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International News

Switzerland freezes $900 m from Angolan insurance businessman

Carlos Manuel de São Vicente was a key figure in Angola’s oil industry, heading a group of companies which sold insurance and reinsurance contracts to state oil company Sonangol.Prosecutors said they froze $1.25 billion in accounts associated with de São Vicente, his family and companies late last year after Swiss banks flagged transfers to them as suspicious. They released most of the accounts in April 2019, save for two, which were in de São Vicente’s name.

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India leads global rise in new weekly COVID-19 cases,while deaths down: WHO

Overall global new deaths in the past seven days fell by 3% compared to the previous week, the WHO reported, adding that overall new infections around the world rose by 1.8 million.

The respiratory disease is also spreading in the Americas, which continues to account for more than half of reported cases and deaths worldwide, although there have been slight decreases in some areas, WHO said in its latest update.

Peru, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina have seen “increasing trends”, it said.

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Pandemic brings hard times for farmers, worsening hunger

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization forecasts that the number of undernourished people will increase by up to 132 million in this year, while the number of acutely malnourished children will rise by 6.7 billion worldwide due to the pandemic.

“We are facing two pandemics. COVID-19, which beyond its health toll is crushing livelihoods, and hunger, a scourge the international community pledged to eradicate by the end of this decade,” Qu Dongyu, the FAO’s director-general said in a commentary ahead of the virtual meeting.

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Global reinsurers maintain equilibrium through COVID-19 turbulence:AM Best

The global reinsurance composite has produced a five-year (2015-2019) average combined ratio of 99.6% and a return on equity of 5.7%. The report notes, however, that 3-4 percentage points of that combined ratio performance is attributable to favorable loss reserve development. This benefit continues to diminish, and without prompt, corrective action, will create a drag on earnings.

Companies’ individual abilities to take advantage of the hardening market conditions are likely to be influenced by a flight to quality. After three years of significant industry losses, those companies with a solid financial strength, robust reputation and market position, as well as stable, consistent and transparent results, should be best-positioned to optimize their underwriting risk portfolio and continue to attract and deploy capital. In the medium term,

Swiss Re Ltd. retained the top spot as the world’s largest reinsurer, as measured by reinsurance gross premium written, in AM Best’s highly regarded annual ranking of the Top 50 Global Reinsurance Groups. Munich Reinsurance Company again was No. 2 in this latest ranking as the top 10 remained largely stable from last year. 

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Germany’s Merkel says world needs to do more to combat climate change

The European Commission will next month propose a new 2030 climate target for a 50% or 55% emissions reduction against 1990 levels, compared with an existing goal for a 40%.
Germany is Europe’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, and the country’s environment ministry said last week that, while it can meet its climate target for 2020, it would have missed the goal if the economic havoc wrought by the coronavirus pandemic had not caused a large drop in emissions.

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North Korean hackers ramp up bank heists: U.S. government cyber alert

“North Korean cyber actors have demonstrated an imaginative knack for adjusting their tactics to exploit the financial sector as well as any other sector through illicit cyber operations,” Bryan Ware, a senior cybersecurity official at the U.S. Homeland Security Department, said in a prepared statement.

Cybersecurity experts and foreign policy analysts have said these types of hacking operations are conducted to help fund the North Korean government, which is cash-strapped due to expansive sanctions continuously placed on it by the U.S. and other western countries.

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