NEW YORK -- Federal prosecutors on Thursday revealed charges that accuse a Tunisian man who had lived in Canada with applying for a visa "to remain in the United States to facilitate an act of terrorism." 

The charges name Ahmed Abassi, a native of Tunisia who had been living in Canada.  Prosecutors say he came to New York in mid-March. 

Federal investigators say he met with the men involved in a plot -- first revealed in mid-April -- to attack an Amtrak passenger train from New York to Toronto.  They say the plotters discussed blowing up a bridge at Niagara Falls to cause the train to plunge into the gorge below. 

Canadian authorities announced in mid-April that the plot had been stopped. They disclosed then that they had arrested two men -- Chaieb Esseghaier of Montreal, a 30-year-old Tunisian graduate student who is reported to have guerrilla warfare training and is described as the ringleader, and Raed Jaser of Toronto, 35, a school bus driver.

Frank Gunn / AP

Chiheb Esseghaier, one of two suspects arrested last week in Canada in connection with the alleged terror plot to derail a passenger train near the U.S.-Canada border, arrives at Buttonville Airport outside Toronto on April 23.

Federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York said Thursday that Abassi was arrested 17 days ago. The fact that word of his arrest was withheld indicates he was likely providing some information about the plot to investigators. 

He is charged with fraudulently applying for a work visa "in order to remain in the United States to facilitate an act of international terrorism," according to a statement from the Justice Department. 

Authorities in Canada said in April that an al Qaeda facilitator in Iran had worked with Esseghaier, and also that the train they intended to target was an Amtrak train originating in New York's Penn Station. 

"Esseghaier was simply a bad guy, and dangerous. This guy was purely evil," said one investigator, and had scientific training and the technical ability to make chemical bombs. 

Law enforcement officials say Esseghaier met Abassi during a trip to New York. But they say the meeting did not go well.  Abassi, they say, thought he should be the person in charge. As a result of the failure to get along, Abassi did not have a role in the derailment plot. Authorities did not spell out any further the basis for the visa fraud charge beyond saying it was to facilitate an “act of terror.” 

The FBI has covertly monitored the activities of the two Canadian men, their contact with overseas Al Qaeda facilitators and others, and their possible connection to others who could be linked to the plot. 

"What Mr. Abassi didn't know was that one of his associates, privy to the details of the plan, was an undercover FBI agent," said George Venizelos, the FBI Assistant Director in Charge of the New York office. 

The yearlong covert investigation involved electronic and physical surveillance. Authorities emphasize, however, that this was no sting operation.  It was, they say, a significant terror plot, once which failed to get more notice because of the Boston Marathon bombings. 

CTV News via Reuters

Raed Jaser is seen arriving at court in the back of a police car in Toronto on April 23.

Esseghaier and Jaser made their initial court appearances in Canada in April. They are charged with conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to interfere with transportation and participating in terrorist group activities. Esseghaier told the court that the Criminal Code of Canada “is not a holy book” and did not apply to him.

Richard Esposito is senior executive producer of the NBC News investigative unit; Jonathan Dienst is WNBC chief investigative reporter and NBC News contributing correspondent in New York City; Pete Williams is NBC News justice correspondent.

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Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters file

An Amtrak police officer watches as passengers prepare to board a train at New York's Penn Station on April 19.

WASHINGTON - An alleged al Qaeda-backed plot to derail a U.S. passenger train in Canada sought to exploit the vulnerabilities of railroads that have not gotten much attention from the American public. 

While the United States has sharply tightened security around airlines since the September 11, 2001, attacks, trains are far harder to police, with masses of passengers getting on and off and stops at many stations on a single line. Thousands of miles of track, bridges and tunnels present a major challenge to monitor.

Even though the United States has largely been immune from attacks, extremists around the world have frequently exploited rail transport's vulnerability, said Brian Michael Jenkins, a security expert with the Mineta Transportation Institute at California's San Jose State University.

