3 Arrested in Deadly Nightclub Fire, Fourth Sought

Brazilian authorities have arrested three people in connection to the fire that killed more than 230 people and injured hundreds at a nightclub in Santa Maria, Brazil, this weekend.

The owner of the popular Kiss nightclub, a member of the band Gurizada Fandangueira and the club's security chief have been arrested and are being questioned by police, the BBC reported today.

A fourth person, who the BBC reports is a co-owner of the club, is still being sought by police.

None of the names of those arrested and being sought have been released.

Coffins lined a gymnasium in Santa Maria today as family members tried to identify their loved ones after a fast-moving fire tore through a crowded nightclub Sunday morning.

A community gym near the Kiss nightclub has been converted to a temporary morgue were family members were led in one by one Sunday night and early this morning to identify the dead. Outside the gym police held up personal objects, including a black purse and blue high-heeled shoe, as people seeking information on loved ones crowded around, hoping not to recognize anything they were being shown.

"Doctors from other parts of Brazil were flown in to assist the medical side of this," BBC reporter Julia Carneiro told ABC News this morning. "One hundred people are injured and in hospital. Some have been flown to other cities that have better hospital capacity."

PHOTOS: Santa Maria, Brazil Nightclub Fire

Flames and smoke outraced a terrified crowd at the Kiss nightclub, located in the southern city of Santa Maria, shortly after 2 a.m. Sunday morning. Panicked partygoers tried to outrun flames and black, thick smoke, but the club appeared to have only one open exit, police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello told The Associated Press.

Brazil Nightclub Fire: Nearly 200 People Killed Watch Video

Police confirmed that the toll had risen to 231 with the death of a hospitalized victim.

Hours after the fire, cellphones on the victims were ringing inside the still-smoldering nightclub as family members tried to contact their loved ones, Brazilian radio reporter Sara Bodowsky told "World News" anchor David Muir.

"It's really like a war zone in here. We have [over 230] bodies laid down, side by side, so the families go inside one by one. They look at the bodies," Bodowsky said.

The first funerals for the victims were scheduled to begin later today for those families who have identified their loved ones.

"It was terrible inside. It was like one of those films of the Holocaust, bodies piled atop one another," police inspector Sandro Meinerz said Sunday. "We had to use trucks to remove them. It took about six hours to take the bodies away."

Investigators believe the blaze began when a band's small pyrotechnics show ignited foam sound insulating material on the ceiling, releasing a putrid haze that caused scores of people to choke to death.

Survivors and police inspector Marcelo Arigony said security guards briefly tried to block people from exiting the club in the mass confusion and chaos moments after the fire began.

But Arigony said the guards didn't appear to block fleeing patrons for long.

"It was chaotic and it doesn't seem to have been done in bad faith because several security guards also died," he told the AP.

Police Maj. Bastianello told the AP by telephone the death toll was likely made worse because the nightclub appeared to have just one exit through which patrons could exit.

A security guard told the newspaper Diaro de Santa Maria that the club was filled to capacity, with 1,000 to 2,000 people inside.

Meanwhile, people outside tried to break through walls to get in to save those trapped inside.

Michele Pereira told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit some sort of flare.

"The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward," she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak, but in a matter of seconds it spread."

Guitarist Rodrigo Martins told Radio Gaucha that his band, Gurizada Fandangueira, started playing at 2:15 a.m. "and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning."

"It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It's harmless, we never had any trouble with it," he said. "When the fire started, a guard passed us a fire extinguisher, the singer tried to use it but it wasn't working."

He confirmed that accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other members made it out safely.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was attending a summit with European Union leaders and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States in Chile, cut her trip short and returned home to Brazil Sunday.

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Violence flares in Egypt after emergency law imposed

CAIRO (Reuters) - A man was shot dead on Monday in a fifth day of violence that has killed 50 Egyptians and prompted the Islamist president to declare a state of emergency in an attempt to end a wave of unrest sweeping the biggest Arab nation.

Emergency rule announced by President Mohamed Mursi on Sunday covers the cities of Port Said, Ismailia and Suez. The army has already been deployed in two of those cities and ministers agreed a measure to let soldiers arrest civilians.

