MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has donated more than $4bn (£3bn) to food banks and emergency relief funds in four months.
In a blog post, Ms Scott said she wanted to help Americans who were struggling because of the pandemic.
Ms Scott is the world’s 18th-richest person, having seen her wealth climb $23.6bn this year to $60.7bn.
“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” she wrote on Tuesday, adding that she had picked more than 380 charities to donate to having considered almost 6,500 organisations.

London-listed shares followed global markets on Wednesday as optimism around working vaccines raised hopes of an economic recovery, while investors also held out for a Brexit trade deal. The blue-chip FTSE 100 index was up 0.4% by 0804 GMT, led by energy, healthcare and mining stocks;The domestically focused FTSE 250 index gained 0.3%. In company news, fashion retailer Superdry jumped 3.8% as it said interim Chief Executive Officer Julian Dunkerton would take the top job on a permanent basis and appointed industry veteran Silvana Bonello as its chief operating officer.

(Reuters) – Norway’s top three food retailers and wholesalers face fines amounting to a combined 21 billion Norwegian crowns ($2.4 billion) for breach of antitrust regulations, the Norwegian Competition Authority said on Tuesday. Norgesgruppen, Coop and Rema 1000 have cooperated in ways that may have resulted in inflated prices, the watchdog said.
The three have each employed staff to survey prices at stores operated by competitors, and similarly agreed to allow those surveyors access to their own stores, which they said resulted in fierce competition and lower prices.

(Reuters) – Asian stocks retreated on Tuesday as worries about increasing COVID-19 deaths and lockdowns overshadowed optimism about the roll-out of coronavirus vaccinations, just days after indexes hit record highs. EUROSTOXX 50 futures dipped 0.4% and FTSE futures fell 0.6%, indicating a weaker open for European stock markets. E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 were up 0.05%. Markets showed little reaction to China’s industrial output, which grew in line with expectations in November, expanding for an eighth straight month as an economic recovery gathered pace.

(Reuters) – Germany’s ruling coalition has agreed changes to a new energy law that aims to boost renewable power and help the country meet its goal of producing 65% of its electricity from green sources by 2030, parliamentary sources told Reuters.The energy law is now expected to go before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday ahead of votes in the lower house on Thursday and the upper house on Friday, with a view to enacting the legislation by Jan. 1, 2021, the sources said.

(Reuters) – Sterling kept overnight gains against the dollar and the euro on Monday, as talks for a post-Brexit trade deal between Britain and the European Union were set to continue.
Europe opened with stocks up 0.75% and the euro up on the dollar.
“We are going to give every chance to this agreement … which is still possible,” the European Union’s Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, told journalists before updating envoys from the 27 EU countries on Monday.

(Reuters) – Asian shares bounced back on Friday as progress on COVID-19 vaccines boosted investor sentiment, but tricky Brexit negotiations and U.S. stimulus talks capped gains in riskier assets. MSCI’s ex-Japan Asia-Pacific index rose 0.5%, on track for its sixth straight week of gains, while Japan’s Nikkei dropped 0.6%.
Investors bet on stronger economic growth next year as more countries prepare for vaccinations. U.S. authorities voted to endorse emergency use of Pfizer’s vaccine while doses of a COVID-19 vaccine made by China’s Sinovac Biotech SVA.O are rolling off a Brazilian production line.

(Reuters) – A group of 30 asset managers with more than $9 trillion under management have launched the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative on Friday to help clients ensure their portfolios are carbon neutral by 2050. The group, which includes Schroders and UBS Asset Management, said it would prioritise securing real reductions in emissions, and work with clients over their decarbonisation goals.
They also pledged to set interim targets for assets managed in line with the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the middle of the century.

France’s data privacy watchdog has handed out its biggest ever fine of 100 million euros ($121 million) to Alphabet’s Google for breaching the country’s rules on online advertising trackers (cookies).
The CNIL said in a statement on Thursday it had also fined U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon 35 million euros for breaching the same rules.
The regulator found the French websites of Google and Amazon didn’t seek the prior consent of visitors before advertising cookies were saved on computers, it said in a statement.

(Reuters) – South Korean police are examining a Tesla Inc electric car after its driver told police it went out of control and crashed into a wall killing a passenger and injuring two other people.
The Model X smashed into the wall and caught fire in the parking lot of a Seoul apartment building late on Wednesday, police said. It took about an hour to put out the fire.

