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Bangladesh factory collapse death toll hits 1,021

A woman faints after weeping for hours near the rubble of the eight-story Rana Plaza building that collapsed in Savar, near Dhaka, Thursday, May 9, 2013. The death toll from the collapse of the garment factory building passed 900 on Thursday even as a fire in an 11-story garment factory Wednesday night in Dhaka killed eight people, including a ruling-party politician and a top official in the country's powerful clothing manufacturers' trade group. (AP Photo/Ismail Ferdous)

Rescuers carry a body retrieved from the rubble of the eight-story Rana Plaza building that collapsed in Savar, near Dhaka, Thursday, May 9, 2013. The death toll from the collapse of the garment factory building passed 900 on Thursday even as a fire in an 11-story garment factory Wednesday night in Dhaka killed eight people, including a ruling-party politician and a top official in the country's powerful clothing manufacturers' trade group. (AP Photo/Ismail Ferdous

A Bangladeshi woman mourns after the body of her daughter was retrieved from the rubble of the eight-story Rana Plaza building that collapsed in Savar, near Dhaka, Thursday, May 9, 2013. The death toll from the collapse of the garment factory building passed 900 on Thursday even as a fire in an 11-story garment factory Wednesday night in Dhaka killed eight people, including a ruling-party politician and a top official in the country's powerful clothing manufacturers' trade group. (AP Photo/Ismail Ferdous)

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — The death toll from a garment factory building that collapsed more than two weeks ago outside the Bangladeshi capital soared past 1,000 on Friday, while the list of the dead from a fresh fire at a sweater manufacturer showed the entanglement of the industry and top Bangladeshi officials.

Officials said 1,021 bodies have been recovered from the rubble of the fallen factory building as of Friday morning. There was no sign of where the toll might finally settle as more bodies were being found, but it is already the world's deadliest garment industrydisaster and one of the worst industrial accidents.

The disaster has raised alarm about the often deadly working conditions in Bangladesh's $20 billion garment industry, which provides clothing for major retailers around the globe.

Unlike the collapse at the Rana Plaza building, which was blamed on shoddy construction and disregard for safety regulations, the fire at the Tung Hai Sweater factory appeared to have conformed to building codes. A top fire official said the deaths in Wednesday night's fire — including a senior police officer, a Bangladeshi politician and a top clothing industry official — were caused by panic and bad luck.

"They are really unfortunate," Mamun Mahmud, deputy director of the fire service, said Thursday.

The fire engulfed the lower floors of the 11-story factory, which had closed for the day. The smoldering acrylic products produced immense amounts of smoke and poison gas and the victims suffocated as they ran down the stairs, Mahmud said.

The building appeared on first inspection to have been properly built, though fire inspectors would conduct further checks, he said. It had two stairwells in the front and an emergency exit in the back, he said. 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.

"Apparently they tried to flee the building through the stairwell in fear that the fire had engulfed the whole building," he said.

They also would have likely survived the slow-spreading fire had they stayed on the upper floors, he said.

"We found the roof open, but we did not find there anybody after the fire broke out. We recovered all of them on the stairwell on the ninth floor," he said.

The dead included the factory's managing director, Mahbubur Rahman, who was also on the board of directors of the powerful Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. Along with him was senior police official Z.A. Morshed and Sohel Mostafa Swapan, head of a local branch of the ruling party's youth league.

Independent TV, a local station, reported that Rahman had plans to contest next year's parliamentary elections as a candidate for the ruling party and had been meeting friends to discuss his future when the fire broke out.

It was not immediately clear what caused the fire, which began soon after the factory workers went home for the day and took three hours to bring under control. Mahmud speculated it might have originated in the factory's ironing section. Officials originally said the building also housed several floors of apartments, but later said it was just a factory.

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 country's powerful garment industry has been plagued by a series of disasters in recent months, including a November fire at the Tazreen factory that killed 112 and the building collapse.

More than two weeks after the building in the suburb of Savar collapsed, workers with cranes and other heavy equipment were still pulling apart the rubble and finding more bodies. On Friday, authorities said the death toll had risen to 1,021 and it was unclear how many more people remained missing. More than 2,500 people were rescued alive after the April 24 accident.

Maj. Ohiduzzaman, an army official who uses only one name, said 100 decomposing bodies have been kept at a makeshift morgue at a school and were to be sent to hospitals in Dhaka for DNA testing to identify them.

A total of 648 bodies have so far been handed over to the families, he said. Some of those who authorities have been unable to identify have been buried by the government.

Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus said in an article published in Bangladeshi newspapers Thursday that the tragedy was a "symbol of our failure as a nation."

"The crack in Rana Plaza that caused the collapse of the building has only shown us that if we don't face up to the cracks in our state systems, we as a nation will get lost in the debris of the collapse," he said, urging the government and citizens to work together for reforms.

He also urged global brands not to abandon the country, saying that the workers in the factories — which often subcontract from the well-known brands — should be seen as de facto employees of those companies.

The European Union's delegation to Bangladesh urged the government Wednesday to "act immediately" to improve working conditions in the country's garment industry.

