Rescuers use massive strips of cloth as escape chutes after textile factory in Bangladesh collapses killing at least 159 people.

Around 2,000 workers were in the eight-storey building when it collapsed without warning yesterday morning.

Police said factory owners appeared to have ignored a warning after crack was detected on Tuesday.

At least 159 people died yesterday when a factory building which supplies clothes to Primark collapsed in Bangladesh.

Matalan also took orders from one of the factories in the building until two months ago, while campaigners said the brands Benetton and Mango also used suppliers in the block – although this was denied by the retailers yesterday.

Survivor Shaheena Akhter, 23, said: ‘Some of us did not want to work fearing something might happen, but the garment factory people told us that we had to join our work otherwise we will lose our jobs.’ The tragedy highlights the unsafe conditions many endure in factories making clothes for Western companies.

A Primark spokesman said: ‘Primark has been engaged to review the Bangladeshi industry’s approach to factory standards. ‘Primark will push for this to also include building integrity.’ Two factories in the building – New Wave Style and New Wave Bottoms – were making clothing for Mango of Spain and Benetton of Italy, according to campaign group Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity. But the companies denied their clothes were being made in the building. 

Tessel Pauli, a spokesman for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said: ‘These accidents represent a failure of these brands to make safety a priority.’

“These accidents represent a failure of these brands to make safety a priority. They know what needs to be done and they are not doing it,” Pauli told AFP.

Bangladeshi unions and rights activists have also reacted furiously, calling for an end to the impunity the country’s garment manufacturers enjoy.

Noam Chomsky on Intellectual Property

From the Q&A period of a speech by Noam Chomsky at Washington State University on April 22, 2005

Questioner:

“IP” or Intellectual Properties. Do you feel that they are an integral component to personal freedoms or a detriment? And what place does Intellectual Property have in public and academic settings?

Chomsky:

That’s a very interesting question. It has an interesting history. The World Trade Organization, the Uruguay round that set up the World Trade Organization imposed, it’s called a “free trade agreement”.  It’s in fact a highly protectionist agreement.  The US is strongly opposed to free trade, just as business leaders are, just as they’re opposed to a market economy. A crucial part of the Uruguay round, WTO, NAFTA, and the rest of them, is very strong (what are called) intellectual property rights. What it actually means is rights that guarantee monopoly pricing power to private tyrannies.

So take, say, a drug corporation. Most of the serious research and development, the hard part of it, is funded by the public. In fact most of the economy comes out of public expenditures through the state system, which is the source of most innovation and development.  I mean computers, the Internet.  Just go through the range, it’s all coming out of the state system primarily.  There is research and development in the corporate system, some, but it’s mostly at the marketing end.  And the same is true of drugs.

Once the corporations gain the benefit of the public paying the costs and taking the risks, they want to monopolize the profit.  And the intellectual property rights, they’re not for small inventors. In fact the people doing the work in the corporations, they don’t get anything out of it, like a dollar if they invent something.  It’s the corporate tyrannies that are making the profits, and they want to guarantee them.

The World Trade Organization proposed new, enhanced intellectual property rights, patent rights, which means monopoly pricing rights, far beyond anything that existed in the past.  In fact they are not only designed to maximize monopoly pricing, and profit, but also to prevent development.

Indian Man Offers Underprivileged Children Free Education under a Bridge

A torn rug to sit on, a metro bridge for a roof, a patch of wall painted black for a blackboard and a shopkeeper for a teacher. This may look like a scene out of a Hindi movie but is the everyday reality of 39 children from villages near the Yamuna bank.

"Our teacher has told us that when poverty strikes, you should open your mind, and that can be done only through education," Abhishek, 15, a student of Sharma's now attending a government school, told the Indian Express. He aspires to be an engineer when he grows up.

Rajesh Kumar Sharma, 40, offers a free education to New Delhi's slum children under a metro bridge.

Over 30 local Indian children have been attending his open-air, dirt-floor school since it opened three years ago.

A Vocation for Teaching

Children attend class at the Dongzhong (literally means in cave) primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts.