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International News

Final settlement for Brazil’s Samarco dam disaster could reach $19 bln, governor says

That estimate is nearly four times higher than an initial deal struck with mining companies in 2016, which created a foundation to implement reparations and temporarily froze lawsuits relating to the incident. “The expectation is that the agreement is around 100 billion reais,” Romeu Zema, governor of Minas Gerais, told Reuters in an interview late on Friday.

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Pandemic recovery to push emissions to all-time high – IEA

Spending plans for clean energy allocated by governments around the world in the second quarter of this year add up to $380 billion, making up just 2% of their total stimulus funds in response to the pandemic, the IEA said. The energy watchdog said the figure represented around a third of what it envisioned was needed to put the world on course to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century.

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South Africa’s riots insurer in spotlight after days of Carnage

While some claims will be assessed by heavyweight insurers such as Old Mutual Group Ltd. and Santam Ltd., the bulk of the burden will fall to one company little known outside the country: Sasria Insurance Ltd.
Sasria, a state-owned firm with 8.5 billion rand ($591 million) in assets under management, was founded shortly after the Soweto uprising of 1976, when at least 176 people died in demonstrations led by school children against the apartheid government. The frequency and scale of political protests that followed prompted private insurers to stop offering cover to vulnerable businesses, and Sasria was crated to fill the void.

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US to expose China’s ‘malicious cyber activities’ after threat to economic, national security

In the announcement which will be made tomorrow morning at 7 am (local time), there will be three things including — an unprecedented group of allies and partners (the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and NATO) will be joining the US in exposing and criticising the PRC’s Ministry of State Security’s malicious cyber activities. This is the first time NATO has condemned PRC cyber activities, the officials said via Teleconference.
“We will show how the PRC’s MSS — Ministry of State Security — uses criminal contract hackers to conduct unsanctioned cyber operations globally, including for their own personal profit. Their operations include criminal activities, such as cyber-enabled extortion, crypto-jacking, and theft from victims around the world for financial gain,” the officials said.

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FACTBOX:Automakers cutting back on rare earth magnets

Permanent magnet motors – using rare piles of the earth such as neodymium and dysprosium – naturally have a magnetic force. These are at the heart of many electric motors, powering the rotor of the drivetrain.

Motors without permanent magnets, such as induction motors, use electric current, often with copper wiring, to create a magnetic field and power the motor. These are cheaper, but less efficient and require a larger battery, reducing the driving range.

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India among top three countries facing phishing attacks via WhatsApp and Telegram, reveals report

The biggest share of detected malicious links between December 2020 and May were sent via WhatsApp (89.6 per cent), followed by Telegram (5.6 per cent), according to data shared by Kaspersky Internet Security for Android, part of the cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab.
Countries experiencing the highest number of phishing attacks were Russia (46 per cent), Brazil (15 per cent) and India (7 per cent).

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Climate change is driving a large increase in intense, slow-moving storms, a new study has found.

Researchers from the Newcastle University and the UK Met Office Hadley Centre used very detailed climate model simulations and found that slower storm movement acts to increase the amount of rainfall that accumulates locally, increasing the risk of flash floods across Europe beyond what has been expected based on previous studies.
The scientists estimate that these slow-moving storms may be 14 times more frequent across land by the end of the century. It is these slow-moving storms that have the potential for very high precipitation accumulations, with devastating impacts, as currently seen in Germany and Belgium.

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