At least seven ships – mainly dry bulk vessels – have crossed the Strait of Hormuz in the past 24 hours, in line with muted activity in recent days, shipping data showed on Monday, while talks between Iran and the United States have stalled. The vessels included ships leaving from Iraqi ports and one dry bulk vessel from an Iranian port, according to ship tracking data from Kpler and separate satellite analysis from data analytics specialists SynMax. Shipping traffic passing through the crucial waterway at the entrance to the Gulf during an uneasy ceasefire between Washington and Tehran represents a…
Author: Awais
Underwriter is holding margins firm even as a softening market eats into one of its key growth engines
Mike Cusack Alliant Insurance Services named Michael J. Cusack president of Alliant Property & Casualty. Cusack previously served as head of Alliant Specialty, responsible for overseeing 16 industry verticals and expanding Alliant’s specialty business across the U.S. Cusack has more than 35 years of industry experience, including playing a role in forming Alliant Construction. Alliant is headquartered in Irvine, California. Topics Property Alliant Property Casualty Casualty Was this article valuable? Yes No Here are more articles you may enjoy. Interested in Casualty? Get automatic alerts for this topic.
Canyons in eastern Utah will churn this spring with huge volumes of water—as much as 50,000 toilets flushing constantly at the same time—in a desperate attempt to maintain electricity generation for thousands of homes across much of the Western U.S. The Green and Colorado river flows might seem like a bounty of moisture in a parched desert of sandstone arches and prickly cacti, but in fact it’s just the opposite. After the driest winter on record, officials this spring want to raise the level of badly depleted Lake Powell on the Colorado River to keep its hydropower humming. To do…
The chief of Europe’s securities regulator said the risks from and potential speed of cyberattacks are growing, joining a chorus of warnings from financial supervisors on the threats posed by artificial intelligence models that are evolving quickly. Geopolitical tensions have increased cybersecurity risks and the regulator has been contacting financial entities it supervises to assess their cybersecurity defenses in light of recent developments in AI, Verena Ross, chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority, said in an interview in Paris. “We are closely watching how bringing AI models into this could increase the potential speed with which such attacks…
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued New York on Friday, accusing the state of invading its authority to regulate prediction markets by filing lawsuits accusing Coinbase Financial Markets COIN.O and Gemini Titan GEMI.O of promoting gambling. In a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, the CFTC said the litigation filed on April 21 by New York Attorney General Letitia James “intrudes on the exclusive federal scheme Congress designed” to oversee commodity derivatives markets, including prediction markets. The CFTC filed similar lawsuits on April 2 against Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois. In a joint statement, James and New York Governor Kathy…
India’s Acko Insurance is targeting a valuation of between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in its planned initial public offering and is eyeing a listing in early 2027, two people familiar with the matter said. Backed by investors including General Atlantic, Accel, Amazon.com and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Acko provides insurance products including motor, health and travel insurance. Acko has appointed Morgan Stanley, ICICI Securities and Kotak Mahindra Capital as the bankers to manage the proposed listing, the sources said, requesting anonymity as they are not authorized to talk to media. The insurer could seek to raise…
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is progressing a plan to become the first to utilise catastrophe bonds for food security financing, in a novel transaction that would see it become the first UN agency to sponsor a cat bond, with a target to source up to $100 million in risk transfer to boost drought resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa.This drought catastrophe bond, dubbed a food security catastrophe bond by the WFP, would be groundbreaking for a number of reasons. It would mark the first catastrophe bond to benefit a UN organisation directly, with the WFP positioned to be the…
Raeann Hunt scrambled to her cellar as a tornado bore down on her Oklahoma community. “It is headed right for us,” she recalled thinking, as she peeked outside, unable to contain her curiosity. Huddled inside the dark 8-by-8 foot (2.44-by-2.44 meters) concrete shelter with her husband, brother-in-law and a neighbor, she heard roaring, metal slapping on the door and glass breaking. Afterward, they emerged unscathed, but found the windows smashed out of the one-story brick home in Enid and the roof badly damaged. The scene was repeated Thursday night across the city of about 50,000 people about 85 miles north…
A former ransomware negotiator has pleaded guilty to charges he helped a ransomware group extort tens of millions of dollars from companies. Angelo Martino, 41, of Land O’Lakes, Florida, worked for a cyber incident response company as a ransomware negotiator but used his position to provide operators of the Blackcat/ALPHV ransomware variant with confidential information regarding victims in order to maximize ransom payments, said the U.S. Department of Justice. “Ransomware victims turned to this defendant for help, and he sold them out from the inside,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. In exchange…
Eight years after South Carolina lawmakers forced a $1 million liquor liability insurance requirement on bars and restaurants, and one year after they tweaked the law with conditional coverage requirements, the state Senate is trying again. Senators voted last week to amend a state appropriations bill and suspend the million-dollar coverage requirement until June 30, 2027, according to news reports and legislative tracking services. The South Carolina House of Representatives, where the budget bill originated, must ratify the change before it can become law, a vote that is far from certain. Xiao Bao Biscuit restaurant in Charleston (Adobe) The 2018…
The state of Michigan was cleared of liability Thursday in a disastrous 2020 dam failure that flooded communities, destroyed more than 100 homes and drained a popular lake. Court of Claims Judge James Redford acknowledged the “real and lasting damages” of the Edenville Dam failure. But he said days of relentless rain and an unprecedented 100-year flood triggered the calamity in the Midland area, not the state-authorized level of Wixom Lake. Redford cited experts who said a lower lake level before the disaster was unlikely to have prevented the catastrophe. He also said state regulators had “received by default” a…
For Curtis Barton, CEO of ALKEME Insurance, Troy Chakarun, Chief Commercial Officer, and Josh Benveniste, Chief Corporate Strategy Officer, the company was not the product of a startup fantasy sketched out years earlier. It came together far more gradually. The friendship was established first. The careers came next. Only later did the business case become obvious.
Insurance agency mergers & acquisitions in the first three months of 2026 were down 6% compared with the same period last year. It was the 10th consecutive quarter of deal volume below the long-term trend line but, investment banking and financial consulting firm OPTIS Partners said the trend is “probably bottoming out.” During the Q1 2026 there were 148 insurance agency deals, which was the lowest total for the time period since 2016, said OPTIS Partners’ M&A database. “The industry has ridden down a three-year slide in deal volume, which we believe is beginning to bottom out to about 650…