NEWS,23.06.2013

Saudi switches to Fri-Sat weekend

Oil powerhouse Saudi Arabia is switching its weekend to Friday-Saturday to better serve its economy and "international commitments", the official SPA news agency reported on Sunday quoting a royal decree.
Saudi Arabia becomes the last of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council - which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and United Arab Emirates - to abandon the Thursday-Friday weekend to be closer to the world's Saturday-Sunday weekend.
The decision takes effect in ministries and government departments from next week, while it will be implemented by schools and universities from the start of the next academic year.
According to the decree the change was made to better serve "the Saudi economy and its international commitments" and coordinate with the working days in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world.
It will "reduce the negative repercussions on economic and financial activity in the kingdom and make up for lost economic opportunities", said the decree.
Riyadh's stock exchange, the biggest in the Arab world, is open for five days a week, but until now only three of these coincided with the working week in the world's major financial centres.
Saudi Arabia is the world's largest oil exporter and a member of the G20 group of the globe's biggest economies.
The move had been previously rejected by clergymen in the kingdom, which follows the ultra conservative Wahhabi school of Islam, on the grounds that Saturday is the religious weekend for Jews.
Oman became the fifth GCC member state to make the switch several years after the other four members.

New leaks emerge from Snowden documents

Britain's intelligence services are tapping cables that carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and are gathering vast amounts of data, according to leaked documents from US ex-intelligence technician Ed Snowden, who faces spying charges in the United States.
The claims, published on Saturday by The Guardian newspaper, sparked a fresh outcry from privacy campaigners and surfaced as the United States filed criminal charges against 30-year-old Snowden and asked Hong Kong, where he has fled to, to detain him.
In a sign of growing international tensions, Germany said on Saturday that Europe would need Britain to clarify the latest allegations.
Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who made the comments, added that the accusations would be a "catastrophe" if they are true.
A US justice department official meanwhile confirmed that a sealed criminal complaint has been lodged with a federal court in the US state of Virginia and a provisional arrest warrant has been issued.
Snowden faces charges of theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information, and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person. Two of the charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
The Guardian reported that Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has started processing vast amounts of personal information, ncluding Facebook posts, emails, internet histories and phone calls, and is sharing it with its US partner the National Security Agency (NSA).
In reaction, however, GCHQ said it was "scrupulous" in its compliance with the law and declined to comment further.
The Guardian reported that GCHQ was able to tap into and store data from the cables for up to 30 days, under an operation codenamed Tempora.
"It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the newspaper.
"They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."
Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong in May, has since proceeded to leak details of secret US intelligence programmes to international media outlets.
Tempora
The Guardian claimed Tempora had been running for 18 months and GCHQ and the NSA were able to access vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people.
It also said that the intelligence-gathering directly led to the arrest and jailing of a British terror cell, the arrests of others planning acts of terror, and three London-based people planning attacks prior to the city's 2012 Olympic Games.
The Guardian said the documents it had seen showed that by last year, GCHQ was handling 600 million "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.
The two main components of GCHQ's surveillance programme are called "Mastering the Internet" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation", the daily said, adding that the operations were all being carried out "without any form of public acknowledgement or debate".
The Guardian added that it understood NSA staff and US private contractors had access to GCHQ databases.
Hong Kong officials remained tight-lipped on Saturday as to whether Snowden had been approached by the law enforcement authorities or was still a free man.
Police commissioner Andy Tsang told reporters it was "inconvenient" to disclose details of the case.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Britain-based human rights pressure group Liberty, expressed shock at the latest revelations.
"I'm shocked but not surprised. Clearly they (GCHQ) are exploiting the fact that the internet is so international in nature," she told the BBC.
"And I'm pretty sad in a democracy when all that appears to be holding back the secret state is its physical and technological capability, and not its ethics or a tight interpretation and application of the law."
However, former foreign and defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind, the chairman of parliament's intelligence and security committee, told the BBC that all agencies like GCHQ used the latest technology to gain intelligence.
But he added: "If GCHQ wants to know the content of your or my email, they have to go through exactly the same legal procedure of getting a warrant from the secretary of state, regardless of whether they are going to intercept the emails themselves, or whether they are going to ask the NSA or someone else to do it."