Abdul Latif Siddiqui, head of special Cabinet committee to inspect garment factories that was formed days after the Rana Plaza collapse, said the government has closed 18 garment factories in recent days for failing to meet work and safety standards. He did not say whether the closures were temporary or permanent.

Officials say the owner of Rana Plaza illegally added three floors and allowed the garment factories to install heavy machines and generators, even though the structure was not designed to support such equipment.

The owner and eight other people, including the owners of the garment factories, have been detained.

Ice-Free Arctic May Be Near, Study Suggests

Multi-year Arctic ice in 2012. The bright white central mass shows the perennial sea ice. The larger light blue area shows the full extent of the winter sea ice including the average annual sea ice during the months of November, December and January.

Study co-authors Julie Brigham-Grette and Pavel Minyuk collect sediment cores from Lake El'gygytgyn in the northeast Russian Arctic. These samples help scientists better understand the Arctic's climate history, dating from 2.2 million to 3.6 million years.

The Arctic experienced an extended period of warm temperatures about 3.6 million years ago — before the onset of the ice ages — at a time when the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere was not much higher than the levels being recorded today, a new study finds. The research suggests that an ice-free Arctic may be a reality in the near future.

An international team of researchers analyzed sediment cores collected in 2009 from Lake El'gygytgyn (pronounced El-Gee-Git-Kin), the oldest deep lake in the northeast Russian Arctic. The samples enabled the scientists to peer back into the Arctic's climate history dating from 2.2 million to 3.6 million years ago, during themiddle Pliocene and early Pleistocene epochs.

The researchers found that during this time, the Arctic was very warm, with summer temperatures about 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) warmer than they are in the region today, saidJulie Brigham-Grette, a professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and lead author of the new study, which was published today (May 9) in the journal Science.

"There was probably no sea ice, and the whole Arctic was pretty well forested, so it was a very different world," Brigham-Grette told LiveScience. "So, how did we go from that to the tundra that we have today, and what does this tell us about the future?" [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

A window into the past

Lake El'gygytgyn, or "Lake E," as the researchers refer to it, was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteorite hit Earth and carved out an 11-mile-across (18 kilometers) crater. The lake is one of the few Arctic areas not eroded by continental ice sheets during the ice ages, meaning it has collected a continuous and undisturbed sediment record, the researchers said.

The lake, which today is covered in ice for most of the year, is so deep that if the Washington monument were placed inside it, the tip would just barely appear above the surface, Brigham-Grette said.

The researchers examined fossil pollen in the sediment core and discovered traces of Douglas fir and hemlock. Understanding the vegetation in the area during that time helped the scientists piece together more clues about the precipitation and climate.

"To get Douglas fir and hemlock that far north of the Arctic Circle — you have to have pretty warm summers and warm winters in order for those trees to establish there," Brigham-Grette said.

Previous research suggests the proportion of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere in the Middle Pliocene and Early Pleistocene was similar to the levels that are recorded today and attributed to man-made sources. If this is the case, Earth's climate may be more sensitive to carbon dioxide than scientists previously thought, Brigham-Grette said.

"We can see that the Arctic is quite sensitive to CO2 changes, and levels in the Pliocene were thought to be similar to today," Brigham-Grette explained. "Some of the changes we see going on now — sea ice melting, tree lines migrating and glaciers with tremendous ablation rate — suggest that we're heading back to the Pliocene."

Rising greenhouse gases

Climate scientists are expecting the atmospheric carbon dioxide level to exceed 400 parts per millionany day now, which will break a 3-million-year record. Hitting that level means there are 400 molecules of carbon dioxide in the air for every 1 million air molecules.

"We want to know these mechanisms so we can understand better if the climate system has real, serious tipping points," Brigham-Grette said. "As we get warmer, is there a tipping point where the climate would shift into a different kind of regime that we would be worried about? Understanding the past helps inform us of what the future might hold for us." [Earth in the Balance: 7 Crucial Tipping Points]

The results of this new study represent an important contribution toward understanding how Earth is affected by man-made greenhouse gases, said Kate Moran, an ocean engineer who was not involved with the study. Moran is director of NEPTUNE Canada, an underwater ocean observatory managed by the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

"This new paleoclimate record adds to the growing evidence that Earth's sensitivity to these levels of greenhouse gases may be higher than previously thought," Moran said. "Understanding Earth's sensitivity is one of the key parameters for predicting future conditions of the planet under global warming."

And a return to Pliocene-type conditions may not be too far off in the future, said Gifford Miller, a professor in the department of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, who conducts research in the Canadian Arctic.

"The ice is melting at all elevations," Miller said. "Even if there is no additional warming, it's only a matter of time before the ice is all gone."

Rethinking the timeline

The extended warm period during the middle Pliocene also raises new questions about the subsequent ice ages. According to the new study, warm Arctic temperatures persisted past the time when previous studies estimated the start of expanding glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, Moran said.

These conflicting results mean scientists are still unclear when big continental ice sheets began to expand and grow, and what triggered these changes.

"It really stays relatively warm in the Arctic, even in the onset of the first part of the ice age cycle," Miller said. "That one was unexpected."

But, researchers are slowly filling in the history of the Arctic's climate.

