NEWS,28.07.2013

Pope asks youth to change world

Rio's famed Copacabana beach, usually the venue for scantily-clad sun-seekers and revelry, became a massive Catholic campground on Sunday as Pope Francis concluded a youth festival by urging young people to go forth and build a new world.
A festive crowd estimated by organisers and the Vatican to be more than 3 million strong, including many who slept in the area and local residents who poured out of homes and buses, turned out to see the Argentine pope on the final day of his week-long trip.
Aerial television footage showed the sand and pavements blanketed with people for several kilometres along the crescent-shaped shoreline.
"I was totally tranquil, waking up among the people on the beach. This view made it a very special and unique experience," said Aline Vonsovicz, a 23-year-old Brazilian of Polish origin.
The throng of people, many in the green and yellow Brazilian colours, gave Francis the kind of ecstatic welcome that he has received all through his trip to his home continent.
Work for social change
They shouted and sang as he was driven through the crowd in an open-sided popemobile, stopping often to kiss babies offered to him by their mothers on the shoreline most famous for its bars and nightclubs and hedonist spirit.
His message to the young people in Rio for week-long World Youth Day festivities, sometimes called "the Church's Woodstock", was serious: they should not make their time in Rio a one-off experience.
In his sermon during the Mass from a huge white stage at the beach's northern tip, he said they should return to their home countries energised and ready to work for social change.
"Bringing the Gospel is bringing God's power to pluck up and break down evil and violence, to destroy and overthrow the barriers of selfishness, intolerance and hatred, so as to build a new world," he said.
Latin American presidents at mass
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, Bolivian President Evo Morales and several Latin American vice presidents were among those who attended.
The Copacabana events were to have taken place on a pasture on the outskirts of Rio, but days of unseasonable rain turned the area into a field of mud.
"It was cold in the morning and there was a problem with a long wait for the toilets. Some people went in the sea. It was a bit chaotic. But it was lovely," said Marcel Stelsberg, 27, who came from Copenhagen with a group of 65 people from Scandinavia.
"People were playing guitars and drums and singing and dancing to religious songs in different languages. Now we don't feel so alone, especially coming from Scandinavia where there are so few of us Catholics," he said.
Francis, who was due to leave for Rome on Sunday night after addressing Latin American bishops, has dedicated much attention in his speeches to the problems, the prospects and the power of youth.
He announced that the next World Youth Day will be in Krakow, Poland, in 2016.
On Saturday night, he encouraged Brazil's young people, who have protested against corruption in their country, to continue their efforts to change society by fighting apathy and offering "a Christian response".
Brazil, Latin America's largest nation and still the world's most Catholic country despite declining numbers of faithful, was rocked by protests against corruption, the misuse of public money and the high cost of living.
On Friday night he urged them to change a world where food is discarded while millions go hungry, where racism and violence still affront human dignity, and where politics is more associated with corruption than service.
The day before, during a visit to a Rio slum, he urged them to not lose trust and to not allow their hopes to be extinguished. Many young people in Brazil saw this as his support for peaceful demonstrations to bring about change.

80 Percent Of U.S. Adults Face Near-Poverty, Unemployment: Survey

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.
As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as experiencing unemployment during the year, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.
"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.
"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.
Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.
Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.
More than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.
Salyers' daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.
Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need."
"It's pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."
Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they're only a temporary snapshot that doesn't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.
In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number  4 in 10 adults  falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.
Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
"Poverty is no longer an issue of `them', it's an issue of `us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."
The numbers come from Rank's analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.
Among the findings:
For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.
The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.
Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.
Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites defined as those lacking a college degree remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.
Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for `the middle class' and `average Americans,'" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.
"They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.

·         15.1 Percent

The share of the population in poverty in 2010.

·         22 Percent

The percent of children under 18 in poverty.

·         46.2 Million

The number of people in poverty in 2010.

·         $22,113

The poverty threshold for a family of four.

·         3.2 Million

The number of people kept out of poverty by unemployment insurance.

·         20.3 Million

The number of people kept out of poverty by Social Security.

·         11.3 Percent,6.6 Percent, 4.5 Percent

The change in family income between 2007 and 2010 for the bottom 20 percent, middle 20 percent, and the top 20 percent, respectively.

·         $6,298

The decline in median working-age household income from 2000 to 2010.

