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International News

BMS launches ASIA operations

“We will look to expand out from M&A insurance into additional specialisms, extending our existing areas of expertise into other sectors, potentially including reinsurance, renewable energy, marine, and capital markets. We hope our ambition and entrepreneurial culture will continue to attract the very best talent in the market,”said Nick Cook, CEO of BMS Group

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Global Covid-19 cases surpass 85 million mark: Johns Hopkins University

The US is the worst-hit country with the world’s highest number of cases and deaths at 20,626,686 and 351,453, respectively, according to the CSSE.

India comes in second place in terms of cases at 10,323,965, while the country’s death toll soared to 149,435.
Brazil currently accounts for the second highest number of fatalities at 196,018.

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1 Jan renewals:Reinsurers arrest downward pricing, say no to ongoing Contagious Disease exposures

Improving investment markets, retained earnings and newly raised capital helped global reinsurance capital levels to recover rapidly during 2020, ending the year 3% higher than at year-end 2019.

For buyers, terms and conditions have overall been less onerous than initially feared again revealing the efficient working of the global reinsurance market,

Emerging COVID-19 losses, often advised only late in the renewal process or yet to be advised, triggered technical discussions of primary policy coverage and reinsurance treaty wordings.
Both remain in the early stages of deliberation, so, sensibly, most programmes renewed without considering any potential COVID-19 losses, leaving time for more measured discussions and subsequent adjustments.

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Germany mulls delaying second COVID-19 vaccine shot, Denmark approves delay

Some German health experts have welcomed Britain’s move to delay administering a second dose of the BioNTech/Pfizer shot, which comes as governments try to provide protection against coronavirus to as many people as possible by giving them one shot and delaying a second.

However, BioNTech and Pfizer pointed in a joint statement to a lack of trial data to support delaying the second dose.

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Aviation deaths rise worldwide in 2020 even as fatal incidents, flights fall

Large commercial airplanes had 0.27 fatal accidents per million flights in 2020, To70 said, or one fatal crash every 3.7 million flights — up from 0.18 fatal accidents per million flights in 2019.

The decline in crashes came amid a sharp decline in flights due to the coronavirus pandemic. Flightradar24 reported commercial flights it tracked worldwide in 2020 fell 42% to 24.4 million.

More than half of all deaths in the To70 review were the 176 people killed in January 2020 when a Ukrainian plane was shot down in Iranian airspace.

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More than 50 countries launch Covid-19 vaccination campaigns

In Asia, Singapore launched its campaign on Wednesday with the same vaccine.

Other countries on the Asian continent however have decided to take their time: India, Japan and Taiwan plan to begin vaccinations in the first quarter of 2021 and the Philippines and Pakistan in the second quarter, while Afghanistan and Thailand plan to start in mid-2021.

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SolarWinds hackers accessed Microsoft source code, the company says

The SolarWinds hack is among the most ambitious cyber operations ever disclosed, compromising at least half-a-dozen federal agencies and potentially thousands of companies and other institutions. U.S. and private sector investigators have spent the holidays combing through logs to try to understand whether their data has been stolen or modified.

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