“They can be rescued by today. We will be able to bring them out after we cut seven more iron rods,” rescue official Mohammad Sarwar Hossain said.Rescue operations to find more survivors are expected to continue. However, there are fears that even if survivors are still alive 72 hours after the tragedy, they may be badly dehydrated.An estimated 2,419 survivors have been accounted for. On Saturday, search crews managed to pull 19 survivors out of the rubble, after 40 were found late Friday.”There are many [survivors] still there,” fire official Subrata Sarker told AP.Another rescue worker said he saw 15 people still alive. Many of the trapped workers were so badly injured they needed to be removed within a few hours, and given with dried food, bottled water and oxygen.‘Profits before people’It is unclear how many workers were inside the factory when it collapsed. According to local police, they ordered an evacuation of the building on Tuesday after detecting cracks in the building. However, the bosses of Rana Plaza ignored the order and the building collapsed the next day, on Wednesday morning.“It’s nothing new for Bangladesh,” American trend forecaster and publisher of the Trends Journal, Gerald Celente, told RT.“It’s an international trend that we see growing more and more as profits are put before people. People are more expendable. So it’s just a lot of talk that you hear from these companies in the West, for example, that say they watch the standards going on in the sweat factories around the world. They just show. There’s really no security, really no hard institutions in place that are monitoring these kind of factories,” Celente said. Hundreds of the employees – paid $38 a month to produce low-cost clothing for Western brands – were killed by massive blocks of concrete and mortar falling on them. The top three floors of the eight-story Rana Plaza, which employed 3,122 workers, were illegally constructed, according to media reports. An arrest warrant has been issued for the owner of the factory, Mohammed Sohel Rana, a local leader of the ruling Awami League’s youth front. His wife has been detained for questioning. Rana’s arrest was reportedly ordered by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.‘It felt like I was in hell’”It was so hot, I could hardly breathe, there was no food and water. When I regained my senses I found myself in this hospital bed,” Marina Begum told reporters while in hospital. The 22-year-old survivor was trapped inside the collapsed factory for three days. “It felt like I was in hell,” she added.”We must salute the common people who dared to enter the wreckage to rescue them, as even our professionals didn’t dare to take the risk,” Mizanur Rahman, deputy director of the fire service, told Reuters. Fears turned to grief for many as they anxiously awaited news of their loved ones. Abul Basar burst into tears over his missing wife, who worked in one of the garment factories. “My son says that his mother will come back some day, she must return,” he told AP. Rescue teams went in from seven entry points gouged into the rubble, often returning with badly decomposed bodies covered in cloth and plastic. The bodies were kept at a nearby school before being handed over to relatives armed with photos of their missing family members.North American and European chains, including British retailer Primark, acknowledged they were supplied by factories in the Rana Plaza building. Many other retailers distanced themselves from the disaster, saying they were not involved with the factories at the time of the collapse or had not recently ordered garments from them, AP reported.Wednesday’s collapse was the third major industrial incident in five months in Bangladesh, raising concerns about worker safety and low wages in the South Asian country, which is one of the largest exporters of garments in the world after China and Italy. A reported 60 percent of Bangladeshi garment exports are to Europe.Public outrage over the poor working conditions of Bangladesh’s 3.6 million garment workers, most of whom are reportedly women, has triggered a wave of protests.Hundreds took to the streets on Saturday, burning cars and disrupting traffic as police formed a cordon around the site of the tragedy. The protests reportedly spread outside Savar, the Dhaka suburb where the collapse occurred. … Read More
Budweiser Black Crown Super Bowl Commercial: New Beer Debuts In ‘Coronation’ Ad (VIDEO)
One of the biggest advertisers in Super Bowl history has been Anheuser-Busch and this year, they introduced a new beer called “Budweiser Black Crown.” The brewing company’s first 30-second spot for Black Crown was dubbed “Coronation.”
According to Market Watch, Anheuser-Busch created 12 new beers, narrowed that number down to six and then polled approximately 25,000 people to choose the new Bud brew. Black Crown was the winner.
The ad ends with a man in a Budweiser apron raising his bottled beer saying, “Here’s to taste. Here’s to our kind of beer.”
Disneyland for gang enthusiasts
HERE’S HOW TO TAKE A GANG TOUR: start at a bus parked outside a Silverlake building called The Dream Center, where grown adults cluster like kids on a field trip. Pay $65, and take your complimentary bottled water. Notice the church group from Missouri, 20-strong and blonde, and eye their grocery bag full of snacks. Notice the surprising number of Australians. They pace restlessly. One of them is named Tiny, but he isn’t. He appears to be here with his son, a teenager in baggy shorts and braces.Alfred is the guide. He’s a marine turned gangbanger turned entrepreneur. He’s cracking Inner City Jokes. His phrase. We don’t need the windows open cuz we don’t do drive-bys. Also, we can’t have them open because the bus is air-conditioned. He’s hired three other guys to help lead the tour — ex-gang-members who had trouble finding other jobs with felonies on their records. They’ve turned their experiences into stories for travelers. They are curators and exhibits at once. When they’re not giving tours, they’re doing conflict mediation in the communities these tours put on display. The $65 will fund this work.Continue Reading… … Read More
The Politics of Price Gouging: It’s OK for Unions, Gas Station Owners Not So Much
So it turns out that price gouging is OK in
certain circumstances, even when disaster has struck. Here’s the
Daily Caller reporting on demands from some New York unions that out-of-state
electricians who traveled to repair storm damage either
join the collective or be told to take a hike:
In New York, no government official has stepped in to ensure
that utility crews from other states won’t have to show their
union membership
cards before going to work — even though their own employers are
paying for them to repair power lines in the Empire State.
