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International News

Covid-19 variant 1st reported in India threatens to rapidly spread in sub-region: UNHCR

“. ,“We are particularly worried about the situation in the Asia and Pacific region, which in the past two months has experienced the largest increase in the number of cases globally.The highly infectious variant of the virus which first emerged in India threatens to rapidly spread in the sub-region, including among refugee populations.Over this period, there have been some 38 million recorded Covid-19 cases and more than half a million deaths, the UNHCR spokesperson said.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson Andrej Mahecic said

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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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