Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: One of the most famous actors in India has COVID-19. Big B, as he's called, is Amitabh Bachchan. Bollywood fans are praying for recovery, as NPR's Lauren Frayer reports. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Praying in non-English language). LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: At a Hindu temple in Bhopal, India, the faithful chant prayers for Amitabh Bachchan and his family. The 77-year-old Bollywood icon and his son were both hospitalized over the weekend with COVID-19. His daughter-in-law and granddaughter also tested positive and are isolating at home. The Bachchans are bigger than royalty. There's another Hindu temple dedicated to Amitabh Bachchan in Kolkata, complete with a life-sized idol of the actor on a throne. The sanctuary walls are plastered with movie posters. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken). FRAYER: "We're not fans, we're devotees," this man told local TV.

Congressional investigators are launching an inquiry into a handful of companies that landed government contracts related to COVID-19, calling the deals "suspicious" because the companies lacked experience and, in some cases, had political connections to the Trump administration. In a letter obtained by NPR, the chairman of the bipartisan Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis , Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., asked a roster of administration officials to account for how and why they selected particular companies to provide Personal Protective Equipment, or PPE. Many of the contracts were made without competition at the height of the coronavirus crisis. Seven letters also went out to individual companies asking for information related to those contracts. "The Administration awarded contracts to inexperienced suppliers," Clyburn wrote in a letter addressed to the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services, Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs. "More than 445

A home repair show that helps Coloradans recover from shady contractors is accused of hiring just such a contractor for a project in Larkspur.

Gambling, Risky Pranks and Lucrative Contracts: Inside the Streaming Site Kick

Holyfield will fight Belford on September 11.

An ongoing campaign is targeting npm developers with hundreds of typosquat versions of their legitimate counterparts in an attempt to trick them into running cross-platform malware. The attack is notable for utilizing Ethereum smart contracts for command-and-control (C2) server address distribution, according to independent findings from Checkmarx, Phylum, and Socket published over the past few

An anti-corruption charity finds significant concerns in £15.3bn worth of contracts awarded during the pandemic.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said that President Trump does bear some responsibility for catching COVID-19 last week due to his refusal of not taking social distancing guidelines and not wearing a mask seriously. “Look, anybody who contracts the virus by essentially saying, ‘masks don’t matter; social distancing doesn’t matter’ — I think is responsible […]

The post Biden: Trump Is ‘Responsible’ For Contracting Coronavirus appeared first on Hispolitica.

Sudip Ranjan Bhuia
Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 152 (), 5249-5263.
Abstract, references and article information

Infrastructure Management Contracts: Improving Energy Asset Management in Displacement Settings Research paper sysadmin 17 April 2019

This paper highlights a number of options for managing electricity infrastructure in refugee camps and outlines the challenges, opportunities and operational implications associated with them. It takes the Kalobeyei settlement in Kenya as a case study.

• Building and maintaining electricity infrastructure to power offices, businesses, households and other operations in displacement settings is difficult. It is especially challenging for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partner agencies, because supplying electricity is not their core business.
• Private-sector companies exist that are willing and able to develop infrastructure management contracts to provide energy as a service in displacement settings. However, institutional barriers within humanitarian agencies persist, with short budgeting cycles in particular preventing humanitarian agencies from entering into the sorts of long-term service agreements required by the private sector.
• A number of options exist to leverage the expertise of the private sector through ‘public–private partnership’ (P3) structures. Such mechanisms can promote more efficient management of infrastructure by drawing on private-sector experience and expertise, incentivizing appropriate risk-sharing and providing options to leverage private capital in project development.
• Field work from the Kalobeyei settlement in Kenya suggests that a solar/diesel hybrid mini-grid solution was the most economical option to power camp services and infrastructure there. Compared to distributed diesel generation, the annual savings in operating costs were estimated at $49,880, with the additional investment paid back within 3.6 years.
• Humanitarian agencies need to be willing to change their policies to enable long-term service agreements. Alternatively (or, more likely, in conjunction with this option), financial mechanisms such as partial risk guarantees need to be developed to offset some of the risks. This change will need high-level support from donors and humanitarian agencies.
• Once the first infrastructure management contracts can be signed and tested in displacement locations (through the use of donor funding or otherwise) and associated data collected, it will ease the way for future investments in these types of projects.

Mike Trout and owner Arte Moreno met separately with the media on Monday, but neither would confirm that extension talks have begun between the Angels and Trout's agent, Craig Landis.

General practice leaders in Wales have voted unanimously to reject the Welsh government’s GP contract offer for 2024-25.The BMA’s ​General Practitioners Committee Wales said the government’s general medical services contract offer for the current financial year “fails to provide a credible and sustainable future” for general practice.GPs in Wales will now vote on whether to accept or reject the contract in a referendum that will open later this month.Gareth Oelmann, chair of the committee, said, “The decision to disregard the serious concerns and valuable contribution of general practice in Wales is beyond insulting, it is dangerous, leaving more surgeries and their patients in peril. We are concerned that this offer will leave more practices with no option but to close. GPs are being denied the resources they need to deliver vital services to the population.”The BMA said it was not yet able to disclose any details on the offer, and...

