Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) and ICT Business Promotion Council (aibipisi) aditoriyame basis through the 'Business Software Showcase, the three-day exhibition is accounting software.The Institute of Chartered Accounts of Bangladesh (aisiebira) president Abdus Salam, ephasie chief guest inaugurated theSunday, 26 May 2013
Business Software Showcase <>
Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) and ICT Business Promotion Council (aibipisi) aditoriyame basis through the 'Business Software Showcase, the three-day exhibition is accounting software.The Institute of Chartered Accounts of Bangladesh (aisiebira) president Abdus Salam, ephasie chief guest inaugurated the
<>|| Internet speed will increase
The speed of the Internet is still not satisfactory. So the speed of reduction, but also will increase. Sunday 45 th meeting of the Standing Committee of the Parliament is not recommended.In addition to international incoming and outgoing calls in the minutes of the 6 million to promote besite told a parliamentary committee. At the same time, all kinds of activities to strengthen monitoring to prevent||><|| Not decreasing the price of the mobile Internet ||><||
Since 1996. Keywords are associated with the Internet through Bangladesh. 1 lakh would be spent on the Internet per emabipiesa of 0. But at the BTCL would not have sold any byandauithada.BTCL and myango jointly at the byandauithada sells. However, the price of bandwidth kamaleo installments of the consumers of the benefits are going to remain adharai. The mobile operator and Internet sebadatara abakathamote investing in huge gathers.|| <>The captioned inexpensive iPhone 5!
Rumors of the iPhone gunjane mukhara world. It increases the level of cult ayapalapremira. Speculation about the inexpensive version of the iPhone - imagine the level reached endlessly.The truth is coming out a lot of research prior forecast. Captioned in the coming year could match the experimental models of the iPhone 5. Some of the information in the world media.Thursday, 16 May 2013
||||||Pebble Nabs $15M In Funding, Outs PebbleKit SDK And Pebble Sports API To Spur Smartwatch App Development|||||
Get ready for a whole lot more Pebble. The smartwatch company just announced several software enhancements for the Pebble and a $15M Series A led by Charles River Ventures. Pebble is not going to sit around, scared of iWatch rumors. They’re plowing forward on their own accord and committed to providing the best platform possible for developers and consumers.
|| At I/O, Google Will Be Tracking Things Like Noise Level And Air Quality With Hundreds Of Arduino-Based Sensors ||
If you’re attending Google I/O this week, you will be a part of an experiment from the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team. On its blog today, the team outlined its plan to gather a bunch of environmental information happening around you as you meander around the Moscone Center.Saturday, 11 May 2013
Facebook]] Home downloads reach 1M; App quickly losing popularity
Facebook Home has reached a milestone: one million downloads. Facebook Home is a software suite for Android users that lets you replaces your standard home screen with a stream of friends’ posts and photos. For the time being, however, less than half of a percent of Facebook’s one billion users have downloaded the app.
Microsoft+++responds to 'extreme' Windows 8 criticism
Microsoft posted a rebuttal to the mounting attacks on the company and Windows 8.
Microsoft appreciates the feedback on Windows 8. Up to a point.Chris Brown's creepy curbside art reportedly scaring "Los Angeles" neighbors
Grammy winning musician Chris Brown's neighbors are unhappy with the creepy art he's chosen to have painted along the curb of his Hollywood Hills home.
International Space Station switches from Windows to "Linux, for improved reliability
The United Space Alliance, which manages the computers aboard the International Space Station in association with NASA, has announced that the Windows XP[Astronauts Perform Emergency Spacewalk To Fix Ammonia Leak]
On Saturday afternoon, NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn successfully completed a spacewalk to repair a leaky component on the outside of the International Space Station.
A problem with the station was first noted on Thursday, when Station Commander Chris Hadfield noticed a steady stream of ammonia “snowflakes” on the outside of the station. Ammonia coolant is used on
]][[Printing Electronics Just Got Easier
A new technique developed by researchers in China allows easier printing of electronic components onto paper.