Eventually, [Barry] Moline [head of the Florida Municipal Energy
Association] said, his state’s crews “went everywhere else”
affected by Sandy, “but it was
only in New York where the union had to give their blessing.”
“It just made me sick that you’ve got people who have no power,”
he said, “and you hear about a lot of people dying.”
More here.
Meanwhile, of course, keeping prices low when it comes to gas,
bottled water, and the like is the order of the day throughout the
metro New York area.
That seems right: Gas station owners can’t raise prices, which
might actually encourage more gas suppliers to make the extra
effort to bring in a bigger supply. Meanwhile, the city does
nothing to stop the shaking down of electricians who traveled
hundreds of miles to pitch in and help because it might screw with
union supremacy in a ravaged city.
Reason TV’s Jim Epstein reported on how New York City’s
anti-gouging law is playing out at Brooklyn gas stations:
Watch the Weather from the Comfort of Your Bed with Livestream’s #SandyCam
The #SandyCam awaits the action. (Photo: Screenshot)
The wind is already whipping and New Yorkers, having bought up all the bottled water and discount Halloween candy they could find, are ready to hole up in their apartment for the next two days. It’s not like you can hop on the ACE and go check out the scene at the waterfront, since the subway is shut down and all.
Luckily for anyone seeking a little vicarious storm-chasing, there’s Livestream. The startup has installed a camera on the roof of its Chelsea HQ and will be broadcasting the storm’s transit across downtown on what they’ve dubbed #SandyCam.
“We just decided to scramble everybody, and they’ll be working and locking in with food and maybe even sleeping in the office Monday and Tuesday,” Livestream CEO Max Haot told Betabeat. Now that’s dedication.
By “everybody,” he means a skeleton production crew of about five people, who’ll be responsible for the feed. The rest of the company’s New York employees will be working from home. For his part, Mr. Haot is coordinating the efforts from afar, as he is currently stuck in Las Vegas. “I’ll be safe, but without my wife,” he said.
The motivation behind this last-minute effort, which wasn’t even conceived until Sunday morning? “Basically, we didn’t see any good coverage of [Sandy] in the media that’s really, like, very interactive, simple, and 24/7,” Mr. Haot explained.
Going on infrastructure alone, Livestream was well positioned to provide just that: “Our office happens to be in one of the most connected buildings, both for video fiber and also in terms of power,” he said, explaining they’ve got backup generators on the roof in case of a total blackout. (Hurricane party at 111 Eighth Avenue?)
At the moment, the stream is merely a placid view of downtown, with a NOAA warning on endless loop and a stream of chats. But once the storm really gets going sometime later this afternoon, the excitement will ramp up accordingly. In addition to audio (“so people can really hear the noise and the sounds of the wind”), Livestream will be aggregating the best user-generated footage shot on their remote streaming mobile apps. The company is also dispatching citizen journalist Tim Poole with a specially equipped Jeep and team to shoot photos and live footage across the city, “as long as it’s safe.”
“That could get quite interesting, to weave that in, instead of just the static camera,” added Mr. Haot.
There’s a good chance the page will attract quite a few eyeballs as the weather plays out. Even with a very basic setup for last year’s Hurricane Irene, said Mr. Haot, “we reached about 100,000 uniques and 30,000 concurrents during the evening, and obviously that was editorially not very compelling and not as big as this.” The stream and the entire page are also embeddable, for maximum distribution.
“It could get very interesting in terms of crowd-sourced live news coverage,” he said.
Well, it’s not the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore being buffeted about in a blue anorak, but it’ll certainly do in a pinch. … Read More
Best insulated water bottle
Water is delicious and good. Bottled water is delicious and bad: It’s costly for the environment and people alike. After hours of research, I decided the $18 Klean Kanteen Classic is the bottle I’d use to tote my water.In many ways, recommending a water bottle is tougher than recommending, say, a TV. Everyone watches TV pretty much the same way, so it’s easy to find one that’s well-suited for everyone. But what you’re looking for in a water bottle will depend entirely on where, when and how you’ll be using it. It’s a subjective thing.But after some work, we did find a solid, reusable water bottle for every day use around the home, work and gym. And a bottle that is insulated for warmer and colder climates. And variations with sport tops that will let a thirsty person quickly get a sip.Continue Reading… … Read More
