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The U.S. economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2013, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated Friday morning.

That's modest growth, and was below the 3.2 percent pace economists had expected to hear about. But growth was up substantially from fourth-quarter 2012, when the economy expanded at a scant 0.4 percent annual rate.

The agency will issue revised estimates of first-quarter growth in each of the next two months, so the figure could change. The agency initially reported, for example, that gross domestic product shrank at a 0.1 percent annual rate in fourth-quarter 2012. Then it said there was 0.1 percent growth. On its third swing at the figures, it came up with the 0.4 percent estimate. The figures shift as more information comes in.

We'll have more from the report and reactions to it as the morning continues.

Update at 8:55 a.m. ET. Not Much Real Change?

According to MarketWatch:

"The acceleration in growth in the early stages of the year stood in sharp contrast to the paltry 0.4% increase in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012. Yet the underlying strength of demand for U.S.-made goods and services was actually weaker in the first quarter. So-called real final sales rose just 1.5% — matching the smallest increase in two years.

"The softness in demand suggests little change in the overall pace of U.S. growth once unusual factors are stripped out. The economy has been expanding at about a 2% clip for the past two years."

Rescue workers are still hoping to find survivors from the collapse of an eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that has killed more than 300 people and left hundreds missing.

Meanwhile, angry relatives of the missing have clashed with police, blaming authorities for the catastrophe at Rana Plaza in Savar, an industrial suburb of the capital, Dhaka.

"Some people are still alive under the rubble and we are hoping to rescue them," deputy fire services director Mizanur Rahman told Reuters.

The news agency quoted a spokesman for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as saying that she had ordered the arrest of the owners of the building and of the five factories that occupied it.

According to Army spokesman Shahinur Islam, the death toll had reached 304 and H. T. Imam, an adviser to the prime minister, said it could exceed 350, Reuters said.

Speaking to NPR, Anbarasan Ethirajan, a Bangladesh-based reporter for the BBC, says rescuers have been using "cranes, diggers and even bare hands."

The factory complex, which reportedly supplies major retailers in the United States and Europe, showed signs that something was wrong the day before the structure suddenly crashed to the ground. Ethirajan says workers had reported cracks in the walls and floor.

Survivors and officials told Ethirajan that when the owner of the building was informed, "he said 'no need to worry about the safety,' [that] they can go back to work on the next day."

One of the garment workers who survived the collapse told Ethirajan that they were told Tuesday "if they didn't go back to work, they might lose their wages."

But employees at a bank on the first floor did not report for work Wednesday because they feared for their safety, he said.

Thousands of workers from the hundreds of garment factories across the Savar industrial zone and other nearby industrial areas are protesting over the collapse and poor safety standards, according to the AP.

Garment makers in the building include at least two that claim to supply Western retail outlets.

The Associated Press reports:

"Britain's Primark acknowledged it was using a factory in Rana Plaza, but 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. Wal-Mart said none of its clothing had been authorized to be made in the facility, but it is investigating whether there was any unauthorized production."

The Tribune Co., emerging from bankruptcy and looking to reshape itself, is now considering the sale of all its newspapers — including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and five other regional newspapers. It's still very early in the sale process; although the newspaper unit has been valued at $623 million, significant debts are also attached, and Tribune has signaled that it reserves the right not to sell if there isn't a worthy bid.

Possible buyers of those papers include David and Charles Koch, billionaire brothers from Kansas. The Koch brothers' vast holdings include huge investments in energy, manufacturing and commodities, but they're known these days for their politics.

Matt Welch is the editor of Reason, a libertarian magazine. David Koch sits on its parent foundation, though Welch says he thinks they've never met. "Charles and David Koch have been for the last 40, 40-plus years the most significant backers of libertarian-based organizations and philanthropies in the country," Welch says. "It's not even close. It is Charles and David Koch 100, everybody else 2."

David Koch — the younger one, at 72 — ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party's ticket in 1980. More recently, the Koch brothers raised millions to elect Tea Party candidates and other Republicans, and raised even more for ads opposing President Obama's re-election last year. As a result, they have become a target of liberals like Rachel Maddow, who said on her MSNBC show: "You really can't get away from the Koch brothers. They're becoming way too ubiquitous. Their names pop up in every scummy scandal, one after another."

Whether one thinks Maddow was being fair or not, the Koch brothers are dogged by their strong political identity. Welch says that identity could be a handicap in the Tribune newsrooms. In a former life, he was an assistant editorial pages editor at the Los Angeles Times, the largest Tribune paper. He says the Kochs would face a challenge: "It would be such a culture clash, inevitably, between them and the newsroom there that it would be kind of open conflict there for a long time," Welch says. "I would have a hard time imagining how they calm that down in a productive way."

Two people with close ties to Tribune confirm the brothers' fancy has now turned to the company's newspapers, which can be obtained for far less money than they would have cost a decade ago. James O'Shea became editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times after a long career at the Chicago Tribune, where he rose to become managing editor. He is also author of The Deal from Hell, a book about real estate mogul Sam Zell's disastrous $8.2 billion acquisition of the Tribune Co. Zell loaded the company with roughly $13 billion of debt, and ultimately landed it in bankruptcy during the recession.

O'Shea says readers and even some journalists in those cities, burnt out after years of ownership tumult, newsroom strife and bankruptcy, may prove open to a bid by the Koch brothers. "I think with the Koch brothers, people will probably look at it and say, 'Well, OK. Here are people with a lot of money, and maybe they'll invest in the place,' " O'Shea says. " 'And maybe they'll have ideas about how we diversify our revenue base and get away from this heavy, heavy, heavy reliance on advertising.' "

Yet O'Shea says journalists at Tribune papers initially said much the same about Zell. And O'Shea says he wonders whether the Kochs really view the papers as a financial investment — or a political one. "I don't think anybody's going to object too much if the Koch brothers buy the Chicago Tribune and [have] a libertarian, right-wing editorial page," O'Shea says.

