Southern Financial News

Baltimore on Sunday — killing two people, wounding 28 and leaving an extensive crime scene that marred the US holiday weekend, police said. Three of the wounded were in critical condition. Baltimore Police Department Acting Commissioner Richard Worley told reporters there were a total of 30 victims during a press conference at the scene.

PARIS (Reuters) — The home of a Paris suburb mayor was ram-raided and set alight while his wife and children were asleep inside during the unrest that has gripped the country following Tuesday's shooting of a teenager by a police officer, the official said on Sunday.

China's Consulate General in Marseille complained to France after a bus carrying a Chinese tour group in the southern city had its windows smashed leading to minor injuries, China's Consular Affairs Office said in a statement on Sunday. The Consulate General's formal complaint called for France to ensure the safety of Chinese citizens and their property, the statement said.

The violence erupted just after Macron finally saw off half a year of protests over his controversial pension reform, which dominated the domestic agenda for most of this year. But the images of shops ransacked and buses burned across the country also risk hurting Macron's international standing at a time he wants to play an instrumental role in ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine and be seen as Europe's number one powerbroker.

London | The existential crisis engulfing Britain’s largest water utility, Thames Water, has thrown a powerful spotlight on one of the UK industry’s most high-profile players: Macquarie Group.

Geert Rouwenhorst, the Yale professor who grandfathered the theory of commodity index investing, used to get plenty of laughs from his audience when he’d tell them that many didn’t know the correlation between pork belly futures and natural gas until they began barbecuing.

The highly anticipated Madurai Metro Rail project is making significant progress as the Detail Project Report (DPR) is set to be submitted on July 15, according to MA Siddique, Managing Director of Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL). Siddique revealed that the metro rail in Madurai will cover a total length of 32 kilometers, with 27 kilometers of elevated structure and 5 kilometers underground.

Segesta on the Italian island of Sicily, local authorities said on Friday. Sicily's regional government said the altar was probably in use at the height of Hellenic cultural influence, just before the rise of the Roman empire in the first century before Christ (BC).

Buildings and vehicles have been torched and stores looted, and the violence has plunged President Emmanuel Macron into the gravest crisis of his leadership since the Yellow Vest protests that started in 2018. Unrest has flared nationwide, including in cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Lille as well as Paris where Nahel M., a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was shot on Tuesday in the Nanterre suburb. His death, caught on video, has reignited longstanding complaints by poor and racially mixed urban communities of police violence and racism.

By Karl Littler

Private credit funds have been under scrutiny in recent months as rising interest rates prompted some observers to worry that the handsome returns generated by lending to companies that can’t get traditional bank financing might not stand the test of time.

A culprit in the infamous 2020 Twitter hack who phished thousands of dollars in Bitcoin from Twitter users has been sentenced to five years in prison for his crime, as well as for a separate SIM swapping scheme. 

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and former CEO of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, made an effort to have several charges against him dismissed in court. 

The US Department of Justice unsealed charges against Russian nationals Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, for allegedly stealing thousands of bitcoin from the Mt.Gox crypto exchange back in 2011 to 2014. 

Following the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) lawsuit, US-based crypto exchange, Coinbase, has received multiple Show Cause orders from US states. 

According to the SEC’s complaint, since at least 2019, Coinbase "has made billions of dollars unlawfully" through the buying and selling of crypto asset securities. The SEC alleges that Coinbase intertwines the traditional services of an exchange, broker, and clearing agency without having registered any of those functions with the Commission as required by law. As alleged in the SEC’s complaint, Coinbase’s failure to register has deprived investors of significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, recordkeeping requirements, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, among others. The regulator also slammed Coinbase for failing to register its staking-as-a-service program as required by the securities laws. "You simply can’t ignore the rules because you don’t like them or because you’d prefer different ones: the consequences for the investing public are far too great,” says Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. "As alleged in our complaint, Coinbase was fully aware of the applicability of the federal securities laws to its business activities, but deliberately refused to follow them. While Coinbase’s calculated decisions may have allowed it to earn billions, it’s done so at the expense of investors by depriving them of the protections to which they are entitled. Today’s action seeks to hold Coinbase accountable for its choices.”

In a recent hearing in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Loretta Preska sentenced Ishan Wahi to two years in prison for his involvement in an insider trading scheme that had rocked the cryptocurrency industry. Wahi had worked as a product manager at Coinbase and was accused of using confidential information to profit off new token listings.

The crypto industry awaits the summary judgment in the ongoing case between the US SEC and Ripple. 

Crypto consortium Fahrenheit, which includes Arrington Capital and US Bitcoin Corp., won the bid to purchase the assets of insolvent crypto lender Celsius, court filings showed Thursday.

Though Billionaire Elon Musk has shown his love for meme coin Dogecoin over the years, that doesn’t mean he is telling investors to put their life savings into it. 

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged with directing $40 million (€36.86 million) in bribes to one or more Chinese officials to unfreeze assets relating to his cryptocurrency business.