A cabinet source told Reuters any trials would be in civilian courts, but the step is likely to anger protesters who accuse Mursi of using high-handed tactics of the kind they fought against to oust his military predecessor Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt's politics have become deeply polarized since those heady days two years ago, when protesters were making the running in the Arab Spring revolutions that sent shockwaves through the region and Islamists and liberals lined up together.

Although Islamists have won parliamentary and presidential elections, the disparate opposition has since united against Mursi. Late last year he moved to expand his powers and pushed a constitution with a perceived Islamist bias through a referendum. The moves were punctuated by street violence.

Mursi's national dialogue meeting on Monday to help end the crisis was spurned by his main opponents.

They say Mursi hijacked the revolution, listens only to his Islamist allies and broke a promise to be a president for all Egyptians. Islamists say their rivals want to overthrow by undemocratic means Egypt's first freely elected leader.

Thousands of anti-Mursi protesters were out on the streets again in Cairo and elsewhere on Monday, the second anniversary of one of the bloodiest days in the revolution which erupted on January 25, 2011 and ended Mubarak's iron rule 18 days later.

"The people want to bring down the regime," they chanted Alexandria. "Leave means go, and don't say no!" they shouted.

VOLLEYS OF TEARGAS

Propelled to the presidency in a June election by the Muslim Brotherhood, Mursi has lurched through a series of political crises and violent demonstrations, complicating his task of shoring up the economy and of preparing for a parliamentary election to cement the new democracy in a few months.

Instability in Egypt has raised concerns in Western capitals, where officials worry about the direction of a key regional player that has a peace deal with Israel.

In Cairo on Monday, police fired volleys of teargas at stone-throwing protesters near Tahrir Square, cauldron of the anti-Mubarak uprising. A car was torched on a nearby bridge.

A 46-year-old bystander was killed by a gunshot early on Monday, a security source said. It was not clear who fired.

"We want to bring down the regime and end the state that is run by the Muslim Brotherhood," said Ibrahim Eissa, a 26-year-old cook, protecting his face from teargas wafting towards him.

The political unrest has been exacerbated by street violence linked to death penalties imposed on soccer supporters convicted of involvement in stadium rioting in Port Said a year ago.

As part of emergency measures, a daily curfew will be imposed on the three canal cities from 9 p.m. (1900 GMT) to 6 a.m. (0400 GMT). Residents have said they will defy it.

The president announced the measures on television on Sunday: "The protection of the nation is the responsibility of everyone. We will confront any threat to its security with force and firmness within the remit of the law," Mursi said, angering many of his opponents when he wagged his finger at the camera.

He offered condolences to families of victims. But his invitation to Islamist allies and their opponents to hold a national dialogue was spurned by the main opposition National Salvation Front coalition. Those who accepted were mostly Mursi's supporters or sympathizers.

SENDING A MESSAGE

The Front rejected the offer as "cosmetic and not substantive" and set conditions for any future meeting that have not been met in the past, such as forming a government of national unity. They also demanded that Mursi declare himself responsible for the bloodshed.

"We will send a message to the Egyptian people and the president of the republic about what we think are the essentials for dialogue. If he agrees to them, we are ready for dialogue," opposition politician Mohamed ElBaradei told a news conference.

The opposition Front has distanced itself from the latest flare-ups but said Mursi should have acted far sooner to impose security measures that would have ended the violence.

"Of course we feel the president is missing the real problem on the ground, which is his own policies," Front spokesman Khaled Dawoud said after Mursi made his declaration.

Other activists said Mursi's measures to try to impose control on the turbulent streets could backfire.

"Martial law, state of emergency and army arrests of civilians are not a solution to the crisis," said Ahmed Maher of the April 6 movement that helped galvanize the 2011 uprising. "All this will do is further provoke the youth. The solution has to be a political one that addresses the roots of the problem."

Rights activists said Mursi's declaration was a backward step for Egypt, which was under emergency law for Mubarak's entire 30-year rule. His police used the sweeping arrest provisions to muzzle dissent and round up opponents, including members of the Brotherhood and even Mursi himself.

Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch in Cairo said the police, still hated by many Egyptians for their heavy-handed tactics under Mubarak, would once again have the right to arrest people "purely because they look suspicious", undermining efforts to create a more efficient and respected police force.

"It is a classic knee-jerk reaction to think the emergency law will help bring security," she said. "It gives so much discretion to the Ministry of Interior that it ends up causing more abuse, which in turn causes more anger."

