Washington, September 17 : Geologists have uncovered the signs of ancient devastation on a remote tropical island of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean, in the form of giant coral boulders deposited by a mega-tsunami thousands of years ago.
According to a report in Discovery News, Matthew Hornbach of the University of Texas, Austin, and a team of researchers discovered are seven giant boulders made of coral on the island of Tongatapu last year, which may represent the largest rocks ever deposited by a mega-tsunami.
“They just looked so out of place. Tongatapu is flat as a pancake, and here are seven boulders from bus-sized to house-sized sitting hundreds of meters inland and 10 to
20 meters (33 to 66 feet) above sea level,” Hornbach said.
London/New York - Britain's Barclays bank has agreed to buy some of the core assets of stricken US investment bank Lehman Brothers for 1 billion pounds (1.75 billion dollars), the two banks said Wednesday.
Barclays had bought Lehman's North American investment banking and trading unit for 250 million dollars, and paid 1.5 billion dollars for its New York headquarters and two data centres following negotiations in New York.
Singapore - Anxious Singaporeans queued up in the wake of the near-collapse of US insurance giant American International Group (AIG) for a second day Wednesday to surrender policies issued by its local subsidiary.
American International Assurance (AIA) policyholders lined up despite news the US Federal Reserve Bank moved to bail out parent firm AIG with an 85-billion-dollar bridge loan.
A bankruptcy filing by AIG, a huge world player in insuring risk for institutions, would have had an even greater impact on the US and global finance system than Monday's
600-billion-dollar bankruptcy by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, industry experts warned.
Washington - The mammoth international insurance firm American International Group Inc (AIG) early Wednesday moved to reassure policyholders over the US government's 85-billion-dollar bailout while Democrats laid the blame on the White House for failing to regulate the finance industry.
In a statement late Tuesday, AIG conceded it had "serious liquidity issues" but said it believed the loan would "protect all AIG policyholders, address rating agency concerns and give AIG the time necessary to conduct asset sales on an orderly basis."
Washington, September 17 : A new research has suggested that surface water may have existed in some parts of the Martian landscape a billion years longer than previous studies have shown.
Catherine Weitz, a senior scientist with the Planetary Science Institute, along with her team, led the research.
This presents strong evidence that sustained and large-scale processes associated with precipitation and flowing water likely occurred on the plains surrounding Valles Marineris during the Hesperian Epoch, 3 to 3.7 billion years ago.
Valles Marineris is a huge canyon system that runs nearly a quarter of the way around the planet at its equator.
London/New York - Britain's Barclays bank has agreed to buy some of the core assets of stricken US investment bank Lehman Brothers for 1 billion pounds (1.75 billion dollars), the two banks said Wednesday.
Washington - The mammoth international insurance firm American International Group Inc (AIG) early Wednesday moved to reassure policyholders over the US government's 85-billion-dollar bailout while Democrats laid the blame on the White House for failing to regulate the finance industry.