US revokes NSA leaker Snowden's passport

The United States has revoked former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's passport, a source familiar with the case said on Sunday.
Snowden, who is wanted on US espionage charges, flew to Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday and is seeking asylum in Ecuador, according to the foreign minister of the South American country.
The source declined to provide any further details of the US move to revoke Snowden's passport.
Ecuador has been sheltering WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its London embassy for the past year.
On its Twitter feed WikiLeaks said Snowden "is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks".
"Mr Snowden requested that WikiLeaks use its legal expertise and experience to secure his safety. Once Mr Snowden arrives in Ecuador his request will be formally processed," it added.
Snowden was charged with espionage by the US authorities last week after revealing details about a vast National Security Agency programme of phone and internet surveillance.

Snowden eludes the US, flees to Russia

Former US spy Edward Snowden on Sunday arrived in Russia from Hong Kong, reportedly on his way to Venezuela, escaping the clutches of US justice at least for now in a shock development sure to infuriate Washington.
Snowden, the target of a US arrest warrant issued on Friday after he blew the lid on massive secret surveillance programmes, arrived in Moscow on a direct flight operated by Russian flag carrier Aeroflot.
The Hong Kong government said earlier it had "no legal basis" to prevent Snowden leaving because the US government had failed to provide enough information to justify its provisional arrest warrant for the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor.
Snowden, 30, landed at Sheremetyevo airport in the north of Moscow at 17:05, but there was no immediate official confirmation of where he would head next, an AFP correspondent at the airport said.
Russian media reports citing sources within Aeroflot said he would fly to Cuba on Monday and then board a flight to the Venezuelan capital Caracas.
"Russian law enforcement agencies have nothing against him and we have no orders to detain him," one law enforcement source told the state news agency Ria Novosti.
Relations between Russia and the United States remain frosty because of discord over a raft of issues including the Syria conflict, reflected in a tense meeting between Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland last week.
'Snowden left Hong Kong legally'
Julian Assange's WikiLeaks operation claimed credit for helping to arrange asylum for the man behind one of the most significant security breaches in US history.
"Mr Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed evidence of a global surveillance regime conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies, has left Hong Kong legally," WikiLeaks said in a statement.
"He is bound for a democratic nation via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks," it said without revealing his final destination.
Snowden's latest interview on Sunday contained new revelations about US cyber-espionage against Chinese targets, drawing a stinging response from China's official news agency which branded Washington an espionage "villain".
The South China Morning Post, which has carried exclusive interviews with Snowden in Hong Kong, said Moscow would not be his final destination, and suggested that Iceland or Ecuador, which is currently giving Assange asylum in its London embassy, may be his ultimate port of call.
Snowden abandoned his high-paying job in Hawaii and went to Hong Kong on 20 May to begin issuing a series of leaks on NSA eavesdropping of phones and computer systems, triggering concern from governments around the world.
Obama's administration has insisted on the legality of the vast surveillance programme and said it has foiled a number of extremist plots.
Snowden's departure from Chinese territory could result in US retaliation against Hong Kong, but more broadly the affair is a shock to the Obama administration, which on Friday unveiled charges including theft and espionage against him.
White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon had said on Saturday that the charges presented a "good case" for Hong Kong to extradite him and that "we expect them to comply with the treaty in this case".
Washington an espionage 'villain'
The government of Hong Kong, a special administrative region (SAR) under Chinese rule that has maintained its own British-derived legal system, said it had informed Washington of Snowden's exit after determining that the documents provided by the US government did not fully comply with Hong Kong legal requirements.
"As the HKSAR government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong," it said in a statement.
It also pressed Washington for answers "on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies".
China's official Xinhua news agency attacked the United States as an espionage "villain" after Snowden detailed new allegations of NSA activity targeting mainland and Hong Kong interests.
In the latest revelations in the South China Morning Post, Snowden said the NSA was hacking Chinese mobile phone companies to gather data from millions of text messages.
He said US spies have also hacked the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, home to one of six "network backbones" that route all of mainland China's Internet traffic -- and the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, which operates one of the Asia-Pacific region's largest fibre-optic networks.
"These, along with previous allegations, are clearly troubling signs," Xinhua said in a commentary. "They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.
Snowden's claims about Pacnet followed a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper in which he claimed the British government's electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ had gained secret access to fibre-optic cables carrying global Internet traffic and telephone calls, and was sharing the information with the NSA.
The charges against him include theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information, and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person.
Two of the charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Canada's oil capital shut for days

