Phils' Ruiz suspended 25 games after positive test

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Add catcher to the Philadelphia Phillies' needs this offseason.

All-Star Carlos Ruiz was suspended Tuesday for the first 25 games of next season following a positive test for an amphetamine. The 33-year-old catcher had a career year in 2012, hitting .325 with 16 homers and 68 RBIs in 114 games.

"I am sincerely regretful for my mistake in taking a prohibited stimulant," Ruiz said in a statement issued by the Major League Baseball Players Association. "I apologize to my teammates, the Phillies organization and the Philadelphia fans. I will serve the imposed 25-game suspension to begin the season and I look forward to returning to the field and working toward bringing a championship back to Philadelphia in 2013."

Ruiz will be eligible to participate in spring training, including exhibition games.

"The Phillies fully support Major League Baseball's drug program," the team said. "We are disappointed by the news of this violation of the program. We will support Carlos in an appropriate manner and move forward to achieve our goal to play championship-caliber baseball in 2013."

Erik Kratz will likely begin the 2013 season as Philadelphia's starting catcher while Ruiz serves his suspension. Kratz, a career minor-leaguer, filled in nicely when he finally got a chance after Ruiz went down with a foot injury. Kratz hit .248, but had nine doubles, nine homers and 26 RBIs in only 141 at-bats. Kratz also threw out 45 percent of base-stealers (15 of 33).

Still, losing Ruiz hurts a lineup that struggled mightily last year. Ruiz moved up from his usual No. 8 spot and took over for an injured Ryan Howard as the team's cleanup hitter for a chunk of the season. He batted fifth after Howard returned in July.

The Phillies, who finished 81-81 after winning five straight NL East titles, have several holes to fill. Only Howard, Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins are certain regulars. Utley, though, didn't play until late May in 2011 and late June in 2012 because of chronic knee injuries.

General manager Ruben Amaro Jr. hopes to add a starting center fielder, another starting outfielder and a third baseman either through free agency or trades. Now he'll also need a backup catcher for Kratz for the first month. Brian Schneider served as the team's primary backup the last three seasons, but only batted .212 in 122 games.

The Phillies have two top prospects catching in the minors. Sebastian Valle hit .253 with 17 homers and 58 RBIs in 80 games at Double-A Reading and Triple-A Lehigh Valley. Tommy Joseph, acquired in the trade that sent Hunter Pence to San Francisco, hit .257 with 11 homers and 48 RBIs for the Giants' and Phillies' Double-A affiliates.

Ruiz became the eighth player suspended this year under the major league testing program, the second for amphetamines following Baltimore shortstop Ryan Adams. The eight suspensions are the most since 2007.

This had to be Ruiz's second positive test for a stimulant. An initial positive for a stimulant does not trigger a suspension, only that the player must undergo follow-up testing.

There have been 102 suspensions this year under the minor league testing program.

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Follow Rob Maaddi on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobMaaddi

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Global Update: Investing in Eyeglasses for Poor Would Boost International Economy

BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

Eliminating the worldwide shortage of eyeglasses could cost up to $28 billion, but would add more than $200 billion to the global economy, according to a study published last month in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

The $28 billion would cover the cost of training 65,000 optometrists and equipping clinics where they could prescribe eyeglasses, which can now be mass-produced for as little as $2 a pair. The study was done by scientists from Australia and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The authors assumed that 703 million people worldwide have uncorrected nearsightedness or farsightedness severe enough to impair their work, and that 80 percent of them could be helped with off-the-rack glasses, which would need to be replaced every five years.

The biggest productivity savings from better vision would not be in very poor regions like Africa but in moderately poor countries where more people have factory jobs or trades like driving or running a sewing machine.

Without the equivalent of reading glasses, “lots of skilled crafts become very difficult after age 40 or 45,” said Kevin Frick, a Johns Hopkins health policy economist and study co-author. “You don’t want to be swinging a hammer if you can’t see the nail.”

If millions of schoolchildren who need glasses got them, the return on investment could be even greater, he said, but that would be in the future and was not calculated in this study.

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A Struggling CNN Casts Its Eyes on Jeffrey Zucker

In the days to come, when Time Warner appoints a new leader of CNN Worldwide for the first time in a decade, that person will face an identity crisis unlike any other in corporate America.

Though CNN over all is on track to have its most profitable year ever, its flagship channel in the United States is seemingly rudderless, run by layers of producers and executives — many with competing visions. Its low prime-time ratings are the stuff of punch lines and a journalism school case study in the damage wrought by the digital age.

