Headlines

German banks blocked PayPal payments totalling more than 10 billion euros ($11.7 billion) over fraud concerns, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported on Wednesday. The payments were halted on Monday after lenders flagged millions of suspicious direct debits from PayPal that appeared last week, the newspaper said. A PayPal spokesperson said a temporary service interruption had affected "certain transactions from our banking partners and potentially their customers", but that the issue had now been resolved.

The number of Dutch retail businesses that went bankrupt rose sharply from April to June, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) has found. A total of 89 businesses were affected, compared to 66 during the same period a year earlier, the national data center said on Tuesday, NLTimes.nl reported. Despite the rise in retail bankruptcies, the number of businesses that went bust fell by 7 percent across all economic sectors. There were several high profile bankruptcies during the second quarter, including fashion chain Gerry Weber.

Ugandan conglomerate Madhvani Group is in talks with Cerberus Capital Management LP for a private credit loan of about $190 million to fund its acquisition of distressed Indian glass bottle maker Hindustan National Glass & Industries Ltd, Bloomberg News reported. The parties are discussing a bilateral private credit loan with a tenor of about three-years. Discussions are on-going and details are subject to change.

Selling Thames Water to a Chinese-controlled company could give Beijing access to sensitive customer data, which might pose a risk to national security, a senior former intelligence officer has warned, The Times reported. Sir Simon Gass, who served as chairman of the government’s joint intelligence committee until two years ago, said that proposals to hand Thames Water over to the Hong Kong-based infrastructure firm CKI required “close scrutiny from a national security perspective”.

In a factory in Hekinan, a seaside town southwest of Tokyo, machines spit hot metal rods into baskets. On a recent Monday, afternoon light poured in through yellowed windows, and the air inside was hot and smelled of metal shavings, the New York Times reported. The plant, operated by an 84-year-old Japanese automotive parts maker, Asahi Tekko, produces components that are fitted into Lexus and Land Cruiser models at nearby Toyota factories. Many of those vehicles are then shipped to the United States.

The Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien ceased operations at its Freyung location on August 21, 2025, after more than four decades. The closure is related to the economic consequences of the Signa insolvency, which made the institution's operations impossible, Aviation.direct reported. The last exhibition at the venerable venue, Mensch Berlin, was a popular success. The show featured more than 120 works of art from the post-war German period and the period of reunification. Thousands of visitors took the opportunity to visit the exhibition and bid farewell to the Kunstforum.

Australia's central bank board judged further policy easing would likely be needed over the coming year when it cut rates this month, and the pace could be gradual or quicker depending on the flow of economic data, Reuters reported. Minutes of its August 11-12 policy meeting showed the Reserve Bank of Australia saw a strong case for a quarter-point reduction in the cash rate to 3.6% as data had shown inflation was heading towards the mid-point of its 2-3% target band.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has unearthed a massive admission racket in which thousands of students secured MBBS seats under the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) quota using forged documents, according to reports by NDTV and The Times of India, GulfNews.com reported. The investigation, assisted by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and Indian embassies abroad, revealed that private medical colleges across states offered around 18,000 MBBS admissions on the strength of fraudulent NRI certificates, The Times of India said.

A top South Korean official said on Monday that the U.S. and South Korea had decided to establish a non-binding agreement to define the operation and structure of $350 billion in investment funds agreed as part of a July trade deal, Reuters reported. Seoul agreed with Washington last month on a trade deal to cut U.S. tariffs in exchange for pledging the investments, though differences emerged on how the sides interpreted details of the plan, including how profits would be distributed.

The province’s real estate watchdog is immediately freezing iPro Realty Ltd.’s funding as it probes the Toronto-area brokerage for its multi-million-dollar shortfall, BNNBloomberg reported. The Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) said on Monday that it is doing this to “safeguard funds and secure business operations” as it carries out a comprehensive audit into the real estate brokerage. RECO shuttered iPro earlier this month due to a “significant shortfall” of $10 million in commission and consumer deposit trust accounts. That figure is now believed to be less than $8 million, RECO says.