WASHINGTON – Tens of thousands of unsafe or decaying bridges carrying 100 million drivers a day must wait for repairs because states are spending stimulus money on spans that are already in good shape or on easier projects like repaving roads, an Associated Press analysis shows.
President Barack Obama urged Congress last winter to pass his $787 billion stimulus package so some of the economic recovery money could be used to rebuild what he called America's "crumbling bridges." Lawmakers said it was a historic chance to chip away at the $65 billion backlog of deficient structures, often neglected until a catastrophe like the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed two years ago this Saturday.
States, however, have other plans. Of the 2,476 bridges scheduled to receive stimulus money so far, nearly half have passed inspections with high marks, according to federal data. Those 1,123 sound bridges received such high inspection ratings that they normally would not qualify for federal bridge money, yet they will share in more than $1.2 billion in stimulus money.
The wooden bridge built in 1900 carrying Harlan Springs Road in Berkeley County, W.Va., is one of the nation's unsafe structures not being repaired. About 2,700 cars cross it every day. But with holes in the wooden deck and corroded railings and missing steel poles, only one car at a time can travel the 300-foot rickety span.
The bridge is an example of how Obama's call to spend recovery money quickly — on "shovel ready" projects to get people back to work — has clashed with other goals of the stimulus, such as targeting high-unemployment areas and rebuilding the nation's infrastructure. State transportation officials say the need for speed makes it hard to funnel money into needy counties or to take on extensive bridge repairs that can involve years of planning and construction.
Repaving or widening roads requires less planning and can be done quickly, which is why such projects account for 70 percent of the $17 billion in transportation stimulus money approved so far. Bridge projects represent 12 percent.
The spending decisions by states are OK with the Obama administration.
Ed Deseve, the president's chief executive of the stimulus, said the administration understands the desire to tackle "longer-term, gleam-in-the-eye projects" but told states "please, give us your shovel-ready projects."
The idea, he said, was to provide an immediate jolt to the nation's economy.
"We're delighted states are able to move quickly," Deseve said.
Florida Rep. John Mica, the senior Republican on the transportation committee, said Friday the government needed to give a "kick in the pants" to whomever is keeping bridges from getting needed repairs. He said states were daunted by the government red tape involved in repairing bridges.
"The stimulus is just leaving the big bridge projects behind," Mica said.
A few states, such as Virginia and South Carolina, are targeting their troubled bridges. In all, 1,286 deficient or obsolete bridges are expected to share $2.2 billion in stimulus money for repairs, the AP analysis shows.
But that's less than 1 percent of the more than 150,000 bridges nationwide that engineers have labeled deficient or obsolete. Of those, more than 39,000 are considered the worst, rated poor in at least one structural component and eligible to be replaced with federal money.
William Stubblefield, a Berkeley County, W.Va., commissioner, said he's confident state transportation officials are monitoring bridge safety and money will come soon for his county's bridges. The wooden bridge in Berkeley County is among more than a third of the state's 7,064 bridges deemed deficient or obsolete by inspectors.
Safety problems are so obvious on some spans, like the Harlan Springs bridge, that engineers have restricted traffic.
"If we're seeing some obvious deterioration, that's too late," Stubblefield said.
For its analysis, the AP asked each state and the District of Columbia to identify every bridge on which it planned some work using stimulus money. In some states that represented a final list. In others, new projects could be added. Most states provided project costs, but some did not. Some states included in their costs other road work related to the bridge project, like paving or widening nearby roads.

The AP then researched each bridge using the latest inspection data available from the Transportation Department.

This analysis found that:

• Many states did not make bridge work a priority in stimulus spending. More than half plan work on fewer than two dozen bridges and 18 states plan fewer than 10 projects.

• In 24 states, at least half of the bridges being worked on with stimulus money were not deficient.

• In 15 states, at least two-thirds of the bridges receiving stimulus money are not deficient.

Transportation officials said the stimulus program's mandates — shovel-ready projects that can be finished in three years and create jobs quickly — made it nearly impossible to focus on bad bridges that weren't already scheduled for repairs.

"The feds had their own priorities, and their big priority was jobs and the economy. As a result, we had to move things quickly. I don't fault that," said John Zicconi, spokesman for the Vermont Agency of Transportation. "Nobody put the stimulus together as an answer to all our bridge issues. It was about putting people to work."

That's not exactly how it was billed. Obama pointed to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge during the Great Depression as an example of how transportation money in the new stimulus law could "remake the face of the nation."

"It's what we're doing once more, by building a 21st century infrastructure that will make America's economy stronger and America's people safer," Obama said in March.

While the stimulus will pay for a few such projects, like the massive new Cleveland Innerbelt Bridge, for the most part the money will not build a 21st century transportation system. It will repave the 20th century system.