European shares hit February highs on Wednesday, joining a global stock market rally on optimism around progress in COVID-19 vaccines and U.S. stimulus package, while all eyes turned to make-or-break Brexit talks.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index and London’s FTSE 100 both climbed 0.3%.

Minister for the Cabinet office, Michael Gove, on Wednesday said Britain and the EU should have a “smoother glide path” to a Brexit trade after they agreed on the Northern Ireland protocol – a major point of contention between the two sides – a day before.

(Reuters) – Twitter and three other U.S. tech companies have urged the EU to take a flexible approach towards harmful and illegal online content instead of blanket rules requiring takedown, saying this would preserve an open internet.
Known as the Digital Services Act, the rules aim to get bigger companies to take more responsibility for removing illegal and harmful content as soon as they have been notified.

A 90-year-old British woman has become the first person to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid 19 vaccine. She received the jab at 06:31 GMT at University Hospital in Coventry, administered by matron May Parsons.

As part of a nationwide rollout program, over 80s and some health and care staff will be vaccinated in the days to come. The UK is the first country in the world to start using the vaccine after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) granted emergency use approval last week to the vaccine.

It was been announced that NHS assured ‘myGP’ – the UK’s largest independent GP booking and healthcare management app – aims to provide people in England with a simple, clear means of communicating their verified Covid-19 vaccination status, via their smartphone. Due to be launched in February 2021, the new digital verified vaccination status feature will display, within the patient profile page of the app, whether or not a patient is sufficiently protected from COVID-19, illustrated via a few personal details and a simple green tick. 

(Reuters) Oil prices fell on Tuesday, adding to losses from the previous session that came as California tightened its pandemic lockdown through Christmas and coronavirus cases continued to surge in the United States and Europe.

Brent crude futures fell 1.1%, to $48.28 a barrel by 0744 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell 45 cents to $45.31 a barrel.

Globally, a sharp rise in coronavirus cases has led to a string of renewed lockdowns, including strict measures in the U.S. state of California as well as Germany and South Korea.

(Reuters) Booming car sales drove a stronger-than-expected jump in German industrial output in October, in a further sign that the export-oriented manufacturing sector helped Europe’s largest economy to get off to a solid start in the fourth quarter.

The German government has unleashed an unprecedented array of rescue and stimulus measures to help companies and consumers get through the COVID-19 pandemic as unscathed as possible, including incentives to buy electric and hybrid cars.

Industrial output was up by 3.2% on the month after an upwardly revised increase of 2.3% in the previous month, figures released by the Federal Statistics Office showed on Monday.

Asian shares retreated from a record peak after a Reuters report stated the United States was preparing to impose sanctions on some Chinese officials, while oil prices fell.

In currencies, investor focus is on a last-ditch attempt by Britain and the EU to strike a post-Brexit trade deal this week.

If there is no deal, a five-year Brexit divorce will end messily, just as global economies grapple with the severe economic cost of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Six major retailers have agreed to repay more than £1.8bn in business rates relief, a policy introduced for all retailers in March.

Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco, B&M, Morrison’s and Aldi have announced they would be repaying their emergency tax payer support, received to counteract the economic effects of the pandemic.

While other retailers and hospitality firms have struggled with lockdown closures and other restrictions, supermarkets have seen a boom in sales this past year, albeit with higher costs linked to in store hygiene practices.

Asian shares scaled a record high on Friday on growing prospects of a large U.S. economic stimulus package, while hopes that vaccine rollouts will boost the global economy underpinned investor sentiment.

In New York, the S&P 500 erased earlier gains after the WSJ reported that Pfizer had slashed the target for the rollout of its COVID-19 vaccine due to supply chain obstacles.
In commodities, oil prices got a lift after OPEC+ agreed to ease their deep oil output cuts from January. They agreed to move to cutting production by 7.2 million compared with current cuts of 7.7million bpd.

(Reuters) Hopes that the pandemic, which has so far killed nearly 1.5 million people globally, will finally be brought under control sparked a risk-on rally in currency markets with the Australian and New Zealand dollars advancing against their U.S. counterpart.

In commodities, oil prices slipped on Thursday as producers including Saudi Arabia and Russia locked horns over the need to extend record production cuts set in place in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.