Do-it-yourself electronics manufacturing may soon be possiblewith your desktop printer, say the designers of a new system that directly prints electronic circuits onto ordinary paper.
Friday, 10 May 2013
LG''" Optimus G Pro (AT&T)
FrontThe Optimus G Pro fits in a 1920-by-1080 IPS LCD screen by using a very narrow bezel. The screen is bright and extremely sharp at 400 ppi.[[Asus]] VivoTab TF810C: First look at a solid Windows 8 tablet with pen
Summary: A new VivoTab arrived yesterday and the first impression of this Windows 8 tablet with the keyboard dock and pen is favorable.[F.C.C. Advances Plan for Faster In-Flight Wi-Fi]
Using Wi-Fi on a Southwest flight. A new proposal would increase in-flight Internet speeds to about 300 megabits per second.
WASHINGTON — It may soon be easier and faster to surf the Web at 30,000 feet.
Atlantis Discovered???
Off the coast of Brazil, in one of the earth’s least explored waters, geologists have made an intriguing find.
Geologists are not generally all that excitable. After all, developments in their field generally take place over millions of years. But when scientists began scouring the Atlantic off southeast Brazil in 2011, they suspected that they were on to something—
and something very big, at that.
Two years—and half a dozen deep-sea expeditions later—the geological world is abuzz. Brazilian marine geologists are poring over the rubble dredged up from the undersea excavations in the so-called Rio Grande Elevation, and the research done by a Japanese exploration vessel, which deployed a mini, three-man submarine to comb the same waters before sailing on to Rio.
So what did the rubble reveal?
This week, a joint Brazilian-Japanese research team broke its long silence, officially unveiling its find with a head-turning and slightly mischievous teaser: Could this be a “Brazilian Atlantis?”
“Today we believe we may have found vestiges of an unknown continent,” Roberto Ventura Santos, head of the Brazilian Geological Service, told The Daily Beast. The evidence? Not gold but granite. “We expected to find volcanic rock and debris, typical of a seabed, not granite. Granite is typically found on the continental shelf.”
And yet, as Santos pointed out, this was 1,800 miles from the Brazilian shore, where the water is 5,900 feet deep.
Shinkai and two of its crew members. (Brazilian Geological Service)
No one in Rio or Tokyo expects to find traces of human life on the ocean floor—never mind the ruins of the iconic Atlantis of Plato’s prose: an island where the marine god Poseidon is fabled to have lined his palaces with gold and silver and where elephants and “wild beasts of prey” roamed.
However, if the scientists’ hunch pans out, they will have stumbled upon the earth scientists’ equivalent of hidden treasure. Proof of an underwater continent could be a major piece of a geological puzzle allowing scientists to reassemble events of literally seismic proportion that stretch back tens of millions of years.
The geologists’ Atlantis is a glimpse into the geological upheaval that around 200 million years ago created our world as we know it. The earth shrugged and shifting tectonic plates forced the supercontinent Pangaea to break apart to form the African continent in the east and South America to the west.
Researchers now believe that the high plateau in the high seas might just be a sunken remnant of that earth-moving event. And with this discovery, for the first time, scientists have what could be their best chance to test the theory in the field.
“If this proves to be an unknown continent, we can possibly simulate how life on the planet evolved.”
After the Brazilian research vessel searched the bed of the Rio Grande Elevation, the Japanese submersible Shinkai moved in for a closer look. Designed to descend up to 21,300 feet and withstand crushing water pressure 500 times greater than at the surface, the rugged mini-sub took seven different dives during which the crew photographed and took measurements across the massive underwater plateau. They found irregular, craggy peaks and valleys, with one underwater mountain rising some 9,800 feet from the ocean floor. The next step will be extensive drilling by a giant pile driver device that will pull up core samples from across the submerged plateau.
This is not the first time science has gone searching for lost worlds. Ventura is reading everything he can on similar expeditions, including the recent find in the Indian Ocean, where geologists have dredged off Mauritius, near Madagascar. “There they are looking over traces of zirconium silicate [another mineral found in the continental shelf] mixed with sand. The difference is we have found solid rock.”
