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International News

German ‘insurtech’ Wefox raises $650 mln at valuation of $3 bln

Wefox founder and CEO Julian Teicke told Reuters the Series C round had drawn strong investor demand because Wefox was growing both rapidly and more profitably than rival online insurers that are losing money.

He put that down to Wefox’s strategy of offering digital tools that enable insurance agents to streamline and automate labor intensive processes. Agents sell nine out of every 10 policies in Europe, leaving direct-to-consumer competitors like Lemonade fighting for a smaller piece of the market.

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China, in major policy shift, announces families can have three children

“To further optimise the birth policy, (China) will implement a one-married-couple-can-have-three-children policy,” Xinhua said in a report on the meeting.
In 2016, China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy – initially imposed to halt a population explosion – with a two-child limit, which failed to result in a sustained surge in births as the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities deterred many couples from starting families. read more

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China-backed projects in Africa face fierce backlash from environmentalists

“There is no doubt that Chinese commercial actors … have tried to evade environmental requirements,” said Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington.

Meanwhile, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, said Beijing was not unaware of the potential risks involved with private and state-owned firms operating in belt and road countries.

“Reducing these risks requires more uniformly applied standards and practices on environmental and social issues by China’s outbound actors, which is likely to come only via coherent policy requirements from the top down,” he said.

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90 institutional investors sue Nissan over Ghosn’s financial misconduct cases

According to the complaint, the investors who have traded Nissan stocks through financial institutions since June 2011 argue that Nissan stock prices plunged after the company’s then Chairman Ghosn and Greg Kelly, a former Nissan executive, were arrested by Japanese prosecutors in November 2018 for underreporting Ghosn’s remuneration by billions of yen in financial reports over multiple years.

The investors maintain that Nissan could easily have forecast a drop in stock prices due to damaged trust in the company’s accounting and corporate governance if the incident was reported by news media.

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X-Press Pearl loss will add to insurers’ container ship headaches

Insurers will face hull and machinery, cargo and liability claims, although there is still much uncertainty about the size of the loss. The vessel itself was only three months old; it is unclear how much the hull was insured for and which company insured it.

Rob Hawes, head of marine at loss adjuster Crawford & Co. estimated that the cargo loss could be between $30 million and $50 million, based on the X-Press Pearl’s 2,700 container capacity and an assumption that a container houses an average of $15,000 to $20,000 of goods.

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B1617 variant spreading worldwide at ‘frightening speed’: Experts

“What is frightening is the speed at which this variant is able to spread and circulate widely within the community, often surpassing the capability of contact-tracing units to track and isolate exposed contacts to break the transmission chains, a Professor Teo Yik Ying, Dean of the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, was quoted as saying.

“It has the potential to unleash a bigger pandemic storm than the world has previously seen,” Ying added.

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UK in early stages of 3rd wave of coronavirus, warns Indian-origin scientist

Professor Ravi Gupta of the University of Cambridge, who is a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), said although new cases were “relatively low” the B.1.617 variant of the COVID-19 had fuelled “exponential growth”, the BBC reported.

On Sunday, the UK reported more than 3,000 new COVID infections for a fifth day in a row. Prior to this, the UK had not surpassed that number since April 12.

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