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International News

World’s largest plant capturing carbon from air starts in Iceland

Swiss start-up Climeworks AG, which specialises in capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air, has partnered with Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix to develop a plant that sucks out up to 4,000 tons of CO2 per year.

That’s the equivalent of the annual emissions from about 790 cars. Last year, global CO2-emissions totalled 31.5 billion tonnes, according to the International Energy Agency.

Direct air capture is one of the few technologies extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and is viewed by scientists as vital to limit global warming, blamed for causing more heatwaves, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels.

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Russia’s Yandex says it repelled biggest DDoS attack in history

The DDoS attack, in which hackers try to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it when it can no longer cope with the scale of data requested, began in August and reached a record level on Sept. 5.

“Our experts did manage to repel a record attack of nearly 22 million requests per second (RPS). This is the biggest known attack in the history of the internet,” Yandex said in a statement.

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‘It’s connected to you’: Shared causes fuel surge in disasters

From Arctic heat and wildfires to Texas cold-weather power outages and Amazon deforestation, threats around the world that may seem unrelated are increasingly compounding each other, United Nations researchers said in a report released Wednesday.

The underlying causes of the rising risks – from climate change to lack of cooperation among governments and ignoring the value of nature in economic decision-making – are common across many of them, researchers said.

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HDI Global first partnership on autonomous vehicle segment

Meryem Seyyar, Head of Digital Solutions commented: “This is the perfect time for HDI Global to take a lead and increase its support for the development of the Autonomous Vehicle & Systems ecosystem. AV’s will undoubtedly be a significant part of everyone’s future and the sooner we can establish our expertise and process within the space, the better we will be able to serve our partners moving forward.”

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Reinsurance price rise slowing due to strong capital supply and recovering profitability: Fitch

Fitch expects the sector’s combined ratio, normalised for large losses, to improve by 2pp–3pp in 2021 and another 1pp–2pp in 2022 as price increases gradually feed into underwriting margins.

However, price rises are slowing due to strong capital supply and recovering profitability, and we expect risk-adjusted prices to remain largely unchanged in 2022.

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