Then again, CNN also has tremendous potential, an enviably popular Web site and countless people rooting for it to succeed.

Throughout a four-month search for the person to succeed Jim Walton, the departing president, attention has centered on Jeffrey Zucker, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, who was replaced when Comcast took over the company last year. Mr. Zucker produces Katie Couric’s syndicated daytime talk show.

Several news executives close to Mr. Zucker said this week that they believed he had been chosen to run CNN, and they expected the appointment to be announced soon. People close to the Time Warner chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, also identified Mr. Zucker. A Time Warner spokesman declined to comment.

In considering candidates to run one of the world’s best-known, but beleaguered, news organizations, Mr. Bewkes and his deputy Phil Kent have also been considering their own legacies. They are cautious about not undermining CNN’s journalistic heart and soul, even as they strive to resuscitate the channel’s prime-time lineup, according to people who have met with them about the search. That means the channel’s programming will remain nonpartisan in nature.

“They want someone who has programming and management and cable expertise; someone who can be credible to the staff and to the business community,” one person said. “They know that this is a pretty tall order.”

Mr. Zucker could check off all those boxes. As a young NBC News producer, he helped start what became a 16-year winning streak for the “Today” show. He had mixed results as he moved up the rungs of NBC, but he can point to cable programming successes even as the NBC broadcast network struggled. He did not respond to requests for comment, and people with knowledge of the search insisted on anonymity to preserve friendships and business relationships.

But many others in and around CNN spoke on the record about the challenges ahead. Getting the top-heavy 4,000-person company — spread among New York, Washington, Atlanta and bureaus around the world — to row in the same direction will be one of the toughest tasks, many said.

CNN’s many channels and sites net roughly $600 million in annual profits, through advertising revenue and subscriber fees. But the channel is leaving ad dollars on the table, as one executive put it, because its prime-time ratings are lagging, and it is putting future fee increases at risk by appearing irrelevant in the eyes of some cable subscribers.

One problem dates back to CNN’s creation in 1980: when there is a lack of news, there is a lack of viewers. Kiran Chetry, a CNN morning anchor from 2007 to 2011, said her time there was like being on a news treadmill: “We were running, sweating, doing the work, but never getting anywhere ratings-wise,” she said. This stemmed, she said, from uncertainty about “what we were, who our audience was and how we best served them.”

As Fox News and, later, MSNBC put on confrontational political programs with partisan points of view, CNN sold itself as proudly nonpartisan, but it fell from first to second to third place in the cable news wars along the way. This should have been an “up” year for the channel, thanks to the presidential election; but through mid-November the channel had drawn 412,000 viewers at any given time, down 16 percent from the previous 12 months.

Bill Carter contributed reporting.

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Egypt’s President Said to Limit Scope of Judicial Decree

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians stand near a burned out school, before the funeral of Mohammed Gaber Salah, an activist who died Sunday from injuries sustained during protests.

CAIRO — With public pressure mounting, President Mohamed Morsi appeared to pull back Monday from his attempt to assert an authority beyond the reach of any court. His allies in the Muslim Brotherhood canceled plans for a large demonstration in his support, signaling a chance to calm an escalating battle that has paralyzed a divided nation.

After Mr. Morsi met for hours with the judges of Egypt’s Supreme Judicial Council, his spokesman read an “explanation” on Egyptian television that appeared to backtrack from a presidential decree that had placed Mr. Morsi’s official edicts above judicial scrutiny — even while saying the president had not actually changed a word of the statement.

Though details of the talks remained hazy, and it was not at all clear whether the opposition or even the court would accept his position, Mr. Morsi’s gesture was another demonstration that Egyptians would no longer allow their rulers to operate above the law. But there appeared little chance that Mr. Morsi’s gesture alone would be enough to quell the crisis set off by his perceived power grab.

How far that gesture might go toward alleviating the political crisis, however, remained uncertain. Protesters remained camped in Tahrir Square, and the opposition was moving ahead with plans for a major demonstration on Tuesday.

In a televised statement, the presidential spokesman, Yasser Ali, said for the first time that Mr. Morsi had sought only to assert pre-existing powers already approved by the courts under previous precedents, not to give himself carte blanche from judicial oversight.

