Author: completebodyneeds

The US and Iran said they reached an interim peace agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and move further toward ending a war that’s killed thousands of people across the Middle East. The development caused equities and bonds to jump at the start of the trading week, while oil and natural gas prices — which soared with the strait’s closure — slumped. US President Donald Trump, under pressure as rising fuel costs hit him and his Republican Party ahead of midterm elections in November, hailed it as a “great deal that will bring peace and security to the whole…

A first-of-its-kind law in New York could force 3D printers sold for homes and business to come equipped with technology blocking them from making guns. The new requirement, also under consideration in California, attempts to thwart the latest technique for producing untraceable “ghost guns” that have turned up in crimes. But there are questions about whether the technology can work and concerns about its effect on personal privacy and constitutional rights. About one-third of U.S. states already have taken steps to ban or regulate build-it-yourself firearms that lack serial numbers and evade the background checks required to purchase guns from…

An Indian pollution regulator has alleged wastewater discharged from a Tata components factory for Apple’s iPhone has contaminated the groundwater for nearby farms and warned of a forced shutdown unless Tata gives a satisfactory explanation. India’s Tata Electronics is central to Apple’s push to diversify iPhone production beyond China and is the second-biggest supplier to Apple in South Asia after Taiwan’s Foxconn. The Tata plant under investigation is in Hosur in southern Tamil Nadu state and makes back panels and other components for iPhones. Farmland owners near the plant had complained for months to the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board…

A California man has been criminally charged with defrauding Western Alliance Bancorp out of nearly $100 million by falsifying title insurance policies to inflate the value of collateral he pledged to obtain loans. In a complaint made public on Wednesday, Mahender Makhijani, 44, of Newport Beach, was charged with bank fraud, which carries a maximum 30-year prison term. The case was announced by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli in Los Angeles. It relates to a civil lawsuit that Western Alliance filed last August against Makhijani’s company Cantor Group V, in which the bank claimed it was owed $98.6 million.…

A large tent collapsed during a Virginia church’s 20th anniversary celebration on Friday evening, killing one person and injuring nearly two dozen others, officials said. Heavy rain, lightning and strong winds tore through Moneta, a small community about 124 miles (200 kilometers) southwest of Richmond, as the EastLake Community Church was holding an outdoor service, Shelley Basinger, a spokesperson for Bedford County, said in a statement. The group was in the process of leaving the event tent when it collapsed, according to Abbey Johnston, acting chief of Bedford County Fire and Rescue Eleven people were taken to the hospital and…

El Nino, Nature’s chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists announced Thursday. Experts said the El Nino, a natural warming cycle, should further heat a globe already warming from fossil fuel pollution and will likely turbocharge extreme weather across the planet. Meteorologists forecast it will rival — or exceed — a record El Nino that began in 1997 and helped trigger billions of dollars in damage from heat waves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially confirmed the existence of the El…

An injured employee in Georgia does not need to show that his reason for refusing light-duty work is injury-related, the Georgia Court of Appeals found in a decision that could continue to prove tricky for employers and insurers, especially during the next pandemic. “I do not believe this case creates an opening for an onslaught of new exposure. However, it is certainly something to keep in mind when both sides are crafting their arguments before the courts,” said Sara Phillips, a workers’ compensation defense attorney with the Swift Currie law firm, in Atlanta. The appellate court early last year, in…

A coalition of U.S. state attorneys general has opened a sweeping investigation into OpenAI, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday. The ChatGPT maker was served on Friday with a subpoena seeking documents related to a wide range of its activities and the impact on users, including advertising, user engagement and retention, and the handling of consumer and health data, the source said. The subpoena, sent by New York’s attorney general, also seeks information on activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models and internal company policies, the source added. The probe represents the latest legal challenge…

A deal that could reopen the Strait of Hormuz within days has been met with caution among shipowners and traders, with many saying they would wait for more details in order to assess whether safe transits are possible after months of false starts. The waterway — a vital conduit for global oil and gas — has been at the heart of the conflict from the start, and the urgent need to resume traffic has been a vital theme in peace discussions. Iran’s grip on the strait, combined with a US blockade, has created an unprecedented disruption to the global energy…

As Wall Street races to incorporate war into its risk scenarios, the same people modeling natural catastrophes are now adapting their methodology to help investors, banks and insurers predict military conflicts. Since 2008, the number of countries engaged in external conflicts has nearly doubled to just over 100, while the economic impact of violence now stands at almost $22 trillion, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace. That’s equivalent to more than 10% of the world’s gross domestic product. Wars are upending the finance industry’s ability to predict everything from the price of oil to the cost of a…