(Additional reporting by Yasmine Saleh in Cairo, Yusri Mohamed in Ismailia and Abdelrahman Youssef in Alexandria; Editing by Giles Elgood, Peter Millership and Alastair Macdonald)

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Rebels seek funds and arms, Syria's Assad says winning

PARIS: The Syrian opposition appealed Monday for hundreds of millions of dollars to step up the revolt against Bashar al-Assad, as the president asserted his forces had made "significant gains" in the conflict.

At an international meeting in Paris, the main opposition Syrian National Coalition (SNC) said it needs US$500 million in funding to set up an alternative government.

"With a state and a society collapsing, it is the Islamist groups that could gain ground if we do not do what we have to do," France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius warned the meeting.

"This conference has to send a clear signal, (that) it has one concrete objective: give the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) the means to act."

But the credibility of the opposition alliance has been damaged by mounting evidence that extremist Islamists are playing a central role in the campaign against Assad.

George Sabra, head of the SNC, the main body in the opposition coalition, said Assad's opponents were desperately in need of cash and arms.

"We need a minimum of US$500 million to be able to establish a government," he said. "And we need weapons, weapons and more weapons."

Arab and Western "Friends of Syria" agreed in December to provide a total of US$145 million of support for the opposition, two-thirds of it from Saudi Arabia, but the money has yet to be delivered.

The SNC was created in November with its various components saying they would fight under a unified military command.

But some hardline groups have declined to join the coalition, saying their goal is the creation of an Islamic state to replace Assad's regime.

A top humanitarian official also appealed for funding on Monday, warning that the United Nations will be forced to cut already reduced food rations to hundreds of thousands of Syrians unless a huge cash injection is found.

"We are putting it squarely to the donors, more cuts are likely," humanitarian operations director John Ging said ahead of a donor conference in Kuwait on Wednesday.

UN leader Ban Ki-moon will seek more than US$1.5 billion in new cash pledges at the Kuwait conference.

Assad, meanwhile, said his troops have gained the upper hand against rebels in the 22-month conflict and could win in "two weeks" should Turkey stop its support for insurgents, a Lebanese newspaper reported.

"The army has a very large lead on the ground and has achieved significant gains," Al-Akhbar quoted him as saying. "If the Turkish border was closed to tackle the smuggling of arms and militants, this matter would be resolved in only two weeks."

On the ground, rebels on Monday took over one of four key suspension bridges in Deir Ezzor, which straddle the Euphrates river and connect the eastern city to Hasakeh province further north, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"The bridge is important because that it allows the army to send troops and supplies to Hasakeh," Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP by phone.

Fighting also erupted in a southern district of Damascus, while the army bombed rebel positions on the capital's outskirts, said the Observatory, which gave a toll of at least 61 people killed nationwide, including 23 civilians.

The United Nations says more than 60,000 people have been killed since the start of the conflict in March 2011.

On the international front, US President Barack Obama said in an interview published on Monday that he was wrestling with a decision on whether the US should get involved to resolve the Syrian conflict.

"In a situation like Syria, I have to ask, can we make a difference in that situation?" he told the New Republic magazine.

"Would a military intervention have an impact? ... What would be the aftermath of our involvement on the ground? Could it trigger even worse violence or the use of chemical weapons? What offers the best prospect of a stable post-Assad regime?"

"And what I have to constantly wrestle with is where and when can the United States intervene or act in ways that advance our national interest, advance our security, and speak to our highest ideals and sense of common humanity."

Israel, meanwhile, moved two batteries of its vaunted Iron Dome missile defence system to the north on Sunday in case of military action against Syria or Lebanon, a security source told AFP.

- AFP/jc

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The 404 1,196: Where we get locked up for unlocking (podcast)

Microsoft assumes you probably haven't used an Internet Explorer browser since the mid-1990s, and the company's latest commercial for IE10 takes us all back to those awkward times with a montage of 90s nostalgia that includes slap bracelets, Oregon Trail, LA Gear Lights, and Tamogotchis. We're not how any of those items are supposed to lure us away from
Firefox or Chrome, but check it out anyway.

