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Hurricane Laura slams Louisiana, kills six, but less damage than forecast

Laura was downgraded to a tropical depression by the NHC at 10 p.m., and the forecaster said it will move to the mid-Mississippi Valley later on Friday and then to the mid-Atlantic states on Saturday.

Laura caused less mayhem than forecasts predicted – but officials said it remained a dangerous storm and that it would take days to assess the damage. At least 867,000 homes and businesses in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas remained without power on Thursday afternoon.
“This was the most powerful storm to ever make landfall in Louisiana,” Governor John Bel Edwards told a news conference. “It’s continuing to cause damage and life-threatening conditions.”

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Global protection gap for mortality, health and natural cat reach a new high of $1.24 trillion:Swiss Re

Globally, mortality resilience declined the most, driven by a widening of the mortality protection gap in the Asia-Pacific region, where China’s protection gap expanded due to rapidly growing household debt

Health resilience was stable despite some deterioration in emerging markets. 

The global health protection gap widened by more than 5% to USD 588 billion.Natural catastrophe resilience was lowest of the three risk areas. Swiss Re Institute expects that health and mortality protection gaps will widen as households grapple with lower incomes, higher healthcare costs and the financial consequences of losing a breadwinner as a result of the pandemic.

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Alphabet’s Verily targets employer health insurance with Swiss Re partnership

 Alphabet Inc’s life sciences division Verily’s new subsidiary, Coefficient Insurance Company, will be backed by the commercial insurance arm of Swiss Re, which is also making a minority investment in the new company.

“Coefficient is aimed at reducing blind spots and providing greater cost control mechanisms for self-funded employers,” Verily Chief Executive Officer Andy Conrad said in a statement.
Self-insurance arrangements are increasingly commonplace among larger employers, who typically pay health insurers to manage their healthcare benefits, but cover the costs of those claims themselves.

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Coronavirus re-infections raise concerns about immunity

The cases, in Belgium and the Netherlands, follow a report this week by researchers in Hong Kong about a man there who had been re-infected with a different strain of the virus four and a half months after being declared recovered – the first such re-infection to be documented.

That has fuelled fears about the effectiveness of potential vaccines against the virus, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, though experts say there would need to be many more cases of re-infection for these to be justified.

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SugarCRM Inc acquiers AI platform for leveraging CRM data

Making sense of data is a perennial issue for companies. Deep learning models are limited by the quality and quantity of input data, which historically has been inaccurate or incomplete in real-life CRM implementations. Node’s deep learning models identify signals with up to 81% greater accuracy than heuristic-based approaches to deliver the tangible benefits of heightened performance and true predictability.

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Global dividend plunge to be worst since financial crisis

Global dividend payments plunged $108 billion to $382 billion in the second quarter of the year, fund manager Janus Henderson has calculated, equating to a 22% year-on-year drop which will be the worst since at least 2009.

All regions saw lower payouts except North America, where Canadian payments proved to be resilient. Worldwide, 27% of firms cut their dividends, while worst affected Europe saw more than half do so and two thirds of those cancel them outright.

“2020 will see the worst outcome for global dividends since the global financial crisis,” Janus Henderson said in a report published on Monday.

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