Ventura said the fragments of granite retrieved from the Rio Grande Elevantion are more direct evidence of a possible continental landmass. “This could be our smoking gun,” he said.
Eugênio, an engineer, and one of the crew members on the submarine. (Brazilian Geological Service)
But since science is a slippery vocation, Ventura is holding his enthusiasm on tight reins. “There is the possibility that the granite could be a chunk of ballast from a sunken ship,” he said, though acknowledging that the chances of dredging up a scrap from a shipwreck a mile below the ocean’s surface seem improbably slim. “We need to look closer.”
Ironically, the Brazilians had no intentions of finding a continent in the middle of the Atlantic. Rather, the geologists set sail a few years ago as part of a government plan to boost growth by building research capability and offshore technological know-how. Both skill sets would come in handy as the country ramps up to exploit its offshore oil, the 50 billion to 80 billion barrel cache of crude oil recently found in ultra-deep waters of the Atlantic.
The Brazilian Geological Service teamed up with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), which was drawn by the fact that this stretch of the Atlantic is one of the least explored of the world’s ocean regions.
The fact that the Rio Grande rise also harbors traces of iron and manganese was not lost on the minerals industry. With some of the world’s biggest onshore reserves of minable minerals, like iron, gold, nickel, and manganese, Brazil is not yet part of the blue-water gold rush. But the global scramble for natural resources is already driving mining from the mainland to the ocean floor.
So far, it is science, not mineral stakes that motivates geologists like Ventura. “The oceans are where life began,” he said. “If this proves to be an unknown continent, we can possibly simulate how life on the planet evolved.”
[Studies of the Past Show an Ice-Free Arctic Could Be in Our Future]
As I wrote last week, the carbon concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere is nearing 400 parts per million (ppm). (399.71 ppm right now, according to the Scripps readings Mauna Loa.) The last time carbon levels in the atmosphere were that high was at least 800,000 years ago, and quite possibly much, much longer. What we do know is that the climate was much warmer—up to 11 F warmer on average—and very, very different than the one we’ve lived in rather successfully for thousands of years.
Just how different the climate was is underscored by a new study published in the May 9 Science. Researchers at American, Russian and German universities traveled in the winter of 2009 to the ice-covered Lake El’gygytgyn in far northeastern Russia, more than 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The lake was formed some 3.6 million years ago when a massive meteorite struck the Earth’s surface, gauging out a deep crater. Sediment collected in the crater over time, which has made the lake a gold mine for geoscientists, who are able to analyze the past climate of the surrounding area through the rock record.
The scientists took core samples of the sediment—records in rock of the past that go back millions of years ago. And their findings suggest that the Arctic was very warm between 3.6 and 2.2 million years ago, during the middle Pliocene and Early Pleistocene epochs. So warm in fact—with balmy summer temperatures in the between 59 and 61 F, more than 14 F warmer than they are today—that the Arctic was largely without sea ice, and was thickly forested, more like southern Canada than the forbidding region we know today. And this came during a time period when atmospheric carbon levels were not much higher than they are today.
Lead author Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst said in a statement:
While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there.
And that detective novel may not have a happy ending—at least for human civilization as we know it. As the authors write in the Science paper: “this could tell us where we are going in the near future. In other words, the Earth system response to small changes in carbon dioxide is bigger than suggested by earlier climate models.”
There are still pieces to the climate puzzle that need to be filled in. The study shows that unusually warm temperatures in the Arctic seemed to persist even as glaciers we’re begin to expand in the Northern Hemisphere. But studies like this one help us understand just how changeable our climate—so secure during the history of human civilization—has been in the past, and underscores just how momentous our impact on the planet through the burning of fossil fuels is likely to be. We are well into uncharted territory.