Southern Alberta braced for more disruption on Saturday from floods that killed at least three people, forced about 100 000 from their homes and blacked out the centre of Canada's oil capital, Calgary.
Communities to the south and east of Calgary were on high alert as flood waters moved across the region. But with rainfall easing, a few residents began returning to damaged homes and authorities were hopeful that the worst might be over.
"It's morning in Calgary! Sunny, water levels are down, and our spirit remains strong," Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said on Twitter. "We're not out of this, but maybe have turned (the) corner."
The floods followed about 36 hours of unusually heavy rainfall - some communities received six months of their normal rainfall in under two days.
Evacuations started on Thursday in Calgary and in smaller cities. Utility Enmax switched off power to central Calgary on Friday afternoon lest water damage its downtown facilities, and the area was still without power and closed to cars on Saturday.
Eerily quiet
A few tourists and residents strolled in the carless streets of the city's core, but the area was eerily quiet.
Officials were unable to say how much it would cost to repair flooded homes and rebuild roads and bridges washed away by the murky brown floodwater.
Canada's main oil-producing region in the north of the province, was not affected, although some farmland was flooded, which will likely weaken crops that include wheat and canola.
Police said three bodies had been found near High River, south of Calgary. A fourth person may still be missing.
"A lot of Albertans have faced disasters the likes of which the majority of us could never imagine," Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths told a news conference.
In Calgary, authorities said water levels were expected to drop in the coming days. But the Bow River was still flowing at around five times its normal rate.
Essential operations
Nenshi said downtown could be off limits until the middle of next week "at the earliest," forcing companies to work from alternative sites.
A spokesperson for Imperial Oil, Canada's second-largest producer and refiner, said the company was working on plans to maintain essential operations, including allowing employees to work from other locations.
It was not clear when trading in Canadian crude oil would resume after little if any occurred on Friday.
Shorcan Energy Brokers, which provides live prices for many Canadian crude grades, operated out of Toronto on Friday rather than from Calgary, although no trades in Western Canada Select heavy blend or light synthetic crude took place.
Net Energy Inc, the other main Calgary crude broker, was closed on Friday and no trading took place.
Many roads and bridges remained closed, and the city banned the use of tap water for car-washing or other outside activities because treatment plants take more time to process the sludgy water. But Nenshi said Calgary water was still safe to drink.

Hillary Clinton wants a female president

Hillary Clinton has fed speculation that she might run for the White House in 2016 by telling an audience in Canada that she would like to see a woman president in the United States in her lifetime.
"Let me say this, hypothetically speaking, I really do hope that we have a woman president in my lifetime," Clinton told a private audience in Toronto. "And whether it's next time or the next time after that, it really depends on women stepping up and subjecting themselves to the political process, which is very difficult."
Clinton, a Democrat who was secretary of state under President Barack Obama, a former senator from New York and is the wife of former President Bill Clinton, is said to be undecided whether to seek the presidency in 2016.
Many Democrats and Republicans in the United States are expecting her to run, although the 65-year-old Clinton has said she needed to rest after four years as a globe-trotting secretary of state.
Polls have indicated she is far and away the most popular potential Democratic candidate for 2016, and that most Americans would prefer her to several possible Republican contenders.
Clinton picked up an endorsement on Tuesday from Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, who announced she is supporting a group encouraging Clinton to run for the White House.
McCaskill, who backed Obama over Clinton in the Democratic primaries in 2008, became the first member of Congress to announce her support for Clinton.
She praised the political action committee called Ready for Hillary for using the Internet to build support in the hope that Clinton will run.
Last week Clinton started her official Twitter account, describing herself as, among other things, a "wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate." She alluded to her future as "TBD" - to be determined.
In her speech in Toronto, delivered on Thursday and posted on YouTube on Friday, Clinton said electing a woman president would "would send exactly the right historic signal to girls, women as well as boys and men. And I will certainly vote for the right woman to be president."

