The sale of New South Wales' and Queensland's utility assets will be among the most eagerly anticipated power deals globally in 2015, according to a PwC report released today.

Australia dropped six places to 15th position - the largest drop out of the 27 OECD countries measured.

The global mining industry's fight for value and free cash flow has descended into a brawl, after 2014 saw the world's 40 largest miners ramp up production, slash capital spending, and rein in costs.

The PwC network reported total global gross revenues of US$35.4 billion for the fiscal year ended on 30 June 2015.

The emerging global market for business services using drone technology is valued at over US$127 billion with the drone revolution disrupting industries ranging from agriculture to filmmaking.

PwC Australia has recruited former CEO and Managing Director of David Jones Limited, Paul Zahra as Global Retail Advisor to add fuel to its growing retail and consumer practice.

1. Promising coronavirus vaccine candidate from China in talks to be tested globally  Times Now
2. China conducts first successful coronavirus vaccine test on monkeys  Times of India
3. Inactivated PiCoVacc vaccine found safe, efficacious in animal study  The Hindu
4. Chinese drugmaker in talks to test coronavirus vaccine globally: Report  Hindustan Times
5. Covid-19: The race to develop coronavirus vaccines is heating up  Times of India
6. View Full coverage on Google News

This afternoon Airbnb, a well-known private company that connects travelers with places to stay, announced that it was laying off around a quarter of its workforce. The company cited revenue declines and a need to curtail costs in a memo that TechCrunch viewed. In the note, written by Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky, the […]

She advocated for LGBTQ+ rights on the red carpet at the Emmys last week. And Laverne Cox came out to support another cause - ending extreme poverty - at the Global Citizen Festival

She advocated for LGBTQ+ rights on the red carpet at the Emmys last week. And Laverne Cox came out to support another cause - ending extreme poverty - at the Global Citizen Festival

The former Coronation Street star, 32, flaunted her toned abs in an orange bandeau top and a fuchsia pink suit as she joined her spouse, 33, in London's Hammersmith Apollo.

Angelina Jolie stuns in a black and white floral dress alongside Michelle Pfeiffer during Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil presser one day after she gushed about son Maddox starting college.

Ada Nicodemou has been a star on soap Home And Away since 2000- despite originally signing on for a short 13-week contract.

Everton manager Carlo Ancelotti revealed that Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp believed playing Atletico Madrid in the Champions League in front of a full stadium was 'criminal'.

Kelly Clarkson stunned in a rhinestone-studded black dress at the Global Citizen Festival. She performed a duet version of Where You Lead with legendary songwriter Carole King.

EXCLUSIVE BY SAMI MOKBEL: Premier League clubs have strengthened their global scouting teams as they prepare to take advantage of relaxed post-Brexit regulations on homegrown players.

The singer, 34, looked sensational in a plunging black velvet dress which flaunted her incredible toned figure as she joined John Legend at the event.

Sir James Dyson announced the move to Singapore in January, prompting claims of 'staggering hypocrisy' against the billionaire who backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum.

University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran has accused the World Health Organisation (WHO) of putting unborn children at risk by letting August's Olympics go ahead as planned.

The Radio X presenter, 46, showed off the fruits of his labour, as he presented at the Global Awards 2020 which took place at London's Eventim Apollo Hammersmith on Thursday.

Pope Francis warned that technology and globalisation were homogenising young people to the point where their uniqueness and cultural individuality were endangered.

The Duke of York's new PR expert Mark Gallagher helped to massage Saudi Arabia's image following global outrage over air strikes that killed thousands of Yemeni civilians.

HELEN CAHILL - CITY CORRESPONDENT: Saudi fund boss Yasir Al-Rumayyan is in the final stages of taking over as chairman of Newcastle United, sources told Sportsmail.

Business Wire India

Please replace the release issued May 4, 2020, with the following corrected version due to multiple revisions.

The corrected release reads: 

RMS LAUNCHES NEW PRODUCTS AND MODELS ON RMS RISK INTELLIGENCE, THE UNIFIED CLOUD PLATFORM FOR GLOBAL RISK

Latest product releases include Risk Modeler 2.0, new and updated HD Models and intelligent applications purpose-built for navigating the growing risk landscape

As the world is changing in profound ways, so is risk. Climate change, pandemic events, and cyberattacks are threats we all now have to consider in new and innovative ways. With better understanding of risks, better decisions can be made, enabling better risk management end-to-end. Today, at the opening of its annual Exceedance conference, RMS, the world’s leading catastrophe risk solutions company, announced significant new model and product releases and updates for RMS Risk Intelligence™ (RI).

