\n\nHundreds more people were evacuated from their homes as wildfires blistered land in France, Spain and Portugal on Friday, while officials in Europe issued health warnings for the heatwave in the coming days.\n\nMore than 1,000 firefighters, supported by water-bomber aircraft, have battled since Tuesday to control two blazes in southwestern France that have been fanned by scorching heat, tinder-box conditions and strong winds.\n\nWhile temperatures dipped a little in Portugal, they were still expected to top 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in some places, with five districts on red alert and more than 1,000 firefighters tackling 17 wildfires, authorities said.\n\nIn Spain, a new wildfire broke out in the south of the country after blazes in the west in the past week.\n\nMore than 400 people were evacuated from the hills of Mijas, a town popular with northern European tourists in the province of Malaga. Beachgoers in Torremolinos, some 20 km away, could see plumes of smoke rising above the hotels lining the coast.\n\nMeanwhile, the worst drought in over 70 years reduced Italy's longest river, the Po, to little more than a trickle in places, with temperatures expected to rise next week.\n\nOfficials are worried about the effects on people's health and on healthcare systems already challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic as the searing heat sweeps the continent, with warnings issued for worse to come in Britain in particular.\n\nThe World Meteorological Organization said the heatwave would worsen air quality, especially in towns and cities.\n\n

The U.K. broke its national record for the highest temperature ever registered.

\n\nJapan is asking some 37 million people living in and around Tokyo to use less electricity and ration air conditioning even amid a record heat wave that has seen temperatures in some parts of the country pass 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).\n\nThe government urged citizens in the capital to turn off lights and power switches for three hours in the afternoon and to use air conditioning “appropriately,” as the country struggles with growing power shortages.\n\nThe request comes despite experts warning that record-setting temperatures could continue for weeks.\n\n“Please save as much power as possible, such as by turning off lights that are not in use,” the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said Monday. It said appropriate uses of air conditioning included to “prevent heatstroke.”\n\nJapan’s power supply has been tight since March, when an earthquake in the northeast forced some nuclear power plants to suspend operations. At the same time demand is at its highest since 2011, when Japan was hit by the strongest earthquake in its recorded history. The ministry warned the mismatch between supply and demand is becoming “severe.”\n\nBut with recent temperatures soaring to dangerous levels, rationing electricity will not be easy.\n\nOn Tuesday, Tokyo experienced scorching heat for a fourth successive day after setting records for the month of June at the weekend.\n\n

Temperatures in Tokyo have been setting records for the month of June.

Italy's longest river, the Po, reduced to little more than a trickle in places.


\n\nThe Panama Papers are an unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then shared them with a large network of international partners, including the Guardian and the BBC.\n\nWhat do they reveal?\nThe documents show the myriad ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes. Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.\n\nA $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married.\n\nAmong national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.\n\nAn offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents to sign its paperwork.

Prosecutors in Germany have issued international arrest warrants for the cofounders of a Panama-based law firm.

\n\nThe new head of world football has been caught up in the sport’s corruption scandal because of documents that have been revealed by the Panama Papers leak.\n\nFiles seen by the Guardian will raise questions about the role Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, played in deals that were concluded when he was director of legal services at Uefa, European football’s governing body.\n\nAccording to records, Uefa concluded offshore deals with one of the indicted figures at the heart of an alleged “World Cup of fraud” despite previously insisting it had no dealings with any of them.\n\nThe emergence of the contracts from 2003 and 2006, which were co-signed by Infantino, link Uefa for the first time to one of the companies involved in the huge unfolding scandal that has brought down former Fifa president Sepp Blatter.\n\nUefa has denied any wrongdoing by any of its officials or any other marketing partner.\n\nIt said the contracts were all above board. Fifa has previously insisted Infantino had no dealings with any of the officials currently under investigation – or their companies. Infantino said he was “dismayed” by the reports and “will not accept that my integrity is being doubted”.\n\nThe disclosures are based on the leak of 11m documents from the files of the offshore financial law firm Mossack Fonseca, which were obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and other news organisations.\n\n

Documents revealed by the Panama Papers leak have implicated the new head of world football.

11.5 million files were leaked from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca.

An offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain.

\n\nReports published this week on the secretive industry that banks and lawyers use to hide the financial holdings of some of the world’s top leaders and billionaires brought a powerful global response, including the resignation of one prime minister, while the White House and U.S. agencies reacted more cautiously.\n\nPresident Barack Obama addressed the massive leak of documents, which led to the reporting, on Tuesday during a press conference about business tax reform.\n\n“There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally, is a huge problem,” the president said. The president also noted in his remarks that the problem is not unique to other nations. “There are folks here in America who are taking advantage of the same stuff. A lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem,” the president added. “It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed that they allow people, if they’ve got enough lawyers and enough accountants, to wiggle out of responsibilities that ordinary citizens are having to abide by.”\n\nThe Justice Department, which is investigating alleged corruption in the world’s top soccer body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), said it may focus more on the financial dealings raised in the reporting based on the documents.\n\n

The Justice Department is investigating alleged corruption in the world’s top soccer body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).


\n\nThe global energy crisis has triggered unprecedented momentum behind renewables, with the world set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the past 20\n\nThe global energy crisis is driving a sharp acceleration in installations of renewable power, with total capacity growth worldwide set to almost double in the next five years, overtaking coal as the largest source of electricity generation along the way and helping keep alive the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, the IEA says in a new report.\n\nEnergy security concerns caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have motivated countries to increasingly turn to renewables such as solar and wind to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, whose prices have spiked dramatically. Global renewable power capacity is now expected to grow by 2 400 gigawatts (GW) over the 2022-2027 period, an amount equal to the entire power capacity of China today, according to Renewables 2022, the latest edition of the IEA’s annual report on the sector.\n\nThis massive expected increase is 30% higher than the amount of growth that was forecast just a year ago, highlighting how quickly governments have thrown additional policy weight behind renewables. The report finds that renewables are set to account for over 90% of global electricity expansion over the next five years, overtaking coal to become the largest source of global electricity by early 2025.\n\n

EPA issued a multi-part proposal to build on the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program.

\n\nThe European Union reached a provisional deal on Thursday on higher renewable energy targets, an important pillar of the bloc's plans to fight climate change and end dependence on Russian fossil fuels.\n\nNegotiators of the European Parliament and the Council, representing EU members, agreed that by 2030, the 27-country EU would commit to sourcing 42.5% of its energy from renewable sources like wind and solar, with a potential top-up to 45%.\n\nThe EU's current 2030 target is for a 32% renewable energy share.\n\nThe EU got 22% of its energy from renewable sources in 2021, but the level varied significantly between countries. Sweden leads the 27 EU countries with its 63% renewable energy share, while in Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Ireland, renewable sources make up less than 13% of total energy use.\n\nA rapid shift to renewable energy is crucial if the EU is to meet its climate change goals, including a legally binding aim to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, from 1990 levels.\n\nEU countries will have to raise to 29% the share of renewables in energy used by the transport sector. EU industry would increase its use of renewables by 1.6% per year, with 42% of the hydrogen it uses deriving from renewable sources by 2030 and 60% by 2035.\n\nThe directive added targets for buildings and sought accelerated permitting processes for renewable energy projects.\n\n

The European Union reached a provisional deal on Thursday to commit to sourcing 42.5% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

\n\nChina has been the world's largest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy for more than a decade, but has widened its lead over international rivals through a steep acceleration in the roll out of wind capacity since 2021.\n\nChina added more wind generation capacity in the past two years than over the previous seven, and in 2022 generated 46% more wind power than all of Europe, the second largest wind generation market, according to data from think tank Ember.\n\nAs Europe had been the world's top wind power producer until 2020, China's widening lead over the rest of the world in such a tight time frame further cements China's status as the global green energy leader, and underscores Beijing's commitment to overhauling its massive energy system at a record pace.\n\nFurther, the rapid roll out of wind capacity, along with a more than 27% surge in solar generation in 2022 from the year before, helped push China's electricity share from clean energy sources to a record 34.2% last year.\n\nThat in turn will help the country's energy system to limit reliance on high-polluting fossil fuels such as coal even as economic growth gathers momentum in 2023 following the lifting of COVID-19 movement curbs that restricted activity in 2022.\n\nWhile China has deployed record volumes of both solar and wind power capacity over the past decade, wind generation capacity has grown more steeply than solar capacity since 2020.\n

China added more wind generation capacity in the past two years.

\n\nThe U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a nearly $11 billion investment on Tuesday to help bring affordable clean energy to rural communities throughout the country.\n\nRural electric cooperatives, renewable energy companies and electric utilities will be able to apply for funding through two programs, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a media briefing on Monday.\n\nVilsack said it was the largest single federal investment in rural electrification since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act in 1936 as part of the New Deal.\n\n"This is an exciting opportunity for the Rural Utility Service to work collaboratively with our great partners, the Rural Electric cooperatives, in order to advance a clean energy future for rural America," Vilsack said. "So this is an exciting and an historic day, and it continues an ongoing effort to ensure that rural America is a full participant in this clean energy economy."\n\nThe Empowering Rural America program will make $9.7 billion available for rural electric cooperatives to create renewable energy, zero-emission and carbon capture systems.\n\nJim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, praised the administration for the investment.\n\n"This is an exciting and transformative opportunity for co-ops and their local communities, particularly as we look toward a future that depends on electricity to power more of the economy," Matheson said. "USDA has smartly structured this program in a way that will help electric co-ops leverage new tools to reduce costs and keep energy affordable while meeting the future energy needs of their rural communities."\n\n

Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, praises the administration.


