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Sunni rebels had threatened to strike Hezbollah strongholds to retaliate against the Iranian-backed Shiite group for sending fighters to assist Syrian President Bashar Assad.
• Street fighting between rival Lebanese groups has been relatively common since the end of the country's 1975-1990 civil war, but rocket or artillery attacks on Beirut neighborhoods are rare.
• The rockets were launched hours after the militant group's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, vowed to help propel Assad to victory in Syria's civil war and warned that his overthrow would give rise to extremists.
• One rocket fired Sunday landed in the Mar Mikhael district on the southern edge of the capital, striking a car exhibit near a church on the street and causing all four casualties, a Lebanese army statement said. Another struck the second floor of an apartment in a building in Chiyah district south of Beirut, about two kilometers (one mile) away from Mar Mikhael. The apartment's balcony appeared peppered with shrapnel, but no one was wounded.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some call it wishful thinking, but President Barack Obama has all but declared an end to the global war on terror.
• Obama is not claiming final victory over extremists who still seek to kill Americans and other Westerners. Instead, he is refocusing the long struggle against terrorism that lies ahead, steering the United States away from what he calls an equally frightening threat -- a country in a state of perpetual war. In doing so, Obama recasts the image of the terrorists themselves, from enemy warriors to cowardly thugs and resets the relationship between the U.S. and Islam.
• His speech Thursday was designed to move America's mindset away from a war footing and refine and recalibrate his own counterterrorism strategy. Obama asserted that al-Qaida is "on the path to defeat," reducing the scale of terrorism to pre-Sept. 11 levels. That means that with the Afghanistan war winding down, Obama is unlikely to commit troops in large numbers to any conflict -- in Syria or other countries struggling with instability in the uncertain aftermath of the Arab Spring -- unless, as his critics fear, he tragically has underestimated al-Qaida's staying power.
• "Wishing the defeat of terrorists does not make it so," said Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee

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