Category:

Non-Life

South Africa’s riots insurer in spotlight after days of Carnage

While some claims will be assessed by heavyweight insurers such as Old Mutual Group Ltd. and Santam Ltd., the bulk of the burden will fall to one company little known outside the country: Sasria Insurance Ltd.
Sasria, a state-owned firm with 8.5 billion rand ($591 million) in assets under management, was founded shortly after the Soweto uprising of 1976, when at least 176 people died in demonstrations led by school children against the apartheid government. The frequency and scale of political protests that followed prompted private insurers to stop offering cover to vulnerable businesses, and Sasria was crated to fill the void.

read more

Climate change is driving a large increase in intense, slow-moving storms, a new study has found.

Researchers from the Newcastle University and the UK Met Office Hadley Centre used very detailed climate model simulations and found that slower storm movement acts to increase the amount of rainfall that accumulates locally, increasing the risk of flash floods across Europe beyond what has been expected based on previous studies.
The scientists estimate that these slow-moving storms may be 14 times more frequent across land by the end of the century. It is these slow-moving storms that have the potential for very high precipitation accumulations, with devastating impacts, as currently seen in Germany and Belgium.

read more

Global sustainable debt issuance will crack $1 trillion mark in 2021 -IIF

With corporations and financial institutions under growing pressure from investors to up their environment, social and governance (ESG) game, the issuance of bonds to raise money for climate-related or social projects, or linked to sustainability targets, is an increasingly popular option.

Sustainable debt sales more than doubled year-on-year in the first half of 2021 to over $680 billion, closing in on the $700 billion issued during the whole of last year.

read more

Over 300 phone nos of ministers, journos, activists, bizmen in India could have been hacked: Report

The Wire reported that forensic tests conducted as part of the media investigation project on a small cross-section of phones associated with these numbers revealed clear signs of targeting by Pegasus spyware in 37 phones, of which 10 are Indian.
The government, however, dismissed allegations of any kind of surveillance on its part on specific people, saying it ”has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever”.

read more

Rain fury claims 30 lives as fifth thunderstorm in a month batters Mumbai

Meanwhile, the flooding in the water purification complex at Bhandup affected the water supply in most parts of the metropolis, a BMC official said. The flooding has affected electrical equipment that controls the pumping and filtration processes there, one of the major sites of water supply to the country’s financial capital, following which the BMC asked citizens to boil water before drinking.

read more

Kids aren’t just littler adults – here’s why they need their own clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine

Clinical research studies of the mRNA-based vaccines for children under 12 are ongoing, and authorization of a vaccine for this younger age group is still at least several months away. These trials are necessary because children have important differences in physiology and responses to vaccines from those of adults. Conducting separate studies in children under age 12 is a vital step toward ending the pandemic.

read more