\n\nThis year, the world is predicted to pass a critical turning point in renewable energy.\n\nGreenhouse gas emissions from the power sector, the largest source of the world\'s emissions, are expected to fall for the first time, according to London-based think tank Ember. That\'s despite the fact that the world\'s demand for electricity is still growing. Emissions are set to fall because expansion in renewable energies such as solar and wind is outstripping that growth in demand.\n\nIt\'s a crucial moment in the effort to tackle climate change, and the report, written by Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, senior electricity analyst at Ember, and colleagues, argues that we are fast approaching a positive "tipping point" in the effort to curb climate change.\n\n"This marks the point where power sector emissions stop rising," Wiatros-Motyka and her colleagues write. "Clean power can actually go to replacing fossil fuels, instead of just meeting rising demand."\n\nJust how important are positive tipping points in efforts to tackle climate change? And are we really about to pass an important one in 2023?\n\nFuture Planet editor Martha Henriques puts these questions to Simon Sharpe, author of Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change.\n\nMH: We\'re used to hearing about dangerous tipping points in climate change, like the loss of sea ice or forests. What is a tipping point, and why are some of them good?\n\nSS: A tipping point in general is a point where a small input change leads to a large change in outcome.

The world is predicted to pass a critical turning point in renewable energy in 2023.

\n\nThe global energy crisis has triggered unprecedented momentum behind renewables, with the world set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the past 20\n\nThe global energy crisis is driving a sharp acceleration in installations of renewable power, with total capacity growth worldwide set to almost double in the next five years, overtaking coal as the largest source of electricity generation along the way and helping keep alive the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, the IEA says in a new report.\n\nEnergy security concerns caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have motivated countries to increasingly turn to renewables such as solar and wind to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, whose prices have spiked dramatically. Global renewable power capacity is now expected to grow by 2 400 gigawatts (GW) over the 2022-2027 period, an amount equal to the entire power capacity of China today, according to Renewables 2022, the latest edition of the IEA’s annual report on the sector.\n\nThis massive expected increase is 30% higher than the amount of growth that was forecast just a year ago, highlighting how quickly governments have thrown additional policy weight behind renewables. The report finds that renewables are set to account for over 90% of global electricity expansion over the next five years, overtaking coal to become the largest source of global electricity by early 2025.\n\n

\n\nThe Group of Seven rich nations have agreed to call for reducing gas consumption and increasing electricity from renewable sources while phasing out fossil-fuels faster and building no new coal-fired plants, France\'s energy transition minister said on Saturday.\n\nG7 environment and energy ministers, however, could not agree on a specific date to exit coal power, France\'s Agnes Pannier-Runacher told reporters on the first of two days of climate and energy talks in Sapporo in northern Japan.\n\n"The G7 countries have agreed that the first response to the energy crisis must be to reduce energy and gas consumption… For the first time ever, the G7 said that we must accelerate the phasing out of all unabated fossil fuels... Finally, it sent a message about accelerating renewable energy," Pannier-Runacher said.\n\nThe G7 decided to endorse a goal to "drastically increase electricity generated by renewable energies," a person with knowledge of the discussions separately told Reuters, asking not to be identified because the information is not public.\n\nMinisters also appeared to be considering numerical targets for increasing solar power capacity to at least 1 terawatt and offshore wind power capacity to 150 gigawatts by 2030, the source said.\n\nEnergy-poor Japan was pushing for investments to stay for the gas industry in order to keep the liquefied natural gas in the energy mix as a transition fuel, winning some - but not all - support from the rest of G7.\n\n

G7 nations agreed to reduce gas consumption and increase electricity from renewable sources.

\n\nChina has been the world's largest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy for more than a decade, but has widened its lead over international rivals through a steep acceleration in the roll out of wind capacity since 2021.\n\nChina added more wind generation capacity in the past two years than over the previous seven, and in 2022 generated 46% more wind power than all of Europe, the second largest wind generation market, according to data from think tank Ember.\n\nAs Europe had been the world's top wind power producer until 2020, China's widening lead over the rest of the world in such a tight time frame further cements China's status as the global green energy leader, and underscores Beijing's commitment to overhauling its massive energy system at a record pace.\n\nFurther, the rapid roll out of wind capacity, along with a more than 27% surge in solar generation in 2022 from the year before, helped push China's electricity share from clean energy sources to a record 34.2% last year.\n\nThat in turn will help the country's energy system to limit reliance on high-polluting fossil fuels such as coal even as economic growth gathers momentum in 2023 following the lifting of COVID-19 movement curbs that restricted activity in 2022.\n\nWhile China has deployed record volumes of both solar and wind power capacity over the past decade, wind generation capacity has grown more steeply than solar capacity since 2020.\n

China added more wind generation capacity in the past two years.


\n\nThe Panama Papers are an unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then shared them with a large network of international partners, including the Guardian and the BBC.\n\nWhat do they reveal?\nThe documents show the myriad ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes. Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.\n\nA $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married.\n\nAmong national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.\n\nAn offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents to sign its paperwork.

An offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain.

\n\nPakistan’s supreme court has removed the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from office in a unanimous verdict over corruption allegations that will further upset the country’s unstable political landscape.\n\nThe verdict by the five-member court caps a year of political controversy over corruption allegations unleashed by the 2016 Panama Papers leak.\n\nThe governing party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), said Sharif had stepped down immediately. The party must now choose an interim prime minister to be accepted by parliament.\n\nThe ruling will throw the governing party and the country at large into turmoil ahead of elections due next year.\n\nThe 10-year disqualification of Sharif cut short the third tenure of a man who has been a leading figure in Pakistani politics for nearly three decades since his first term from 1990 to 1993.\n\nIt is the most serious political ramification yet of the Panama Papers leak, which detailed financial dealings of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.\n\nThe papers linked Sharif’s children to the purchase of London property through offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands in the early 1990s. At that time the children were minors, and the purchase is assumed to have been made by Sharif.\n\nLast year, Sharif told parliament that his family wealth had been acquired legally in the decades before he entered politics.\n\nHassan Askari Rizvi, a political analyst, said the judgment had been expected.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court unanimously removed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office over corruption allegations.

\n\nThe new head of world football has been caught up in the sport’s corruption scandal because of documents that have been revealed by the Panama Papers leak.\n\nFiles seen by the Guardian will raise questions about the role Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, played in deals that were concluded when he was director of legal services at Uefa, European football’s governing body.\n\nAccording to records, Uefa concluded offshore deals with one of the indicted figures at the heart of an alleged “World Cup of fraud” despite previously insisting it had no dealings with any of them.\n\nThe emergence of the contracts from 2003 and 2006, which were co-signed by Infantino, link Uefa for the first time to one of the companies involved in the huge unfolding scandal that has brought down former Fifa president Sepp Blatter.\n\nUefa has denied any wrongdoing by any of its officials or any other marketing partner.\n\nIt said the contracts were all above board. Fifa has previously insisted Infantino had no dealings with any of the officials currently under investigation – or their companies. Infantino said he was “dismayed” by the reports and “will not accept that my integrity is being doubted”.\n\nThe disclosures are based on the leak of 11m documents from the files of the offshore financial law firm Mossack Fonseca, which were obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and other news organisations.\n\n


\n\nFormer Equifax CEO Richard Smith says he is "deeply sorry" for the security breach in which sensitive personal information of as many as 143 million Americans was compromised.\nSmith, who is set to testify before a House Energy and Commerce Committee Tuesday, apologized for the cyber attack disclosed by the credit reporting company on September 8. He confirmed that the hack occurred due to "human error and technology failures," according to prepared remarks posted on the committee\'s website Monday.\n\n"To each and every person affected by this breach, I am deeply sorry this occurred," said Smith, who will make his first of four appearances on Capitol Hill this week on the breach. "The company failed to prevent sensitive information from falling into the hands of wrongdoers."\n\nThe former CEO announced his retirement last week from the credit reporting company.\n\nEquifax has come under fire for its handling of the huge cybersecurity breach. The company is one of three nationwide credit-reporting companies that track and rate the financial history of U.S. consumers, gathering data from credit card companies, banks, retailers and lenders.\n\nIn his eight-page testimony, Smith outlined the chronology of events that lead to the breach, which allowed criminals to access personal information including names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and in some cases driver\'s license numbers and credit card information.\n\nThe former CEO said hackers were able to infiltrate a software weakness in an online portal that allows consumers to dispute items on their credit report.

Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. was appointed as the interim chief executive.