But there’s something about the sheer scale of what’s happening that makes it hard for us to really comprehend. The same day the Science paper came out, a new Yale University poll came out showing that the percentage of Americans who believed global warming had dropped to 63% from 70% in the fall—a change that pollsters blamed on the unusually cold winter and spring that hit parts of the country. That’s not surprising—belief in climate change has usually been broad but deep, easily affected in either direction by passing weather events. But as the deep past show us, the climate works on time scales far bigger than a single season. It’s something we may have to experience before we can ever understand it.
[NASA'S] Hubble Space Telescope Discovers Earth-like Planet Debris In Dead Stars' Atmospheres
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered debris of Earth-like planets in the atmospheres of two dead stars.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered debris of Earth-like planets in the atmospheres of two dead stars that are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster named Hyades."We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets," researcher Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge said in a statement. "When these stars were born, they built planets, and there's a good chance that they currently retain some of them. The signs of rocky debris we are seeing are evidence of this - it is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our solar system."
Silicon was found in the atmospheres of these two white dwarfs. This is an important element in the rocky material with which the Earth was formed. These rocky materials are also known to have low levels of carbon which was also discovered in the atmospheres of the two dead stars."The one thing the white dwarf pollution technique gives us that we won't get with any other planet detection technique is the chemistry of solid planets," Farihi said. "Based on the silicon-to-carbon ratio in our study, for example, we can actually say that this material is basically Earth-like."After analyzing the light from the two stars, scientists concluded that there are planetary systems around stars in star clusters. It also helped gain an understanding of the future of our solar system.
Facebook """updating Home after one million downloads in a month
Facebook's Home app has been installed just one million times since its launch last month, remaining a minor access point for the social network's increasingly mobile active user base.
The Home app could have been a boon for HTC — HTC was one of two handset manufacturers whose devices were supported at launch — and might yet turn out to be, but so far the app and the HTC First smartphone that debuted alongside Home have been slow movers.Home was installed 500,000 times in the first two weeks after launch and the rate has not accelerated since. US carrier AT&T this week announced it would almost give the HTC First away on a two-year contract with an upfront cost of 99 cents. It was originally on sale under contract for $99.Home offers supported Android devices a Facebook family of apps that puts the social network's feeds and Messages at the forefront of the user interface.It's also thought Facebook has added Home support for the HTC One and, unofficially, the Samsung Galaxy S4. According to Android Central, while the S4 doesn't have official Home support, users can get access to it by selecting the 'Use Home anyway' option on the Facebook app. Facebook promised at the launch of Home that both the S4 and HTC One would get Home support eventually.
The Home app now has over 8,400 one star reviews on Google Play compared with just over 2,800 five star reviews. Facebook has pored over the 1 star reviews, according to director of product Adam Mosseri, who told media on Thursday that complaints centred on missing features, such as folders for apps, and the inability to rearrange apps.A software update was expected to go live on Google Play on Thursday, however at the time of writing it had not been published. Facebook users are increasingly coming to rely on its mobile site and apps as a primary point of interaction, with monthly mobile active users up over the last year 56 percent to 751 million. The growth rate for mobile only active users is even faster, which have more than doubled since the first quarter of 2012 to 189 million in the last quarter. Facebook has 1.1 billion users.
Mozilla's "Firefox" OS will also appear on high-end phones
Mozilla expects its Firefox OS to become the third major mobile OS.
IDG News Service - The upcoming Firefox OS will appear on higher-end smartphones, and not just entry-level handsets, with Sony expected to release a premium device running the operating system, a Mozilla executive said."Sony is known for quality and user experience. So they are targeting for very very high (end). We are in joint discussions on the kind of device and what's the product," said Li Gong, Mozilla's senior vice president for mobile devices.