"Surface transportation really has become the terrorists' killing fields," he said.

Two suspects were arrested in Canada on Monday charged with conspiring to blow up a trestle on the Canadian side of the border as the Maple Leaf, the daily Amtrak connection between Toronto and New York, passed over it. Amtrak is the U.S. passenger rail service.

The two men charged in the plot made their first court appearances on Tuesday. A lawyer for one said his client would fight the charges vigorously.

Jenkins and Steve Kulm, an Amtrak spokesman, said trains presented a unique security challenge, different from airports with their screening process for passengers.

Amtrak coordinates security with local law enforcement, does counterterrorism exercises and patrols its tracks and stations, Kulm said. It also is reconfiguring stations to make them safer from potential attack.

"It's no surprise and no secret that overseas terrorists have targeted rail transportation, and so we have, as I say, many seen and unseen measures that we have put in place and continue to improve upon," Kulm said.

More fatalities in surface attacks
Although popular attention has tended to focus on airliner attacks, far more people have died worldwide from surface transport assaults, Jenkins said.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, militant attacks on the United States, there have been 75 assaults on airliners, with 157 fatalities, he said.

During the same period, there were 1,800 attacks on surface transport, with nearly 4,000 people killed. Among them were attacks on Madrid in 2004 and on Mumbai in 2006 that each killed about 200 people, and a 2005 London bombing that claimed 52 lives.

In the United States, only one person has died from an extremist rail attack in recent decades, when Amtrak's Sunset Limited was derailed in Arizona in 1995. Responsibility was claimed by a group calling itself Sons of the Gestapo and the saboteurs have not been found.

The United States has more than 200,000 miles of railroad, with about 21,000 miles used by Amtrak. Amtrak carried 31.2 million passengers in the last fiscal year, its ninth record year in the last 10, Kulm said. As a comparison, about 642 million passengers were carried within the U.S. by airlines in 2012, according to the Department of Transportation. 

Elliot G. Sander, a former chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York, which runs two of the biggest U.S. commuter railroads, said public awareness was critical to countering potential attacks.

"One cannot understate the importance of the participation of the public, in terms of eyes and ears," he said.

Far fewer security personnel
The Department of Homeland Security spent $136 million in the 2013 fiscal year on surface transportation security, with 775 personnel. Aviation security received $5.3 billion and has 53,000 personnel.

Special Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams carry out random baggage and security checks at train, subway and bus stations as well as at truck weighing stations.

Stephane Jourdain / AFP - Getty Images file

An Amtrak police officer and a sniffer dog patrol at Union Station in Washington on May 6, 2011, five days after Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. Intelligence seized from his compound showed al Qaeda pondered strikes on U.S. trains on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. officials said.

Created after the Madrid railway bombing, the VIPR teams carried out more than 9,300 operations in fiscal 2011, according to the Department of Homeland Security's 2013 budget request.

The Transportation Security Administration was criticized last year by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, for failing to carry out analysis of railroad security information.

The GAO also criticized the TSA for inconsistent reporting requirements from rail agencies and failure to inspect a rail service the GAO did not name. The TSA concurred with the GAO's recommendations for improvement.

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Six people were injured during their Monday morning commute in Jersey City when an escalator packed with commuters inexplicably changed directions, sending riders tumbling down the moving stairwell. 

At 9 a.m., passengers were traveling up from a station platform at the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City, N.J., when it suddenly started moving downward.  

Port Authority spokesman Ron Marsico said officials don't know what caused the escalator to malfunction.

Cell phone video footage shows passengers stepping forward quickly in an effort to counteract the escalator. Several started yelling, "Stop!" They quickly gave in, however, and the escalator carried them down to the lower platform. A law enforcement official arrived within a minute.  

Read more at NBC New York

Five people were taken to the hospital with injuries that are not life-threatening, Marsico said.

Commuter Nick Lukish said he was headed to work and was halfway up the escalator when it started going down.
 