We knew it was only a matter of time before a 6-second clip of hardcore porn made its way to the Twitter Vine, but we never expected it to come from Twitter itself--a nasty clip was featured for a short time on Vine's "Editor's Choice" pick list. Granted, it's not the first instance of adult content on the new social video service.

With Vine's TOS giving users creative freedom to access its service, an unfiltered stream of dirty hashtags is already building out on VineRoulette. Then again, who the hell wants to wants porn for only six seconds?

Other stories leaked from today's episode:

- Will China end 13-year ban on video game consoles?

- Google accidentally indexes 8,000 publicly available printers.

- Don't forget, it's illegal to unlock your phone now.

- Wi-fi on school buses credited for curbing bad behavior.

Bathroom break video: Beatboxing goat.

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R.I. nightclub fire survivors recall 2003 blaze

Argentina, a year later. Thailand in 2008. Russia in 2009.

For survivors of a 2003 nightclub fire in the state of Rhode Island that was one of the deadliest in U.S. history, the fire in Brazil that killed hundreds Sunday is the latest in a series of reminders that no matter how far away, those who ignore the lessons of their tragedy can pay a horrible cost.

On a cold night in February 2003, the rock band Great White took the stage at The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island. During the show, pyrotechnics set fire to flammable soundproofing foam that lined the walls and ceiling, killing 100 and injuring 200.

Over the decade since, survivors have come together time and again over news of similar disastrous fires overseas.

"We're very tight," said Todd King, one of the survivors. "You can't put into words what we saw."

He said he was woken up Sunday morning by a storm of text messages from others who survived the Rhode Island fire, asking, "Can you believe this is happening again?"

"I'm surprised nobody has learned," he said.

Another Rhode Island survivor, Victoria Eagan, said she and others noted that each of three earlier fires was caused by indoor pyrotechnics igniting material in the building. Investigators have just begun their work in Brazil, but witnesses said a flare or firework lit by band members may have started the fire.

"I had the same reaction as the other three times," Eagan said Sunday. "We're doomed to repeat history and I wish they could learn."

In the year after the Rhode Island fire, a flare ignited ceiling foam at an overcrowded nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 194 people.

Indoor fireworks were blamed for a fire at a club in Bangkok on New Year's Eve 2008 in which 66 partygoers were killed.

And another indoor fireworks display at a nightclub in Perm, Russia, ignited a plastic ceiling decorated with branches, killing 152 people in December 2009.

In Rhode Island, the Station fire brought about sweeping changes to the state's fire code with one intent: Never again.

Sprinklers are now required in nightclubs and bars with occupancy limits of 100 or more, nightclub workers must be trained in fire safety and more money was set aside for fire safety classes in schools.

Rhode Island also banned pyrotechnics in all but its largest public venues and local fire marshals were enabled to order immediate repairs and write tickets for violations.

Eagan said the changes were necessary in Rhode Island.

"I wish it would spread to other countries," she said.

A deadly blaze overseas does not seem so distant because of the Rhode Island tragedy, Eagan said.

"It's a tragedy that hits close to home," she said. "It's maddening to see it happen again."

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Brazil Nightclub Fire: 232 Dead, Hundreds Injured

Flames raced through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing more than 230 people as panicked partygoers gasped for breath in the smoke-filled air, stampeding toward a single exit partially blocked by those already dead. It appeared to be the world's deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.

Witnesses said a flare or firework lit by band members may have started the blaze.

Television images showed smoke pouring out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who had attended a university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at windows and walls to free those trapped inside.

Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper that firefighters had a hard time getting inside the club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance."

Teenagers sprinted from the scene desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms.

"There was so much smoke and fire, it was complete panic, and it took a long time for people to get out, there were so many dead," survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.

The fire spread so fast inside the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop it, Silva said.

Another survivor, Michele Pereira, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit flares that started the conflagration.

Germano Roratto/AFP/Getty Images

"The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward," she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak, but in a matter of seconds it spread."

Guitarist Rodrigo Martins told Radio Gaucha that the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, started playing at 2:15 a.m. "and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning"

"It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It's harmless, we never had any trouble with it.

"When the fire started, a guard passed us a fire extinguisher, the singer tried to use it but it wasn't working"

He confirmed that accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other members made it out safely.

Police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello said by telephone that officials counted 232 bodies that had been brought for identification to a gymnasium in Santa Maria, a major university city with about 250,000 residents at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.