Democrats helping Obama campaign for the stimulus program singled out bridge repairs when promoting the bill. In a conference call with reporters before passage, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed said a bridge in Providence would benefit from the recovery program.

"If we fix that bridge, we're not only putting people to work, but we're going to speed, literally speed our economic activity," Reed said.

The Pawtucket River Bridge may have helped Reed make his point, but it was already on track to be repaired and is not part of the state's stimulus plan. Rhode Island, the state with the nation's highest percentage, 52 percent, of bad bridges, so far plans to use stimulus money to work on only six of its 397 deficient or obsolete structures.

After the stimulus bill was passed in February, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick was asked on National Public Radio to list projects the stimulus would fund.

"I can tell you that, for example, we have some prominent bridges that are structurally deficient that we want to get to as soon as possible for reasons of safety," Patrick said.

But Patrick knew that months earlier he and state legislators had passed a $3 billion bridge program that didn't rely on stimulus money. Massachusetts, a state with more than half of its 5,063 bridges deemed deficient or obsolete by inspectors, so far is spending recovery money on only one bridge.

Some states did decide early to target bad bridges with economic recovery money.

In Virginia, state bridge engineer Kendal Walus recalled bosses telling him last fall, as talk of a stimulus was just beginning, that the state would probably make bridges a priority.

"They said, get as many bridge projects as I could get and they'd be willing to entertain it," Walus said.

With more than 1,200 deficient bridges in the state and an estimated $3.7 billion needed to repair or replace them, there were lots of choices. Engineers selected small bridges that could be fixed without the long engineering process and environmental permitting normally required for larger structures. Walus said engineers worked long hours this winter tying up loose ends to get those projects ready to go.

As a result, 69 of the 73 Virginia bridges receiving stimulus money are either deficient or obsolete, according to inspection records.

But targeting deficient bridges with new federal money isn't as easy as it sounds, officials in other states said.

Washington state, for example, struggled with a plea from King County officials to help pay for the replacement of the 75-year-old drawbridge that serves as a major corridor in Seattle and connects two of the city's industrial areas. The bridge's cracked concrete foundations, widespread corrosion in steel beams and deteriorating moveable spans make it one of the nation's worst still in daily operation — scoring a 3 out of 100 for structural sufficiency.

State officials couldn't commit stimulus money to the project, which already was getting local and state funds, said Paula Hammond, the state's transportation secretary. The South Park bridge was not a state priority, and officials needed to focus on projects that could be completed quickly, Hammond said.

"Every state is going through this because speed was a major, major factor for us," she said.

More than a quarter of Washington's 7,763 bridges are either deficient or obsolete, inspection records show.

With $27 billion in highway and bridge money, the stimulus provided an important stopgap but is too little to remake the U.S. transportation infrastructure, she added.

"If you wanted that to happen," Hammond said, "you'd probably have to multiply that number by 10."

Los Angeles (E! Online) –
Jessica Simpson is sporting a new diamond ring today.

No, she and Tony Romo haven't reconciled with an engagement.

Ms. Simpson hit a listening party in Hollywood last night for An-Ya, a Russian pop singer signed to Joe Simpson's music label. Before the night was over, Jessica walked away with a $10,000 5-carat ring from party host jewelry designer Pascal Mouawad's Black and White Diamond Collection.

"If you didn't already know Jessica just went through a breakup, you really would have no way of telling from the way she was behaving at the event," an eyewitness reported. "She really seemed happy."

While Jessica refused to do media at the soiree, Papa Joe gave us an update on his unlucky-in-love offspring.
"She's good," Joe said. "She's doing very good."

Not too sure if she'll be feeling the same when she gets wind of US Weekly's new cover story. The celeb tabloid claims Romo is already smitten with a new gal, recent college graduate Natalie Smith (her dad is the athletic director from Romo's alma mater, Eastern Illinois University).

Smith denies to the mag that there was a romance. A rep for Romo declined to comment when we asked about the report earlier today.

At least Jessica has work to help take her mind away from Romo. Joe said they leave for Japan in a couple of weeks to work on her upcoming VH1 reality show about beauty.

