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International News

COVID-19 epidemics in India, South Asia growing but not exploding – WHO

“In South Asia, not just in India, but in Bangladesh and… Pakistan and other countries of South Asia with large dense populations, the disease has not exploded, but there is always the risk of that happening,” Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO’s top emergency expert, told a news conference.

Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s chief scientist, noting India has a population of 1.3 billion, said that the 200,000 reported cases, “look big but for a country of this size it’s still modest”.

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Self-driving sector contends its cars can prevent many more crashes than insurance study says

Jack Weast, vice president of autonomous vehicle standards at Intel Corp’s Mobileye, in an interview on Friday said the auto industry was assembling a vast list of likely road scenarios and human behavior that every driverless car should be able to navigate safely. Government agencies and insurance companies are part of that process, Weast said.

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IOC seeks insurance compensation for delayed Tokyo Olympics

An “open discussion” is under way with insurance brokers, the IOC’s Olympic Games operations director Pierre Ducrey said Thursday. The aim is “to try and find the right level of compensation to help us bear the cost of having to wait another year,” Ducrey said.

The IOC pays for insurance against the cancellation of an Olympics but it has been unclear if its policy covers the one-year postponement forced by the coronavirus pandemic.

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U.S. insurers ask Treasury, Fed to back pandemic payouts for trade credit coverage

Trade credit insurance, which covers $600 billion in U.S. business transactions annually, protects businesses selling goods and services from the risk that insolvent buyers will not pay them. Washington lobbyist David Ross spoke with Steven Seitz, director of the Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office on a May 27 call about support for the niche industry, James Daly, chief executive officer of Euler Hermes Americas, an Allianz SE unit, told Reuters.

Trade credit insurers want about $60 billion in government support, as shared claims payouts, Daly said. Policyholders would pay additional premiums for the backing.

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Self-driving cars could only prevent a third of U.S. crashes – study

Companies developing self-driving vehicles, including traditional automakers and technology companies, have repeatedly positioned fully automated driving as a tool to drastically reduce road deaths by taking the human driver out of the equation.But the IIHS study outlined a more nuanced picture of human driver error, showing that not all mistakes can be eliminated by camera, radar and other sensor-based driverless technology.

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As Asia’s tropical storm season arrives, grounded airplanes at risk of damage

Major airports in storm-vulnerable regions such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and India have been effectively turned into giant parking lots as COVID-19 travel restrictions choke demand.

“If you have got those aircraft on the ground, you can imagine to get them back up and running in a short space of time is no easy thing,” said Gary Moran, head of Asia aviation at insurance broker Aon. “The challenge is you can have a typhoon or hurricane coming and there are going to be a lot of aircraft that aren’t going to be able to be moved in time.”

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Publishers sue internet archive over free E-Books

The plaintiffs, who include Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Wiley, are seeking a permanent injunction against the library and an undetermined amount of money for damages. Court papers refer to page views on the archive site, more than 50,000 alone in New York state, but not to how many books were actually borrowed.

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