RMS Risk Intelligence (RI), first launched in May 2019, is an open, modular, unified, and reliable cloud platform that enables advanced modeling, deeper risk insights and analytics. Leveraging a cloud-native architecture, RI delivers higher performance and scale. With the RMS Risk Intelligence platform, there is no hardware or software to maintain, focused on reducing cost of ownership. The platform enables (re)insurers, the capital market, governments, and other organizations to efficiently operate and manage all their RMS risk models in the cloud, with an intuitive user experience, integrated with advanced risk analytics. RI is compliant with all industry recognized best-in-class security requirements such as GDPR, ISO27001, C5 and SOC2.

This week, during the virtual Exceedance 2020 conference, RMS will demonstrate significant advancements on RMS Risk Intelligence.

Risk Modeler 2.0

Risk Modeler 2.0™ is a break-through product release at RMS, running on RMS Risk Intelligence. Risk Modeler 2.0 provides advanced portfolio and account risk analyses leveraging RMS models and is designed to meet the complex needs of risk analysts and cat modelers. The latest version of the Risk Modeler product enables real-time risk analytics and unified, high performance execution of RiskLink® models and HD Models. It can also be easily integrated with on-premises modeling and other on-premises applications as well as other cloud applications through open APIs, giving customers maximum flexibility and choice. Risk Modeler 2.0 offers an all-in-one RiskLink and RiskBrowser experience, with familiar features along with an enhanced, intuitive user interface that streamlines workflows to reduce the time and steps it takes to complete complex analyses. Risk Modeler 2.0 is a unified modeling and analytics solution for an entire organization to run portfolio and account modeling workflows, promoting real-time risk insights.

Risk Modeler 2.0 provides:

• Global risk model coverage in North America, Europe, and Asia, with RiskLink versions 18.0 and 18.1 of core models, HD Models and specialty models
• Future-proof architecture for model engines that unify execution of RiskLink and HD Models under one roof
• Faster model execution. For some of the most popular RiskLink Models such as North Atlantic Hurricane, North America Earthquake, Europe Windstorm and North America Winterstorm, plus others that run four to six times faster on a one million location portfolio
• Simplified integration with existing systems with support for a rich set of data formats, from Exposure Data Module (EDM), Results Data Module (RDM), event loss tables (ELT) to period loss tables (PLT), and year loss tables (YLT)
• Zero-downtime upgrades and faster access to models with side-by-side model versions in one application
• Intuitive and familiar workflows including for RiskLink and RiskBrowser users
• Simplified usability, with batch processing of multiple steps such as the data upload process, now reduced to one-step
• API integration with third-party tools and in-house applications to enable a fully automated modeling end-to-end process, e.g., importing exposures, running geocoding and hazard lookup services
   

Risk Modeler 2.0 is available to customers in preview today and will be generally available with RiskLink models, with initial HD models in preview, by June 2020.

Risk Modeler with New HD Models

RMS High Definition Models are the next generation of risk modeling, delivering greater analysis and granularity than ever before. RMS HD Models have now all undergone a significant upgrade as they transitioned to the Risk Modeler application, which gives them greater flexibility and computational strength. The following models are in addition to the US Flood and US Wildfire HD Models that have been available through Risk Modeler’s earlier version:

• Updated Europe Inland Flood Model suite that covers 18 river basins and over 8,000 catchments across 15 countries in Europe
• Updated Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and New Zealand Earthquake models that both include sub-peril coverage for tsunami, fire-following, liquefaction and landslides
• Updated Japan Typhoon and Flood Model that incorporates the most recent events such as Typhoons Jebi and Hagibis
• Europe Severe Convective Storm Models, a brand new model suite that covers 17 countries with large pan-European event sets and is fully integrated with our Europe Windstorm Model.
   