The 33-year-old said he some people on the escalator jumped onto an adjacent escalator. Lukish says he sustained cuts and bruises.
 
Two of the station's three escalators have been shut down. Exchange Place remained open to commuters Monday. 

At least two people were injured when a car was struck by a freight train at an intersection in Clayton, N.J., authorities told NBC News.

The crash occurred just after 9 a.m. at the intersection of West Chestnut and South Broad Street, NBC10 in Philadelphia reported.

An operator at the Clayton Police Department said two people were taken to hospitals after the crash. It was unclear if there were other people in the car and how the accident occurred.

Clayton is a town of about 8,000 about 25 miles south of Philadelphia.

Check back for more details on this breaking news story.

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The U.S. Department of Transportation says it's easier for police to spot a motorist chatting on a cellphone than it is to catch someone texting while driving.

The federal government is giving $550,000 to Connecticut and Massachusetts for pilot projects to crack down on people who text while driving.

Each state is getting $275,000 grants to develop “high-visibility anti-texting enforcement programs,” which will include stationing police spotters on highway overpasses looking for motorists who can’t keep their fingers off the keypad.

 “We have come a long way in our fight against distracted driving, but there is still much work to be done,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Tuesday in announcing the grants. “Texting behind the wheel is especially dangerous, which is why we’re working with states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to address this important safety issue.”

The money will be used to develop and train police officers on better methods for spotting texting drivers, and to develop media campaigns that alert the public to the dangers of texting and driving.

The Department of Transportation says distracted driving has become even more dangerous with the proliferation of cellphones. In 2010, more than 3,000 people were killed in distracted driving crashes that included texting, talking on a cellphone, eating and drinking, grooming, and other activities.

The agency cites research that found drivers who use handheld devices are four times more likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves.  Text messaging creates a crash risk 23 times worse than driving while not distracted, according to research.

Thirty-nine states have laws on the books that specifically ban texting, and 10 states have laws that prohibit the use of handheld cell phones while driving, according to federal transportation officials. 

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Despite such laws, prior demonstration programs conducted in Hartford, Conn., and Syracuse, N.Y., found that it's more difficult to detect texting drivers than drivers talking on a handheld device, the Transportation Department said.  The vast majority of tickets issued under those programs were for handheld phone use – only about 5 percent were for texting violations.

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“While it is relatively easier for law enforcement to determine illegal handheld cellphone use by observing the position of the phone at the driver’s ear, the dangerous practice of texting while driving is often not as obvious,” said David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a press release. “These two new demonstration programs will help identify real-world protocols and practices to better detect if a person is texting while driving.”

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The grants will help Connecticut and Massachusetts develop anti-texting enforcement protocols and techniques, such as using stationary patrols, spotters on overpasses or elevated roadways and roving patrols. The results will be documented for the benefit of other states.

“I look forward to seeing the results of the new enforcement programs announced today as we work to put an end to this deadly behavior,” LaHood wrote Tuesday on  the Transportation Department’s fastlane.dot.gov blog. 

You can find more government information on distracted driving at distraction.gov.

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The Texas Department of Transportation on Wednesday signed a 50-year deal with a Spanish company to add private, for-profit toll lanes along Interstate 35 north of downtown Fort Worth -- a stretch of highway considered the most congested in the state.

"This is a major step forward and a day to celebrate for those who drive that Interstate 35 corridor every day," said Texas Transportation Commissioner Bill Meadows, of Fort Worth. "People are tired of sitting in congestion, and we want to do something about it."

Construction on two toll lanes in each direction is set to begin next year and finish in 2018. They will be built next to the existing free lanes.

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The deal is with NTE Mobility Partners Segments 3 LLC, which is a subsidiary of Cintra, a Spanish company that builds similar toll roads around the world, including several in North Texas.

Critics such as state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, say Texas is selling its future.