\n\nVisa and MasterCard are issuing confidential alerts to financial institutions across the US, cautioning them that more than 200,000 credit cards were compromised in the recent Equifax data breach, according to PYMNTS. \n\nCompromised information included card account numbers, expiration dates, and cardholders’ names, all of which can be used to conduct fraud at online retailers and perform identity theft. Visa and MasterCard claim that the breach initially occurred in November 2016, but Equifax says the accounts were all stolen at the same time — in May 2017 — exploiting the information of approximately 143 million US consumers.\n\nAs consumers increasingly use digital financial services, their information becomes more susceptible to fraud. This is the third cybersecurity incident for the agency since 2015. There were two prior data hacks in which cyber criminals stole tax and salary information from the Equifax website, according to The New York Times. At a time of rising breaches — in 2016, 15.4 million victims had their identities stolen, up 16% from the prior year — it's more important than ever for companies to assure consumers that their information is secure. This could include investing in higher security, such as blockchain technology, biometric authentication, or real-time alerts.\n\nDan Van Dyke, senior research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service has written a detailed report that explores the digital payments ecosystem today, its growth drivers, and where the industry is headed.

\n\nHackers were able to access personal data of 143 million Equifax customers.\nHow did it happen?\n\nMuch is still unknown. But it came down to a flaw in a tool designed to build web applications, the company said in a press release this week. And Equifax admitted it was aware of the security flaw a full two months before the company says hackers first gained accessed to its data.\n\nSome of the information hackers had access to includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver\'s license numbers.\n\nThe tool is called Apache Struts, and it\'s used by many large businesses and government organizations. Equifax used it to support its online dispute portal -- where Equifax (EFX) customers go to log issues with their credit reports. The flaw allowed hackers to take control of a website.\n\nA cybersecurity arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, US-CERT, "identified and disclosed" the Apache Struts flaw in March, Equifax said in a statement.\n\nAnd the company\'s security department "was aware of this vulnerability at that time, and took efforts to identify and to patch any vulnerable systems."\n\nYet, according to the company, hackers exploited the flaw months later.\n\nEquifax has said it discovered the data breach on July 29. On Friday, it said it waited until it "observed additional suspicious activity" a day later to take the affected web application offline.\n\nAnd on August 2 Equifax contacted Mandiant, a professional cybersecurity firm, to help the company assess what data had been compromised.\n\n

\n\nThe blows keep coming for Equifax (NYSE:EFX) as shares continue to tumble and the Federal Trade Commission announced plans to open an investigation into the credit reporting company Thursday after the company went public with its massive security breach last week, putting 143 million American’s personal data at risk.\n\nIn case you missed all drama, here’s a timeline of events, involving one of the biggest security breaches of all time.\n\nMid-May through July 2017 – This is the time frame in which Equifax says hackers gained unauthorized access to its data.\n\nThursday, July 29 – Equifax discovers the hack and immediately stopped the intrusion.\n\nTuesday, August 1 & Wednesday, August 2– Three top executives from Equifax sell nearly $2 million worth of company stock.\n\nThursday, September 7 – Equifax officially alerts the public about the cybersecurity incident and provides a dedicated website for consumers to check if they were affected. Later on that night, the company also issues a statement saying the three executives “had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time they sold their shares.”\n\nFriday, September 8 –Shares of Equifax shed more than 13% of their value in trading. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tears into the company on social media for trying to push customers to give up their right to sue.\n\n\n.@Equifax is forcing you to give up your right to join a class action against the company if you want their credit protection product. pic.twitter.com/anu0SE58wg\n\n— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 8, 2017\n


Temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across much of Spain and Portugal on Wednesday.

\n\nHundreds more people were evacuated from their homes as wildfires blistered land in France, Spain and Portugal on Friday, while officials in Europe issued health warnings for the heatwave in the coming days.\n\nMore than 1,000 firefighters, supported by water-bomber aircraft, have battled since Tuesday to control two blazes in southwestern France that have been fanned by scorching heat, tinder-box conditions and strong winds.\n\nWhile temperatures dipped a little in Portugal, they were still expected to top 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in some places, with five districts on red alert and more than 1,000 firefighters tackling 17 wildfires, authorities said.\n\nIn Spain, a new wildfire broke out in the south of the country after blazes in the west in the past week.\n\nMore than 400 people were evacuated from the hills of Mijas, a town popular with northern European tourists in the province of Malaga. Beachgoers in Torremolinos, some 20 km away, could see plumes of smoke rising above the hotels lining the coast.\n\nMeanwhile, the worst drought in over 70 years reduced Italy's longest river, the Po, to little more than a trickle in places, with temperatures expected to rise next week.\n\nOfficials are worried about the effects on people's health and on healthcare systems already challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic as the searing heat sweeps the continent, with warnings issued for worse to come in Britain in particular.\n\nThe World Meteorological Organization said the heatwave would worsen air quality, especially in towns and cities.\n\n

Europe is experiencing extreme heat waves.

\n\nJapan is asking some 37 million people living in and around Tokyo to use less electricity and ration air conditioning even amid a record heat wave that has seen temperatures in some parts of the country pass 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).\n\nThe government urged citizens in the capital to turn off lights and power switches for three hours in the afternoon and to use air conditioning “appropriately,” as the country struggles with growing power shortages.\n\nThe request comes despite experts warning that record-setting temperatures could continue for weeks.\n\n“Please save as much power as possible, such as by turning off lights that are not in use,” the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said Monday. It said appropriate uses of air conditioning included to “prevent heatstroke.”\n\nJapan’s power supply has been tight since March, when an earthquake in the northeast forced some nuclear power plants to suspend operations. At the same time demand is at its highest since 2011, when Japan was hit by the strongest earthquake in its recorded history. The ministry warned the mismatch between supply and demand is becoming “severe.”\n\nBut with recent temperatures soaring to dangerous levels, rationing electricity will not be easy.\n\nOn Tuesday, Tokyo experienced scorching heat for a fourth successive day after setting records for the month of June at the weekend.\n\n

Temperatures in Tokyo have been setting records for the month of June.

\n\nMore than 125 million Americans are under heat warnings and advisories on Monday evening as a dangerous heat wave that began in the Southwest covers more real estate in the Central and Southern U.S.\n\nThe big picture: The National Weather Service (NWS) is warning that a "dangerous" combination of heat and humidity will affect the majority of the lower 48 states before the week is over, and there are few signs the heat will abate after that.\n\nAll of Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, Illinois, Iowa and Indiana are under heat warnings plus parts of at least a dozen other states.\nThe heat wave is courtesy of a strong area of high pressure, or heat dome, that is slowly moving east across the Central U.S.\nThe heat dome is likely to shift eastward during the first part of the week, but then careen back west in a see-saw pattern, setting up hotter conditions again for the Upper Plains and Central states later in the week.\nClimate change is causing heat waves such as this one to be more severe, frequent and longer-lasting than just a few decades ago.\n\nWhy it matters: Heat waves are the deadliest type of severe weather hazard in the U.S., and they especially target low-income residents who may lack access to air conditioning. They are also particularly dangerous for outdoor workers.\n\nThreat level: As of Monday morning, heat watches, advisories and warnings were in effect from the Carolinas to Texas, extending north into Wisconsin and Minnesota and south to the Gulf Coast.\n\n

The US is experiencing more severe, frequent, and longer-lasting heat waves than just a few decades ago.


\n\nMore than 125 million Americans are under heat warnings and advisories on Monday evening as a dangerous heat wave that began in the Southwest covers more real estate in the Central and Southern U.S.\n\nThe big picture: The National Weather Service (NWS) is warning that a "dangerous" combination of heat and humidity will affect the majority of the lower 48 states before the week is over, and there are few signs the heat will abate after that.\n\nAll of Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, Illinois, Iowa and Indiana are under heat warnings plus parts of at least a dozen other states.\nThe heat wave is courtesy of a strong area of high pressure, or heat dome, that is slowly moving east across the Central U.S.\nThe heat dome is likely to shift eastward during the first part of the week, but then careen back west in a see-saw pattern, setting up hotter conditions again for the Upper Plains and Central states later in the week.\nClimate change is causing heat waves such as this one to be more severe, frequent and longer-lasting than just a few decades ago.\n\nWhy it matters: Heat waves are the deadliest type of severe weather hazard in the U.S., and they especially target low-income residents who may lack access to air conditioning. They are also particularly dangerous for outdoor workers.\n\nThreat level: As of Monday morning, heat watches, advisories and warnings were in effect from the Carolinas to Texas, extending north into Wisconsin and Minnesota and south to the Gulf Coast.\n\n

Californians are enduring a historic heat wave.

More than 1,000 firefighters battled two blazes in southwestern France.