NEWS,10.05.2013

Gang steals $45m worldwide through ATMs

A worldwide gang of criminals stole $45m in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe, federal prosecutors said and outmoded US card technology may be partly to blame.

Seven people were under arrest on Thursday in the US in connection with the case, which prosecutors said involved thousands of thefts from ATMs using bogus magnetic swipe cards carrying information from Middle Eastern banks.

The fraudsters moved with astounding speed to loot financial institutions around the world, working in cells including one in New York, Brooklyn US Attorney Loretta Lynch said.

She called it “a massive 21st-century bank heist” carried out by brazen thieves.

One of the suspects was caught on surveillance cameras, his backpack increasingly loaded down with cash, authorities said.

Others took photos of themselves with giant wads of bills as they made their way up and down Manhattan.

Here's how they did it:

Phase 1: Card processor network intrusion. Using malware, hackers breached the worldwide processors for Rakbank in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman.

Phase 2: The criminals override security protocols and hunt for the prepaid debit card systems and delete limits on the accounts. It takes months to penetrate the systems, prosecutors said.

Phase 3: Access codes are created. Data is loaded onto any plastic card with a magnetic stripe an old hotel key card or an expired credit card would do as long as it carried the account data and correct access codes.

Phase 4: Cells around the globe fan out and begin to make repeated cash machine withdrawals. In New York City alone, 750 transactions were made in two hours and 25 minutes from 140 different ATMs totaling $400,000, prosecutors said.

Phase 5: Hackers maintain unauthorized access to the banks to monitor the cashout, keeping withdrawals rolling until the breach is discovered and the systems shut down.

Phase 6: Cash is laundered and organizers are paid.

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.

She called it a “virtual criminal flash mob,” and a security analyst said it was the biggest ATM fraud case she had heard of.

There were two separate attacks, one in December that reaped $5 million worldwide and one in February that snared about $40m 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.

The plundered ATMs were in Japan, Russia, Romania, Egypt, Colombia, Britain, Sri Lanka, Canada and several other countries, and law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen nations were involved in the investigation, U.S. prosecutors said.

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 $2.8m in cash from hacked accounts in less than a day.

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 favour 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 US citizens originally from the Dominican Republic, lived in the New York City suburb orf Yonkers and 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 face 10 years in prison.

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 $100m a year.

By 2008, that had risen to about $1bn 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 $45m, 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.”

Cars made in Brazil 'deadly'

