Bermuda insurance market facing new challenges.

The magazine, a Crown Communications quarterly publication, is free on news stands today.

A special focus on the Risk and Insurance Management Society's annual RIMS conference in San Francisco later this month reports that the industry is finally able to raise insurance premium rates after a decade of being mired in a soft market.

But Royal Gazette reporter Mairi Mallon writes that recent criticism of Bermuda by US-based insurers for being a "tax haven'' has raised fears that Congress will move to close the so-called Bermuda tax loophole.

Bottom Line also takes a look at the controversy surrounding the Commission for Unity and Racial Equality regulations, which supporters see as a way of improving the diversity of the workplace and opponents fear will be "tip of a xenophobic iceberg'' which will "chase away the goose that lays the golden egg''.

Bottom Line's cover story approaches insurance from the technological angle; will today's highly successful brick and mortar insurance companies be able to adjust to the "New Economy's'' clicks and mortar world.

Appleby, Spurling & Kempe lawyer Warren Cabral predicts that insurers have the opportunity to turn risks into rewards as e-commerce opens new opportunities for offering cover for risks as diverse as business being interrupted by hackers to trademark and copyright infringement.

Elsewhere in Bottom Line, Bermuda International Film Festival panellist Adam Page describes how insurance companies can play a key role in world firm production economics while Duncan Hall profiles Bermuda International Business Association chairman Ray Medeiros.

And Crown Communications senior writer John Burchall talks to three married couples who also successfully work together, Mairi Mallon gives an update on the Thyssen family's billion-dollar trust feud and Rebecca Zuill goes inside the newly renovated Swan building.