\n\nHundreds more people were evacuated from their homes as wildfires blistered land in France, Spain and Portugal on Friday, while officials in Europe issued health warnings for the heatwave in the coming days.\n\nMore than 1,000 firefighters, supported by water-bomber aircraft, have battled since Tuesday to control two blazes in southwestern France that have been fanned by scorching heat, tinder-box conditions and strong winds.\n\nWhile temperatures dipped a little in Portugal, they were still expected to top 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in some places, with five districts on red alert and more than 1,000 firefighters tackling 17 wildfires, authorities said.\n\nIn Spain, a new wildfire broke out in the south of the country after blazes in the west in the past week.\n\nMore than 400 people were evacuated from the hills of Mijas, a town popular with northern European tourists in the province of Malaga. Beachgoers in Torremolinos, some 20 km away, could see plumes of smoke rising above the hotels lining the coast.\n\nMeanwhile, the worst drought in over 70 years reduced Italy's longest river, the Po, to little more than a trickle in places, with temperatures expected to rise next week.\n\nOfficials are worried about the effects on people's health and on healthcare systems already challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic as the searing heat sweeps the continent, with warnings issued for worse to come in Britain in particular.\n\nThe World Meteorological Organization said the heatwave would worsen air quality, especially in towns and cities.\n\n

The US is experiencing more severe, frequent, and longer-lasting heat waves than just a few decades ago.


\n\nIceland’s embattled prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, has become the first major casualty of the Panama Papers, stepping aside from his office amid mounting public outrage that his family had sheltered money offshore.\n\nWhat was planned as a mass protest in Reykjavik on Tuesday evening turned to muted satisfaction as demonstrators vented their anger following revelations that Gunnlaugsson once owned – and his wife still owns – an offshore investment company with multimillion-pound claims on Iceland’s failed banks.\n\n“We were hoping parliament would be dissolved,” said Steingrimur Oli Einarsson, a fish oil trader, one of a few hundred to brave a freezing northeasterly wind on parliament square in downtown Reykjavik.\n\n“Of course we’re happy the prime minister has stepped down. But we are not satisfied with who is taking over from him, and with the fact that the government itself is still there.”\n\nGunnlaugsson’s office said in a statement that he was not resigning, but “handing over the office of prime minister for an unspecified time” to Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, the agriculture and fisheries minister.\n\nGunnlaugsson was “very proud” of his success resurrecting Iceland’s economy after the 2008 financial crisis, the statement said, and “especially proud of his government’s handling of ... the creditors of the failed Icelandic banks”.\n\nOutside parliament, Sigrin Eiroksdottir, a pre-school teacher, said the occasion “doesn’t really feel like any kind of victory. There is so much still to put right in this country in terms of ethics, of how the world looks at us.”\n\n

Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson steps down amid public outrage over his family's offshore investments.

\n\nThe new head of world football has been caught up in the sport’s corruption scandal because of documents that have been revealed by the Panama Papers leak.\n\nFiles seen by the Guardian will raise questions about the role Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, played in deals that were concluded when he was director of legal services at Uefa, European football’s governing body.\n\nAccording to records, Uefa concluded offshore deals with one of the indicted figures at the heart of an alleged “World Cup of fraud” despite previously insisting it had no dealings with any of them.\n\nThe emergence of the contracts from 2003 and 2006, which were co-signed by Infantino, link Uefa for the first time to one of the companies involved in the huge unfolding scandal that has brought down former Fifa president Sepp Blatter.\n\nUefa has denied any wrongdoing by any of its officials or any other marketing partner.\n\nIt said the contracts were all above board. Fifa has previously insisted Infantino had no dealings with any of the officials currently under investigation – or their companies. Infantino said he was “dismayed” by the reports and “will not accept that my integrity is being doubted”.\n\nThe disclosures are based on the leak of 11m documents from the files of the offshore financial law firm Mossack Fonseca, which were obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and other news organisations.\n\n

\n\nIcelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned on Tuesday, after documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm revealed that his wife possesses a secret offshore account worth millions of dollars.\n\nThe money is housed in a shell corporation called Wintris, which had bought bonds in Icelandic banks. So when Iceland\'s financial sector collapsed in 2008, Wintris became a creditor to those banks. In 2013, Gunnlaugsson became the prime minister, having run partly on a promise to get tougher with Iceland\'s remaining foreign creditors.\n\nSo what Icelandic voters didn\'t know when they elected him in 2013, but have learned with this week\'s "Panama Papers" revelations, is that Gunnlaugsson\'s own wife was secretly one of the creditors he\'d promised to crack down on — an enormous and undisclosed conflict of interest.\n\nWhen the truth came out this week, it led to mass protests on Monday calling for Gunnlaugsson\'s resignation. He stepped down the next day.\n\nWhat happened in Iceland shows the political power of the Panama Papers, but it also shows the degree to which the political turmoil from the 2008 financial crisis is, in some ways, still ongoing in that country.\n\nWhat\'s more, if Gunnlaugsson\'s resignation leads Iceland to schedule new elections soon, that vote could end up empowering a radical political party called the Pirate Party, a left-libertarian amalgam that\'s obsessed with transparency and direct democracy.\n\n

Mass protests on Monday called for Gunnlaugsson's resignation.


\nThe devastating fire that ravaged the famed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on April 15 prompted unsubstantiated rumors online about who or what was to blame.\n\nBy Tuesday, for example, the website of former Fox News commentator Kevin Jackson had zeroed in on a whole group of people, running a headline that reads: “Muslim Ties to Notre Dame Fire.”\n\nWe could find no credible sources to support the incendiary suggestion that Muslims were responsible.\n\nThe French government said in a press release Tuesday the cause of the fire remained unknown, and Paris public prosecutor Remy Heitz told reporters that investigators were currently eyeing it as an accident.\n\nThe article on Jackson’s site, however, advances the unsupported idea of a “Muslim attack” through paragraphs of innuendo, not fact.\n\n“Was this a true accident? Or is someone trying to send Christians a message?” the article on theblacksphere.net reads. “Many people speculate this is a Muslim attack on Christianity. In 2016, a car parked outside Notre Dame was discovered. It contained full gas tanks and documents written in Arabic. Therefore, authorities were well-aware of the threats posed against Notre Dame.”\n\nBut there is no evidence tying that 2016 episode with this week’s fire, as some news outlets worked to make clear. The U.K.’s Telegraph, which covered the 2016 incident at the time, affixed an update to its story indicating: “This story is from 2016 and unrelated to the fire at Notre-Dame on April 15 2019.”\n\n

Global corporations and wealthy French individuals pledge over €800 million in donations.

At 6:20 p.m. local time (12 p.m. ET) on Monday, a fire alarm rang out, interrupting mass. Security guards started to evacuate the cathedral even though they did not see any sign of a fire, a spokesman for the Paris fire brigade told CNN.\nFrançois-Xavier Lochet, a 70-year-old worshiper, said the congregation had just begun the Universal Prayer when the siren sounded. He said visitors were ushered out but those gathered for mass remained in place. Lochet said mass continued until a police officer went up and told the priest: “This is no joke. You’ve got to get out.”\nTwenty-three minutes later, at 6:43 p.m. (12:43 p.m. ET), a second alarm blared and the fire was visible at that point, the fire department said.\nAround 400 firefighters were deployed to the scene but were delayed slightly by rush hour traffic.\nPolice in Paris confirmed a fire had taken hold at Notre Dame and asked the public to avoid the area in a tweet sent at 7:20 p.m. (1:20 p.m. ET). A minute later, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo posted a tweet saying “a terrible fire is underway” with photographs taken outside the church: one of smoke billowing from near the spire and over the towers, and a second showing the fire department responders working at the scene.\n\nShortly before 8 p.m. (2 p.m. ET), the cathedral’s famed spire burned to a blackened shell before finally toppling, as thousands of Parisians who had gathered in the streets watched in horror.

The cathedral’s spire burned to a blackened shell and collapsed.

A fire that devastated Notre Dame Cathedral in the heart of Paris was brought under control by firefighters in the early hours of Tuesday morning, though officials warned there were still residual fires to put out.\n\nThousands of Parisians watched in horror from behind police cordons as a ferocious blaze devastated Notre Dame Cathedral on Monday night, destroying its spire and a large part of the roof.\n\nAn investigation has been opened by the prosecutor’s office, but police said it began accidentally and may be linked to building work at the cathedral. The 850-year-old gothic masterpiece had been undergoing restoration work.\n\nThe French president, Emmanuel Macron, attended the scene and later gave a speech in which he vowed that the cathedral would be rebuilt, as fire crews said the landmark’s rectangular bell towers and structure of the building had been saved.\nMacron said “the worst had been avoided” thanks to hundreds of brave firefighters who battled for hours and who would continue working through the night. One firefighter was severely injured but no other casualties were reported.\n\n“What happened tonight in Paris, in this cathedral, is a terrible event,” the president said, vowing to raise funds worldwide and bring the best talents from around the world to reconstruct the building in its entirety.\n\n“Notre Dame is our history, our literature, part of our psyche, the place of all our great events, our epidemics, our wars, our liberations, the epicentre of our lives ... So I solemnly say tonight: we will rebuild it together.”

Firefighters battle for hours, one severely injured, no other casualties

Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris suffered a devastating fire.