—Reporting by Dahvi Shira

··· THEY SAID WHAT? Get today's most commented stories now at www.eonline.com

Washington (The Weekly Standard) Vol. 014, Issue 43 - 8/3/2009 –
Detention policy is one of the least discussed but most important aspects of the war in Afghanistan. The handling of prisoners gets publicity only when there is a major screw-up such as at Abu Ghraib or the smaller-scale abuses that occurred in Afghanistan in the early years of the U.S. presence there. But properly handled this can and should be a major element of any successful counterinsurgency strategy.
The French soldier Roger Trinquier, who served in Indochina and Algeria, did a good job of summing up both the pitfalls and potential of detentions in his classic text, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counter-insurgency (1964): One of the first problems encountered, that of lodging the individuals arrested, will generally not have been anticipated. Prisons, designed essentially to accommodate offenders against common law, will rapidly become inadequate and will not meet our needs. We will be compelled to intern the prisoners under improvised, often deplorable conditions, which will lead to justifiable criticism our adversaries will exploit. From the beginning of hostilities, prison camps should be set up according to the conditions laid down by the Geneva Convention. They should be sufficiently large to take care of all prisoners until the end of the war.Top U.S. leaders during the early stages of the Iraq war didn't take Trinquier's admonitions to heart. But when the surge started in 2007, those oversights began to be rectified by a commander, David Petraeus, who had coauthored a counterinsurgency manual that drew on the work of Trinquier and other eminent strategists.The number of detainees held in Iraq by U.S. forces swelled from 14,000 to 24,000 during the course of the surge in 2007. (The figure is now down below 11,000.) But while the number held increased, complaints about abuses--and about terrorists turning prison camps into Jihad U.--decreased. This was largely a result of the changes implemented by Major General Douglas Stone, a Marine Corps reservist who brought a fresh eye to the problem when he took over Task Force 134, charged with detainee operations, in April 2007. He was helped by the fact that since the Abu Ghraib debacle in 2004 an entirely new detention camp had been built in southern Iraq (Camp Bucca), while the Camp Cropper facility near Baghdad had been upgraded and more troops (primarily military police) had been assigned to their operations.But the way those facilities were run still left a lot to be desired. Among other steps, Stone segregated detainees based on threat level--the hard-core jihadists were moved away from the small fry so they could not influence them. Moderate Islamic leaders were brought in to preach nonviolence and to counteract jihadist indoctrination. Panels of officers were set up to review all detentions and arrange for release of prisoners deemed no longer a threat. (Tribal elders or -others had to vouch for their continued good conduct, which helps explain why the recidivism rate has been extremely low.) For those still stuck behind barbed wire, family visits were not only allowed but encouraged, providing a morale boost and dispelling rumors of mistreatment. First-rate medical care was offered--equivalent to that received by U.S. troops. Educational and vocational programs were set up to keep prisoners busy and to teach them skills they could use to get a job. When I visited Camp Cropper last year, I saw an impressive array of paintings and sewing projects that the detainees were producing--some looked like they might fetch a nice price in a Manhattan art gallery. All of this was part of a concept known as "COIN inside the wire" (COIN is the military acronym for counterinsurgency), and it is now generally acknowledged that this was a major aspect of the vast improvements that have occurred in Iraq since 2006. Nothing like it has been done in Afghanistan--yet. But it's starting to happen. Stone was just sent to Afghanistan at Petraeus's request to study American and Afghan detention operations and to make recommendations for improvements. One of the major problems in Afghanistan is that we are not holding nearly enough detainees--only 620 or so at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. A new detention facility at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul is almost complete and expected to open in September. Then U.S. forces will have the capacity to hold over 1,200 detainees in better conditions. That's an improvement, but it leaves capacity still inadequate given that Afghanistan is a larger country than Iraq, in both area and population, and confronts an insurgency believed to number tens of thousands of full- and part-time fighters. If and when U.S.-led counter-insurgency operations gain irreversible momentum, lots of Taliban are expected to flip over to the government's side as happened in Iraq with the Awakening councils and the Sons of Iraq. But to gain momentum in the first place it is important to take a lot of terrorists off the streets (or, more accurately, off the hills)--either by killing them or by locking them up. And there is a lot to be said for the latter over the former. You can't interrogate dead men, and the massive use of firepower is sure to alienate the population even more than massive lockups.As I discovered during a visit a few months ago, no one knows how many suspected terrorists the Afghans are holding--itself a major part of the problem. There needs to be a much better accounting of prisoners. A July 20 article in the New York Times cites a figure of 15,000 detainees, but this covers the country's entire prison population, most of them common criminals. Only about 350 detainees are being held at the special high-security wing of the Pul-i-Charkhi prison, which was set up with U.S. help. The first and most urgent demand is to put a lot more suspected terrorists behind bars, while being careful to avoid the kind of backlash that would occur if U.S. troops were to start indiscriminately rounding up young men. In Iraq in 2003-04 we saw how large-scale sweeps and detentions can alienate the population, but we also saw in 2007-08 how targeted operations based on good intelligence can dramatically improve a situation by taking hardened killers off the streets. That kind of intelligence can be generated only by having troops live in small outposts among the people, something that is only now starting to happen in some of the most insurgent-infested areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan.The second and equally urgent demand is to improve detention operations so that larger numbers of detainees can be held securely and safely--and ensure that those who are eventually released don't come out more embittered and better versed in the dark arts of destruction than when they went in. There are daunting obstacles in the way of accomplishing these urgent objectives. The biggest problem is the lack of Afghan government capacity. There are not nearly enough judges, lawyers, or prison guards, and the ones who exist are too often corrupt, incompetent, and unprofessional. A dramatic indication of the problem was the fact that the Taliban were able to raid a major prison in Kandahar a year ago, freeing hundreds of their compatriots. Iraq had (and still has) many of these same issues, but they were somewhat alleviated by an American Rule-of-Law Task Force which built court houses, trained prison guards and judges, and undertook other steps to boost Iraqi capacity. No such large-scale effort has yet been undertaken in Afghanistan.There is another obstacle in Afghanistan that we didn't face in Iraq. That would be NATO. Our European allies are so wary of being involved in "another Abu Ghraib" that they have gone to the extreme of refusing to take part in detention operations altogether. Troops operating under the NATO mandate--that is, almost all foreign troops in Afghanistan, including almost all Americans--are allowed to hold detainees for only 96 hours. Then they have to either release them or turn them over to the Afghans. Neither choice is a good one. As one officer at Task Force Guardian, the U.S. unit in charge of detention operations, told me, "With the NATO policy the Taliban have a sanctuary right here in Afghanistan." Troops I talked to in southern Afghanistan complained of a "catch and release" policy, with U.S. detention officials accepting only "high value targets." Many lower-level detainees had to be cut loose even if they were still dangerous.The final problem is the U.S. courts. Already one federal judge has given Bagram detainees captured outside Afghanistan the right to challenge their detention in habeas corpus proceedings in American courts. If this precedent stands and expands, it could put at risk the entire war effort. Troops cannot effectively fight a massive insurgency if bound to observe the same constitutional protections we extend to criminal suspects at home. They need to have the authority to lock up those deemed a threat, often on the basis of secret intelligence that can't be shared with the accused, even if there is no evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt" to convict them in a court of law.But assuming that the Supreme Court doesn't simply take charge of the entire detention operation, the other problems are hardly insuperable. The United States can dual-hat American troops to give them the authority under Operation Enduring Freedom to hold detainees indefinitely, as occurred in Iraq. We can also work with the Afghans to boost their own capacity to adjudicate cases and to hold terrorism suspects. The bad news is that during the seven-plus years we've been fighting in Afghanistan these steps still have not been taken. The good news is that the new leadership team--General Stanley McChrystal in Kabul, General David Petraeus at Central Command, and Admiral James Stavridis at NATO--understands the place of detention operations within a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy and is starting to address the problems. Better late than never. Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