An earlier count put the number of dead at 245.

Federal Health Minister Alexandre Padhilha told a news conference that most of the 117 people treated in hospitals had been poisoned by gases they breathed during the fire. Only a few suffered serious burns, he said.

Brazil President Dilma Roussef arrived to visit the injured after cutting short her trip to a Latin American-European summit in Chile.

"It is a tragedy for all of us," Roussef said.

Most of the dead apparently suffocated, according to Dr. Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a professor at the medical school of the Federal University of Santa Maria who went to the city's Caridade Hospital to help victims.

Beltrame said he was told the club had been filled far beyond its capacity during a party for students at the university's agronomy department.

Survivors, police and firefighters gave the same account of a band member setting the ceiling's soundproofing ablaze, he said.

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Nightclub fire kills at least 232 in Brazil

SANTA MARIA, Brazil (Reuters) - A fire in a nightclub killed at least 232 people in southern Brazil on Sunday when a band's pyrotechnics show set the building ablaze and fleeing partygoers stampeded toward blocked and overcrowded exits in the ensuing panic, officials said.

The blaze in the university town of Santa Maria was started by a band member or someone from its production team igniting a flare, which then set fire to the ceiling, said Luiza Sousa, a civil police official. The fire spread "in seconds," she said.

Local fire officials said at least one exit was locked and that bouncers, who at first thought those fleeing were trying to skip out on bar tabs, initially blocked patrons from leaving. The security staff relented only when they saw flames engulfing the ceiling.

The vast majority of the victims, most of them university students, died from asphyxiation, officials said. Others were crushed in the stampede.

"We ran into a barrier of the dead at the building's exit," Colonel Guido Pedroso de Melo, commander of the Santa Maria fire squad, said of the scene firefighters found on arrival. "We had to clear a path to get to the rest of those that were inside."

An estimated 500 people were in the Boate Kiss nightclub when the fire broke out at around 2:30 a.m., police said. Witnesses said the club, which has a 2,000-person capacity, was always busy on weekends but wasn't any more crowded than usual.

The death tally was lowered slightly, with police saying at midafternoon that 232 people had been killed, down from an initial figure of 245.

When the fire began, many revelers were unable to find their way out amid the chaos, confusing restroom doors for exits and finding resistance from bouncers when they did find an exit door.

"It all happened so fast," survivor Taynne Vendrusculo told GloboNews TV. "Both the panic and the fire spread rapidly, in seconds."

Once security guards realized the building was on fire, they tried in vain to control the blaze with a fire extinguisher, according to a televised interview with one of the guards, Rodrigo Moura. He said patrons were getting trampled as they rushed for the doors, describing it as "a horror film."

Television footage showed people sobbing outside the club before dawn, while shirtless firefighters used sledge hammers and axes to knock down an exterior wall to open up an exit.

SAFETY STANDARDS IN SPOTLIGHT

Rescue officials moved the bodies to a local gymnasium, where the deceased were segregated by gender. Male victims were easier to identify, they said, because most of them, unlike the women, whose purses were left scattered in the devastated nightclub, had identification on them.

One of the club's owners had already surrendered to police for questioning, GloboNews reported.

President Dilma Rousseff, who started her political career in the Rio Grande do Sul state where the fire happened, cut short a visit to Chile to return to visit the scene. Before leaving Chile, she broke out in tears as she pledged government help for the victims and their families.

"We are trying to mobilize all possible resources to help in the rescue efforts," Rousseff said. "All I can say at the moment is that my feelings are of deep sorrow."

The disaster recalls other incidents including a 2003 fire at a nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, that killed 100, and a Buenos Aires nightclub blaze in 2004 that killed nearly 200. In both incidents, a band or members of the audience ignited fires that set the establishment ablaze.

Brazil's safety standards and emergency response capabilities are under particular scrutiny as it prepares to host the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament and the 2016 Olympics.

Santa Maria, with a population of more than 275,000, is about 186 miles west of the state capital of Porto Alegre.

Rio Grande do Sul state's health secretary, Ciro Simoni, said emergency medical supplies from all over the state were being sent to the scene.