\n\nChina has been the world's largest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy for more than a decade, but has widened its lead over international rivals through a steep acceleration in the roll out of wind capacity since 2021.\n\nChina added more wind generation capacity in the past two years than over the previous seven, and in 2022 generated 46% more wind power than all of Europe, the second largest wind generation market, according to data from think tank Ember.\n\nAs Europe had been the world's top wind power producer until 2020, China's widening lead over the rest of the world in such a tight time frame further cements China's status as the global green energy leader, and underscores Beijing's commitment to overhauling its massive energy system at a record pace.\n\nFurther, the rapid roll out of wind capacity, along with a more than 27% surge in solar generation in 2022 from the year before, helped push China's electricity share from clean energy sources to a record 34.2% last year.\n\nThat in turn will help the country's energy system to limit reliance on high-polluting fossil fuels such as coal even as economic growth gathers momentum in 2023 following the lifting of COVID-19 movement curbs that restricted activity in 2022.\n\nWhile China has deployed record volumes of both solar and wind power capacity over the past decade, wind generation capacity has grown more steeply than solar capacity since 2020.\n

China has been the world's largest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy for more than a decade.

\n\nThe U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a nearly $11 billion investment on Tuesday to help bring affordable clean energy to rural communities throughout the country.\n\nRural electric cooperatives, renewable energy companies and electric utilities will be able to apply for funding through two programs, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a media briefing on Monday.\n\nVilsack said it was the largest single federal investment in rural electrification since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act in 1936 as part of the New Deal.\n\n"This is an exciting opportunity for the Rural Utility Service to work collaboratively with our great partners, the Rural Electric cooperatives, in order to advance a clean energy future for rural America," Vilsack said. "So this is an exciting and an historic day, and it continues an ongoing effort to ensure that rural America is a full participant in this clean energy economy."\n\nThe Empowering Rural America program will make $9.7 billion available for rural electric cooperatives to create renewable energy, zero-emission and carbon capture systems.\n\nJim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, praised the administration for the investment.\n\n"This is an exciting and transformative opportunity for co-ops and their local communities, particularly as we look toward a future that depends on electricity to power more of the economy," Matheson said. "USDA has smartly structured this program in a way that will help electric co-ops leverage new tools to reduce costs and keep energy affordable while meeting the future energy needs of their rural communities."\n\n

Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, praises the administration.

\n\nThe global energy crisis has triggered unprecedented momentum behind renewables, with the world set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the past 20\n\nThe global energy crisis is driving a sharp acceleration in installations of renewable power, with total capacity growth worldwide set to almost double in the next five years, overtaking coal as the largest source of electricity generation along the way and helping keep alive the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, the IEA says in a new report.\n\nEnergy security concerns caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have motivated countries to increasingly turn to renewables such as solar and wind to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, whose prices have spiked dramatically. Global renewable power capacity is now expected to grow by 2 400 gigawatts (GW) over the 2022-2027 period, an amount equal to the entire power capacity of China today, according to Renewables 2022, the latest edition of the IEA’s annual report on the sector.\n\nThis massive expected increase is 30% higher than the amount of growth that was forecast just a year ago, highlighting how quickly governments have thrown additional policy weight behind renewables. The report finds that renewables are set to account for over 90% of global electricity expansion over the next five years, overtaking coal to become the largest source of global electricity by early 2025.\n\n

\n\nThe European Union reached a provisional deal on Thursday on higher renewable energy targets, an important pillar of the bloc's plans to fight climate change and end dependence on Russian fossil fuels.\n\nNegotiators of the European Parliament and the Council, representing EU members, agreed that by 2030, the 27-country EU would commit to sourcing 42.5% of its energy from renewable sources like wind and solar, with a potential top-up to 45%.\n\nThe EU's current 2030 target is for a 32% renewable energy share.\n\nThe EU got 22% of its energy from renewable sources in 2021, but the level varied significantly between countries. Sweden leads the 27 EU countries with its 63% renewable energy share, while in Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Ireland, renewable sources make up less than 13% of total energy use.\n\nA rapid shift to renewable energy is crucial if the EU is to meet its climate change goals, including a legally binding aim to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, from 1990 levels.\n\nEU countries will have to raise to 29% the share of renewables in energy used by the transport sector. EU industry would increase its use of renewables by 1.6% per year, with 42% of the hydrogen it uses deriving from renewable sources by 2030 and 60% by 2035.\n\nThe directive added targets for buildings and sought accelerated permitting processes for renewable energy projects.\n\n

The European Union reached a provisional deal on Thursday to commit to sourcing 42.5% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.


\n\nOn Sunday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a massive leak of documents, dubbed the Panama Papers. CNNMoney has you covered with what you need to know about the story and responses to it.\n\nICIJ and an international coalition of media outlets investigated the trove of papers, which allegedly reveal a clandestine network involving associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and business ties between a member of FIFA’s ethics committee and men whom the United States has indicted for corruption.\n\nThe more-than 11 million documents, which date back four decades, are allegedly connected to Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca. ICIJ reports that the firm helped establish secret shell companies and offshore accounts for global power players. ICIJ reports that a 2015 audit found that Mossack Fonseca knew the identities of the real owners of just 204 of 14,086 companies it had incorporated in Seychelles, an Indian Ocean archipelago often described as a tax haven.\n\nAnd as Gerard Ryle, the director of ICIJ, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour: “These documents, if nothing else, raise an awful lot of questions.”\n\nThe documents reference 12 current or former world leaders, as well as 128 other politicians and public officials.

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers.

\n\nThe Panama Papers are an unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then shared them with a large network of international partners, including the Guardian and the BBC.\n\nWhat do they reveal?\nThe documents show the myriad ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes. Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.\n\nA $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married.\n\nAmong national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.\n\nAn offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents to sign its paperwork.

An offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain.


Another Bay Area bank was affected Monday by uncertainty in the financial markets following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday.\n\nStock in San Francisco-based First Republic Bank sank nearly 62% Monday and shares of other regional banks suffered losses, reportedly. First Republic has 86 locations across the country. Its Midpeninsula offices include two in Menlo Park and one each in Los Altos, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Redwood City.\n\nOn Sunday, regulators seized Signature Bank in New York after it failed.\n\nBut a San Jose State University professor of finance and accounting does not see the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank as signs of a coming crisis.\n\n"I don\'t think it is a huge contagion issue," said assistant professor Matthew Faulkner. "It\'s more toward an isolated incident."\n\nOver the weekend and Monday, top federal officials including President Joseph Biden appeared to be getting ahead of the issue.\n\nBiden sought to ease American\'s fears by making all deposits held by Silicon Valley Bank customers available regardless of the amount of their deposits, federal officials said over the weekend.\n\nThat includes businesses who must pay their employees and their bills, officials said.\n\n"Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe," Biden said Monday morning. "Your deposits will be there when you need them."\n\nInvestors will not be protected, Biden said. According to the president, they took a risk and "that\'s how capitalism works."\n\nTaxpayers will not be on the hook for the losses.

Wall Street is worried about what may be next to topple following the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, and stocks are swinging sharply Monday as investors scramble to find someplace safe to park their money.\n\nThe S&P 500 was virtually unchanged in morning trading, but only after tumbling 1.4% at the open. The sharpest drops were again coming from banks. Investors are worried that a relentless rise in interest rates meant to get inflation under control are approaching a tipping point and may be cracking the banking system.\n\n\nThe U.S. government announced a plan late Sunday meant to shore up the banking industry following the collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank since Friday.\n\nThe most pressure is on the regional banks a couple steps below in size of the massive, “too-big-to-fail” banks that helped take down the economy in 2007 and 2008. Shares of First Republic plunged 78%, even after the bank said Sunday it had strengthened its finances with cash from the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase.\n\nHuge banks, which have been repeatedly stress-tested by regulators following the 2008 financial crisis, weren’t down as much. JPMorgan Chase fell 0.7%, and Bank of America dropped 3.7%.\n\n“So far, it seems that the potential problem banks are few, and importantly do not extend to the so-called systemically important banks,” analysts at ING said.

The U.S. government announced a plan late Sunday meant to shore up the banking industry.

On Wednesday, Silicon Valley Bank was a well-capitalized institution seeking to raise some funds.\n\nWithin 48 hours, a panic induced by the very venture capital community that SVB had served and nurtured ended the bank’s 40-year-run.\n\nRegulators shuttered SVB Friday and seized its deposits in the largest U.S. banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis and the second-largest ever. The company’s downward spiral began late Wednesday, when it surprised investors with news that it needed to raise $2.25 billion to shore up its balance sheet. What followed was the rapid collapse of a highly-respected bank that had grown alongside its technology clients.\n\nEven now, as the dust begins to settle on the second bank wind-down announced this week, members of the VC community are lamenting the role that other investors played in SVB’s demise.\n\n“This was a hysteria-induced bank run caused by VCs,” Ryan Falvey, a fintech investor at Restive Ventures, told CNBC. “This is going to go down as one of the ultimate cases of an industry cutting its nose off to spite its face.”\n\nThe episode is the latest fallout from the Federal Reserve’s actions to stem inflation with its most aggressive rate hiking campaign in four decades. The ramifications could be far-reaching, with concerns that startups may be unable to pay employees in coming days, venture investors may struggle to raise funds, and an already-battered sector could face a deeper malaise.

Silicon Valley Bank attempted to raise $2.25 billion from investors.