Mozilla's Firefox OS is among several fledgling mobile operating systems all vying for a presence in today's market dominated by Android and Apple's iOS. To start off, Firefox OS is targeting entry-level smartphone users and the first handsets will arrive in select markets in Europe and South America this July, Gong said in an interview Wednesday on the sidelines of the Global Mobile Internet Conference.Mozilla, however, is in talks with additional vendors on developing higher-end phones using the OS, Gong said "The low-end entry point devices are good point to enter the market. But that doesn't mean we can't scale up or we don't want to scale. We do want to scale up," he said. "But an ecosystem takes some time to build."Already, handset makers Sony, LG, ZTE, Huawei and Alcatel are working with Mozilla to develop phones running the Firefox OS. In addition, 18 telecom operators want to use the operating system, Gong said.The initial industry support has Mozilla confident that its operating system can stand alongside Android and iOS as the third major operating system in the smartphone market."I can tell you there will be a third one (mobile OS) and it's going to be us." Gong said. "Why it's going to be us? It's because we are the only company that takes a pure approach. We are entirely open. Not only open source, but open process. No price, no nothing."Google also markets Android as open source. But the behind-the-scenes development of the OS and its upcoming versions are still closed off to telecom operators and hardware manufacturers, according to Gong. These industry players can only make tweaks to Android once a new version is fully released."They may like it or not like it. But they have to take it," he said. "People like to see us because we are totally transparent....
"Facebook" Is Buying Social Mapping/Traffic App Waze For Up To $1B To Court Mobile Users
Facebook appears to be close to makinganother billion-dollar acquisition to once again ramp up its mobile efforts: according to three reports in the Israeli press at Calcalist and sister publication Ynet andThe Marker (all in Hebrew), Facebook has approached Waze, the social mapping and traffic app maker, and is now in advanced due dilligence on a deal that Calcalist puts at between $800 million and $1 billion. The negotiations between the social network and crowdsourced mapping app apparently began six months ago.
We have been digging too and have picked up confirmation from a source that both sides have privately confirmed that the deal is happening, and that the pricing reported first by the Calcalist is accurate. The main issue right now, the source said, is whether to keep Waze in Israel or take it to the U.S., as Facebook did with two previous Israel acqusitions. Those were of feature phone interface developer Snaptu (bought for up to $70 million in March 2011) and facial recognition specialistFace.com (bought in June 2012 for $50-60 million).
But! Facebook and Waze have already come back to us with flat non-responses. “We do not comment on rumors or speculation about the business,” a spokesperson at Waze told TechCrunch. The company tells me that it currently has over 47 million active users — more than double what it had in July last year when it reported 20 million.
“We won’t comment on speculation,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
However, if the rumors are true, adding Waze to Facebook makes a lot of sense in some respects: Facebook has been putting a lot of effort into its mobile business, which now has 751 million monthly active users as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 54% year-over-year. That puts mobile on a faster track at the moment than Facebook’s desktop business, which currently has 1.11 billion MAUs, an increase of 23% year-over-year.
The most recent of its movements on mobile services is Facebook Home, an Android-based launcher that lets a user embed a connection into their Facebook social graph across their entire mobile experience with services like the ever-present Chat Heads. On another track, Facebook has for years now been building up a business around location-based check-ins, which also include local deals. A service like Waze, with social networking and crowdsourcing of information part of its DNA, fits perfectly into that landscape.
This would not be Facebook’s first 10-figure acquisition in the mobile space. Just over one year ago, leading up to its IPO, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, a deal that had a large portion in stock and ended up being worth more like $747 million when it finally got approved. That, too, gave Facebook a big leap into mobile services: while Instagram these days also has a handy way of viewing profiles on the desktop web, at its heart it is a wildly popular mobile app that for many works as a social network in its own right.
Nor would this be the first time that Waze has been in the crosshairs of acquisition rumors. One deal that was hotly reported by many, including us, involved Apple buying the mapping company. Of course that ended up not happening, although the two clearly were talking a lot because Waze ended up being a significant part of Apple Maps. The startup has raised $67 million in VC funding from backers including Kleiner Perkins, BlueRun Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, and Li Ka-shing.