·         $5,494

The decline in median African-American household income from 2000 to 2010.

·         $4,235

The decline in median Hispanic household income from 2000 to 2010.

·         49.1 Million

The number of people under 65 without any health insurance.

·         13.6 Million

The decline in the number of people under 65 with employer-sponsored health insurance from 2000-2010.

·         10.5 Percentage Points

The decline in the share of the under 65 population with employer-sponsored health insurance from 2000-2010.

NEWS,07.07.2013

Inquiry into Vatican bank chief dropped

Italian prosecutors have dropped inquiries into the Vatican bank's former president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, after concluding a money laundering investigation that did implicate two of his juniors, judicial sources say.
Prosecutors accused the bank's director general, Paolo Cipriani, and its deputy director, Massimo Tulli, who both earlier resigned, of "authorising illegal financial transactions", the sources said.

A judge will now decide whether to proceed to a trial of Cipriani and Tulli.

The two directors left the bank on Monday last week after the arrest of a senior cleric who is accused of plotting to smuggle millions of euros into Italy from Switzerland.
Gotti Tedeschi was ousted from the bank last year.
He said earlier he had been dismissed because he wanted more transparency, but the board of directors said he had neglected his duties.
The Vatican bank, known formally as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), has been a byword for opaque and secretive dealings for decades and its future has been in question since the appointment of Pope Francis in March.
Italian investigators believe the way the bank operated may have facilitated money laundering, according to a document summing up their preliminary inquiries that was leaked to Italian newspapers on Saturday.

Snowden: Western states in bed with NSA

Fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden said the US National Security Agency operates broad secret spying partnerships with other Western governments now complaining about its programmes, in an interview published on Sunday.
Snowden said in comments made before his exposure of US espionage practices came to light last month and printed in German news weekly Der Spiegel that NSA spies are "in bed together with the Germans and most other Western states".
In remarks published in German, Snowden said an NSA department known as the Foreign Affairs Directorate coordinated work with foreign secret services.
The partnerships are organised so that authorities in other countries can "insulate their political leaders from the backlash" if it becomes public "how grievously they're violating global privacy", he said.
The interview was conducted by US cryptography expert Jacob Appelbaum and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras using "encrypted emails shortly before Snowden became known globally for his whistleblowing", Spiegel said.
On cooperation with Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency, Snowden said the NSA provides "analysis tools" for data passing through Germany from regions such as the Middle East.
The US government has revoked the passport of Snowden, a former NSA contractor who is seeking to evade US justice for leaking details about a vast US electronic surveillance programme to collect phone and internet data.
He has been stranded at a Moscow airport for two weeks but three Latin American countries have now offered him asylum.
His claims about widespread US spying on Western partners have sparked uproar among European allies in particular and threatened to derail talks on the world's largest free-trade zone due to start on Monday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke with US President Barack Obama on Wednesday and agreed to a "high-level meeting" between US and German security officials in the coming days to address intelligence matters.

Brazil Target Of U.S. Spying, Globo Newspaper Reports

The U.S. National Security Agency monitored the telephone and email activity of Brazilian companies and individuals in the past decade as part of U.S. espionage activities, the Globo newspaper reported on Sunday, citing documents provided by fugitive Edward Snowden, a former NSA intelligence contractor.

The newspaper did not say how much traffic was monitored by NSA computers and intelligence officials. But the Globo article pointed out that in the Americas, Brazil was second only to the United States in the number of transmissions intercepted.

Brazil was a priority nation for the NSA communications surveillance alongside China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, Globo said.

In the 10-year period, the NSA captured 2.3 billion phone calls and messages in the United States and then used computers to analyze them for signs of suspicious activity, the paper said. In the United States, the NSA used legal but secret warrants to compel communications companies to turn over information about calls and emails for analysis.

Some access to Brazilian communications was obtained through American companies that were partners with Brazilian telecommunications companies, the paper reported, without naming the companies.

The Globo article was written by Glenn Greenwald, Roberto Kaz and José Casado. Greenwald, who works for Britain's Guardian newspaper and lives in Rio de Janeiro, was the journalist who first revealed classified documents provided by Snowden, outlining the extent of U.S. communications monitoring activity at home and abroad.

After providing the information to Greenwald, Snowden fled the United States for Hong Kong and was most recently seen in the transit area of the Moscow airport.