President Biden says customers of U.S. banks should have confidence that their money will be there when they need it, as he seeks to limit the damage done by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other problems. He also promised accountability for leaders and investors of banks that fail.\n\nBiden\'s words didn\'t prevent anxiety over the banking emergency from hammering stock prices of financial institutions on Monday morning. The pain was particularly acute for regional and middle-sized banks.\n\nThe banking emergency has prompted federal regulators to take extraordinary actions to close two banks and guarantee all their deposits.\n\nBecause of those actions, Biden said, "every American should feel confident that their deposits will be there if and when they need them."\n\nCompanies with accounts at the collapsed banks "can breathe easier, knowing they\'ll be able to pay their workers and pay their bills," Biden said. "Their hardworking employees can breathe easier as well."\n\nBiden spoke from the White House at 9 a.m. ET Monday, just 30 minutes before the New York stock market opened. But one hour into trading, a number of banking stocks were down.\n\nMany eyes are on First Republic Bank, the San Francisco institution whose clients include tech companies and wealthy investors. The bank\'s stock plummeted below the $20 mark early Monday — one week after it closed at $122.\n\nBank of America and Wells Fargo also saw their stock prices slip, both of them falling by 4% or more in the first hour of trading.

President Biden speaks on the banking emergency and assures customers of U.S. banks that their money will be there when they need it

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank continues to reverberate, hitting bank stocks, revealing hidden stresses, knocking on to Credit Suisse, and setting off a political blame-game.\n\n\nWhy the $212bn tech-lender abruptly collapsed, triggering the most significant financial crisis since 2008, has no single answer. Was it, as some argue, the result of Trump-era regulation rollbacks, risk mismanagement at the bank, sharp interest rate rises after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs, or perhaps a combination of all three?\n\nFederal investigations have begun and lawsuits have been filed and no doubt new issues at the bank will emerge. But for now, here are the main reasons experts believed SVB failed.\n\nThe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders argues that the culprit was an “absurd” 2018 law, supported by Congress and signed by Donald Trump, that undid some of the credit requirements imposed under the Dodd-Frank banking legislation brought in after the 2008 banking crisis.\n\nDodd-Frank required that banks with at least $50bn in assets – banks considered “systemically important” – undergo an annual Federal Reserve “stress test” and maintain certain levels of capital as well as plans for a living will if they failed.\n\nSVB’s chief executive, Greg Becker, argued before Congress in 2015 that the $50bn threshold (SVB held $40bn at the time) was unnecessary and his bank, like other “mid-sized” or regional banks, “does not present systemic risks”.\n\nTrump said the new bill went a “long way toward fixing” Dodd-Frank, which he called a “job-killer”.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) abruptly collapsed


\n\nEquifax says a giant cybersecurity breach compromised the personal information of as many as 143 million Americans — almost half the country.\nCyber criminals have accessed sensitive information -- including names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and the numbers of some driver\'s licenses.\n\nAdditionally, Equifax said that credit card numbers for about 209,000 U.S. customers were exposed, as was "personal identifying information" on roughly 182,000 U.S. customers involved in credit report disputes. Residents in the U.K. and Canada were also impacted.\n\nThe breach occurred between mid-May and July, Equifax said. The company said it discovered the hack on July 29.\n\nThe data breach is one of the worst ever, by its reach and by the kind of information exposed to the public.\n\n"This is clearly a disappointing event for our company, and one that strikes at the heart of who we are and what we do," said Equifax chairman and CEO Richard F. Smith.\n\nEquifax is one of three nationwide credit-reporting companies that track and rates the financial history of U.S. consumers. The companies are supplied with data about loans, loan payments and credit cards, as well as information on everything from child support payments, credit limits, missed rent and utilities payments, addresses and employer history, which all factor into credit scores.\n\nUnlike other data breaches, not all of the people affected by the Equifax breach may be aware that they\'re customers of the company.

Former Equifax CEO Richard Smith apologizes for the security breach.

\n\nThe blows keep coming for Equifax (NYSE:EFX) as shares continue to tumble and the Federal Trade Commission announced plans to open an investigation into the credit reporting company Thursday after the company went public with its massive security breach last week, putting 143 million American’s personal data at risk.\n\nIn case you missed all drama, here’s a timeline of events, involving one of the biggest security breaches of all time.\n\nMid-May through July 2017 – This is the time frame in which Equifax says hackers gained unauthorized access to its data.\n\nThursday, July 29 – Equifax discovers the hack and immediately stopped the intrusion.\n\nTuesday, August 1 & Wednesday, August 2– Three top executives from Equifax sell nearly $2 million worth of company stock.\n\nThursday, September 7 – Equifax officially alerts the public about the cybersecurity incident and provides a dedicated website for consumers to check if they were affected. Later on that night, the company also issues a statement saying the three executives “had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time they sold their shares.”\n\nFriday, September 8 –Shares of Equifax shed more than 13% of their value in trading. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tears into the company on social media for trying to push customers to give up their right to sue.\n\n\n.@Equifax is forcing you to give up your right to join a class action against the company if you want their credit protection product. pic.twitter.com/anu0SE58wg\n\n— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 8, 2017\n

Equifax discovers the hack and stops the intrusion.

\n\nFormer Equifax CEO Richard Smith says he is "deeply sorry" for the security breach in which sensitive personal information of as many as 143 million Americans was compromised.\nSmith, who is set to testify before a House Energy and Commerce Committee Tuesday, apologized for the cyber attack disclosed by the credit reporting company on September 8. He confirmed that the hack occurred due to "human error and technology failures," according to prepared remarks posted on the committee\'s website Monday.\n\n"To each and every person affected by this breach, I am deeply sorry this occurred," said Smith, who will make his first of four appearances on Capitol Hill this week on the breach. "The company failed to prevent sensitive information from falling into the hands of wrongdoers."\n\nThe former CEO announced his retirement last week from the credit reporting company.\n\nEquifax has come under fire for its handling of the huge cybersecurity breach. The company is one of three nationwide credit-reporting companies that track and rate the financial history of U.S. consumers, gathering data from credit card companies, banks, retailers and lenders.\n\nIn his eight-page testimony, Smith outlined the chronology of events that lead to the breach, which allowed criminals to access personal information including names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and in some cases driver\'s license numbers and credit card information.\n\nThe former CEO said hackers were able to infiltrate a software weakness in an online portal that allows consumers to dispute items on their credit report.


\n\nPakistan’s supreme court has removed the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from office in a unanimous verdict over corruption allegations that will further upset the country’s unstable political landscape.\n\nThe verdict by the five-member court caps a year of political controversy over corruption allegations unleashed by the 2016 Panama Papers leak.\n\nThe governing party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), said Sharif had stepped down immediately. The party must now choose an interim prime minister to be accepted by parliament.\n\nThe ruling will throw the governing party and the country at large into turmoil ahead of elections due next year.\n\nThe 10-year disqualification of Sharif cut short the third tenure of a man who has been a leading figure in Pakistani politics for nearly three decades since his first term from 1990 to 1993.\n\nIt is the most serious political ramification yet of the Panama Papers leak, which detailed financial dealings of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.\n\nThe papers linked Sharif’s children to the purchase of London property through offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands in the early 1990s. At that time the children were minors, and the purchase is assumed to have been made by Sharif.\n\nLast year, Sharif told parliament that his family wealth had been acquired legally in the decades before he entered politics.\n\nHassan Askari Rizvi, a political analyst, said the judgment had been expected.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court unanimously removed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office over corruption allegations.

\n\nReports published this week on the secretive industry that banks and lawyers use to hide the financial holdings of some of the world’s top leaders and billionaires brought a powerful global response, including the resignation of one prime minister, while the White House and U.S. agencies reacted more cautiously.\n\nPresident Barack Obama addressed the massive leak of documents, which led to the reporting, on Tuesday during a press conference about business tax reform.\n\n“There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally, is a huge problem,” the president said. The president also noted in his remarks that the problem is not unique to other nations. “There are folks here in America who are taking advantage of the same stuff. A lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem,” the president added. “It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed that they allow people, if they’ve got enough lawyers and enough accountants, to wiggle out of responsibilities that ordinary citizens are having to abide by.”\n\nThe Justice Department, which is investigating alleged corruption in the world’s top soccer body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), said it may focus more on the financial dealings raised in the reporting based on the documents.\n\n

The Justice Department is investigating alleged corruption in the world’s top soccer body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

\n\nIceland’s embattled prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, has become the first major casualty of the Panama Papers, stepping aside from his office amid mounting public outrage that his family had sheltered money offshore.\n\nWhat was planned as a mass protest in Reykjavik on Tuesday evening turned to muted satisfaction as demonstrators vented their anger following revelations that Gunnlaugsson once owned – and his wife still owns – an offshore investment company with multimillion-pound claims on Iceland’s failed banks.\n\n“We were hoping parliament would be dissolved,” said Steingrimur Oli Einarsson, a fish oil trader, one of a few hundred to brave a freezing northeasterly wind on parliament square in downtown Reykjavik.\n\n“Of course we’re happy the prime minister has stepped down. But we are not satisfied with who is taking over from him, and with the fact that the government itself is still there.”\n\nGunnlaugsson’s office said in a statement that he was not resigning, but “handing over the office of prime minister for an unspecified time” to Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, the agriculture and fisheries minister.\n\nGunnlaugsson was “very proud” of his success resurrecting Iceland’s economy after the 2008 financial crisis, the statement said, and “especially proud of his government’s handling of ... the creditors of the failed Icelandic banks”.\n\nOutside parliament, Sigrin Eiroksdottir, a pre-school teacher, said the occasion “doesn’t really feel like any kind of victory. There is so much still to put right in this country in terms of ethics, of how the world looks at us.”\n\n

Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson steps down amid public outrage over his family's offshore investments.