He said that the president meant all along to follow an established Egyptian legal doctrine suspending judicial scrutiny of presidential “acts of sovereignty” that work “to protect the main institutions of the state.” Mr. Morsi had maintained from the moment of his decree that his purpose was to empower himself to protect the constitutional assembly from threats that Mubarak-appointed judges might dissolve the constituent assembly, which is led by his fellow Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The courts have already dissolved the Islamist-led Parliament and an earlier constituent assembly.

But the text of the original decree has exempted all presidential edicts from judicial review until the ratification of a constitution, not just those edicts justified as “acts of sovereignty.”

Legal experts said that the spokesman’s “explanations” of the president’s intentions, if put into effect, would amount to a revision of the decree he had issued last Thursday. But lawyers said that the verbal statements alone carried little legal weight.

How the courts would apply the doctrine remained hard to predict. And Mr. Morsi’s political opposition indicated it was holding out for far greater concessions, including the breakup of the Islamist-led constituent assembly.

Speaking at a news conference while Mr. Morsi was meeting with the judges, the opposition activist and intellectual Abdel Haleem Qandeil called for “a long-term battle,” declaring that withdraw of Mr. Morsi’s new powers was only the first step toward the opposition’s goal of “the withdrawal of the legitimacy of Morsi’s presence in the presidential palace.” Completely withdrawing the edict would be “a minimum,” he said.

Most in the opposition focused on the spokesman’s declaration that the president had not revised the text of his decree. Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and former presidential candidate, pointed to the growing crowd of protesters camped out in Tahrir Square for a fourth night. “Reason here means that the one who did the action has to take it back,” Mr. Ali said.

Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University, said Mr. Morsi appeared to be trying to save face with a strategic retreat. “He is trying to simply say, ‘I am not a new pharaoh, I am just trying to stabilize the institutions that we already have,’ ” he said. “But for the liberals, this is now their moment, and for sure they are not going to waste it, because he has given them an excellent opportunity to score.”

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$1,499 Gaming Laptop is Ready for Steam on Linux

Alternative, Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu haven’t historically carried much weight with PC gamers. Very few PC games have been made for Linux, over the years, ever since the company that was porting AAA gaming titles to Linux (Loki Games) went bankrupt in 2001. And while it’s possible to use a “compatibility layer” such as Wine to run Windows PC games in Linux, the results are mixed at best and require a lot of technical tweaking, sometimes even in between updates.

Colorado-based indie PC hardware company System76, however, clearly expects that not only are there PC gamers on Linux out there, but that some of them are willing to pay $ 1,499 for a tricked-out gaming laptop — the 17.3-inch Bonobo Extreme. Like all of System76′s machines, it runs the Ubuntu flavor of Linux; and its actual price tag is $ 1,599, but it’s gotten a $ 100 discount for the holidays.

Is it ahead of its time, like the Loki Games ports? Or has the time come for a new age of Linux gaming? For whatever reason, Valve — the creators of the Steam social gaming service — seems to think the latter.

​The hardware

The 17.3-inch screen is full 1080p, with a 1920×1080 resolution. Pretty much every spec starts out at “high end” and maxes out at “over the top”; it comes standard with an Intel Core i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 500 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive, with a second drive bay and the option to swap the DVD burner out for a third storage disk. All three have the option of going up to a 512 GB Crucial solid state disk, or a 480 GB Intel SSD.

Gaming graphics are powered by an nVidia GeForce GTX 670MX, with 3 GB of memory. An extra $ 340 will get you a GTX 680M with 4 GB of memory. All told, with every possible hardware upgrade the Bonobo Extreme maxes out at an “extreme” $ 4,333 … and the Alienware-style, multicolored light-up keyboard is included for free.

​But what about the games?

Valve’s Linux Steam client is currently in beta, with another 5,000 testers added over the Thanksgiving holiday. About two dozen games are already available for purchase, including Valve’s free-to-play multiplayer online shooter Team Fortress 2 and a selection of games from previous Humble Indie Bundles.

The HIB previously became famous not just for having nearly all of its games support Linux, but for posting public sales figures online, and showing that a good-sized chunk of each bundle’s sales were for Linux gamers. Efforts such as this helped to convince Valve that supporting Linux would be worthwhile … and also seem to have reached someone at System76.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Column: Johnny Football should be Johnny Heisman

Johnny Football finally got a chance to speak Monday.

This was it, our first opportunity to hear from the quarterback himself why he feels he should win the Heisman Trophy.

Turns out, he's not much of a lobbyist.

Off the charts when he's got that ol' pigskin in his hands, Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel sounds like just another boring QB when asked about his chances of becoming the first freshman to claim college football's highest individual honor.