Snowden's U.S. passport has been revoked. He has made asylum requests to several countries, including Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia. Three countries - Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua - have offered to give Snowden asylum.

IMF Chief Christine Lagarde Calls U.S. Budget Cuts 'Inappropriate'

The U.S. federal budget cuts are an inappropriate measure that will weigh on potential growth, IMF chief Christine Lagarde said on Sunday, urging Washington to present "credible" fiscal plans.
Washington enacted across-the-board federal government spending cuts, known as sequestration, in March because Congress could not agree on an alternative.
It has meant everything from furloughs for air traffic controllers to fewer planes for the U.S. Navy to smaller subsidies for farmers.
"The budgetary procedure that is in place in the United States, which leads to a budgetary adjustment, seems to us absolutely inappropriate ... because it blindly affects certain expenditures that are essential to support medium and long term growth," Lagarde told an economists' conference in Aix-en-Provence, southern France.
Her comments echoed those last month from the IMF itself, which said: "The deficit reduction in 2013 has been excessively rapid and ill-designed."
In its annual check of the health of the U.S. economy, the IMF forecast economic growth would be a sluggish 1.9 percent this year. The IMF reckons growth would be as much as 1.75 percentage points higher if not for the rush to cut the government's budget deficit.
While the budget cuts that took hold on March 1 do not appear to be hitting government payrolls directly so far, some economists said they were weighing on private employers and helped explained a sharp slowdown in hiring in the health care and social assistance sector.
Lagarde urged Washington  as well as Tokyo to come up with fresh plans to cut their debt.
Japan has pledged to halve the primary deficit the budget excluding new bond sales and debt servicing by March 2016 and bring it to surplus by March 2021 to contain its ballooning public debt. It will detail how it wants to accomplish that in a medium-term fiscal plan expected in August.
"It is indispensable that these countries indicate for the long and medium term predictable, credible fiscal policies, anchored in legislation that will not be challenged, which will bring the deficit down in a way that will reverse the debt trajectory to a downward trend," she said.

Bundesbank Chief: ECB Cannot Solve Euro Zone Crisis

The European Central Bank cannot solve the euro zone crisis, Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann told economists on Sunday, pressing the bloc's governments to get their economies in shape and tighten their fiscal rules.

Weidmann addressed an economists' conference in Aix-en-Provence, southern France, only three days after the ECB broke with precedent by declaring that it intended to keep interest rates at record lows for an extended period and may yet cut further.

"Monetary policy has already done a lot to absorb the economic consequences of the crisis, but it cannot solve the crisis," Weidmann said in his speech.

"This is the consensus of the Governing Council. The crisis has laid bare structural shortcomings. As such, they require structural solutions."

Weidmann, widely recognised to be the most hawkish member of the ECB's 23-man Governing Council, does not want the bank to intervene too strongly in tackling the bloc's economic crisis, thereby allowing governments to soft-pedal reforms.

He spoke a day after fellow ECB policymakers Christian Noyer and Benoit Coeure said the bank's decision to abandon its customary insistence that it never precommits on policy was a change in communication but meant no change from its strategy, which is based on monitoring inflation, real economy and monetary developments.

"The euro zone is on the mend, it must be at peace, protected, be allowed to heal," Coeure told the same conference on Sunday to explain the ECB's decision to issue such forward guidance, while urging governments to tackle structural problems.

The EU's top economic official, Olli Rehn, welcomed the ECB's move, saying the step - taken in response to turbulence caused by the U.S. Federal Reserve's plan to slow monetary stimulus - was needed to preserve recovery in Europe.

"The United States and Europe are at different points of the economic cycle. While the U.S. has a more restrictive approach, Europe needs to continue with a more accommodative policy," the EU monetary affairs commissioner said.


FISCAL RULES

While he does not see sufficient support in the euro zone for governments to give up sovereignty on fiscal matters to forge a fiscal union to prevent such crises in the future, Weidmann pressed them to stiffen Europe's fiscal rules.

"To fully unleash the common currency's potential, efforts are needed on two fronts: structural reforms as well as the abolition of implicit guarantees for banks and sovereigns (government bonds)," Weidmann said.

"In addition to stronger rules, we need to make sure that in a system of national control and national responsibility, sovereign default is possible without bringing down the financial system. Only then will we really do away with the implicit guarantee for sovereigns."