\n\nOn Sunday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a massive leak of documents, dubbed the Panama Papers. CNNMoney has you covered with what you need to know about the story and responses to it.\n\nICIJ and an international coalition of media outlets investigated the trove of papers, which allegedly reveal a clandestine network involving associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and business ties between a member of FIFA’s ethics committee and men whom the United States has indicted for corruption.\n\nThe more-than 11 million documents, which date back four decades, are allegedly connected to Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca. ICIJ reports that the firm helped establish secret shell companies and offshore accounts for global power players. ICIJ reports that a 2015 audit found that Mossack Fonseca knew the identities of the real owners of just 204 of 14,086 companies it had incorporated in Seychelles, an Indian Ocean archipelago often described as a tax haven.\n\nAnd as Gerard Ryle, the director of ICIJ, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour: “These documents, if nothing else, raise an awful lot of questions.”\n\nThe documents reference 12 current or former world leaders, as well as 128 other politicians and public officials.

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers.


\n\nInternational pressure may be the only way to stop the Brazilian government from taking a “suicide” path in the Amazon, one of the country’s most respected scientists has said, as the world’s biggest rainforest continues to be ravaged by thousands of deliberate fires.\n\nThe large number of conflagrations – set illegally to clear and prepare land for crops, cattle and property speculation – has prompted the state of Amazonas to declare an emergency, created giant smoke clouds that have drifted hundreds of miles, and sparked international concerns about the destruction of an essential carbon sink.\n\n“Our house is burning,” tweeted the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who called for emergency talks on the subject at this week’s G7 summit. But the response to the crisis has been mixed: while Norway and Germany have halted donations to the Brazilian government’s Amazon fund, the EU has recently signed a trade deal with South America, and the UK spent this week focusing on post-Brexit business with Brazil.\n\nOn Wednesday, the UK trade minister Conor Burns was shaking hands with his counterparts in Brasilia and declaring a desire to “deepen relations”. Asked about the fires, he declined to comment but reportedly said Bolsonaro’s government had “legitimate ambitions to bring prosperity to its people”.\n\nScientists say the ongoing destruction will have dire consequences for Brazil and the world.\n\n

International pressure is needed to stop the Brazilian government from taking a “suicide” path in the Amazon.

\n\nFires in Brazil's Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.\n\nThat's the gist of an announcement this week by the country's National Institute for Space Research, or INPE. According to the agency, there have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year — most of which erupted in the Amazon. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.\n\nAbout half those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That's nearly as many as in all of 2018. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities, such as São Paulo.\n\nBrazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has signaled unconcern about the situation. The far-right leader, who took office in January, has repeatedly lambasted Brazil's environmental regulations as an impediment to economic development, and under his tenure environmental agencies have seen diminished staff and funding. That includes INPE itself, whose leader, Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão, was canned this month because — according to Galvão — he questioned how Bolsonaro was using his agency's data.\n\nAsked about the fires by local media, Bolsonaro baselessly suggested that nongovernmental organizations have been setting the fires themselves as retaliation for the scaling back of Brazil's usual funding support for them.

The Brazilian President has scaled back environmental regulations and funding for environmental agencies.

The fires have prompted the state of Amazonas to declare an emergency and created giant smoke clouds.

Emmanuel Macron called for emergency talks on the subject at the G7 summit.


11.5 million files were leaked from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca.

An offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain.

\n\nProsecutors in Germany have issued international arrest warrants for the cofounders of a Panama-based law firm behind the offshore tax scam that was exposed by the so-called Panama Papers leak.\n\nGerman-born Jürgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca are being sought by Cologne prosecutors on charges of accessory to tax evasion and forming a criminal organization, German public broadcasters NDR and WDR, as well as national newspaper the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) reported on Tuesday.\n\nCologne prosecutors confirmed that they had issued international arrest warrants for two people but declined to provide further information.\n\nThe 2016 Panama Papers leak included a collection of 11 million secret financial documents taken from law firm Mossack Fonscesca.\n\nThe documents showed how some of the world's richest people hid their money in shell corporations — some of which were used for illegal purposes.\n\nThe documents leak — initially to the SZ and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) – had wide-reaching repercussions. Several country leaders stepped down following the revelations and others came under close scrutiny.\n\nUS federal prosecutors have also alleged that law firm Mossack Fonseca conspired to circumvent US law to maintain the wealth of its clients and conceal tax dollars owed to the Internal Revenue Service.\n\nHowever, Fonseca maintained the firm, which closed in 2018, had no control over how its clients may have used offshore vehicles created for them.\n\nBoth Mossack and Fonseca have Panamanian citizenship, NDR reported. Panama does not extradite its own citizens so it is unclear whether either will ever be brought to Germany for trial.\n\n

Panamanian lawyers closed the offshore law firm and had no control over how its clients may have used the offshores he created for them.

\n\nIceland’s embattled prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, has become the first major casualty of the Panama Papers, stepping aside from his office amid mounting public outrage that his family had sheltered money offshore.\n\nWhat was planned as a mass protest in Reykjavik on Tuesday evening turned to muted satisfaction as demonstrators vented their anger following revelations that Gunnlaugsson once owned – and his wife still owns – an offshore investment company with multimillion-pound claims on Iceland’s failed banks.\n\n“We were hoping parliament would be dissolved,” said Steingrimur Oli Einarsson, a fish oil trader, one of a few hundred to brave a freezing northeasterly wind on parliament square in downtown Reykjavik.\n\n“Of course we’re happy the prime minister has stepped down. But we are not satisfied with who is taking over from him, and with the fact that the government itself is still there.”\n\nGunnlaugsson’s office said in a statement that he was not resigning, but “handing over the office of prime minister for an unspecified time” to Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, the agriculture and fisheries minister.\n\nGunnlaugsson was “very proud” of his success resurrecting Iceland’s economy after the 2008 financial crisis, the statement said, and “especially proud of his government’s handling of ... the creditors of the failed Icelandic banks”.\n\nOutside parliament, Sigrin Eiroksdottir, a pre-school teacher, said the occasion “doesn’t really feel like any kind of victory. There is so much still to put right in this country in terms of ethics, of how the world looks at us.”\n\n

Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson steps down amid public outrage over his family's offshore investments.


Uefa has denied any wrongdoing by any of its officials or any other marketing partner.

\n\nIcelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned on Tuesday, after documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm revealed that his wife possesses a secret offshore account worth millions of dollars.\n\nThe money is housed in a shell corporation called Wintris, which had bought bonds in Icelandic banks. So when Iceland\'s financial sector collapsed in 2008, Wintris became a creditor to those banks. In 2013, Gunnlaugsson became the prime minister, having run partly on a promise to get tougher with Iceland\'s remaining foreign creditors.\n\nSo what Icelandic voters didn\'t know when they elected him in 2013, but have learned with this week\'s "Panama Papers" revelations, is that Gunnlaugsson\'s own wife was secretly one of the creditors he\'d promised to crack down on — an enormous and undisclosed conflict of interest.\n\nWhen the truth came out this week, it led to mass protests on Monday calling for Gunnlaugsson\'s resignation. He stepped down the next day.\n\nWhat happened in Iceland shows the political power of the Panama Papers, but it also shows the degree to which the political turmoil from the 2008 financial crisis is, in some ways, still ongoing in that country.\n\nWhat\'s more, if Gunnlaugsson\'s resignation leads Iceland to schedule new elections soon, that vote could end up empowering a radical political party called the Pirate Party, a left-libertarian amalgam that\'s obsessed with transparency and direct democracy.\n\n

Mass protests on Monday called for Gunnlaugsson's resignation.

\n\nPakistan’s supreme court has removed the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from office in a unanimous verdict over corruption allegations that will further upset the country’s unstable political landscape.\n\nThe verdict by the five-member court caps a year of political controversy over corruption allegations unleashed by the 2016 Panama Papers leak.\n\nThe governing party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), said Sharif had stepped down immediately. The party must now choose an interim prime minister to be accepted by parliament.\n\nThe ruling will throw the governing party and the country at large into turmoil ahead of elections due next year.\n\nThe 10-year disqualification of Sharif cut short the third tenure of a man who has been a leading figure in Pakistani politics for nearly three decades since his first term from 1990 to 1993.\n\nIt is the most serious political ramification yet of the Panama Papers leak, which detailed financial dealings of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.\n\nThe papers linked Sharif’s children to the purchase of London property through offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands in the early 1990s. At that time the children were minors, and the purchase is assumed to have been made by Sharif.\n\nLast year, Sharif told parliament that his family wealth had been acquired legally in the decades before he entered politics.\n\nHassan Askari Rizvi, a political analyst, said the judgment had been expected.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court unanimously removed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office over corruption allegations.


