Europe’s weaker airlines face a heightened risk of collapse this winter as nations that rescued carriers during the Covid crisis focus support elsewhere amid rising inflation, according to analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein, Bloomberg News reported. While the pandemic brought few airline failures in the region amid a deluge of aid payments, carriers now face a squeeze from higher fuel and labor costs combined with a seasonal decline in travel, Bernstein said in an investor note Monday. That’s just as governments struggle to respond to soaring household bills.

Crisis-hit Scandinavian airline SAS sees savings of $200 million through 2026 from a new collective bargaining deal reached with most of its pilots following a crippling two-week strike in July, Reuters reported. The flag carrier, pressured for years by low-cost rivals and ravaged by the pandemic, in February announced a big restructuring plan, and on the second day of the strike sought U.S. bankruptcy protection.

A union representing pilots at Lufthansa on Tuesday called off a planned two-day strike after a last-minute agreement with Germany’s biggest airline in a pay dispute, the Associated Press reported. The Vereinigung Cockpit union had announced plans for a walkout on Wednesday and Thursday, calling on the company to make a “serious” offer in talks over pay increases. It would have been the second strike in a week after pilots staged a walkout Friday that led to hundreds of flights being canceled.

Former Trinity Biotech chief executive Brendan Farrell, co-founder of insolvent medical diagnostics company HiberGene Diagnostics, is looking for potential buyers for the business in a last-ditch effort to save it, the Irish Times reported. Mr. Farrell, who also served as chief executive of HiberGene until he resigned from the board of the company in 2018, told the Irish Times on Friday that he had spoken to one Irish investor and two from outside the country with a view to securing funding to keep the business afloat.

Pilots at Lufthansa went on strike on Friday, forcing the German airline to cancel hundreds of flights, stranding holidaymakers, Reuters reported. The airline said that it had cancelled about 800 flights at its main bases in Frankfurt and Munich on Friday, affecting 130,000 passengers, and said it was working flat out to minimise the impact of the strike. Labour union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) had called on more than 5,000 Lufthansa pilots to stage a 24-hour walkout, saying the latest round of wage talks had failed.

The British government is set to release data showing around 1.1 billion pounds of small business loans ($1.27 billion) made under a COVID-19 emergency lending scheme has already been classified as suspected fraud, a source told Reuters. The previously unpublished data from Britain's Department for Business, Energy and Industry (BEIS) gives the first firm indication of likely fraud levels in the scheme, which has faced scrutiny over the quality of checks on borrowers.

Power prices surged, European currencies hit multidecade lows and governments scrambled to contain the economic hit after Russia cut its main natural-gas pipeline to Europe, the Wall Street Journal reported. The cutoff, which the Kremlin blamed Monday on Western sanctions and said would be long-lasting, realizes the worst-case scenario Europe had been girding for since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Europe is at the front lines of the economic war between Russia and the West that runs parallel to the battlefield war in Ukraine.

The European Commission is seeking emergency powers to force companies to make key products and stockpile goods in a crisis or else face fines, according to an EU document seen by Reuters on Friday. The proposed Single Market Emergency Instrument, set to be presented on Sept. 13, comes in response to supply bottlenecks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine "a special military operation." It also aims to deter foreign countries with similar powers from taking such action without first informing the 27-country bloc.

Tens of thousands of applications for a payment-by-instalment plan have flooded into a British budget grocery chain just two weeks after its launch, as a cost of living crisis crushes UK household incomes, Bloomberg News reported. Customers of Iceland Foods have sent in around 60,000 applications so far, more than the total number of loans the credit provider behind the initiative expected to offer in 18 months. Successful applicants can borrow up to £100 ($115) to pay for food at one of its outlets.