Reuters

By Lucy Papachristou

LONDON (Reuters) - A Russian theatre director and playwright told a court on Monday they were not guilty of charges of justifying terrorism on the first day of their trial over the staging of an award-winning play, Mediazona reported.

Director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested in May last year for putting on "Finist, the Brave Falcon", which tells the story of Russian women who married... (continue reading...)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday slammed the International Criminal Court prosecutor's application for arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling the move "outrageous".

"And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence - none - between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security." Biden said in a... (continue reading...)

(Reuters) - Ivan Boesky, the financier who was a central figure of the 1980s insider trading scandals, has died at the age of 87, the New York Times reported on Monday.

Boesky, who partly inspired the Gordon Gekko character in the 1987 movie "Wall Street," was at his peak considered a genius at risk arbitrage, the business of speculating in takeover stocks, and his wealth was estimated at $280 million.

But the U.S. Securities and... (continue reading...)

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - BlackRock was sued for $20 million by a whistleblowing former vice president who said the asset manager fired him after shutting down a search engine that could monitor client discussions about illegal investments, including in China.

In a complaint on Saturday, Hamdan Azhar said BlackRock ordered him in March 2022 to stop work on Trend Spotter, which he had developed, and transfer his projects to... (continue reading...)

By Howard Schneider

AMELIA ISLAND, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve is considering new rules to break the "stigma" around borrowing from the central bank's discount window to cover short-term cash needs, Fed vice chair for supervision Michael Barr said on Monday.

"We've made good progress over the last year," since the failure of Silicon Valley Bank exposed gaps in the Fed's main lender-of-last-resort program, Barr said at an... (continue reading...)