Some of the largest players in the sustainable investing market are reviewing their relationships with FTI Consulting, a business advisory and public relations firm, after a US media report highlighted controversial work it has done on behalf of the oil industry.

The first year of a Joe Biden administration is likely to be marked by a rebound in the burning of coal and a record increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the US, providing a sharp — if fleeting — contrast to the president-elect’s agenda for cleaning up the power sector.

Barclays is facing the ire of climate campaigners after increasing its support for fossil fuel companies this year, despite announcing in March it would target net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said on Monday he would depart the US securities regulator at the end of the year. Mr Clayton, a veteran Wall Street lawyer before his appointment by Donald Trump in 2017, has overseen a deregulatory push designed to make it easier for companies to raise capital.

Former Wells Fargo chief executive John Stumpf has agreed to pay $2.5m to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that he misled investors about the bank’s retail operations, which were at the centre of a fake accounts scandal.

SSE plans to triple its renewable electricity output by 2030 as it struck a confident tone, despite a hit to company results in the wake of a plunge in energy demand in Britain because of the coronavirus crisis.

A former deputy governor of China’s northern Hebei province was accused of taking more than 50 million yuan ($7.6 million) in bribes between 2006 and 2013 in exchange for business favors to others.

A total of 54 cities issued air pollution warnings Sunday, as smog descended across swathes of northern China.Most of the cities – which are in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region or the Fenwei Plain which includes parts of Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan provinces — have enforced orange alerts, which are the second-most severe warnings on a tiered scale. Seven of the cities, including the province-level municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin, have issued yellow alerts, one notch below orange. The alerts coincide with the beginning of the winter heating season in the country’s north, as well as an industrial comeback in the wake of suspended work earlier this year amid the domestic Covid-19 epidemic.

An anti-corruption storm continued rocking China’s national liquor maker Kweichow Moutai Co. Ltd. as another former senior executive was placed under investigation. Zhang Jiaqi, a former deputy general manager of Moutai, has been investigated for serious violations of law and principle, the Communist Party’s anti-graft watchdog in Guizhou province, where Moutai is based, said Wednesday.

The abrupt 1 billion yuan ($151 million) bond default of a state-owned coal mining company in Central China’s Henan province set off reverberations across China affecting its parent company, industry peers and other state-owned bond issuers and triggered an investigation by the interbank bond market regulator.