Changes to the editorial page might not spark objections, but O'Shea and other journalists question how the brothers would treat news coverage. The Koch brothers set up the site Kochfacts.com to take on press coverage they don't like, and several reporters told NPR they had felt the sting of coordinated campaigns to harass them. Take David Sassoon, the publisher of Inside Climate News, a small, not-for-profit news outfit that just won a Pulitzer Prize. A few years ago, it published a series of pieces on the possible winners and losers were the Keystone XL pipeline to be built from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska.

"We wrote a story saying [the Koch brothers are] positioned to be winners if the pipeline is built, because it will lead to higher prices for tar sands and a boom in general that will lift all boats," says Sassoon.

The Kochs pressured the Reuters news agency to stop distributing articles from Sassoon's site, though they identified no specific mistakes to correct. The brothers took out ads against Sassoon on Facebook and Google, too. "They used my photograph in these ads," Sassoon says. "They used my name in these ads. And really came after us in a way that I have really never experienced before."

A spokeswoman for the Kochs, Missy Cohlmia, says they "respect the independence" of the Tribune papers, though she did not confirm the brothers' interest in buying them.

The Koch brothers are not the only magnates with an eye on the Tribune's publications. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is particularly interested in the L.A. Times, and his executives are exploring the implications of making a bid. Federal regulations bar cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same market, and News Corp. already owns two TV stations in Los Angeles. That's a challenge, but not an impossible one: The company has previously obtained waivers to exempt their stations and newspapers in New York City from those same cross-ownership regulations.

Meanwhile, Doug Manchester and Aaron Kushner, the new owners of the San Diego Union-Tribune and The Orange County Register, respectively, have also expressed an interest in acquiring the L.A. Times. So has the Los Angeles billionaire and developer Eli Broad, a political liberal who has been a major benefactor in Southern California. And billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who has snatched up many smaller newspapers, has indicated he is intrigued by the prospect of buying Tribune's Allentown, Pa., Morning Call.

But the Kochs may have an advantage in making a bid: They could easily afford to acquire the entire newspaper division, even given the accompanying debts, estimated at more than $1 billion. Tribune's current owners would prefer to sell the papers as a single unit. And while other potential suitors have stronger ties to journalism, money might speak louder than experience. The Tribune Co.'s primary current owners are two investment funds and a bank; none has any emotional investment in these historic newspaper titles being held by people with a journalistic background.

If the Koch brothers were to buy the Tribune papers and put their stamp on the editorial pages, it wouldn't be entirely unprecedented. Several papers in the Tribune family have histories of conservative-leaning political engagement. Perhaps most notably, before 1960, the family that owned the L.A. Times propelled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to office. Reason magazine's Matt Welch asks, why shouldn't the Kochs? "I mean, the L.A. Times were the Republican kingmakers of California — and therefore at least of the country — for nearly a century," Welch says. "It's incredible, that history."

Tribune is to send out formal documents to potential buyers next month.

Dying on the job continues at a steady pace according to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The fatal injury rate for American workers dropped slightly in 2011 — the most recent year with reported numbers — from 3.6 to 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.

But 4,693 men, women and teenagers died at work. That's three more than the total number of lives lost on the job in 2010.

BLS says it's the third-lowest death toll since counting began in 1992. Worker safety groups find no comfort in the report, though. It comes as they and the Labor Department prepare to mark Workers Memorial Day on Sunday.

"These deaths were largely preventable," says Tom O'Connor, executive director of National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), an advocacy group formed by organized labor and workers safety advocates. "Simply by following proven safety practices and complying with [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] standards, many of these more than 4,600 deaths could have been avoided."

COSH has just released its own report on workplace deaths, which focuses on specific industries and incidents.

O'Connor blames companies that "decry regulations and emphasize profits over safety."

The vast majority of deaths involve white men in private industry. Nearly 2,000 died in "transportation incidents," including traffic accidents. Close to 10 percent of the workers killed were victims of workplace homicides. Notoriously dangerous work in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting took 566 lives — 24.9 deaths for every 100,000 full-time workers. The most deaths for any single industry were in construction, with 738. That was 9.1 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers.

The BLS report now lists fatalities among contractors and that's a first, according to a story by Jim Morris from the Center for Public Integrity. O'Connor told Morris that "the total death toll is far greater than what we see from a handful of catastrophic incidents. It seems that the public just sort of accepts that as a risk of going to work."

Workers Memorial Day events include the placement of empty and well-worn work boots to symbolize the lives lost at work, groups of spouses and children holding photos of loves ones, and readings of the names of victims.

Last week, Democrats in Congress reintroduced the Protecting America's Workers Act (PAWA), a bill that seeks tougher penalties for employers when willful and egregious behavior results in workers deaths. Senate Democrats introduced a similar measure last month.

"The fact remains that penalties for harming workers are often the cost of doing business for some employers," said Rep. George Miller of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "Congress needs to work together to increase these outdated penalties and give real teeth to the law so that workers and communities can remain safe while trying to make a living."

Senators Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Bob Casey, D-Pa., cited a recent NPR series, Buried in Grain, in announcing support for the Senate's version of PAWA.

"Whether working on a factory floor, on an oil rig, or in a grain bin, our workers and their families need to know that they will be safe and protected at the workplace," said Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

PAWA failed to gain enough support in Congress in the past in the face of industry opposition and congressional resistance to expanded government regulation.