• Travel often? Airport food may not be as safe as you thought it was. “A USA TODAY review of inspection records for nearly 800 restaurants at 10 airports found items such as tuna salad and turkey sandwiches stored at dangerously warm temperatures, raw meat contaminating ready-to-eat foods, rat droppings and kitchens lacking soap for workers to wash hands.” The report highlighted instances at Atlanta, New York City, Detroit and Boston airports.

• The E.U. says they’re not to blame for the “great failure” on climate change negotiations. In fact, European Union leaders openly blamed China and the U.S. for not wanting more than what was achieved at Copenhagen. The obstacles created by China and the U.S. were “part of what we regretted,” said Andreas Calgren, the environment minister of Sweden.

• On the topic of energy risk, the OPEC conference is in full swing. Conference delegates seem concerned that “for the first time since the early 1980s, world oil demand has declined for the second, successive year.” After much discussion, the conference has decided to maintain current oil productions levels for now.

• This should quiet the property-casualty industry nay-sayers: its net income through the first three quarters of 2009 improved 272% compared to the same period last year. “Net income improved by close to $12 billion, rising to $16.2 billion, according to a report on the industry’s consolidated nine-month results released today by Jersey City, N.J.-based Insurance Services Office, Inc., and the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.”

• Georgia residents and businesses again urged to conserve . . . you guessed it, water. The report from the state’s Water Contingency Task Force lists several water conservation plans, including asking utility companies to “adopt more aggressive conservation pricing schemes, which penalize bigger water users while benefiting the thriftiest.” Watch out Coca-Cola.

• An interesting editorial on financial regulation. BusinessWeek columnist Chris Farrell gives his take on a way to prevent risk-taking firms from damaging the broader financial system yet again. And the answer doesn’t include reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act.

• The Compliance Exchange lists its losers of 2009 — and there are many. Recipients of this honor include hedge funds, private equity, retention at the big four and job hoppers, to name a few. “It wasn’t a great year for many in the financial services sector, but these guys really found it tough.”

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• Travelers has set up a new catastrophe bond, named Longpoint Re II. The new “Cayman Islands special purpose vehicle” will provide $250 million of reinsurance from losses resulting from certain hurricane events in the northeastern United States. “The reinsurance purchased from Longpoint Re II is intended to work in conjunction with Travelers’ traditional reinsurance to provide $1bn of protection for Northeast hurricane events in excess of $2.25bn of losses.”

• AIG halts plans for an initial public offering of its Chartis property casualty unit. The company’s relatively new CEO, Robert Benmosche, allegedly told employees he is leaning towards more of a “hold and grow” plan than a racing towards a chunk of capital infusion (which the company would receive from such an IPO). Such a move could be seen as smart, and even admirable as “Benmosche, 65, is slowing the pace of divestitures to boost the value of assets needed to repay loans in the $182.3 billion bailout.”

• Coca-Cola moves ahead with innovative benefits funding plan. The Labor Department has given the go-ahead to the beverage giant’s plan to fund retiree health care benefits “through a special trust and its captive insurance company.” Towers Perrin consulted on the project, which took 12 months to complete, and Prudential Insurance provided the medical stop-loss policies.

• RIMS names new president. The Risk and Insurance Management Society announced Terry Fleming as president, effective January 1, 2010. Fleming has served on the Society’s board since 2004 and is currently vice president.

• Congress has extended the National Flood Insurance Program until February 28. “But officials of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America made clear they believe the respite, unlike others that have extended the program for short periods since last Sept. 30, should be the last.”

• Obama has finally chosen his cybersecurity czar. And the winner is . . . Howard Schmidt, head of the Information Security Forum, a non-profit cybersecurity organization. But Schmidt, even with his impressive resume, wasn’t Obama’s first choice, or second or third. In July, Forbes reported that at least three other candidates had been offered the position but turned it down.

• Ernst & Young was fined $8.5 million for violating securities laws while auditing Bally’s Fitness. “In 2002, worried about growing financial scandals, the audit firm of Ernst & Young set out to identify its riskiest clients and force them to comply with accounting rules. The effort backfired.” On the violations, SEC enforcement division director Robert Khuzami said: “It is deeply disconcerting that partners, even at the highest levels of E. & Y., failed to fulfill their basic obligations to the investing public by not conducting proper audits.”

• Insurance woes plague Florida businesses as unemployment insurance premiums are set to skyrocket. “The minimum rate for employers with few claims, which was $8, is leaping to more than $100 per employee. That has left business owners like Rusk with sticker shock.”

• An Op-ed arguing for the transparency of e-mails and key internal accounting documents on AIG servers by Eliot Spitzer, Frank Partnoy and William Black in the New York Times. “As fraud investigators, we would like to examine the trading patterns of A.I.G.’s financial products division, and its communications with Goldman Sachs and other bank counterparties who benefited from the bailout. We would like to understand whether the leaders of A.I.G. understood that they were approaching a financial Armageddon, and whether they alerted their counterparties, regulators and shareholders to the impending calamity.”

• PricewaterhouseCoopers says it’s thankful for a deal of any sort out of Copenhagen, but the outcome was not exactly what it had wished for. Richard Gledhill, head of climate change for the company said: “Business was looking for more. Major capital investments in low carbon infrastructure require long and loud regulatory signals and long term carbon price visibility. We aren’t there yet, so we aren’t going to see the scale OR SPEED of investment required to accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy.”

