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$83 billion global insured cat losses in 2020, the fifth-costliest on record:Swiss Re 

”As with COVID-19, climate change will be a huge test of global resilience.Neither pandemics nor climate change are ‘black swan’ events. But while COVID-19 has an expiry date, climate change does not, and failure to ‘green’ the global economic recovery now will increase costs for society in future,”said Jerome Jean Haegeli, Swiss Re Group Chief Economist.

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Lloyd’s, Parsyl to insure emerging market COVID-19 vaccine rollout

The Global Health Risk Facility (GHRF), made up of 14 insurers and reinsurers, has been set up to address the challenges of transporting temperature-sensitive vaccines, and will be supported by $26.7 million in funding from the U.S International Development Finance Corporation, the companies said on Tuesday.

The DFC loan will be used to capitalize a new public-private Lloyd’s syndicate, which will start operating in January, and allow the GHRF to offer cost-effective insurance policies for shipments of vaccines and medical products to developing countries.

Syndicate 1796 is the first public-private partnership to address a global health emergency in Lloyd’s 330-year history, the companies said.

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Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and other services go down in multiple countries

Not much more to update yet but we’re seeing and getting word from others that multiple Google services have gone down. Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Maps, Adwords and Adsense, Google Pay, Google Home and Google’s Chromecast are all experiencing outages, with dozens, even hundreds, of reports we’ve seen so far coming in from across Europe, the US, Canada, India, South Africa, countries in Central and South America, Australia and likely more.

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Aviva to sell Vietnamese business to Canada’s ManuLife

Aviva, under new boss Amanda Blanc, is looking to sell its businesses in continental Europe and Asia, to focus on Britain, Ireland and Canada, after years of share price underperformance in the life and general insurer irked investors.
Asia has emerged as a battleground for foreign insurers who are attracted by the region’s lower insurance penetration levels and faster growth rates for life insurance premiums than in their home markets.

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Next four to six months could be worst of Covid-19 pandemic: Bill Gates

“Overall, when I did the forecasts in 2015, I talked about the deaths potentially being higher. So, this virus could be more fatal than it is. We didn’t get the worst-case. But the thing that has surprised me is that the economic impact in the US and around the world has been much greater than the forecasts that I made five years ago,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said.

Gates said that his foundation had been funding a lot of the research for the vaccines.

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