All these HD Models are available today, and will be generally available between June and September 2020 in the Risk Modeler 2.0 application. Customers can evaluate and validate these models even earlier with the preview program for Risk Modeler, or through Analytical Services. Customers can access the Europe Inland Flood and US Wildfire Models starting in June on Risk Modeler 2.0, followed by Europe Severe Convective Storm, Japan Typhoon, Japan Earthquake and New Zealand Earthquake Models coming onto Risk Modeler 2.0 shortly after. All HD models will be generally available on the new Risk Modeler 2.0 by September 2020.

Analytical Application Suite

RMS Risk Intelligence also offers a new suite of advanced applications that are tailored for specific portfolio management and underwriting tasks. These include:

• ExposureIQ™ – This new application ensures portfolio managers gain deeper insights into their books with millions of locations, enabling easy discovery of hotspots, diversification and re-balancing their portfolio. The ExposureIQ application provides real-time exposure information combined with wind forecasting events and footprints from RMS Event Response to help gain a quicker assessment of potential losses before, during and after an event. Customers may gain advanced preview access to the Exposure IQ application in June and it will be generally available Sept 2020.
• Next versions of SiteIQ™ and Location Intelligence APIs-Rigorous catastrophe peril risk assessment can now be done in seconds, early in the underwriting process. The RMS SiteIQ and Location Intelligence APIs have been enhanced in these latest versions to provide fast and easy access to over 100 trillion data points and can now deliver over 200 data points per location in some regions, with current (and expanding) coverage of over 70+ countries.

• TreatyIQ™- Harnessing a massively scalable roll-up engine, a trusted financial model, and flexible contract languages, the TreatyIQ application enables property treaty underwriters to achieve greater return on capacity with pricing and portfolio roll-up analytics. The Treaty IQ application will be available in preview in Q3 2020 and will be generally available in Q4.
   

Cihan Biyikoglu, Executive Vice President, Product, at RMS, said: “The significant advancements that the RMS team has made across all our products, HD Models, and especially Risk Modeler have been possible through collaboration with more than 400 RMS customers this past year. The Risk Intelligence unified cloud platform, through its innovative use of the risk data lake, the Risk Data Open Standard (RDOS), unified modeling and IQ applications - securely brings greater scale, capabilities and risk insights to the market. I am also excited about what the future holds in terms of new products and technologies. Further developments of the machine learning and artificial intelligence tools used by RMS will continue to open greater opportunities.”

Karen White, Chief Executive Officer at RMS said, “Risk Intelligence is the world’s first comprehensive global risk platform. The complexity and connectedness of risks continually confront us - we are all experiencing the crisis of COVID-19, along with the persistent crises of climate change, extreme weather and growing cyber threats. Facing all this, our industry needs a modern risk platform that takes advantage of all manner of data, modeling and analytics, in a way that is fast, integrated, and leverages technology in new ways for better insights and outcomes. RMS promised innovation, and with Risk Modeler 2.0 and the IQ applications, we have delivered – with an integrated platform for modeling risk in the cloud at the scale and speed required to take on the future of risk.”

ENDS

Notes to editors:

About RMS:

Risk Management Solutions, Inc. (RMS) helps insurers, financial markets, corporations, and public agencies evaluate and manage global risk from natural and man-made catastrophes, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, climate change, cyber, and pandemics.

RMS leads the catastrophe risk industry that we helped to pioneer by marrying data and advanced model science with leading-edge technology. Leaders across multiple industries can address the risks of tomorrow through RMS Risk Intelligence™, our open, real-time exposure and risk management platform, enabling them to tap into RMS HD models, rich data layers, intuitive applications and APIs that simply integrate into existing enterprise systems.

RMS is a trusted solutions partner enabling effective risk management for better business decision making across underwriting, risk selection, mitigation, and portfolio management.

Visit RMS.com to learn more and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200504005491/en/

Joining a legion of stars backing the fight against the deadly virus and those supporting the NHS, Megan chose to show gratitude through her music

As countries across the world continue to grapple with COVID-19, ZEE5 Global, which is present in 190 countries, sees a 60% surge in subscriptions and 20% growth in viewership in all markets. The platform’s focus this year is going to be on expanding across geographies, localization and strengthening its content strategy.Archana Anand, Chief Business Officer, ZEE5 Global further shares the growth plan, which are the key markets for ZEE5 global, and its retention strategy once the lockdown is lifted. As most countries across the globe continue being under lockdown, viewers are turning to OTT platforms to stay entertained and escape from the much scarier reality. ZEE5 Global has also seen a 60% uptick in the number of subscribers globally and a 20% growth in viewership in the past month due