(Additional reporting by Guillermo Parra-Bernal, Gustavo Bonato, Jeferson Ribeiro, Eduardo Simões and Brian Winter; Writing by Paulo Prada; Editing by Todd Benson, Kieran Murray and Eric Beech)

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Football: I must improve, says modest Messi

BUENOS AIRES: Barcelona and Argentina star Lionel Messi says he must improve on all fronts even as debate rages as to whether he is the best player ever.

"In everything we do in life we try to improve on all fronts and in football I am no exception," Messi told Clarin daily in an interview published Sunday.

Messi, 25, claims to be mulling how to do even better despite having already won a welter of honours, including a record four straight Ballons d'Or.

Playing for Barcelona keeps his feet on the ground, Messi says, not least because clubmates Xavi and Andres Iniesta were also candidates for his footballer of the year status, conferred on him once again earlier this month.

Messi says remaining humble is part of the Barcelona philosophy.

"It's a dressing room where we are all very similar in outlook. The way we are and our education both within and outside the club gave us that (outlook)," said Messi.

Messi, who saw off Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo and Iniesta for the Ballon d'Or for 2012, won the accolade in part for breaking Gerd Mueller's 40-year record for the most goals in a calendar year - the Barcelona man finished the year with an astonishing 91 goals in all competitions.

Even so, with Barca he was unable to land either La Liga or the Champions League in a somewhat disappointing campaign, while some observers insist he cannot yet be classed as the greatest player ever, moving ahead of Pele and Diego Maradona, unless and until he lifts the World Cup.

Messi also told Clarin that he would not change his view that the club must come before the individual.

"My goal is not to break records - every season I want to win everything possible with my team - be it Barcelona or the national side," he insisted.

- AFP/de

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Boeing battery solution may keep 787 grounded until 2014

This Boeing 787 Dreamliner made the aircraft's first commercial flight. It's seen here at Narita airport near Tokyo just before takeoff.

(Credit:
All Nipon Airways)

A battery expert and chemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has some suggestions for how Boeing can solve its airplane battery woes, one of which could keep the fleet grounded until 2014.

The problems with Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, which was grounded earlier this month by Federal Aviation Administration order, could be solved by switching from the current lithium-ion batteries to nickel metal-hydride (NiMH) batteries, Donald Sadoway told Forbes. However, switching to NiMH batteries, which have a better safety track record, could result in a lengthy certification process that could take up to a year to complete, Forbes reports.

After a series of onboard fires earlier this month, the FAA on January 16 ordered all airlines to park their fleets until the much-hyped airplane's onboard batteries are proven safe to operate. The order followed Japan Airlines' grounding its 787s after a battery fire forced the evacuation of an All Nippon Airways flight.

Sadoway says Boeing's choice of the lithium-ion battery was consistent with the airplane maker's goal to reduce the 787's weight, thus saving money on its cost of operation. However, he said lithium-ion batteries were more prone to spontaneous combustion due to "organic electrolyte which makes it volatile and flammable."

Sadoway told Forbes that in his examination of the 787's lithium-ion battery, he was surprised by a seeming lack of a cooling mechanism for the batteries.

"In a large format battery, heat can be generated faster than it dissipates to the surroundings with the result that the temperature of the battery can rise to dangerously high levels which leads to bloating and ultimately fire," he said.

But designing, building, and testing a new control system for the NiMH batteries could take a year, Sadoway said.

Short of replacing the batteries outright, Sadoway also suggests Boeing create vents in the battery box that allows them to dissipate heat, as well as install temperature sensors to ensure that batteries stay within a safe range.

A Boeing representative told CNET that the company was withholding comment until its investigation is complete.

Boeing said it was working with the FAA to develop a solution to the problem that would allow airlines to resume operation of the 787s as soon as possible. Boeing has shipped about 50 Dreamliners to carriers around the world, including ANA, Japan Airlines, Air India, and United Airlines, which is the only U.S. airline that has taken delivery of the aircraft.

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Hackers take over gov't website

This screenshot shows the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission after it was hijacked by the hacker-activist group Anonymous, early Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013, to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed." / AP Photo

Last Updated 12:47 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed."

The message read in part:

Citizens of the world,
Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the "discretion" or prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain."

The hackers say they've infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.

Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors.

Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.

By mid-morning Saturday the website was offline.

The FBI's Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, said in a statement that "we were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation. We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person's or government agency's network."

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