The cars roll endlessly off the local assembly lines of the industry's biggest automakers, more than 10 000 a day, into the eager hands of Brazil's new middle class. The shiny new Fords, Fiats, and Chevrolets tell the tale of an economy in full bloom that now boasts the fourth largest auto market in the world.
What happens once those vehicles hit the streets, however, is shaping up as a national tragedy, experts say, with thousands of Brazilians dying every year in auto accidents that in many cases shouldn't have proven fatal.
The culprits are the cars themselves, produced with weaker welds, scant safety features and inferior materials compared to similar models manufactured for US and European consumers, say experts and engineers inside the industry. Four of Brazil's five bestselling cars failed their independent crash tests.
Unsafe cars, coupled with the South American nation's often dangerous driving conditions, have resulted in a Brazilian death rate from passenger car accidents that is nearly four times that of the United States, according to an Associated Press analysis of Brazilian Health Ministry data on deaths compared to the size of each country's car fleet. In fact, the two countries are moving in opposite directions on survival rates - the US recorded 40% fewer fatalities from car wrecks in 2010 compared with a decade before. In Brazil, the number killed rose 72%, according to the latest available data.
Dr. Dirceu Alves, of Abramet, a Brazilian association of doctors that specializes in treating traffic accident victims, said poorly built cars take an unnecessary toll.
"The gravity of the injuries arriving at the hospitals is just ugly," he said, "injuries that should not be occurring."
Automakers in Brazil point out that their cars meet the nation's safety laws. Some said they build even tougher cars for the country because of its poorly maintained roadways and rejected any notion that cost-cutting in production leads to fatalities.
But the country's few safety activists perceive a deadly double standard, with automakers earning more money from selling cars that offer drivers fewer safeguards - a worrisome gap for new middle-class households, whose surging spending power has outpaced consumer protections taken for granted in more developed countries. The problem extends beyond Brazil, with economic forecasts showing the majority of global growth in auto sales taking place in emerging-market nations as the world's auto fleet doubles to 1.5 billion by 2020.
"Entry-level cars in Brazil are incredibly dangerous, it can't be denied. The death rate from accidents is far too high," said Maria Ines Dolci, coordinator of the Rio de Janeiro-based consumer defence group Proteste. "The manufacturers do this because the cars are a little cheaper to make and the demands of the Brazilian consumers are less; their knowledge of safety issues is lower than in Europe or the US."
Manufacturers earn a 10% profit on Brazilian-made cars, compared with 3% in the US and a global average of 5%, according to IHS Automotive, an industry consulting firm.
Only next year will laws require frontal air bags and antilock braking systems on all cars, safety features that have been standard in industrial countries for years. The country will also have new impact regulations on paper, at least; Brazilian regulators don't have their own crash-test facility to verify automakers' claims about vehicle performance, nor are there independent labs in the country.
Experts say those requirements alone are not sufficient to meet basic safety standards. Some models sold in Brazil, like the Chinese-made JAC J3, scored only one star in a recent crash test despite having air bags and antilock brakes.
An independent pilot effort known as the Latin New Car Assessment Program has run initial tests of Brazil's most popular car models, and the results are bleak.
The cheapest models of four of the five top-selling cars, made by General Motors, Volkswagen and Fiat, received a one-star rating, out of five stars, while other top sellers also scored poorly. Such a rating means cars provide little protection in serious head-on wrecks, compared to four- or five-star rated cars, which are virtually the minimum that consumers in the US and Europe buy.
"The difference is you're talking about somebody dead in the vehicle or dying very quickly, or somebody being able to get out of the vehicle themselves," said David Ward, director general of the London-based FIA Foundation for auto safety, which supports the Euro and Latin NCAP programs. "It's definitely a difference between life and death."
The squat Ford Ka hatchback sold in Europe scored four stars when it was tested by Euro NCAP in 2008; its Latin American version scored one star.
Ford acknowledged that particular Ka is built on an outdated platform, and said it cannot be compared with the European version of the same name - it's that different. The company said it aims to have all its cars produced in Brazil built on updated, global platforms by 2015.
The Mexico-produced Nissan March compact sold in Latin America received a two-star rating from Latin NCAP, while the version sold for about the same price in Europe, called the Micra, scored four stars. The crash tests found the Latin American model had a weak, unstable body structure that offered occupants little protection in even non-serious wrecks.
In an emailed statement, Nissan said the March sold in Brazil is "practically the same model" offered in Europe. "The difference in the results achieved in Europe and Latin America is due to variations in the NCAP tests applied in different parts of the world."
Not so, said Alejandro Furas, technical director for the Global NCAP crash test programs.