"Fear is the most contagious disease you can imagine. It makes the virus look like a piker," Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said.Buffet's net worth is an estimated $72 billion, and his investment firm has a cash pile of $137 billion.Buffett's view, and it is hard to disagree with it, the worst of the coronavirus impact on the global economy and markets may not be over yet."Fear is the most contagious disease you can imagine. It makes the virus look like a piker," Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and more importantly an iconic investor said. "I don’t believe anybody knows what the market is going to do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year,” he added.The words are from a man whose net worth is an estimated $72 billion, and his investment

The Blank Space hitmaker announced the news by sharing a picture with Troy and Chairman and CEO of UMPG, Jody Gerson, and Universal boss, Sir Lucian Grainge, in which she was holding her pet cat.

Pop sensation Taylor Swift has been named global recording artist of the year for a second time. The Pennsylvania-native won over her friend Ed Sheeran who came in second place.

Taylor Swift capped off an exceptional year by being named the top-selling global artist of 2019.

CHRIS FOY - WORLD OF RUGBY: The coronavirus shutdown has forced rugby into an emergency spell of introspection and exposed the need for change. Here is this column's vision for the sport's future…

EXCLUSIVE BY NIK SIMON: Sir Bill Beaumont says he 'still alive and kicking' as he revealed his manifesto to be re-elected as World Rugby chairman after Sir Clive Woodward backed Agustin Pichot.

The famous couple said they've been grateful to have had the opportunity to spend time together as a family during the lockdown.

Ellie joined a slew of British stars performing in the worldwide pre-show and the following televised concert, including David Beckham, Rita Ora and Liam Payne.

The Premier League is even more cosmopolitan with the arrival of Wolves, Cardiff and Fulham. That's because the men bankrolling the three new additions are from China, America and Malaysia.

Government officials and business leaders to begin thinking about how to re-open the US economy. But many operating procedures in place before the outbreak are unlikely to return back to normal - at least in the near-term. Cisco, for example, is weighing whether to place employees into two "teams" and tier which cohort can be in the office working at a certain time - effectively continuing some of the social distancing guidelines currently in place.The tech giant also plans on continuing a halt on business travel, according to Chief Operating Officer Irving Tan.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.The sudden pivot to remote work led to a few chaotic weeks as companies scrambled to make the necessary adjustments. But as corporations begin to settle into the new normal - or at

Delta Goodrem earned herself an army of new fans on Sunday morning. 

Delta Goodrem invited the world inside her $4.8million Sydney home on Sunday.

Michael Buble lent his classic crooner voice to Lady Gaga's star-studded Global Citizen One World: Together at Home concert on Saturday.

Keith Urban's performance on Lady Gaga's Global Citizen One World: Together at Home concert proved to be memorable to millions of viewers on Sunday. 

Will the real Marco Rubio please stand up? Political no-man's land has left the Florida senator with few options other than running directly at Obama and throwing few stones inside his own party.

The MP said the outbreak is 'very dangerous' after a two-day visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Health officials have rejected proposals to declare a global emergency three times.

PETER FRANKOPAN: The Wuhan outbreak may be just another tremor. But few should have any doubts. The problem about nightmares is that they are reflections of realities.

The 34-year-old Briton appeared in court in Sydney on charges relating to a huge haul of suspected methamphetamine found onboard the vessel.

Covid-19 may have come from China but its spread has been horrifyingly global.

Prince Harry, 35, and Meghan Markle, 38, have taken to the Sussex Royal Instagram accounr and have paid tribute to 'the mums all over the world' on Mother's Day.

Gwen Stefani, Uma Thurman and Nicole Kidman led the celebrity arrivals at the Gala for the Global Ocean hosted by H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco at Opera of Monte-Carlo on Thursday.

Ada Nicodemou has been a star on soap Home And Away since 2000- despite originally signing on for a short 13-week contract.

On current trends, Britain's output should be 'a quarter larger than the French economy' by 2034, the Centre for Economics and Business Research's (CEBR) predictions found.

The former Arsenal manager was recently reported to be a target for the vacant managerial role at Bayern Munich but they have instead put Hans Dieter Flick in charge.