"I like to think of it as working on a big 500-piece puzzle," she said. "We had 200 pieces before, and now the lake record provides us with another 100 pieces, and the picture is starting to become more and more clear."

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook &Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Global network of hackers steal $45m from ATMs

This undated graphic released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York City shows ten photos of a man identified as "defendant Reyes" who allegedly used fraudulent magnetic cards to steal money from cash machines, next to a map of Manhattan indicating the locations of the looted machines. Federal prosecutors said on Thursday, May 9, 2013, that a gang of cyber-criminals stole $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe. (AP Photo/U.S. Attorney’s Office)

NEW YORK (AP) — The sophistication of a global network of thieves who drained cash machines around the globe of an astonishing $45 million in mere hours sent ripples through the security world, not merely for the size of the operation and ease with which it was carried out, but also for the threat that more such thefts may be in store.

Seven people were arrested in the U.S., accused of operating theNew York cell of what prosecutors said was a network that carried out thefts at ATMs in 27 countries from Canada to Russia. Law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen nations were involved in the investigation, U.S. prosecutors in New York said Thursday.

"Unfortunately these types of cybercrimes involving ATMs, where you've got a flash mob going out across the globe, are becoming more and more common," said Rose Romero, a former federal prosecutor and regional director for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

"I expect there will be many more" of these types of crimes, she said.

Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, who called the theft "a massive 21st-century bank heist," announced the case Thursday in New York.

Here's how it worked:

Hackers got into bank databases, eliminated withdrawal limits on pre-paid debit cards and created access codes. Others loaded that data onto any plastic card with a magnetic stripe — an old hotel key card or an expired credit card worked fine as long as it carried the account data and correct access codes.

A network of operatives then fanned out to rapidly withdraw money in multiple cities, authorities said. The cells would take a cut of the money, then launder it through expensive purchases or ship it wholesale to the global ringleaders. Lynch didn't say where they were located.

It appears no individuals lost money. The thieves plundered funds held by the banks that back up prepaid credit cards, not individual or business accounts, Lynch said.

Ori Eisen, a cybercrime expert and founder of 41st Parameter, a fraud detection and prevention firm, said the $45 million heist was on the "high-end" of what can be done by cybercriminals who exploit banking systems connected to the Internet.

"Given the scale of the global credit card networks, it is almost impossible to detect every kind of attack," he said. "This attack is not the last one, and if the modus operandi proves to be successful crooks will exploit it time and again."

There were two separate attacks in this case, one in December that reaped $5 million worldwide and one in February that snared about $40 million in 10 hours with about 36,000 transactions. The scheme involved attacks on two banks, Rakbank in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman, prosecutors said.

Such ATM fraud schemes are not uncommon, but the $45 million stolen in this one was at least double the amount involved in previously known cases, said Avivah Litan, an analyst who covers security issues for Gartner Inc.

Middle Eastern banks and payment processors are "a bit behind" on security and screening technologies that are supposed to prevent this kind of fraud, but it happens around the world, she said.

"It's a really easy way to turn digits into cash," Litan said.

Some of the fault lies with the ubiquitous magnetic strips on the back of the cards. The rest of the world has largely abandoned cards with magnetic strips in favor of ones with built-in chips that are nearly impossible to copy. But because U.S. banks and merchants have stuck to cards with magnetic strips, they are still accepted around the world.

Lynch would not say who masterminded the attacks globally, who the hackers are or where they were located, citing an ongoing investigation.

The New York suspects were U.S. citizens originally from the Dominican Republic who lived in the New York City suburb of Yonkers. They were mostly in their 20s. Lynch said they all knew one another and were recruited together, as were cells in other countries. They were charged with conspiracy and money laundering. If convicted, they each face 10 years in prison.

The accused ringleader in the U.S. cell, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Pena, was reportedly killed in the Dominican Republic late last month, prosecutors said. More investigations continue and other arrests have been made in other countries, but prosecutors did not have details.

An indictment unsealed Thursday accused Lajud-Pena and the other seven New York suspects of withdrawing $2.8 million in cash from hacked accounts in less than a day.

Arrests began in March.

Lajud-Pena was found dead with a suitcase full of about $100,000 in cash, and the investigation into his death is continuing separately. Dominican officials said they arrested a man in the killing who said it was a botched robbery, and two other suspects were on the lam.

The first federal study of ATM fraud was 30 years ago, when the use of computers in the financial community was growing rapidly. At the time, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found nationwide ATM bank loss from fraud ranged from $70 and $100 million a year.

By 2008, that had risen to about $1 billion a year, said Ken Pickering, who works in security intelligence at CORE Security, a white-hat hacking firm that offers security to businesses.

He said he expects news of the latest ring to inspire other criminals.

"Once you see a large attack like this, that they made off with $45 million, that's going to wake up the cybercrime community," he said.

"Ripping off cash, you don't get that back," he said. "There are suitcases full of cash floating around now, and that's just gone."

___

Associated Press technology writer Peter Svensson in New York, national writer Martha Mendoza in San Jose, Calif., and writer Ezequiel Abiú López in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, contributed to this report.

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