"We perform the frontal crash test exactly in the same way as the Euro NCAP," he said. "The March and Micra were tested in the same lab, with the same type of crash test dummies, under the same conditions with the same people running the laboratory."
The Euro NCAP tests are more complete. They include side-impact and other tests, while the Latin American version only records front-impacts. Each type of impact test is individually scored on a 16-point scale.
The March sold in Brazil obtained a 7.62 rating in its frontal-impact test. The Micra fared much better, 12.7 points.
Italian automaker Fiat said in an emailed statement that "in general, Brazilian projects receive more reinforcements" within the cars' bodies to fortify them against the nation's "harsher roads and terrain."
However, NCAP tests found that Fiat's best-selling car in Brazil, called the Novo Uno, had an unstable body structure and scored it just one star.
Crash-test footage shows the front of the car folding up like an accordion, giving it a 2.0 point rating, the second lowest of the 28 cars NCAP has examined. Consumers purchased nearly 256 000 Novo Uno's last year - the second-most popular car in the country.
Renault's safety standards also vary. The French company builds its Sandero in Brazil, selling 98 400 cars last year. That car scored one star on the Latin NCAP test, but the model sold in Europe, made by Renault's Romanian subsidiary Dacia, scored three stars.
Renault said the safety record of the Sandero and its other cars were on par with autos of the same class in Brazil.
One of those is the VW Gol, Brazil's best-selling car for the last decade.
Volkswagen said it strives to maintain a global standard for body strength, putting the same number of welds on the same models regardless of where they're produced, and using high-strength steel in Brazilian cars. It added that since 1998 it's given Brazilian consumers the option of buying a car with air bags - its Gol Trend model with two frontal air bags scored three stars, while the same model without air bags scored one star.
The company didn't respond to requests for figures on how many consumers requested air bags.
"Structural integrity during a crash is a global standard for Volkswagen," the company said in an emailed statement. "The passenger compartment for the Gol remained stable and thus guarantees survival space for occupants."
Latin NCAP has tested three VW models. The Gol and the Polo had stable bodies. The Bora sedan, however, was rated as unstable, though other factors helped it score three stars.
And then there are the cars the companies do not market outside Latin America, such as the Celta by GM. Celta is Brazil's No. 5 car in terms of sales, with 137 615 sold last year. It received one star after its door unhinged and the passenger cabin roof bent into an inverted V shape during its crash test.
General Motors had no comment other than to say that its cars in Brazil are legal.
An engineer for a major US automaker, speaking only on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said he has watched for years as his company failed to implement more advanced safety features in Brazil, simply because the law did not require them.
""The automakers are pleased to make more profitable cars for countries where the demands, whatever they may be, are less rigorous," he said. "It happens everywhere - India, China and Russia, for example."
Car crashes
About 40 million Brazilians moved into the middle class during the past decade with more income than ever to buy their first car. The growth potential is enormous: One out of every seven Brazilians owns a car, while the US vehicle fleet covers nearly every American.
But as auto sales boom in Brazil, so have the number of accidents and deaths.
An analysis of Health Ministry data shows that 9 059 car occupants died in vehicle crashes in Brazil in 2010, according to the most recent statistics available. That same year, 12 435 people in the US were killed in car crashes, though the US passenger car fleet is five times larger than Brazil's. The result: Brazilian automobile crash victims died at four times the rate as those in the US.
The dangers come down to basics, engineers said: the lack of body reinforcements, lower-quality steel in car bodies, weaker or fewer weld spots to hold the vehicles together and car platforms designed decades before modern safety advances.
"The electricity used in building a car is about 20% of the cost of the structure," said Marcilio Alves, an engineering professor at Brazil's premier University of Sao Paulo and one of the few independent researchers in the nation looking at car safety.
"If you save on electricity, you save on cost. One way to save electricity is either reducing the number of spot welds or using less energy for each spot weld made. This affects structural performance in the event of a crash."
In a car with no air bags and an unstable body structure, a driver's biggest danger is the steering wheel.
A weak body structure and fragile steering column make it easier for the wheel to slam into the driver's chest and abdomen in frontal crashes, the deadliest and most common, causing serious damage to vital organs.
Ward talks of steering wheels that break off and "float" during wrecks in poorly made cars - moving around the cabin in the driver's area. That means that even if an air bag is deployed, the steering wheel may go around or under it and directly hit the driver.
Many Brazilian car bodies also don't contain crumple zones, areas that absorb energy during wrecks. The omission endangers occupants' lower limbs, as foot wells rip off and expose feet and legs to car parts slamming into them from the front.
