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A top U.S. biosecurity lab is assuming responsibility for signing “poorly drafted” agreements with three high-level biosecurity labs in China that they concede may have broken the law.The three contracts, including one with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), gave the Chinese labs powers to destroy “secret files” from any stage of their collaboration.“The party is entitled to ask the other to destroy and/or return the secret files, materials, and equipment without any backups,” stated the 2017 memorandum of understanding (MOU) that the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) signed with the Wuhan lab, which first came to light in...

International Business Machines is giving thousands of its remote workers in the U.S. a choice this week: Abandon your home workspaces and relocate to a regional office -- or leave the company. The 105-year-old technology giant is quietly dismantling its popular decades-old remote work program to bring employees back into offices, a move it says will improve collaboration and accelerate the pace of work. The changes comes as IBM copes with 20 consecutive quarters of falling revenue and rising shareholder ire over Chief Executive Ginni Rometty's pay package. The company won't say how many of its 380,000 employees are affected...

The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom. That's IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s pitch to the laid-off American workers it's offering to place in India. The catch: Wages in the country are pennies-on-the-dollar compared to U.S. salaries. Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance for countries in which Big Blue has openings. Mostly that's developing markets like India, China, and Brazil. His challenge? Creating open environment for Internet users without compromising information security and privacy."IBM has established Project...

A group of private investors agreed today to buy IndyMac Bank, the Pasadena specialist in exotic home loans that collapsed in July and became the third-largest bank to fail since the government began insuring deposits in 1934. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which has run IndyMac since its collapse, said the bank would be purchased by IMB Management Holdings, a New York-based partnership led by buyout expert J. Christopher Flowers, hedge-fund operator John Paulson and Steven Mnuchin, chairman of private equity firm Dune Capital Management. IMB Management Holdings and the investor group will inject about $1.3 billion in new capital...

A private equity company led by former Goldman Sachs executives is the likely buyer of IndyMac Bank, according to a report published Friday. The winner of the bidding for the Pasadena-based thrift is New York-based Dune Capital Management, founded in 2004 by ex-Goldman partners Steven Mnuchin and Daniel Niedich, according to the report on the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter Web site.

A long-awaited sale of IndyMac Bank may be announced as early as today. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has been looking for a buyer, or buyers, for the Pasadena lender since the government declared it insolvent and seized it in July. Final bids were due by Dec. 12, and the FDIC said it expected to close a deal by the end of the year. The American Banker newspaper reported Tuesday that the announcement could come today.

A senior bank regulator was removed from his job after being accused of helping mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp alter its records so it appeared to be in better shape -- weeks before it was seized by the government. The Office of Thrift Supervision has reassigned its top West Coast official, Darrel Dochow, who was also a controversial figure in the regulatory lapses surrounding the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s. In a letter sent Monday to Sen. Charles Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, the Treasury Department's inspector general wrote that the federal OTS allowed the bank...

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (BP)--Vietnamese Baptists met at Grace Baptist Church in Ho Chi Minh City Jan. 10-11 to celebrate the church’s receiving official government recognition and to organize a new national confederation. This historic development is expected to encourage future evangelism and church-planting efforts in the country. The Vietnamese government made this possible by granting a certificate of religious practice to the church. The 400-member group met to create Grace Baptist Southern General Confederation. It adopted a constitution and elected officers for the new organization, which will organize and represent new churches across Vietnam. Bouquets of flowers and...

The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard have expressed interest in the 30-ft.-long Protector, which comes mounted with a machine gun and could be retrofitted for commercial use. Robots versus pirates -- it's not as stupid, or unlikely, as it sounds. Piracy has exploded in the waters near Somalia, where this past week United States warships have fired on two pirate skiffs, and are currently in pursuit of a hijacked Japanese-owned vessel. At least four other ships in the region remain under pirate control, and the problem appears to be going global: The International Maritime Bureau is tracking a 14-percent increase...

The International Mission Board (IMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention has targeted the former Soviet Union for a major initiative, including evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. The campaign, called "Hope 4 Russia," targets the largest land mass country in the world 13 years after the fall of communism there. Teams of workers and volunteers have been placed throughout Russia in an effort to reach people in the former communist country. Ed Tarleton, the coordinator of the massive effort, says there are many challenges and rewards when it comes to ministering in the former Soviet Union -- especially with the current...

Members of North America’s largest protestant denomination are calling for unity to push for further investigation into the recent allegations of financial impropriety at their International Mission Board (IMB) which has an annual budget of $288,900,000.00*. The organization has been under a cloud of suspicion since admitting that more than $350,000.00 of the Central Asia region’s budget remains unaccounted for. Some believe that there may be much more money missing. Messengers at the June 2006 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in Greensboro, NC accepted a motion to require an “external audit” of the books from 1999 to 2005, and automatically referred...

A RECENT report by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), an ocean crime watchdog, suggests that increased vigilance by the respective law enforcement authorities has brought down the the number of armed attacks in the waters of India, Malaysia and the Philippines in the past few months. Some other countries also have seen a drop in the attacks. Somalia had a 50 per cent drop, despite the eastern and the north-eastern coasts of the African country being notorious for hijacking of vessels and kidnapping of crew for ransom. Other countries reporting fewer attacks included Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ecuador, Guyana and Thailand....

Piracy and Kidnapping Soar on the High Seas 2 hours, 56 minutes ago Add World - Reuters to My Yahoo! By Neil Chatterjee LONDON (Reuters) - Violent piracy on the high seas has soared and more ships are being hijacked to kidnap the crew for ransom, an ocean crime watchdog said Wednesday. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) said the number of reported ship attacks jumped to 445 in 2003, 20 percent higher than the previous year and the second highest level since it began compiling statistics in 1991. The number of seafarers killed also climbed to 21, with another 71...

WASHINGTON -- In two decades as a Baptist missionary in the Middle East, Mike Edens has had a lot of opportunity to worry he and his family could be targets of anti-American passions and violence. Yet whenever he wondered whether he should leave his post, he always came to the same conclusion: "It's much wiser and safer to be obedient to God and do his work than to do otherwise." Edens' attitude helps explain why the number of U.S. evangelical missionaries has increased steadily in the Middle East in recent years, even as a radicalized, anti-American form of Islam has...

As evangelical Christian emissaries have spread throughout the Muslim world, their presence has increasingly proved to be a lightning rod for anti-American sentiment while provoking the anger of native Christian sects and Islamic clerics. The murder of three American missionaries yesterday at the hospital where they worked in Yemen, and the killing of another American missionary in southern Lebanon in November, underscored the dangers of working at the intersection of religion and politics. The negative reaction is not limited to Muslim countries, but has been seen in Hindu-dominated nations like India, where a Christian missionary family was burned to death...