He says it would be "a dream come true." (Boooring!) He says "whatever is meant to happen will happen." (Give this man an award for clichés.) He deflects credit to his teammates and coaches, pointing out time and time again that none of his success would be possible without those around him. (Wake us when he's done.)

That's OK. Nothing more really needs to be said.

Johnny Football, meet Johnny Heisman.

With a nod to Notre Dame defensive star Manti Te'o, a dominating linebacker with a bittersweet back story, Manziel's numbers are simply too outlandish to be denied.

— He's rushed for 1,181 yards and 19 touchdowns.

— He's thrown for 3,419 yards and another two dozen TDs.

— He's already surpassed Cam Newton's totals from two years ago by 273 yards (in two fewer games), and the former Auburn quarterback won the award in a landslide.

Manziel deserves a similar rout.

"The way Johnny has performed this season, the numbers speak for themselves," said Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin, who had barred Manziel from talking to reporters until Monday. "He's a tremendous competitor, a tremendous leader. That's something you really don't see in a player as a redshirt freshman. But all his leadership — on and off the field, all throughout the season — made our season a real special one."

Sumlin's policy of denying media privileges to all his freshmen, even those like Manziel who are in their second year of school, has only added to the mystique.

Here was a guy with the cool nickname and enough highlights to fill his own YouTube channel, but we didn't really know anything else about him other than what was in the biography. The small-town Texas kid who initially committed to Oregon but really wanted to play in the Lone Star State, who signed with the Aggies when Mike Sherman was the coach but didn't get a chance to play until Sumlin took over the job.

Otherwise, our impressions were formed by what he did with the helmet on.

How he ran circles around opposing defenses, how he threw touchdown passes off the wrong foot, how he chased down and tackled two Louisiana Tech players after a turnover, how he led the Aggies to a surprising 10-win season in their Southeastern Conference debut, including an upset of mighty Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Now, after an hour-long conference call with media from all over the country, we know a little more.

Manziel is cool with the nickname. He enjoys playing video games, including the college football version, though apparently not so much as himself. He's still getting used to all the attention he receives when he does something as simple as going out to dinner.

"I don't see myself as Johnny Football. I see myself as Johnathan Manziel," he says. "When people want to take my picture or ask for an autograph, I'm shocked by it. I'm not used to the whole thing, even though it's kind of becoming a daily thing."

He tries to avoid watching highlights of himself, like the ones posted in countless tribute videos, or the more humorous attempts to pay homage to his growing legend. No, he hasn't seen the video by the woman old enough to be his mother, who croons to the camera with her own version of early-1960s hit "Johnny Angel" while surrounded by Aggies gear.

"Johnny Football, how we love him," she warbles. "He's got something Aggies can't resist. And he doesn't even know impossible exists."

In other seasons, when the race wasn't so clear-cut, Te'o might've been positioned to join Charles Woodson as only the second defensive player to capture the Heisman.

The Notre Dame senior certainly has the stats to back up his candidacy (103 tackles and seven interceptions), but there's so much more to his resume.

He's the undisputed leader on the nation's top-ranked team, a major reason the Fighting Irish went unbeaten in the regular season for the first time since 1988 and landed a spot in the national championship game against either Alabama or Georgia. It's hard not to shed a tear every time he makes a big play, either, remembering how he's still dealing with the grief of losing both his grandmother (who died after a long illness) and his girlfriend (who succumbed to leukemia) just a few hours apart on an awful day back in September.

A special season, to be sure.

But Manziel's debut season goes beyond that. It's transformational, like the first time you saw Herschel Walker flatten a defensive back, or Michael Vick cutting this way and that on one play, then unleashing a 70-yard pass on the next.

It's beyond Heisman-worthy.

"This is something you dream about as a kid," Manziel said. "When you're playing those NCAA (video) games as a kid, you create players who can win the Heisman by putting up some crazy numbers."

When he used to dream up his perfect player for that make-believe world, it looked more like Newton.

You know, 6-foot-6, about 250 pounds, stronger and faster than anyone else on the field.

In real life, Manziel didn't turn out that way. He's just a smidgen over 6-foot. He tips the scales at around 200 pounds. Solid, but not imposing.

"I did get tackled a couple of times and heard people say, 'You're really small' or 'You're not as big as we thought,'" Manziel conceded.

Turns out, he was better than the guy on the video game.

The one with the Heisman.