\n\nIn the midst of an unprecedented heat wave, the U.K. on Tuesday broke its national record for the highest temperature ever registered, with a provisional reading of 104.36°F (40.2°C) at London's Heathrow Airport, according to the country's weather service.\n\nWhy it matters: This is the first time the U.K. has breached this temperature that is more common in tropical and desert climates, and studies point to climate change as a key factor behind the scorchingly hot temperatures.\n\nHeat waves of this magnitude and duration can be deadly, and pose particular health risks to vulnerable groups like the elderly, those with preexisting medical conditions and anyone without access to cooling.\nOnly about 3% of homes in the U.K. have air conditioning.\nDriving the news: The U.K. Met Office warned that temperatures are expected to keep rising throughout the day. Multiple other locations have exceeded the 40-degree mark as well, including within the city of London.\n\nThe previous national temperature record, set in 2019, stood at 101.66°F (38.7°C). A provisional total of 34 weather stations broke that record on Tuesday, the Met Office reported.\nAccording to climate scientist Simon Lee, 3 of the 4 hottest days in U.K. history have occurred during the last 4 years.\nContext: Studies have shown that climate change is making heat waves like this one hotter than they otherwise would have been, as well as more frequent and longer-lasting.\n\n

British authorities have declared a "national emergency".

Japan is asking 37 million people living in Tokyo to use less electricity.

\n\nNew records have been set as temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across much of Spain and Portugal Wednesday amid a persistent heat wave across western Europe.\n\nIn northwest Spain, the city of Ourense set its all-time temperature record of 43.2 degrees Celsius (109.76 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday, according to Spain’s meteorological agency, AEMET.\n\nOn Wednesday, Zamora set its own record after reaching 41.1 degrees Celsius (105.98 degrees Fahrenheit), according to climate statistician Max Herrera. Soria set a record of 38.7 degrees Celsius (101.66 degrees Fahrenheit) that same day.\n\nThe central Portuguese town of Lousã set an all-time record of 46.3 degrees Celsius (115.34 degrees Fahrenheit) and Lisbon set a July record of 41.4 degrees Celsius (106.52 degrees Fahrenheit).\n\nBut the worst is yet to come.\n\nOfficials in Spain and Portugal are bracing themselves for the hottest day of the heat wave so far.\n\nTemperatures are set to reach around 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts of western and southern Spain, according to AEMET. In its afternoon update, AEMET warned that Spain is set to experience its hottest day of the heat wave on Thursday.\n\nSimilar is being said of Portugal. Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa told reporters that Thursday is set to be the “most serious day” for Portugal as far as the extreme weather is concerned, warning that the country needs “to be more careful than ever to avoid new occurrences.”\n\n

Temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across much of Spain and Portugal on Wednesday.

\n\nHundreds more people were evacuated from their homes as wildfires blistered land in France, Spain and Portugal on Friday, while officials in Europe issued health warnings for the heatwave in the coming days.\n\nMore than 1,000 firefighters, supported by water-bomber aircraft, have battled since Tuesday to control two blazes in southwestern France that have been fanned by scorching heat, tinder-box conditions and strong winds.\n\nWhile temperatures dipped a little in Portugal, they were still expected to top 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in some places, with five districts on red alert and more than 1,000 firefighters tackling 17 wildfires, authorities said.\n\nIn Spain, a new wildfire broke out in the south of the country after blazes in the west in the past week.\n\nMore than 400 people were evacuated from the hills of Mijas, a town popular with northern European tourists in the province of Malaga. Beachgoers in Torremolinos, some 20 km away, could see plumes of smoke rising above the hotels lining the coast.\n\nMeanwhile, the worst drought in over 70 years reduced Italy's longest river, the Po, to little more than a trickle in places, with temperatures expected to rise next week.\n\nOfficials are worried about the effects on people's health and on healthcare systems already challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic as the searing heat sweeps the continent, with warnings issued for worse to come in Britain in particular.\n\nThe World Meteorological Organization said the heatwave would worsen air quality, especially in towns and cities.\n\n

\n\nJapan is asking some 37 million people living in and around Tokyo to use less electricity and ration air conditioning even amid a record heat wave that has seen temperatures in some parts of the country pass 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).\n\nThe government urged citizens in the capital to turn off lights and power switches for three hours in the afternoon and to use air conditioning “appropriately,” as the country struggles with growing power shortages.\n\nThe request comes despite experts warning that record-setting temperatures could continue for weeks.\n\n“Please save as much power as possible, such as by turning off lights that are not in use,” the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said Monday. It said appropriate uses of air conditioning included to “prevent heatstroke.”\n\nJapan’s power supply has been tight since March, when an earthquake in the northeast forced some nuclear power plants to suspend operations. At the same time demand is at its highest since 2011, when Japan was hit by the strongest earthquake in its recorded history. The ministry warned the mismatch between supply and demand is becoming “severe.”\n\nBut with recent temperatures soaring to dangerous levels, rationing electricity will not be easy.\n\nOn Tuesday, Tokyo experienced scorching heat for a fourth successive day after setting records for the month of June at the weekend.\n\n


The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank continues to reverberate, hitting bank stocks, revealing hidden stresses, knocking on to Credit Suisse, and setting off a political blame-game.\n\n\nWhy the $212bn tech-lender abruptly collapsed, triggering the most significant financial crisis since 2008, has no single answer. Was it, as some argue, the result of Trump-era regulation rollbacks, risk mismanagement at the bank, sharp interest rate rises after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs, or perhaps a combination of all three?\n\nFederal investigations have begun and lawsuits have been filed and no doubt new issues at the bank will emerge. But for now, here are the main reasons experts believed SVB failed.\n\nThe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders argues that the culprit was an “absurd” 2018 law, supported by Congress and signed by Donald Trump, that undid some of the credit requirements imposed under the Dodd-Frank banking legislation brought in after the 2008 banking crisis.\n\nDodd-Frank required that banks with at least $50bn in assets – banks considered “systemically important” – undergo an annual Federal Reserve “stress test” and maintain certain levels of capital as well as plans for a living will if they failed.\n\nSVB’s chief executive, Greg Becker, argued before Congress in 2015 that the $50bn threshold (SVB held $40bn at the time) was unnecessary and his bank, like other “mid-sized” or regional banks, “does not present systemic risks”.\n\nTrump said the new bill went a “long way toward fixing” Dodd-Frank, which he called a “job-killer”.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is shut down by regulators.

Interest rates rise after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs.

SVB invested in technology companies (startups).

On Wednesday, Silicon Valley Bank was a well-capitalized institution seeking to raise some funds.\n\nWithin 48 hours, a panic induced by the very venture capital community that SVB had served and nurtured ended the bank’s 40-year-run.\n\nRegulators shuttered SVB Friday and seized its deposits in the largest U.S. banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis and the second-largest ever. The company’s downward spiral began late Wednesday, when it surprised investors with news that it needed to raise $2.25 billion to shore up its balance sheet. What followed was the rapid collapse of a highly-respected bank that had grown alongside its technology clients.\n\nEven now, as the dust begins to settle on the second bank wind-down announced this week, members of the VC community are lamenting the role that other investors played in SVB’s demise.\n\n“This was a hysteria-induced bank run caused by VCs,” Ryan Falvey, a fintech investor at Restive Ventures, told CNBC. “This is going to go down as one of the ultimate cases of an industry cutting its nose off to spite its face.”\n\nThe episode is the latest fallout from the Federal Reserve’s actions to stem inflation with its most aggressive rate hiking campaign in four decades. The ramifications could be far-reaching, with concerns that startups may be unable to pay employees in coming days, venture investors may struggle to raise funds, and an already-battered sector could face a deeper malaise.

Silicon Valley Bank attempted to raise $2.25 billion from investors.

Stefan Kalb was in the middle of a meeting around 1 p.m. on Thursday when a fellow company executive sent him a panicked Slack message: "Do you know what\'s happening at SVB?"\n\nKalb, the CEO and co-founder of Seattle-based food management startup Shelf Engine, had been following news of a bank run at Silicon Valley Bank. Droves of depositors were attempting to pull out as much as $42 billion from the bank on Thursday alone, as fear spread that the bank was teetering on the brink of collapse.\n\nThe bank seemed to be on firm financial footing on Wednesday. The following day, it appeared to be under water.\n\nFor Shelf Engine, a 40-person startup founded in 2015 that uses artificial intelligence to help grocery stores reduce food waste, this was a big problem.\n\nNot only did Silicon Valley Bank help the company process checks and payments, but millions of dollars of the startup\'s cash was locked up in the bank.\n\nKalb sprung into action. He and his team quickly opened an account at JPMorgan Chase and attempted to wire transfer every last penny out of Silicon Valley Bank.\n\n"Unfortunately, our wire was not honored and our money is still at Silicon Valley Bank," Kalb, 37, said in an interview on Friday. "We woke up this morning hoping the money would be in that JPMorgan bank account, and it was not."

Hysteria and fear spread that the SVB was collapsing.