Insurance and reinsurance company Allied World Assurance Co Holdings Ltd. said it will acquire Darwin Professional Underwriters Inc. for $550 million in cash to expand its operations in the United States.

"This acquisition will more than double Allied World's presence in the U.S., particularly within the U.S. health care market," said Scott Carmilani, chief executive of Allied World.  Darwin's Chief Executive Stephen Sills will retire after the transaction closes.

Read this story here on the Reuters website.

A former Amesbury woman who wanted to stop having to take heart medications so she could have another child, only to end up with permanent heart damage, has won a $4.3 million verdict in a lawsuit against two Boston doctors.

With interest, the total amount will be more than $6 million, said Denyse (Gonthier) Richter's lawyer, Annette Gonthier-Kiely of Salem, who is also Richter's sister. It's one of the larger jury awards in a medical malpractice case in recent history. The jury returned its verdict Wednesday in Suffolk Superior Court.

Richter was a 39-year-old mother of three who wanted to have a fourth child when, in 2002, she saw Dr. Laurence Epstein, chief of the arrhythmia service at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Epstein was a noted specialist in a procedure that used radio frequency catheter ablations — using high-frequency radio waves to burn away abnormal cells that were causing the arrhythmia.

Read the full story here on the Newbury Port News website.

When you sit down, you probably don't check under your seat for a bomb. Even though it could kill you, chances are slim that it's there.

A similar view of risk led bankers, their regulators and other government officials to overlook dangerous investments and business models that contributed to the global credit crisis, according to speakers at the annual financial risk roundtable held by the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and the Oliver Wyman Institute, a management consulting firm.

Read the full article here on the Knowledge@Wharton website.

The European Commission sued nine EU nations on Thursday for not enacting European law that holds polluters liable for the environmental damage they cause.

The commission began the legal action in the European Court of Justice against Austria, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Britain and the Brussels region of Belgium, saying they failed to incorporate the EU's 2004 "polluter-pays" law into their national legislation.

EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said in a statement the "EU's Environmental Liability Directive implements the polluter-pays principle and is one of the most significant new pieces of EU environmental law of the last few years."

Read the full article here on the Yahoo! Finance website.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court's 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia's 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

California's attorney general slams the nation's largest mortgage lender with a lawsuit over risky loans that cost people their homes.

The lawsuit accuses Countrywide Financial of misleading and unfair business practices. California is demanding that Countrywide pay restitution to borrowers who lost their homes or loans and tens of thousands of people were affected.

California's lawsuit, and another like it in Illinois, cut to the core of the financial crisis in the Bay Area and elsewhere. It blames Countrywide for coursing people into loans destined for default.

Read the full story here on the ABC 7 website.

The Supreme Court Wednesday overturned the record $2.5 billion in punitive damages that Exxon Mobil Corp had been ordered to pay for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska.

The nation's highest court ruled that the punitive damages should be limited to an amount equal to the total relevant compensatory damages of $507.5 million.

In the court's opinion, Justice David Souter concluded that the $2.5 billion in punitive damages was excessive under federal maritime law, and should be cut to the amount of actual harm.

By a 5-3 vote, the justices overturned a ruling by a U.S. Court of Appeals that had awarded the record punitive damages to about 32,000 commercial fishermen, Alaska natives, property owners and others harmed by the nation's worst tanker spill.

Read the full article here on the Insurance Journal website.

A woman injured in a fall at a church where her teenage son was a member cannot sue because she is still considered a beneficiary of its mission and as a result the church is covered by a state law protecting non-profit organizations, an appellate panel ruled Tuesday.

The 2-0 decision reversed a trial judge's ruling and ordered that Joan Patterson's lawsuit against a Somerset County church be dismissed.

For insurers, it could be the perfect storm of bad news : how to deal with declining rates when the cost of everything else, from oil to food to labor, is going up.

Past underwriting cycles have turned on any number of events in the past -- liability crises, terrorist events, devastating hurricanes -- but never before has inflation been the trigger to stem market softening, noted Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute.

"Inflation tends to be amplified in the insurance system," Hartwig said. "If you look at the sorts of services property/casualty insurers typically provide -- such as medical services for people injured in auto accidents or injured workers in the case of workers' compensation -- those costs tend to move directionally with overall inflation, but at a much quicker pace."

Read the full story here on the Individual.com website.

The litigation tentacles reaching out of the subprime mortgage mess could entwine corporate prey well beyond the financial institutions and individuals blamed for creating the debacle and resulting credit crisis, some insurance and legal experts say.

Errors and omissions liability litigation could envelope companies that facilitated home purchases by subprime risks who eventually defaulted, they say.

And the directors and officers at companies outside the financial services sector that shareholders think failed to disclose how they would be affected by the credit crisis should expect shareholder class action litigation, they say.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.

"A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared," said Bob Janjuah, the bank's credit strategist.

A report by the bank's research team warns that the S&P 500 index of Wall Street equities is likely to fall by more than 300 points to around 1050 by September as "all the chickens come home to roost" from the excesses of the global boom, with contagion spreading across Europe and emerging markets.

Such a slide on world bourses would amount to one of the worst bear markets over the last century.

Read the full story here on the Telegraph.co.uk website.

Only 3% of survey participants with international operations have purchased separate Directors and Officers (D&O) liability insurance policies for other individual countries, according to the 2007 Survey on Insurance Purchasing and Claims Trends conducted by Towers Perrin. Forty-three percent of all survey participants indicated that their firms are global.

Global D&O coverage has become one of the most recent emerging D&O issues as a result of increased claim activity outside the U.S. and changing corporate laws in many countries that now permit derivative and shareholder lawsuits. In addition, legal changes have expanded the responsibilities of directors.

Read the full story here on the Yahoo! Finance website.