklahoma state medical examiner’s office said Monday evening that 51 people had so far been confirmed killed in the tornado that tore through the city of Moore.

The monstrous tornado at least a half-mile wide roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs, flattening entire neighborhoods with winds up to 200 mph

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Hysterical parents converged Monday at an elementary school wrecked by the tornado that tore through Moore, Okla., desperate to learn if their children survived.

Crews were still trying to track down students in kindergarten through third grade, including dozens of children who had been sheltering in a hallway at Plaza Towers Elementary School, according a reporter for NBC station KFOR.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/20/18381078-frantic-search-for-survivors-at-oklahoma-school-flattened-by-tornado?lite

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by CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: Moore Medical Center is evacuated
• NEW: Homes and other buildings are leveled
• NEW: “As bad as today is, this is not over yet,” says an official

Shawnee, Oklahoma (CNN) — A powerful tornado blasted an area outside of Oklahoma City on Monday, ripping roofs off buildings, leveling homes and leaving a massive band of destruction in its wake.

In the desperate seconds and minutes after the storm passed, the human toll was yet to even begin to be counted.

Survivors emerged from shelters to see an apocalyptic vision — the remnants of cars twisted and piled on each other to make what had been a parking lot look like a junk yard. Bright orange flames roaring from a structure that was blazing even as rain continued to fall.

At least one school was in the tornado’s devastation zone in Moore, Oklahoma. Lance West, a reporter for CNN affiliate KFOR, says there were people pulling students from a classroom at an elementary school heavily damaged by the tornado. There were no immediate reports on the condition of the children.

“Our worst fears are becoming realized this afternoon,” Bill Bunting, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center, told CNN.

via Massive tornado slams Oklahoma City area – CNN.com.

AFP, Beirut -

More than 94,000 people have been killed in more than two years of conflict in Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a newly-revised toll on Tuesday.

The watchdog group said it revised the toll — just two days after it announced a tally of 82,257 dead — after receiving new information from regime-controlled Alawite areas of the Sunni-majority country.

“Based on this information, the number of martyrs and dead killed since the beginning of the Syrian revolution is more than 94,000,” it said in a statement.

The group said it had received new figures from areas including Tartus and Latakia — strongholds on the Mediterranean coast of the Alawite minority to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs.

The information showed “that the number of casualties among the ranks of the Alawite community was much higher than the Observatory’s statistics which were published two days ago.”

On Sunday, the Britain-based watchdog which relies on a vast network of activists and medics on the ground put the death toll since the March 2011 start of the anti-regime uprising at 82,257, including 34,473 civilians.

via NGO revised toll: 94,000 dead in Syria conflict – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.

Savar, Bangladesh (CNN) –

Across from the detritus of Bangladesh’s deadliest industrial disaster, up four flights of narrow stairs and inside the makeshift offices of the recovery operations, stands a dry erase board that marks, in neat black handwriting, each life a nine-story building claimed when it pancaked to the ground last month.

On some days, as rescue workers pulled body after body from the mountain of steel and concrete, the number would spiral past 100.

On Monday, it settled at zero.

And so, after 20 days of non-stop digging, the army-led effort to pull out every last body from the ruins of Rana Plaza in the Dhaka suburb of Savar came to an end.

“We said we wouldn’t stop until there were no more victims, and we didn’t,” said army Capt. Ibrahim Islam. “We are confident we have found them all.”

via Bangladesh building collapse recovery efforts end, toll at 1,127 dead – CNN.com.

Their report was highly critical of the State Department’s handling of at the U.S. outpost. Pickering, who also appeared on the Sunday shows, defended his scathing assessment but absolved former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“We knew where the responsibility rested,” said Pickering, whose career working for Republican and Democratic administrations, spans four decades.

Issa said he wants to know with whom the pair spoke to reach their conclusions about Clinton. Cummings suggested that they testify in public before the committee on May 22.

“This is a failure, it needs to be investigated. Our committee can investigate. Now, Ambassador Pickering, his people and he refused to come before our committee,” Issa said Sunday.

Pickering, sitting next to Issa during an appearance on one Sunday show, disputed the chairman’s account and said that he was willing to testify before the committee.

“That is not true,” said the former top diplomat, referring to Issa’s claim that he refused to appear before the committee.

In a separate interview, Pickering said he asked, via the White House, to appear at last Wednesday’s hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in which three State Department officials testified. He said he could have answered many of the questions lawmakers raised, such as whether U.S. military forces could have saved Americans had they dispatched F-16 jet fighters to the consulate, some 1,600 miles away from the nearest likely launching point.

“Mike Mullen, who was part of this report and indeed worked very closely with all of us and shared many of the responsibilities directly with me, made it very clear that his view as a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that there were nothing within range that could have made a difference,” Pickering said.

via Top Dem calls for public testimony on Benghazi – 7NEWS Boston News WHDH-TV 7NEWS WHDH.COM.

By Ece Toksabay

ISTANBUL | Sat May 11, 2013 11:01am EDT

(Reuters) – Twin car bombs killed at least 20 people near Turkey’s border with Syria on Saturday, increasing fears that Syria’s civil war was dragging in neighbors and drawing a swift warning from Ankara not to test its resolve.

Turkey supports the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said it was no coincidence the attacks in the town of Reyhanli came as diplomatic moves to end the conflict intensify.

“There may be those who want to sabotage Turkey’s peace, but we will not allow that,” Davutoglu told reporters during a trip to Berlin. “No-one should attempt to test Turkey’s power, our security forces will take all necessary measures.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

NATO member Turkey has been one of Assad’s harshest critics and has harbored both Syrian refugees and rebels during the uprising against him, now in its third year.

Prospects appeared to improve this week for diplomacy over the civil war, in which more than 70,000 people have been killed, after Moscow and Washington announced a joint effort to bring government and rebels to an international conference.

But a Russian official said on Saturday that there was already disagreement over who would represent the opposition and he doubted whether a meeting could happen this month.

via Car bombs kill 20 in Turkish town near Syrian border | Reuters.

Associated Press

PARACHINAR, Pakistan—A pair of bombings in northwest Pakistan targeting individuals involved in this week’s national elections killed 17 people on Tuesday, police said, taking the death toll from attacks on candidates and party workers to over 100 since the beginning of April.

via Bombs Kill 17 in Pakistan – WSJ.com.

BBC

North Korea has removed two missiles from a launch site on the east coast, indicating a lowering of tension on the peninsula, a US official said.

Pyongyang reportedly made preparations for a missile launch last month.

It had threatened nuclear strikes and attacks on specific targets in the US and South Korea.

The missiles had been ready to launch at any moment but North Korea had now “moved them”, a unnamed US defence official told AFP news agency.

Regional tensions escalated following Pyongyang’s third nuclear test in February.

The North had been angered by fresh UN sanctions and wide-ranging annual US-South Korea military drills, which were completed a week ago.

via BBC News – N Korea ‘removes’ missiles from east coast launch site.