Tens of thousands of striking Boeing machinists voted Monday to ratify a new contract, ending their seven-week work stoppage.

NASA said on Tuesday that it will restart its Mentor-Protégé Program for contractors on Friday to expand commercial markets with eligible small businesses.

Utah education officials have abruptly canceled a $44 million contract with a Minnesota-based standardized-testing company amid a flurry of technological glitches that have created uncertainty about whether this year's test scores will be validated.

As evidence mounts that the cardiac-sympathetic nervous system reacts to challenging cognitive settings, we ask if these responses are epiphenomenal companions or if there is evidence suggesting a more intertwined role of this system with cognitive function. Healthy male and female human participants performed an approach-avoidance paradigm, trading off monetary reward for painful electric shock, while we recorded simultaneous electroencephalographic and cardiac-sympathetic signals. Participants were reward sensitive but also experienced approach-avoidance "conflict" when the subjective appeal of the reward was near equivalent to the revulsion of the cost. Drift-diffusion model parameters suggested that participants managed conflict in part by integrating larger volumes of evidence into choices (wider decision boundaries). Late alpha-band (neural) dynamics were consistent with widening decision boundaries serving to combat reward sensitivity and spread attention more fairly to all dimensions of available information. Independently, wider boundaries were also associated with cardiac "contractility" (an index of sympathetically mediated positive inotropy). We also saw evidence of conflict-specific "collaboration" between the neural and cardiac-sympathetic signals. In states of high conflict, the alignment (i.e., product) of alpha dynamics and contractility were associated with a further widening of the boundary, independent of either signal's singular association. Cross-trial coherence analyses provided additional evidence that the autonomic systems controlling cardiac-sympathetics might influence the assessment of information streams during conflict by disrupting or overriding reward processing. We conclude that cardiac-sympathetic control might play a critical role, in collaboration with cognitive processes, during the approach-avoidance conflict in humans.

The City of Winnipeg wants security guards at the Millennium Library to receive a living wage, but councillors recently rejected a motion that would have made a living wage mandatory for all city staff and contractors.

The Florida Panthers have given out another big extension — this one, to their Stanley Cup-winning coach. Paul Maurice and the Panthers have agreed on an extended contract, the team announced Tuesday.

Record October ADV for interest rate, energy, metals and agricultural products Record October ADV across U.S. Treasury and SOFR complexes All-time record monthly ADV in U.S. Treasury options and...

SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD data to fuel interactive design on the Web

A Kenyan court ruled on Friday that Facebook's parent company Meta could be sued in the East African nation over the dismissal of dozens of content moderators by a contractor.

Dover, Del. (July 15, 2021) – The Delaware Division of Small Business and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced today the launch of a Market Pressure Relief Fund designed to assist state contractors facing increased costs for construction materials due to the pandemic. The fund will provide adjustment reimbursements for non-transportation construction materials purchased […]

DOJ-CLASI agreement covers most disputes with community owners Attorney General Kathy Jennings announced Monday that manufactured home owners in disputes with their community owners will be eligible for free legal representation by the non-profit Delaware Community Legal Aid Society, Inc. (CLASI), under a contract it entered with the Delaware Department of Justice. “Constituents in all three counties have […]

Attorney General Kathy Jennings’ Consumer Protection Unit promulgated final regulations that establish clear rules of the road for the Home Improvement Services industry in Delaware.  The regulations, issued pursuant to the Consumer Fraud Act, become effective today, November 1. The Regulation is based on hundreds of complaints received by the Department of Justice, and it requires a number […]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2020   MEDIA CONTACT: Kenneth Briscoe Delaware Department of Labor Communications Coordinator kenneth.briscoe@delaware.gov   Thursday, October 1, 2020, The Delaware Department of Labor announced that the effective date of The Delaware Contractor Registration Act has been extended to July 1, 2021.    On September 28, 2020, Governor John Carney […]

The Delaware Department of Agriculture is administering the program and will be accepting applications until December 1, 2020.

Dover, DE – The Delaware Department of Correction (DOC) announced today that it has signed three-year contracts with VitalCore Health Strategies to provide medical care, behavioral health care and substance use disorder treatment to individuals under DOC supervision. The DOC’s Bureau of Healthcare, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services is responsible for contracting medical and behavioral health services in all […]

The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control announced that A-Del Construction of Newark has been awarded the contract for the replacement of the Bancroft Bridge in Alapocas Run State Park. Construction is tentatively scheduled to begin Oct. 1 and be completed in April 2025. Replacement of the existing Bancroft Bridge has been one of the DNREC Division of Parks and Recreation’s highest priorities since its emergency closure September 2021 when it was damaged beyond repair due to Hurricane Ida floodwaters.

OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET: Division Of Facilities Management

THE Ministry of Commerce yesterday added two United States companies to the Unreliable Entity List over their involvement in arms sales to China’s Taiwan region. In a statement, the ministry said it