The Bundesbank chief also called for euro zone governments to sever what he describes as the "excessively close links" between banks and sovereign governments, saying that European banks hold too many of their own governments' bonds.

"This is because banks do not have to hold any capital against their government debt, as the risk-weight assigned to sovereign bonds is zero.

To counteract excessive investment in sovereign bonds, Weidmann believes that the capital rules need to be changed to take account of risk and exposure levels.

"Only then will banks be able to cope with the repercussions of sovereign default."

Countries Spending the Most on the Military

For the first time since 1998, global military spending is down. This coincides with a major decline in U.S. spending, which fell by more than $40 billion between 2011 and 2012. Even with this decline, however, the United States still had a military budget four times larger than China, the next biggest spender.

 

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) measures annual military spending for most of the world’s armed countries. According to SIPRI, the United States spent $668 billion, more than the combined budgets of the next 10 countries. While the U.S. budget has declined, some of the other global powers, including Russia and China, have ramped up spending. Based on SIPRI’s 2012 data, these are the countries spending the most on the military.
The major decline in the U.S. military budget was the result of two factors, explained Carina Solmirano, senior researcher at SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. The first is the severe decline in overseas military spending after America’s eight-year war in Iraq ended in 2011, as well as the continued wind down of operations in Afghanistan, Solmirano said.
“The second reason,” said Solmirano, “is purely economics. … The United States is facing a huge deficit crisis, and as part of the agreements in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Defense agreed to start a reduction of expenditure quite a significant reduction.” Solmirano added that barring the emergence of a new conflict, U.S. military spending likely will continue to fall.
Short-term changes in military spending, like the nearly 6% decline in the United States, often go hand-in-hand with periods of economic growth or crisis. Indeed, spending among nearly all the top European military powers, including Italy, France and the United Kingdom, declined last year.
Meanwhile, China went against the global trend by increasing its spending by nearly 8% between 2011 and 2012, and by more than 47% since 2008. Part of this increase is for geopolitical reasons, explained Solmirano, who added the increase in spending has “been parallel to its increase in economic power as well.”
Other nations, while not the biggest spenders overall, have much larger military budgets relative to the size of their economies. As of 2012, the United States spent 4.4% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the military. In countries like Saudi Arabia and Oman, military costs amounted to more than 8% of GDP. Part of this, explained Solmirano, has to do with the consistently tense security situation in the Middle East. She added that countries like Saudi Arabia are able to fund massive militaries with substantial oil revenue.
24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 countries that spend the most on their military in 2012, based on SIPRI’s measure of military spending in more than 130 nations. We also reviewed SIPRI data on military exports and imports, as well as military expenditure as a percentage of GDP. From Globalfirepower.com, we reviewed statistics on military size and strength, based on the most recent available data. We also considered GDP and GDP growth figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

