Insurance agent inspired to break silence, seek peace
Before the towers fell and calls for war began, Dan Yaseen was an insurance agent, just a man with a workaday job who didn't spend time protesting anything.
"I was doing the regular things. I'd been an insurance agent for 32 years. I was trying to make a living, pay my taxes. Then all of the sudden this happened and I was right in the middle of it."
Yaseen, now 57, is a native of Pakistan, where he still has family. After the Sept. 11 attacks, there was talk that the United States would bomb Afghanistan, which shares a border with Pakistan. Bombing would change lives in the whole region.
He had never believed in war, had always quietly embraced nonviolence.
Further troubling to him were news reports of hate crimes against Saudis or Sikhs or Pakistanis, anyone who happened to look like the Arab terrorists who had attacked the U.S.
"It affected me on every level," Yaseen said. "But especially the tension of the building rhetoric. I felt that the U.S. would attack and violence was going to perpetuate violence." [ read full article ]
New Policy Expected To Ease Insurance Cost
It won't be much, but Florida homeowners -- especially those in Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties -- soon will see a dip in their skyrocketing homeowners insurance costs.
New policies announced Thursday allow insurance companies to charge higher deductibles for sinkhole coverage. Backers say the changes will make coverage more affordable and eliminate fraudulent claims if people have to pay more money out of pocket to claim their home sits on a sinkhole.
The savings will apply to the sinkhole coverage portion of a homeowner's insurance policy; in some cases, that can amount to as much as 14.4 percent.
The effect will be most significant in the Suncoast area -- especially sinkhole-riddled Pasco County, said Bob Lotane , a spokesman for the state Office of Insurance Regulation.
This year, state Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, and state Rep. John Legg, R-New Port Richey, pushed through legislation requiring the state to re-evaluate how companies assess rates, especially in regard to sinkholes.
The policy change announced Thursday came out of those bills. [ read full article ]
Ruling on insurance report Friday
A Thurston County judge says he'll rule Friday on whether to let state insurance regulators disclose the identities of three insurance companies whose credit scoring practices were the topic of a 2003 state report to the Legislature.
The information is sought by the state Democratic Party, which seeks to link Safeco Insurance Co. with the practices of a company identified in the report as having canceled auto insurance policies based on credit scores. The report said the practice disproportionately hit minorities, divorced women and poor people, even those with clean driving records.
Democratic Party spokesman Kelly Steele accuses McGavick, the presumptive Republican challenger to Democratic U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell in the November general election, of ramping up use of credit scoring when he led Safeco from 2001 to late 2005, getting rich in the process.
Jerry Kindinger, a lawyer for Safeco Insurance, told Superior Court Judge Richard Strophy on Friday that the information sought is the equivalent of a trade secret -- which is legally protected against disclosure.
He said the data were disclosed to the Office of the Insurance Commissioner in response to a request related to a formal examination of the company, which is specifically protected from public release, and the state also promised confidentiality.
But Christina Beusch, an assistant attorney general representing Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler's office, disputed those claims, saying the information actually sought by Democrats is contained in certain documents that are easily and legally disclosed.
"The fact a company wants to keep negative information confidential is not itself a trade secret ... just because it might be embarrassing or it might raise questions," Beusch told the judge. [ read full article ]