The FDIC is clarifying its policy and supervisory approach related to facilitating payment processing services directly, or indirectly through a third party, for merchant customers engaged in higher-risk activities.

An American newspaper stressed in a report: Although the US government has intensified its rhetoric and economic pressure on Iran, it seems that in fact, the main focus on Iran in its national security strategy is shifting to Russia and China. According to Fars News Agency, the administration of US President Donald Trump has intensified its rhetoric about Iran’s alleged threat this year. On the other hand, military officials and experts believe that the US military has reduced its presence in the Persian Gulf region and has withdrawn its ships, military aircraft and missiles. No US aircraft carrier has been replaced in the region since Theodore Roosevelt sailed from the Persian Gulf to...

A NATO squadron of three US destroyers Porter, Donald Cook and Roosevelt, the British frigate Kent and the American supply ship Sapplay left the Barents Sea. This was reported on the website of the Sixth Fleet of the United States. Ships entered...

Miami: Carolina Vásquez lost track of days and nights, unable to see the sunlight while stuck for two weeks in a windowless cruise ship cabin as a fever took hold of her body. On the worst night of her encounter with COVID-19, the Chilean woman, a line cook on the Greg Mortimer ship, summoned the strength to take a cold shower fearing the worst: losing consciousness while isolated from others. Vásquez, 36, and tens of thousands of other crew members have been trapped for weeks aboard dozens of cruise ships around the world — long after governments and cruise lines negotiated their passengers’ disembarkation. Some have gotten ill and died; others have survived but...

Internships provide a great way for small firms to recruit talent and potential successors.

While it is unclear what kind of chase it was, the Japan Coast Guard ordered the vessels to leave and deployed a ship to guard ...

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expresses ‘deep concern’ over reports of failure to assist and coordinate pushbacks of migrant boats in the central Mediterranean

Korea's exports of coronavirus test kits last month amounted to more than US$200 million, or eight times the month before, according to the Korea Customs Service on Thursday.They were exported to 103 countries.Brazil imported US$30 million worth of test kits, which is the biggest proportion of 13 pe...

A major focus of the Phuentsholing Township Development Project is to provide a safer space in which the town can grow by helping develop a new urban center with raised ground levels in an area sheltered by the embankments.

Always forgetting birthdays? Terrible at staying in touch? New tech promises to turn you into the best buddy ever. We put it to the test

First imagined in the 17th century, blimps borne aloft by nothing but nothing are finally ready for lift off, carrying goods and even passengers in gondolas in the clouds

Always forgetting birthdays? Terrible at staying in touch? New tech promises to turn you into the best buddy ever. We put it to the test

Upper Lutetian–Bartonian sedimentary mélanges, corresponding to ancient mud-rich submarine mass transport deposits, are widely distributed over an area c. 300 km long and tens of kilometres wide along the exhumed outer part of the External Ligurian accretionary wedge in the Northern Apennines. The occurrence of methane-derived carbonate concretions (septarians) in a specific tectonostratigraphic position below these sedimentary mélanges allows us to document the relationships among a significant period of regional-scale slope failure, climate change (the Early and Mid-Eocene Optimum stages), the dissociation of gas hydrates and accretionary tectonics during the Ligurian Tectonic Phase (early–mid-Lutetian). The distribution of septarians at the core of thrust-related anticlines suggests that the dissociation of gas hydrates was triggered by accretionary tectonics rather than climate change. The different ages of slope failure emplacement and the formation of the septarians support the view that the dissociation of gas hydrates was not the most important trigger for slope failure. The latter occurred during a tectonic quiescence stage associated with a regressive depositional trend, and probably minor residual tectonic pulses, which followed the Ligurian Tectonic Phase, favouring the dynamic re-equilibrium of the External Ligurian accretionary wedge. Our findings provide useful information for a better understanding of the factors controlling giant slope failure events in modern accretionary settings, where they may cause tsunamis.

The Northern Paraguai Belt, at the SE border of the Amazonian Craton, central Brazil, has been interpreted as a Brasiliano–Pan-African (c. 650–600 Ma) belt with a foreland basin, recording collisional polyphase tectonism and greenschist-facies metamorphism extending from the late Precambrian to the Cambrian–Ordovician. New structural investigations indicate that the older metasedimentary rocks of the Cuiabá Group represent a Tonian–Cryogenian basement assemblage deformed in two contemporaneous fault-bounded structural sub-domains of wrench-dominated (rake <10°) and contraction-dominated (rake ~30–40°) sinistral transpression, with tectonic vergence towards the SE. The younger late Cryogenian to early Cambrian sedimentary rocks lying to the NW of the Cuiabá Group are non-metamorphic and display only pervasive brittle transtension characterized by normal-oblique faults, fractures and forced drag folds with no consistent vergence pattern. Our analyses suggest that an unconformity separates the metasedimentary Cuiabá Group basement of the Northern Paraguai Belt from the unmetamorphosed sedimentary cover. It is proposed that the latter units were deposited during a post-glacial marine transgression (after c. 635 Ma) in a post-collisional basin. The Paraguai Belt basement and its post-collisional sedimentary cover share a number of significant geological similarities with sequences in the Bassarides Belt and Taoudéni Basin in the SW portion of the West African Craton.

