Financial Mindset

Temperatures in Central Europe soared to  extreme levels again  on Wednesday with Slovakia and Austria both having their  hottest day on record . For Slovakia, it was also the third time this summer that temperatures reached a record high. The country’s south recorded temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the latest heat wave, with a new record of 41.4 C (106.5 F) in the town of Kamenica nad Hronom in southern Slovakia, the Slovak Meteorological Institute said. The previous records were set on two days — June 29 and June 30 — with 41.0 C (105.8 F) in the town of Turna nad Bodvou, and 41.3 C (106.3 F) in Kamenica nad Hronom. That smashed a 2007 high of 40.3 C (104.5 F) in the town of Hurbanovo. The night of Tuesday into Wednesday was also the hottest on record, with 28.4 degrees Celsius (83 F) in the town of Skalica in southwestern Slovakia. In Austria, the all-time high of 41.2 C (106.1 F) was measured in Bad Deutsch...

The Trump administration is moving ahead with its efforts to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, two months after the Supreme Court  allowed her to retain her job  while she fights the president’s effort to terminate her over mortgage fraud allegations that she has denied. The justices in a 5-4 decision in June said Cook, who was nominated to the Fed’s Board of Governors by President Joe Biden, could remain in her post at least as long as her lawsuit challenging her firing goes on. The Trump administration is appealing a lower-court ruling in Cook’s favor. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a footnote in his opinion that nothing forbids President Donald Trump from “trying again” to fire Cook provided she is given proper notice and a chance to contest it. Trump indicated after the opinion that he would do just that, vowing to “take appropriate action immediately.” In a letter this week obtained by The Associated Press, White House aide Dan Scavi...

Ida Huddleston has lived on the same stretch of farmland outside Maysville, Kentucky, since she was 16. She and her late husband built a log home there, raised children, and worked the soil through six decades of marriage. Today, the family owns roughly 1,200 acres, and multiple generations still live on it. Last spring, an unnamed company described only as a major artificial intelligence firm came looking for a piece of it, according to WKRC Local 12 . The company approached dozens of landowners in Mason County about buying roughly half of the Huddleston family’s property for a proposed data center campus. Huddleston, 82, was offered about $60,000 an acre for her 71 acres, over $4 million. Her daughter, Delsia Bare, 54, was offered $48,000 an acre for her 463 acres, putting her potential payout above $22 million. Combined, the family’s offer topped $26 million, well above the roughly $6,000-an-acre going rate for farmland in the county. Bare admits she signed a...

You’re not imagining it. Getting a job right now really is harder than it used to be. That’s because Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait has crunched the numbers on the job market, and they’re brutal: for every 10 open roles on his hiring platform alone, there are 2,539 applicants fighting over them. His advice for standing a chance? Stop applying to the companies everyone’s heard of. “Don’t just apply to, you know, OpenAI, because they’re in the news every day,” Chait exclusively told Fortune . “Think of the job you want and apply to less-known companies who do that type of work—you’ll find a lot more success.” The numbers back him up. There are currently 175,000 live jobs on Greenhouse’s platform—and on average, for every job ad posted, around 254 job seekers are applying, pushing applications per recruiter up by 412%—and that’s before accounting for the handful of household names soaking up a disproportionate share of that flood....

At 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Aug. 5, the price of oil sits at $83.72 per barrel, using Brent as the benchmark (we’ll explain what that means shortly). That’s a decrease of $6.09 since yesterday morning and roughly $15.38 more than at this time last year. oil price per barrel % Change Price of oil yesterday $89.81 -6.78% Price of oil 1 month ago $72.65 +15.23% Price of oil 1 year ago $68.34 +22.50% Check Out Our Daily Rates Reports Discover the highest high-yield savings rates , up to 4.50% for August 6, 2026. Discover the highest CD rates , up to 4.50% for August 6, 2026. Discover the top CD rates from major banks on August 6, 2026. Discover the current mortgage rates for August 6, 2026. Discover current refi mortgage rates report for August 6, 2026. Discover current ARM mortgage rates report for August 6, 2026. Discover current HELOC rates for August 6, 2026. Discover the current price of gold for August 6, 2026. Discover the current price of silver for...

Asia’s energy security depends on the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway it doesn’t control, and the fallout from the return of conflict would extend well past fuel pumps. If Asia doesn’t build deeper, more liquid electricity networks now, it risks losing its slice of the AI value chain. Nearly every major Asian economy now has a formal national AI masterplan. Japan recently announced a 370 trillion yen ($2.3 trillion) budget , with more than a quarter of that sum earmarked for spending on artificial intelligence and chips alone over the next 15 years. Training a frontier AI model concentrates enormous computing power into a handful of locations, while inferencing pushes low-latency facilities into dense urban hubs. Data center power demand across Asia-Pacific is expected to increase by an estimated 165% in 2023-30. Much of the region’s headline megawatt figures, though, are “bragawatts”—announcements that look impressive on paper but are far ...

Hackers tried to break into at least 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota on July 26-27, 2026. Since then, Michigan , New Jersey and several other states have reported similar cyberattacks . The attackers did not try to infiltrate the computers that utility offices use. Instead, they tried to seize control of small computers in equipment like pumps and valves that deliver drinking water to millions of people. The utilities countered the attacks by shutting down the control computers and sending personnel out into the field to operate equipment manually. Utility officials have said that water remained safe to drink. As a scholar who researches cyber conflict , I find that the methods used in these incidents are typical of international cyberattacks . Initial suspicion has fallen on hackers allegedly aligned with Iran , but the U.S. government has yet to attribute the attack to anyone. How can someone from far away seize control of a water system and possibly shut ...