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Paul Newberry in a national writer for The Associated Press. Write to him at pnewberry(at)ap.org or www.twitter.com/pnewberry1963

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Panel Lukewarm on Hepatitis C Screening for Baby Boomers

An influential advisory committee has given only lukewarm support to a government recommendation that all baby boomers be tested for hepatitis C.

In a draft opinion Monday, the United States Preventive Services Task Force said that clinicians may “consider offering” hepatitis C screening to adults born between 1945 and 1965.

That falls short of the recommendation made in August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all adults in that age group should get a one-time test to see if they are infected.

The task force is made up of outside experts appointed by the government, and its recommendations can in some cases carry more weight than those of the C.D.C. Had hepatitis C screening for baby boomers received a stronger recommendation from the task force, health plans would have been required to pay for it under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, with no charge to the patient.

Some advocates of wider screening said they feared the new opinion would be used by insurers to deny reimbursement for testing and would slow efforts to ferret out hidden cases of hepatitis C at a time when more effective and tolerable treatments are being developed.

The recommendation “could derail the hard work that the C.D.C. has put in in proving the case that it’s smart for baby boomers to get a one-time hepatitis C test,” said Martha B. Saly, director of the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, a coalition of more than 200 groups dedicated to eradicating hepatitis. Some drug companies, which would benefit from wider screening, are associate members of the round table.

Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, of the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the task force, said differences in the recommendations were merely a matter of degree. “I would say our findings are compatible,” she said.

The C.D.C. declined to comment, saying the opinion was still a draft.

About 3 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, but 45 percent to 85 percent of them do not know it, according to the C.D.C. The virus can cause scarring of the liver and liver cancer, though typically not until decades after the initial infection, and not in everyone. About 15,000 people a year die from hepatitis C.

The C.D.C. used to recommend screening only for people most likely to be infected: intravenous drug users or people who got blood transfusions before 1992 when testing of donated blood for the virus began.

But a lot of cases were missed because people did not remember risky behaviors from decades ago or did not tell their doctors.

So in August the C.D.C. recommended that all baby boomers be tested. Although only about 3 percent of this age group is infected, they account for about three quarters of all cases. Screening them would detect more than 800,000 infections, which could then potentially be treated, averting many cases of liver disease and about 120,000 deaths.

But the task force said there were no clinical trials or studies directly proving that screening asymptomatic adults would reduce liver disease or deaths.

It noted that the C.D.C. recommendation was based partly on computer models that might have overestimated how many people with hepatitis C would develop liver cirrhosis or die, and therefore overstated the number of cases or deaths that could be prevented.

The task force concluded that there would be at least a small benefit from screening baby boomers and gave the recommendation a grade of C, meaning “for most individuals without signs or symptoms there is likely to be only a small benefit from this service.”

The task force provoked controversy in the past with recommendations against screening for prostate cancer and against routine mammograms for women under 50.

In 2004, the task force recommended against hepatitis C screening of adults not considered at high risk.

The draft, posted on the task force Web site, will be open for comment until Dec. 24. The evidence behind the recommendation is being published in The Annals of Internal Medicine.

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Budget Talks and Retailers’ Discounts Drag Markets Down

The stock market mostly slipped on Monday, pulling back from last week’s gains in Thanksgiving-shortened trading, as retailers fell on concerns about heavy discounts at the start of the holiday shopping season and the overhang of federal budget negotiations kept investors wary of making big bets.

The Nasdaq composite index closed higher, led by gains in eBay and Apple. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index cut most of its losses during Monday’s trading session and remained above its 200-day moving average, maintaining its long-term upward trend.

The S.& P. 500 consumer discretionary index fell 0.5 percent after the start of the holiday shopping season over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. Target, one of the largest retailers by market value, fell $1.71, or 2.6 percent, to $62.78.

“The concern is big retailers are discounting so much, sales look better, but at what cost?” said Angel Mata, managing director of listed equity trading at Stifel Nicolaus Capital Markets.

Bucking the retail trend, shares of eBay closed at their highest in almost eight years, rising $2.39, or 4.9 percent, to $51.40, as the online marketplace posted strong sales on Cyber Monday. Amazon gained $3.74, or 1.6 percent, to $243.62.

The White House showed little enthusiasm on Monday for a proposal to avoid the fiscal shock of tax increases and spending cuts to take effect at the first of the year by limiting tax deductions and loopholes, instead of allowing tax rates to rise for the richest Americans.