Background:

Despite smoking being a well-established risk factor for pancreatic cancer, there is a need to further characterize pancreatic cancer risk according to lifespan smoking patterns and other smoking features, such as tobacco type. Our aim was to deeply investigate them within a large European case–control study.

Always forgetting birthdays? Terrible at staying in touch? New tech promises to turn you into the best buddy ever. We put it to the test

Touch is key to social relationships, and while coronavirus social distancing measures may limit physical interactions, there are still many ways to connect from afar, says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar

The 36th edition of the European Athletics Indoor Championships is scheduled to take place from March 5 to 7 next year in Torun, Poland.

Donald Trump has instructed the US Navy to shoot down and destroy Iranian gunboats "if they harass our ships at sea".

Flamingos form long-lasting friendships and some "behave like married couples", according to new research.

Ships on the River Thames joined hundreds of vessels worldwide to sound their horns for 1.2 million "unsung heroes" stuck at sea during the coronavirus travel restrictions.

'It seems - like humans - flamingos form social bonds for a variety of reasons,' researcher says

Guardian investigation finds workers stranded on at least 50 ships with Covid-19 outbreaks, limited medical equipment, some without pay, and no end in sight

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While most cruise ship passengers have now made it back to land, another crisis has been growing – with no safe haven in sight.

Around the world, more than 100,000 crew workers are still trapped on cruise ships, at least 50 of which have Covid-19 infections, a Guardian investigation has found. They are shut out of ports and banned from air travel that would allow them to return to their homes.

Eight cruise ships to resume operations from 1 August, sailing from Texas and Florida

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Carnival Cruise Line has announced plans to resume operations at the beginning of August despite dozens of deaths on cruise ships during the Covid-19 pandemic and investigations into the industry’s possible role in spreading the disease around the planet.

In a statement on Monday, the operator said eight cruise ships would resume operations from 1 August, sailing from Galveston, Texas, and Miami and Port Canaveral in Florida, once a no-sail order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had expired.

Swimming follows a similar move by track, shifting to 2022 to make room for the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

In what appears to be a lax enforcement by China of UN sanctions, North Korean vessels — some carrying illicit coal shipments — are seen anchored in Chinese waters last year in photos from a UN report.

Coronavirus concerns see low crowd numbers at the NT's NTFL grand final, where the Nightcliff Tigers make history winning back-to-back premierships in a first for the club, beating St Mary's by 13 points.

Since March, many ports are refusing to allow crew changes or shore leave.

Thermoformed packaging company Lacerta has managed to ship over three million Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) face shields to healthcare and frontline workers, in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The federal government announced today that it would remove the remaining 52 ships that currently sit in the Suisun Bay as part of an agreement with environmental groups that was filed in federal court in Sacramento, Calif.

Alejandro Gonzalez, 60, of Miami-Dade County, Fla., was convicted by a federal jury in Miami of three counts of making false statements to the U.S. Coast Guard and one count of obstruction of an agency proceeding.

Charles Alan Pflueger, owner of Pflueger Inc., Randall Kurata, the company’s chief financial officer, and Julie Kam, Pflueger’s executive assistant, pleaded guilty to filing false federal income tax returns before U.S. District Court Judge Leslie E. Kobayashi in Honolulu, the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced today.

Alejandro Gonzalez, 60, of Miami-Dade County, Fla., was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to 21 months in prison.

The Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education announced today a new, nearly $1 million grant fund entitled, “Promoting Reentry Success through Continuity of Educational Opportunities”, that will invest in innovative programs preparing incarcerated individuals to successfully reenter society with the support of education and workforce training.

Two shipping firms based in Germany and Cyprus today pleaded guilty to felony obstruction of justice charges and violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships related to the deliberate concealment of vessel pollution from four ships that visited U.S. ports in New Jersey, Delaware and Northern California.

The U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina and the North Carolina Department of Justice filed a lawsuit today alleging that the owners and operators of two “buy here, pay here” used-car dealerships in Charlotte, N.C., violated the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act by intentionally targeting African-American customers for the extension and servicing of installment sale contracts on unfair and predatory terms.

Halifax Hospital Medical Center and Halifax Staffing Inc. (Halifax), a hospital system based in the Daytona Beach, Fla., area, have agreed to pay $85 million to resolve allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by submitting claims to the Medicare program that violated the Physician Self-Referral Law, commonly known as the Stark Law.

As part of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative, President Obama announced new AmeriCorps partnerships with federal agencies and the private sector to connect young people to mentoring, support networks and job skills to help them reach their full potential

The United States has filed two complaints under the False Claims Act against Michigan neurosurgeon Dr. Aria Sabit, spinal implant company Reliance Medical Systems, two Reliance distributorships—Apex Medical Technologies and Kronos Spinal Technologies—and the companies’ owners, Brett Berry, John Hoffman and Adam Pike.

Mar 24, 2020

While the Middle East Initiative is focused entirely on the MENA region, several other Center programs are also working on issues related to the Middle East, including Future of Diplomacy, Geopolitics of Energy, and the Managing the Atom.