| » After long insisting on going it alone, Portugal announced that it would seek a bail-out from its euro-zone partners. The country follows Greece and Ireland in asking for help. The decision came after ten-year government-bond yields came within a whisker of 9% and rates on 12-month and six-month treasury bills sold in a €1.0 billion ($1.4 billion) auction jumped by more than one and a half percentage points compared with similar sales in March. See article
Stressed out » Further stress tests of Ireland's banks revealed that they need an extra €24 billion ($34.4 billion) of capital. That would push the total cost of the government bail-out to around €70 billion, bringing almost all of the Irish banking industry under state control.  » Banks elsewhere in Europe made efforts to bolster their capital bases before the Basel 3 rules begin to bite. Intesa Sanpaolo, an Italian lender, decided to issue new shares worth as much as €5 billion ($7.2 billion). In Germany Commerzbank said it planned to raise €8.25 billion to help repay the money it got in a government rescue. See article » Texas Instruments, a maker of computer chips, offered to buy National Semiconductor, an American rival, for $6.5 billion. American and European technology stocks rallied on the news. » NASDAQ OMX Group joined IntercontinentalExchange, a smaller American trading platform, in an attempt to swipe NYSE Euronext from under the nose of Deutsche Börse. The German company had agreed to pay $9.6 billion for the New York exchange group in February. NASDAQ and ICE are offering $11.3 billion. Their bid, which would create an entity with 50% of America's share-trading market, is expected to face scrutiny from antitrust regulators. » Australia's government said it might thwart an A$8.4 billion ($8.7 billion) bid by Singapore Exchange for ASX, the main Australian bourse, citing "national interest". The combined exchange would be Asia's second largest by the number of listings.
Not so jolly Roger » Roger Agnelli was ousted as boss of Vale after refusing to bow to pressure from Brazil's government, which indirectly controls the mining giant, to pare back plans to expand and diversify abroad, and to focus instead on domestic growth. His departure is widely seen as a portent of a more active industrial policy by the government of the country's president, Dilma Rousseff. Mr Agnelli will be replaced by Murilo Ferreira, who returns to Vale after a three-year stint at an investment company.
» A Chinese state-owned mining company, Minmetals Resources, made a C$6.3 billion ($6.5 billion) offer for Equinox Minerals, an Australian-Canadian owner of a large copper mine in Zambia. The unsolicited bid, financed entirely with cash, is the biggest yet for a Chinese mining firm. China consumes around 40% of the world's copper and is concerned about competition for supplies of the metal. Copper's price remains high, though it has slipped by around 5% from February's stratospheric levels.  » Increasingly alarmed by an overheating economy, the People's Bank of China raised interest rates for the fourth time in five months. The rise of a quarter of a percentage point, to 6.31% for the one-year lending rate and 3.25 for the deposit rate, came as a surprise, leading analysts to suppose that inflation in March had been higher than expected. » Just weeks after T-Mobile decided to sell its American arm to AT&T, consolidation in domestic mobile-telecoms markets continues apace. Vivendi, a French media group, agreed to pay Britain's Vodafone €8 billion ($11.2 billion) for the 44% it does not already own in SFR, a French mobile-phone operator. The sale, with earlier disposals of stakes in Japan's Softbank and China Mobile, will help Vodafone repay debt before an auction of spectrum for fourth-generation mobile networks in Britain early next year. » Cesare Geronzi unexpectedly quit as chairman of Generali, Italy's biggest insurer. Some blamed the company's poor recent performance on meddling by the septuagenarian Mr Geronzi, who is said to epitomise old-style Italian capitalism. Generali's share price rose by 5% on the news.
Grand theft e-mail » A hacker pilfered e-mails from Epsilon, an American marketing-services firm, which handles 40 billion e-mails each year on behalf of around 2,500 corporate clients. Prominent customers affected by the data breach are said to include Citigroup, Marks & Spencer and the Marriott hotel chain. Epsilon assured its clients that the leak was confined to e-mail addresses and did not compromise their customers' financial information. See article | 
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