NEWS,27.01.2013

Brazil Nightclub Fire Kills At Least 230 People

Flames raced through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing more than 230 people as panicked partygoers gasped for breath in the smoke-filled air, stampeding toward a single exit partially blocked by those already dead. It appeared to be the world's deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.Witnesses said a flare or firework lit by band members may have started the blaze in Santa Maria, a major university city of about 225,000 people.Television images showed smoke pouring out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who had attended a university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at windows and walls to free those trapped inside.Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper that firefighters had a hard time getting inside the club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance."Teenagers sprinted from the scene desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms."There was so much smoke and fire, it was complete panic, and it took a long time for people to get out, there were so many dead," survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.The fire spread so fast inside the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop it, Silva said.Another survivor, Michele Pereira, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit flares that started the conflagration."The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward," she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak, but in a matter of seconds it spread."Guitarist Rodrigo Martins told Radio Gaucha that the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, started playing at 2:15 a.m. "and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning""It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It's harmless, we never had any trouble with it."When the fire started, a guard passed us a fire extinguisher, the singer tried to use it but it wasn't working"He confirmed that accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other members made it out safely.Police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello said by telephone that the toll had risen to 233 with the death of a hospitalized victim. Officials counted 232 bodies that had been brought for identification to a gymnasium in Santa Maria, which is located at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.An earlier count put the number of dead at 245.Federal Health Minister Alexandre Padhilha told a news conference that most of the 117 people treated in hospitals had been poisoned by gases they breathed during the fire. Only a few suffered serious burns, he said.Brazil President Dilma Roussef arrived to visit the injured after cutting short her trip to a Latin American-European summit in Chile."It is a tragedy for all of us," Roussef said.Most of the dead apparently suffocated, according to Dr. Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a professor at the medical school of the Federal University of Santa Maria who went to the city's Caridade Hospital to help victims.Beltrame said he was told the club had been filled far beyond its capacity during a party for students at the university's agronomy department.Survivors, police and firefighters gave the same account of a band member setting the ceiling's soundproofing ablaze, he said."Large amounts of toxic smoke quickly filled the room, and I would say that at least 90 percent of the victims died of asphyxiation," Beltrame told The Associated Press by telephone."The toxic smoke made people lose their sense of direction so they were unable to find their way to the exit. At least 50 bodies were found inside a bathroom. Apparently they confused the bathroom door with the exit door."In the hospital, the doctor "saw desperate friends and relatives walking and running down the corridors looking for information," he said, calling it "one of the saddest scenes I have ever witnessed."Rodrigo Moura, identified by the newspaper Diario de Santa Maria as a security guard at the club, said it was at its maximum capacity of between 1,000 and 2,000, and partygoers were pushing and shoving to escape.Santa Maria Mayor Cezar Schirmer declared a 30-day mourning period, and Tarso Genro, the governor of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, said officials were investigating the cause of the disaster.The blaze was the deadliest in Brazil since at least 1961, when a fire that swept through a circus killed 503 people in Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro.Sunday's fire also appeared to be the worst at a nightclub since December 2000, when a welding accident reportedly set off a fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309.In 2004, at least 194 people died in a fire at an overcrowded nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Seven members of a band were sentenced to prison for starting the flames.Several years later, in December 2009, a blaze at the Lame Horse nightclub in Perm, Russia, killed 152 people after an indoor fireworks display ignited a plastic ceiling decorated with branches.Similar circumstances led to a 2003 nightclub fire that killed 100 people in the United States. Pyrotechnics used as a stage prop by the 1980s rock band Great White set ablaze cheap soundproofing foam on the walls and ceiling of a Rhode Island music venue.The band performing in Santa Maria, Gurizada Fandangueira, plays a driving mixture of local Brazilian country music styles. Guitarist Martin told Radio Gaucha the musicians are already seeing hostile messages."People on the social networks are saying we have to pay for what happened," he said. "I'm afraid there could be retaliation".

 

Bangladesh factory fire concerns groups

International labour rights groups called on Sunday for global clothing retailers to ensure adequate safety measures for garment workers in Bangladesh after a blaze killed seven employees at a small factory.Saturday's fire gutted Smart Exports Garment Ltd, just two months after Bangladesh's worst ever factory blaze killed 112 workers and injured 150 at Tazreen Fashions Ltd, a multi-storey garment workshop in Dhaka's Ashulia suburb.In a joint statement issued after the latest blaze, three organisations asked retailers and brands to sign a fire safety agreement with Bangladesh."After more than two decades of the apparel industry knowing about the risks to these workers, nothing substantial has changed," the executive director of the International Labour Rights Forum, Judy Gearhart, said in the statement."Brands still keep their audit results secret. They still walk away when it suits them and trade unions are still marginalised, weakening workers' ability to speak up when they are at risk," she added. The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) also signed the statement.Another rights group, the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights (ILGHR), said on its website it had gained access to the gutted factory and found seven women workers had been crushed to death as employees tried to escape the fire.Firefighters and police said the cause of the latest blaze was not yet known. Survivors said it could have been caused by an electrical short circuit at the factory on the upper floor of a two-storey building in the crowded Mohammadpur area.Kalpona Akter, Executive Director of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity told Reuters that two garment factories had subcontracted orders to the factory's owner, Smart Export Garments Ltd. She said the company was not a member of the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association and had no license from fire prevention or labour bodies.An official report into the Tazreen blaze in November concluded it was the result of both sabotage and negligence. Bangladesh has about 4 500 garment factories and is the world's biggest exporter of clothing after China. Clothing makes up 80% of its $24bn annual exports.