Facebook earlier this year reported that it passed 1 billion users, and it’s likely that the next billion will not be in the U.S. Waze has around one-third of its users in the U.S. with the rest worldwide. Facebook’s past acquisition of another Israeli startup, Snaptu, which develops services for feature phones, was another deal that helped the social network tackle the burgeoning population of mobile users in developing markets; Waze, however, would help the company take aim specifically at smartphone users.
While Waze’s R&D is in Israel, its U.S. offices, and its CEO Noam Bardin, are based in (Facebook’s old haunt) Palo Alto, where the firm recently redecorated its front window.
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Apple"" Seeks Android Source Code Records in Samsung Suit
Apple Inc. (AAPL), taking its patent fight to Google Inc. (GOOG) through its infringement litigation against Samsung Electronics Co. (005930), is asking a judge to force Google to turn over documents related to its Android operating system.Apple told U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in San Jose, California, that Google is improperly withholding information about what terms it’s using to find the documents Apple has requested in pretrial information sharing.
Apple, as part of its second patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung in the same court, argues that Android is used in all of Samsung’s allegedly infringing products and “provides much of the accused functionality” in Apple’s claims, according to a court filing.“It’s a question of transparency,” Mark Lyon, a lawyer for Apple, told Grewal yesterday, referring to the documents. “We have concerns that they’re not doing a full search.”
The dispute over evidence gathering comes in the case filed last year by Cupertino, California-based Apple covering technology in newer smartphones made by both companies, including its iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy S III.Matthew Warren, a lawyer for Google who also represents Samsung, told Grewal that Apple made a “strategic decision” in filing its case “to keep Google off the complaint.” As a third-party to the case, Warren said, Google doesn’t have the same legal rights that Apple and Samsung have, in particular with respect to “reciprocal discovery.”
Search Terms
Turning over the search terms Apple wants may lead to “future discovery that we don’t think they’re entitled to” and give Apple “ideas about how to proceed that they wouldn’t have had.”The second patent suit follows a previous case in which a jury awarded Apple $1.05 billion, finding Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung infringed six of the iPhone maker’s mobile-device patents. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, correcting what she said was the jury’s error, lowered the damages total to $639.4 million and ordered a new trial in November for some of the products at issue in that case.The earlier case is Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., 11-cv-1846, and the second case is Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., 12-cv-630, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).
Samsung Galaxy S4 vs iPhone 5 head to head review
Samsung Galaxy S4 vs iPhone 5 head to head review
We see if the S4's screen and software add-ons can beat the iPhone's quality build and performance
"Google" Translate for Android Gets Phrase Syncing.
Google this week rolled out an update for its Translate for Android app, making commonly used translations more accessible on the go.
Google Translate lets you save your favorite translations into a so-called Phrasebook, but until now there was no easy way to access them from your phone or tablet. This week's update lets you automatically sync all the saved translations in your Phrasebook to your Android device, so they're right at your fingertips whenever you need them."When you're traveling in another country, you want quick access to your favorite translated phrases — whether it's 'Where can I find a museum?' or 'Do you know where the bathroom is?' the Google Translate team wrote in a blog post. "With your favorite phrases synced across devices, we hope you'll never be at a loss for words again."To sync your phrases, select "Phrasebook" in the app menu, then tap the "Sign in" button to log in to your Google account. Users of the app will notice that the new Phrasebook option replaces the old Favorites feature. But don't worry about losing your saved phrases — they are now part of your Phrasebook.In addition, the update also bolsters the camera input feature, which lets you snap a photo of text you need translated. This feature now supports 16 additional languages, including Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish.
The updated app is available for download in Google Play.
Bangladesh "Islamic Politician" Sentenced to Death
Critics have accused Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of using the tribunals to decimate the country's opposition parties ahead of elections scheduled for next year.Bangladesh fought a nine-month war against Pakistan in 1971 to obtain its independence. The government says three million people died in the violence, although other estimates put the death toll lower.