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"I'm against toll roads," he said. "But I'm even more strongly against privately owned toll roads, and that's what we're confronting here. And frankly, the way it's being presented is, 'My way or the highway.'"

"We shouldn't be exporting our local transportation dollars to Spain," he said.

Supporters say it's a creative way to leverage the state's limited budget to solve the problem. The project will add $1.7 billion in infrastructure improvements, officials said. 

85 mph! Texas to open fastest highway in US

"Bottom line is, we don't have the financial resources necessary to meet the kind of growth that we've had," Meadows said.

The deal will be reviewed by the Texas Legislative Budget Board and the Texas Attorney General's Office.

A public hearing on the plan is scheduled for Thursday at 6 p.m. at the transportation department's Fort Worth District Regional Training Center at 2501 Southwest Loop 820.

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A Miami-Dade Metrorail train pulls into a station in Miami. The service's ridership increased by 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

Rising gas prices apparently helped drive a 5 percent increase in public transit ridership in the first three months of 2012, the biggest first-quarter increase in 13 years, transit figures show.

NBC stations WGEM of Quincy, Ill., and KTVZ of Bend, Ore., contributed to this report by M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

The American Public Transportation Association reported Monday that Americans took almost 125 million more rides on public transit in January, February and March than they did in the same period last year — an increase of 4.98 percent, the largest since the first quarter of 1999.

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Ridership fell sharply after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and had remained relatively stagnant until last year, according to the organization's tallies, which go back to 1996. 

But in the first quarter of last year, the number of rides on trains, light and commuter rail, buses and streetcars began rising year over year — beginning about the time U.S. retail gas prices began their steep climb from an average of $3.10 a gallon in January 2011 to $3.96 a gallon three months later.

Read the full report (.pdf)

"More people are choosing to save money by taking public transportation when gas prices are high," said Michael Melaniphy, president and chief executive of the APTA, a Washington policy group that is lobbying Congress for new surface transportation legislation that would increase spending on public transit.

Karen Friend, manager of Cascades East Transit of central Oregon, said her agency's ridership has increased by 23 percent in the past year.

Saying the increase is probably "due to gas prices," Friend told NBC station KTVZ-TV of Bend, Ore., that "it was to be expected — it definitely was."

But gas prices aren't the only reason for the growth, Melaniphy said in a statement analyzing the APTA figures. With local economies rebounding, more people are commuting to new jobs, some of them on public transportation, he said.

"As we look for positive signs that the economy is recovering, it's great to see that we are having record ridership at public transit systems throughout the country," he said.

One of those systems is the Quincy Transit service in Quincy, Ill., which is racing to build more bus infrastructure to meet record demand. Its ridership jumped from about 400,000 in 2010 to about 500,000 last year, the city reported late last month.

There are some cautions about the APTA figures, however. 

For one thing, passengers are counted each time they board a vehicle, meaning each segment of a trip with transfers — from one bus to another, for example, or from a train to a bus at a transit station — is counted as a separate trip.

And not all transit systems are included in the collation, especially rail systems. For those systems, the organization assumes the same percentage growth it finds for the reporting agencies.

Still, for many people, public options remain vital, said Catherine Hayden of Quincy, Ill.

"If you don't have a car and you have to go someplace and you have to be there — even people that work — they're very dependent on it," Hayden told NBC station WGEM-TV. "I take the bus to the doctor. I take the bus shopping — anything that I need to do."

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KPRC-TV

Officials said fog and smoke from marsh wildfires created zero visibility in early Thursday morning.

More than 50 people were injured, four of them critically, in a massive 41-vehicle pileup Thursday in southeast Texas, authorities said.

The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office said the pileup began shortly before 5:30 a.m. when a collision on foggy east-bound state Highway 73 in LaBelle, near Beaumont, started a chain reaction. 

Rescue agencies ran out of ambulances after all 20 of the area's units rushed to the scene, and crews began transporting victims on shuttle buses with a paramedic on board, NBC station KPRC of Houston reported. 