Davos warns on global economic crisis

The world's political and business elite headed home on Sunday from this year's Davos forum with warnings that while the worst of the financial crisis seems over there is still much to be done.International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde said in the closing moments of the annual gathering in the snowy Swiss ski resort on Saturday that she recommended the "do not relax principle" for the coming year.Where for the two previous years a sense of crisis had hung over the World Economic Forum, the mood was sunnier at the 2013 edition as speaker after speaker said they were now cautiously optimistic."I feel the circumstances in which I'm addressing you today are very different than 12 months ago," said Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti in his opening speech, following a torrid year dominated by the euro crisis.European central banker Mario Draghi meanwhile hailed 2012 as the year that the troubled single currency was "relaunched", even as others were hailing him as the man who had saved the eurozone from catastrophe.The Chinese economy's slowdown seemed less serious than a year ago to the participants while the step back from the fiscal cliff in the United States also eased minds.But as the 2 500 world leaders, financial officials, tycoons and journalists departed the picture-postcard Alpine resort, they may have felt a chill that was not just down to the subzero temperatures.Lagarde said the IMF's forecast of a "very fragile and timid recovery for 2013" was based on "eurozone leaders, the US authorities on the other hand and the Japanese authorities making the right decisions".She added: "And that's what I mean by 'do not relax' because some good policy decisions have been made in various parts of the world. In 2013, they have to keep the momentum."The head of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Angel Gurria, warned meanwhile that countries had exhausted most room for manoeuvre in terms of fiscal and monetary policy."We should be very worried because the lack of room for some of the more traditional tools has gone and we are left with very few of these tools," he said.As in previous years the Davos forum was partly hijacked by external events, particularly after British Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to hold a referendum on European Union membership by the end of 2017.The move threatened to cause a stir, with Cameron's European counterparts worried about the effect the uncertainty would have on the euro's already fragile recovery, but they left any rows for another day.The turmoil in the Arab world also took centre stage for a time as officials including Jordan's King Abdullah II urged "desperately needed" action over Syria's civil war, though none came.Amid the cocktail parties and lavish luncheons at Davos this year there was sometimes a "mood of complacency", said Axel Weber, the chairman of Swiss bank UBS and former head of Germany's Bundesbank."My biggest fear is that 2013 could be a replay of 2012, another lost year," he said. "We shouldn't be complacent, we haven't really fundamentally improved that much."Many were still worried by the euro. The Deloitte financial group's global chief executive Barry Salzberg told AFP he was "reasonably comfortable, with one exception - and that is what's the impact on the US from Europe."Other officials expressed fears that governments would increasingly lean on central banks, which have often been the heroes of the fragile global recovery in the past two years, instead of taking action themselves.But in many ways it was business as usual at Davos, with world leaders huddling in private and corporate deals sewn up on the sidelines, such as a $10bn shale gas deal between Ukraine and oil giant Royal Dutch Shell.Even a noisy protest on Sunday by three topless, pink-flare-waving women from a Ukrainian feminist group failed to shock - they had targeted Davos the previous year too.

Gun control: Listen more, Obama says

President Barack Obama urged gun control advocates to listen to views of rural Americans who use guns for hunting and said bridging a cultural divide in attitudes to gun ownership would be critical to his administration's push to curb gun violence. "If you grew up and your dad gave you a hunting rifle when you were 10, and you went out and spent the day with him and your uncles, and that became part of your family's traditions, you can see why you'd be pretty protective of that," Obama said in an interview with The New Republic magazine published on Sunday.Obama made gun control a top priority for his second term after 20 children and six adults were killed by a gunman at a school in Newtown, Connecticut in December. Obama spoke with The New Republic on 16 January, the same day he announced he would put the full weight of his office behind urging Congress to approve an assault weapons ban and background checks for all gun buyers."Part of being able to move this forward is understanding the reality of guns in urban areas are very different from the realities of guns in rural areas," Obama said."So it's trying to bridge those gaps that I think is going to be part of the biggest task over the next several months...and that means that advocates of gun control have to do a little more listening than they do sometimes," he said.Vice President Joe Biden is leading the White House effort to talk to Americans about gun control proposals and galvanise public support to pressure Congress to act. e addressed the issue in Virginia on Friday. Gun ownership rights are enshrined in the US Constitution and past efforts to restrict gun ownership have been blocked by gun owners, the National Rifle Association and their supporters in Congress.