TOKYO (Reuters) –
Honda Motor Co (7267.T), Japan's No.2 automaker, posted an 88 percent fall in operating profit as demand slumped, but beat expectations for a loss and lifted its forecast for the year on the back of an improved outlook for its global car sales.

Like most Japanese automakers, Honda is expected to see its earnings improve as production volumes return from the low levels since late last year when sales plunged after the collapse of U.S. bank Lehman Brothers squeezed the auto loans market and led to job losses.

Still, most auto executives have yet to call a convincing recovery in demand and are trying to battle a sales decline with cost-cutting as much of the demand in developed markets is artificially supported by government schemes to encourage consumption.

Honda, also the world's top motorcycle maker, made an operating profit of 25.2 billion yen ($267 million) in the April-June quarter, against a profit of 210.5 billion yen a year earlier and a consensus estimate for a 106 billion yen loss in a survey of four analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

It made a net 7.6 billion yen in the first quarter compared with a profit of 173.4 billion yen a year ago.

For the financial year to March 31, 2010, Honda expects an operating profit of 70 billion yen and net profit of 55 billion yen. Three months ago, it had forecast the profits at 10 billion yen and 40 billion yen.

The maker of the popular Accord and Fit models lifted its global car sales forecast to 3.295 million vehicles from 3.210 million, for the year to March 2010.

While Honda has fared better than many rivals in Japan and China this year, as government incentives helped sales of its smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles, investors are keen to see signs of a recovery in the United States and Europe, where its sales lag the market with sharp double-digit falls.

Its new Insight hybrid car has sold well at home, but it faces competition in the United States where Toyota Motor Corp's (7203.T) new Prius has been stealing the show with a roomier, bigger and more fuel-efficient alternative at a deep discount to the previous version.

Honda now sees a stronger yen against the dollar, averaging 91 yen for the financial year, while it expects a stronger euro of 127 yen versus the previous 125 yen assumption.

Honda has deliberately held back shipment of the Insight to the United States to meet robust orders in Japan where the model is more profitable at current exchange rates, making it difficult to gauge latent demand in North America.

Shares in Honda have risen 44 percent in the year to date, in line with Tokyo's transport sub-index (.ITEQP.T).

Before the results were announced, Honda ended up 1.1 percent while the transport sector gained 0.3 percent.

($1=94.38 Yen)

(Reporting by Chang-Ran Kim; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Valerie Lee)