• D&O rates for financial industry companies declined in the third quarter, according to Aon. On average, pricing fell 2.7% during the third quarter of this year compared with the same quarter last year. “The decreasing number of claims may signal an end to the litigation explosion for financial services firms,” Mike Rice, national practice leader of Aon’s financial services group and author of the index, said in the report. Aon foresees a continuing softening of D&O rates for financial companies into 2010.

• Top eight security threats of 2010 were released today by BankInfoSecurity.com.

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• Despite President Obama’s plea to the Copenhagen climate summit (“While the science of climate change is not in doubt, I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now, and it hangs in the balance”), it is looking more and more like the philosophical differences and logistical squabbles between the developed and developing worlds are too large of an impasse for a new global carbon emission-cutting accord to come out of Denmark.

• Marsh is paying $220 million to buy HSCB Insurance Brokers.

• AM Best has affirmed “A” ratings for the AIG subsidiaries (Chartis, Lexington, AIU and Yosemite), which were downgraded from “A+” in September 2008 as the world economy burned down. “Best Analyst Jennifer Marshall said the rating reflected the fact that the companies had enough capital available to support their risk exposures, showed better underwriting and operating performance, and retained the bulk of their policies and customers around the world. ‘It is still an excellent rating, and we believe that, based on our analysis of the capitalization, the rating is appropriate,’ said Marshall.”

• Since LED lights use some 90% less electricity than the traditional incandescent variety, many cities and towns throughout the country have installed LED traffic lights in recent years to save money and become more environmentally conscious. Great idea, right? Maybe not so much once winter hits. It turns out that the extra energy radiated by the traditional lights was what melted snow landing on the lights and blocking the signal. So many of the lights using the LED alternative now become unreadable during major storms. Related accidents have been reported in Indiana, Iowa and Minnesota, and a cop responding to a traffic accident in Oswego, Illinois, had this to say: “Would the accident have occurred if the lights had been clear? I would be willing to bet not.” There is currently no good solution to this clear and deadly (from at least one report) public safety concern, but different cities are trying different things until they get the opportunity to implement a better technological fix, which could include heated lights, water-repellent coating or weather shields. St. Paul, Minnesota, has its workers using compressed air to blow the snow off while Green Bay, Wisconsin, is sending crews out to brush the snow off by hand. I don’t know if this extra effort will completely offset the electricity savings (which the state of Wisconsin reports as $750,000), but it sure does sound like a tedious process. And cold.

• The Aon quarterly D&O pricing index shows a year-over-year, third-quarter premium drop of 2.65%.

• The NAIC is gearing up to ask insurers to provide more info on their fraud-prevention plans.

• The Dubai Ports controversy a few years back brought the debate about national security vs. foreign investment to the forefront. Now, with the Obama administration recently threatening to block a Chinese bid to buy a Nevada gold mining company, it seems the debate continues. While the Times piece is good, check out the Risk Management take on the issue from late 2008 if you’re looking for a more in-depth look at the risk-related angle here.

• Netflix is facing a potentially huge breach-of-privacy law suit that could be financially devastating for the company. But for the rest of us? It may actually help clarify some of the still-murky legal issues surrounding these new, user-centric, online social networks.

• This is a few days old, but I’m just reading this Justin Fox’s “The Real Jobless Rate” column from this week’s Time (which also has a pretty good “Year in Pictures” feature, by the way). Fox suggests that while November’s reported 10% unemployment rate is a useful barometer of the current recession, there are many other, more nuanced jobless measures out there to better illustrate the true gravity of the current recession. What measures should we be looking at? “How about the simplest possible job-market measure, the employment-to-population ratio? Among Americans ages 25 to 54, it was at 75.1% in November, down from 80.3% in early 2007 and — with the exception of October’s 75% — the lowest it’s been since 1984. Because of the entry of women into the workforce, the ratio trended upward from the 1960s through the 1990s. If you look just at men ages 25 to 54, the picture is much more dire. Their employment-to-population ratio of 80.6% in November is the lowest since the BLS began keeping track in 1948. It’s 4 percentage points lower than it was in the depths of the early-1980s downturn.” In the comments below Fox’s article, someone linked to Paul Krugman’s take on the matter, which I found it interesting as well.

• This is similarly a few days old but probably even more interesting: Paul Volcker speaks to the Wall Street Journal on moral hazard, a fundamental restructuring the banking sector and the financial “innovation” of the past few decades so-often touted as a key driver of the U.S. economy. “The most important financial innovation that I have seen the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine. That really helps people and prevents visits to the bank and is a real convenience. How many other innovations can you tell me that have been as important to the individual as the automatic teller machine, which is in fact more of a mechanical innovation than a financial one?”

• Including the 12 who died in the Philippines massacre, 68 journalists have now been killed this year — a record number.

• The social media site Twitter was knocked offline last night by what may have possibly been an Iranian group of hackers calling themselves “IRANIAN CYBER ARMY” hijacking the site for political motivations. The digital assailants left a written message accompanied by a green flag on Twitter.com when the site went down that included the warning that “U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power” as well as the oddly polite salutation “Take Care.” Some are skeptical that this is really an Iranian political group rather than merely a prank, but as we saw this Summer, Twitter has had a major role in the ongoing in-fighting taking place in Iran. “Twitter has been an important tool for the opposition movement in Iran this year. Following the disputed presidential election there in June, as the country’s government sought to contain mass protests on the streets and online, threatening messages started to appear on the site from at least one user who claimed to be part of a cyber-unit of the country’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, established to fight enemies of the government.”

• In other Twitter-related news, “AIG” was the #7 most popular news event discussed this year by users.

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