All told, 54 people were injured, authorities said. Four were reported in critical condition.

Officials said fog and smoke from marsh wildfires created zero visibility in the area. 

Before the collisions, eastbound traffic appeared to be moving about 70 mph despite the heavy fog and limited visibility, state troopers told The Beaumont Enterprise.  Drivers in the other direction apparently were moving more slowly, they said.

Investigators said some of the cars left no skid marks, indicating their drivers didn't see the stopped vehicles until they crashed.

"I was driving straight down this road, and all of a sudden … just smoke," Jesus Gonzalez told KPRC, describing "a wall of fog, flying objects, a little bit of everything."

Gonzalez and his friends, who weren't hurt, jumped out of their car to help others and were credited with carrying two people to safety.

"They had a gas leak in their car, so we definitely had to get them out," said one of them, Basilio Renovato. 

Jefferson County sheriff's Deputy Rod Carroll said the accidents were spread over more than three-quarters of a mile. More than a dozen other vehicles skidded off into the median but didn't hit anything, authorities said.

"Thank God it was before the school buses started running," Carroll told KPRC.

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Insurance and safety advocates said Tuesday that nationwide restrictions on teenage driver's licenses could save 2,000 lives and billions of dollars each year.

In a report released Tuesday, the National Safety Council, a congressionally chartered independent research agency, asked what would happen if a variety of laws known generally as "graduated driver licensing," or GDL, were fully adopted in all 50 states.

Besides saving about 2,000 lives, universal adoption would also save more than $13 billion a year, said the report, which was funded by the Allstate Foundation, charitable and research group supported by insurance giant Allstate Corp.

GDL laws include more than just legislating that teenagers can't get driver's licenses until they're 18. They also encompass bans on texting and other cellphone use while driving, restrictions on nighttime driving by 16- and 17-year-olds and limits on the number of passengers in a car driven by a teen. They're currently a patchwork, with some states' having adopted most restrictions and others' having adopted as few as one, said John Ulczycki, the safety council's group vice president for research.

Projections on death were derived from baseline data published in a 2007 report (.pdf) examining GDL laws by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, and "what we know from (that) study is that when a state passes a GDL with one component, it gets a 4 percent reduction in deaths," Ulczycki told msnbc.com.

More on graduated driver licensing:

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has compiled all 50 state GDL laws
• The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety maintains a list of frequently asked questions about GDL laws
• Full National Safety Council report (.pdf)

Ulczycki acknowledged that the 2007 AAA report used data that went back as far as 1994, but he said that because the safety council was looking simply at lives saved year over year, "the total number of lives saved each year" was statistically sound.

For the cost savings, the safety council used its own annual data on crashes involving teenage drivers, compiling reports on medical expenses, wage and insurance losses, police and ambulance costs, vehicle damage and costs to employers for lost productivity. The report's projections were compared to costs from 2009, when the safety council calculated that teen crashes cost the U.S. $38.3 billion annually.

Ulczycki said the council asked what the cost savings would be, based on the 2009 data, if all 50 states were to enact comprehensive GDL legislation. The answer: $13.6 billion a year.

That's a relatively recent date, meaning the council's projections for the future are unlikely to be significantly affected by the impact of inflation. That point is important because Congress is moving closer to taking up legislation to reauthorize federal highway spending. The highway bill often includes new federal roadway safety mandates — which the safety council heavily emphasized in announcing the report Tuesday.

Federal traffic safety data indicate that crashes involving teenage drivers are the No. 1 killer of teenagers in the U.S. Overall, more than 81,000 people died in crashes involving drivers ages 15 to 20 from 2000 to 2009.

Story: Ten safety tips for first-time drivers

Vicky Dinges, vice president of public social responsibility for Allstate, which funded the report, called teen driving deaths a real public health crisis."

"What's worse is that these deaths are avoidable," she said.

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