"If a car's body cannot absorb the energy of a crash, it will logically result in more damage, more injuries to passengers," said Alves, the doctor who specialises in traffic accident victims.
One auto engineer described the situation by sketching two car body designs with identical perimeters, but one depicted internal gaps -missing body reinforcements.
He worked three decades for Volkswagen and spent the last 10 years as an independent engineering consultant for big automakers. He asked that his name not be published for fear of losing contracts and benefits.
"The secret of a car's body being able to withstand the crash test are the weld spots," he said.
"Let's say this is a German car," he pointed to the gapless sketch. "It's really sophisticated. Nothing is missing."
Then he pointed at the car made in Brazil, full of incomplete ink strokes.
"The Brazilian version looks the same from the outside, but its missing pieces," he said. "In one version they include the reinforcement, in the other they don't. What's of interest is the final shape. What's inside, nobody can see."
No lawsuits
In 2008, Carlos Alberto Lopes, then a 23-year-old waiter, was riding in a one-star car travelling about 50 mph on a rainy highway in the south-eastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais when the road curved smoothly left. The car hydroplaned, skidded into an embankment and rolled several times down a long incline. Of the four occupants, Lopes was the only one with serious injuries, leaving him paralysed from the waist down.
Lopes says the three-point seatbelt he was wearing didn't lock his body in place, allowing him to repeatedly hit the collapsing roof as the car rolled. He suffered a crushed vertebra.
"If the seatbelt had locked when the car rolled I wouldn't have hit my back. None of this would have happened," Lopes said.
A study by a chain of Brazilian rehabilitation centres where Lopes is being treated found that in 2011, 40% of the patients it worked with in Sao Paulo with serious spinal injuries were hurt in traffic accidents.
Lopes never considered a lawsuit. In fact, in more than a dozen interviews with accident victims left paralysed after crashes, not one considered taking legal action against vehicle manufacturers.
That's in part a reflection of the lack of police investigations into car accidents, the majority of which, like Lopes', only result in simple "occurrence bulletins" that include minimal information.
But it's also indicative of the deference Brazil's new middle class consumers show to automakers and most other industries.
"We're 20 years behind the US and Europe in terms of consumer awareness," said Dolci, coordinator of the Proteste consumer defence group. "The new, emerging middle class entering the market has little information on car safety. They think little of automobile security. It's this very class of consumer the automakers are targeting and to whom they're selling a mountain of cars."
Accidents like Lopes' involve more than a poorly built car.
Drivers fail to obey traffic laws, which many of the region's governments notoriously don't enforce. Cars must navigate crumbling roads and poorly designed highway systems that all but make gridlock and accidents unavoidable. And many drivers simply value perks such as alloy wheels and sound systems over unseen crumple zones.
In 1965, there were 47 089 motor vehicle fatalities in the US. That same year, consumer activist Ralph Nader's famous indictment of the auto industry was published, Unsafe at Any Speed. The book ignited a national discussion on auto safety and ultimately led to reforms that dramatically refashioned the industry's standards, helping lead to a 32% drop in deaths by 2011.
Nader said halting the growing number of auto deaths in Brazil would take "a public uproar, product liability lawsuits, selective boycotts by motorists or by mandatory Brazilian law equalising safety standards with the safest engineering required in other countries."
"These responses in the past have worked in other countries confronted by auto industry double standards for protecting lives on the highway. Such actions are long overdue but now Brazilians know the truth in more detail," he said.
The Brazilian government says its new laws mandating frontal air bags and anti-lock brakes will dramatically improve safety, as will new impact standards. But because there are no independent crash-test centres in Brazil, companies will not face the same scrutiny as elsewhere. They will run the impact tests themselves and present the results to the government for approval. Because there is no "conformity of production" clause in the Brazilian legislation, cars won't be spot-checked to ensure they meet safety laws.
Alexandre Cordeiro, the top government minister overseeing auto safety laws, acknowledged that the government doesn't have its own crash-test centre - but said Brazil will monitor crash tests conducted outside the country.
"Regarding front- and rear-end crash tests, our cars are as secure as European or American cars," Cordeiro said.
However, when asked about the stark differences in performance that the NCAP tests document between Brazilian and European cars, Cordeiro acknowledged improvements need to be made, saying "we need to evolve and we're working on it."
Over the years Ward said he has watched the same battles play out over auto safety - the only thing that changes is the location.
"The sad thing is, this has been the experience in the 1960s in the US, in the 1990s in Europe and now in Latin America," Ward said. "The industry does the least it can get away with until they're forced to do something different. It's maddening." 