Investors are hoping for advances in Congressional talks over the more than $600 billion in spending cuts and tax increases that threaten to drag the American economy back into recession.

Indications of progress in talks, or just a political willingness to negotiate, contributed to the market’s recent rally. Major indexes last week gained 3 to 4 percent; the Dow Jones industrial average moved above 13,000 and the S.&P. 500 above 1,400 for the first time since Nov. 6.

On Monday, the Dow industrials fell 42.31 points, or 0.33 percent, to 12,967.37. The S.& P. 500 dropped 2.86 points, or 0.20 percent, to 1,406.29. The Nasdaq gained 9.93 points, or 0.33 percent, to 2,976.78.

Apple, a big mover in the Nasdaq, jumped $18.03, or 3.2 percent, to $589.53. The company said on Friday that it had asked a federal court to add six more products to its patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung Electronics, including the Samsung Galaxy Note II, the latest move in the continuing legal war between the two companies.

In the bond market, interest rates slipped. The price of the Treasury’s 10-year note rose 8/32, to 99 20/32, while its yield fell to 1.67 percent, from 1.69 percent on Friday.

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Bangladesh Fire Kills More Than 100 and Injures Many

MUMBAI, India — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.

It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.

“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”

Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have easily been avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.

Activists say that global clothing brands like Tommy Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart need to take responsibility for the working conditions in Bangladeshi factories that produce their clothes.

“These brands have known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps,” Ineke Zeldenrust, the international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said in a statement. “Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”

The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn, and quickly spread to the upper floors. The building was nine stories high, with the top three floors under construction, according to a garment industry official at the scene who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Though most workers had left for the day when the fire started, the industry official said, as many as 600 workers were still inside working overtime.

The factory, which opened in May 2010, employed about 1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to a document on the company’s Web site. It made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.

Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors, fire officials said, and were killed because there were not enough exits. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the Fire Department, according to The Associated Press.

In a telephone interview later on Sunday, Major Mahbub said the fire could have been caused by an electrical fault or by a spark from a cigarette.

In a brief phone call, Delowar Hossain, the managing director of the Tuba Group, the parent company of Tazreen Fashions, said he was too busy to comment. “Pray for me,” he said and then hung up.

Television news reports showed badly burned bodies lined up on the floor in what appeared to be a government building. The injured were being treated in hallways of local hospitals, according to the reports.

The industry official said that many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and that it would take some time to identify them.

One survivor, Mohammad Raju, 22, who worked on the fifth floor, said he escaped by climbing out of a third-floor window onto the bamboo scaffolding that was being used by construction workers. He said he lost his mother, who also worked on the fifth floor, when they were making their way down.

“It was crowded on the stairs as all the workers were trying to come out from the factory,” Mr. Raju said. “There was no power supply; it was dark, and I lost my mother in dark. I tried to search for her for 10 to 15 minutes but did not find her.”

A document posted on Tazreen Fashions’ Web site indicated that an “ethical sourcing” official for Walmart had flagged “violations and/or conditions which were deemed to be high risk” at the factory in May 2011, though it did not specify the nature of the infractions. The notice said that the factory had been given an “orange” grade and that any factories given three such assessments in two years from their last audit would not receive any Walmart orders for a year.

A spokesman for Walmart, Kevin Gardner, said the company was “so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is a supplier to Walmart nor if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.”

But the International Labor Rights Forum, which tracks fires in the Bangladesh garment industry, said documents and logos found in the debris indicated that the factory produced clothes for Walmart’s Faded Glory line as well as for other American and foreign companies.

Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments a year. Employees in the country’s factories are among the world’s lowest-paid, with entry-level workers making the government-mandated minimum wage of about $37 a month or slightly above.

Tensions have been running high between workers, who have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and the factory owners and government. A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka this year.

Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Stephanie Clifford and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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Nokia imaging chief to quit

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Nokia‘s long-time imaging chief Damian Dinning has decided to leave the loss-making cellphone maker at the end of this month, the company said in a statement.

The strong imaging capabilities of the new Lumia smartphone models are a key sales argument for the former market leader, which has been burning through cash while losing share in both high-end smartphones and cheaper handsets.

Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop has replaced most of the top management since he joined in late 2010 and Dinnig is the latest of several executives to leave.

Dinning did not want to move to Finland as part of the phonemakers’ effort to concentrate operations and will join Jaguar Land Rover to head innovations in the field of connected cars, he said on Nokia’s imaging fan site PureViewclub.com.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki, editing by William Hardy)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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