Latest "Bangladesh" factory fire kills owner, seven others
DHAKA, Bangladesh -- Eight people died in a fire that filled stairwells with acrid smoke at a sweater factory here, the latest deadly incident to hit Bangladesh's huge and weakly regulated garment processing sector.The fire happened in the Mirpur area of north Dhaka, where soldiers are still retrieving corpses from the ruins of a factory collapse in which over 900 garment workers died last month.That collapse has focused attention on the safety of the garment industry here, which makes textiles and clothing for export to many Western retailers. Bangladesh is the world's second largest apparel maker after China.Wednesday's fire was fed by huge piles of acrylic products used to make sweaters at the building for Tung Hai Sweaters Ltd., the Daily Star newspaper reported. Outside the smoke-blackened premises, employees gathered Thursday morning to share sadness at the deaths and concern about their own livelihoods.
"Firstly we are in sorrow for the owner who died [Rahman]," said Ripom Muhammed Abu, 26, who operates sweater processing machinery at the factory. "We are also worried about our jobs, our futures depend on them.""Safety was better here than in other garment factories," said Ripom, who earns up to $150 per month but only works for half the year due to the seasonal nature of the sweater business. "We have had regular training including use of fire extinguishers, and fire drills happen at least monthly."
The fire engulfed the lower floors of the 11-story factory, which had closed for the day. The smoldering acrylic produced immense amounts of smoke and poison gas that killed those trying to flee. The victims died of suffocation as they ran down the stairs, according to Mamun Mahmud, deputy director of the fire service.
"They are really unfortunate," he said.The building appeared to have been properly built, he said. It had two stairwells in the front and an emergency exit in the back, but those inside probably panicked when they saw smoke and ran into one of the front stairwells, he said. Had they used the emergency stairwell, they would have survived, he said.Almost all the employees had left work as usual Wednesday evening, but the firm's managing director Mahbubur Rahman, a few friends including a senior local police officer and some staff were on the 9th floor when the started after 11 p.m.Undated photos on a local training provider, Bangladesh Fire Protection Services Limited, show fire and safety training sessions at Tung Hai. Mossanaam Amina, 35, a cleaner at Tung Hai, remembered being taught how to handle a fire extinguisher.
Before the building collapse at Rana Plaza, the worst disaster in the South Asian nation's $20 billion a year garment export sector was a November 2012 blaze that killed 112 people at the Tazreen Fashion factory outside Dhaka.
But training can't make up for huge lapses in building safety at Bangladesh's factories, says Scott Nova, executive director of the non-profit labor group Worker Rights Consortium.News reports say the dead were in stairwells, as they were in the Tazreen blaze. Nova says no building in the U.S. - or even Bangladesh - can legally be built without enclosed stairwells that have fire walls and doors that help those on upper floors escape if the fire is on a lower floor."Instead of being a lifeline, they become a chimney," Nova says of the stairwells.Despite the fire, and the Rana Plaza collapse, Ripom and other employees stressed they wanted to return to work if the factory re-opens."He was a good boss," Mossanaam said of Rahman, also a director of the country's Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), a coalition of factory owners and a lobby group."He assured us our salaries were guaranteed, and there were never any tricks," said Mossanaan, who earns $50 a month.
The Facebook page of the Tung Hai Group claimed it was a sprawling enterprise with a total of 7,000 employees at its two factories and the capacity to produce well over 6 million sweaters, shirts, pants and pajamas every month. The group claimed it did business with major retailers in Europe and North America.The death of an executive – instead of the factory floor workers who more commonly perish – and his BGMEA status may mean this tragedy has a broader impact.
"I hope the government and industry will make greater changes" than after earlier fires, said Ripom.Nova, whose group is funded by colleges and universities who want higher standards at factories that produce their branded clothing, hopes so too."It's madness," he says. "It's indicative of the fact these guys are pursuing a strategy that is so high risk, they are risking their own lives."Workers with cranes and other heavy equipment were still pulling apart the rubble and finding more bodies at the site of the April 24 building collapse in Rana Plaza. On Thursday, authorities said the death toll had risen to 950 and it was unclear how many more people were missing. More than 2,500 people were rescued alive after the accident.
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