Obama vows to boost jobs, economic growth

President Barack Obama pledged on a trip to Texas on Thursday to take steps to accelerate economic growth, turning his attention to job creation after concentrating on gun-control legislation and immigration reform in recent months.
Obama was kicking off events he has scheduled across the country to draw attention to his efforts to boost economic growth through jobs that benefit the middle class, White House officials said.
"Watching cable TV sometimes, you might get to thinking nothing's going right. But the truth is there's a lot of reasons for us to feel optimistic about where we're headed as a country," he told students and staff at Manor New Technology High School outside Austin.
The first trip on his jobs tour comes as a poll shows that what Americans want most from politicians in Washington is job creation and action to help the economy grow.
But the president's economic efforts face opposition from congressional Republicans who remain set on cutting federal spending and shrinking the size of government as a path to stronger economic growth.
Republicans have wasted no opportunity to blame Obama for an economy where the unemployment rate remains a relatively high 7.5% four years after the end of the deep 2007-2009 recession.
The office of Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry - who was one of the president's greeters on arrival - said in a tweet, "Obama should have focused on jobs and opportunity five years ago."
At the Texas school he visited, Obama praised efforts to expand science and math education and watched students operate robots they had built.
"You look like some serious engineers," he told them.
The president's visit also included stops at Applied Sciences, a maker of semiconductors and other technology, and meetings with business people and ordinary citizens, including a visit to Stubb's Bar-B-Q restaurant.
Obama has suffered some recent policy setbacks. He failed to persuade Congress to accept expanded background checks for gun buyers following the December shootings of 20 children and six adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.
He also is at an impasse with congressional Republicans over a deficit reduction deal he insists should include higher tax revenues, which Republicans oppose.
While the president appears to be making headway in reforming immigration laws, final legislation is months off.
Sparring over the economy
White House officials on Thursday criticised congressional Republicans for reviving plans to use the debt ceiling as leverage to extract spending cuts and tax reductions, as well as for allowing deep spending cuts known as "sequestration" to remain in place.
"The status quo doesn't serve any of the long-term objectives of job growth or competitiveness," White House National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling told reporters during a conference call.
"Those who are serious about our economic recovery, our economic stability, our economic standing, should not be contemplating putting our economy at risk of default," he said.
A Gallup poll released on Tuesday found 86% of those surveyed this month ranked creating jobs as their top priority for action by Congress and Obama, tied at 86% with helping the economy grow.
Lower on the priority list were reducing the federal deficit at 69%, reforming the tax code at 59%, reducing gun violence at 55% and reforming immigration at 50%.
Obama in his speech on Thursday pointed to signs of economic recovery, such as improved corporate profits, a resurgence in the auto industry and a boom in energy.
A top Republican attacked Obama, however, for failing to generate stronger economic growth with his policies.
"That's the Obama economy," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said. "I hope the president is traveling to Austin today because he's finally serious about turning that around - about changing course and implementing policies that might actually work to get the economy moving again."
McConnell singled out Obama's signature healthcare legislation as an obstacle to hiring.
The White House announced a competition for locations to house three manufacturing institutes where businesses, government and educational institutions will get funding to develop new technologies.
The president also issued an executive order requiring that newly released government data be made freely available in easily readable formats.