Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) has agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit accusing the social media giant of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ personal information.

The proposed settlement, which was disclosed in a court filing late on Thursday, would resolve a long-running lawsuit prompted by revelations in 2018 that Facebook had allowed the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access data of as many as 87 million users.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the proposed settlement the largest to ever be achieved in a U.S. data privacy class action and the most that Meta has ever paid to resolve a class action lawsuit.

“This historic settlement will provide meaningful relief to the class in this complex and novel privacy case,” the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, Derek Loeser and Lesley Weaver, said in a joint statement.

Meta did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which is subject to the approval of a federal judge in San Francisco. The company said in a statement settling was “in the best interest of our community and shareholders.”

“Over the last three years we revamped our approach to privacy and implemented a comprehensive privacy program,” Meta said.

Cambridge Analytica, now defunct, worked for Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016, and gained access to the personal information from millions of Facebook accounts for the purposes of voter profiling and targeting.

Cambridge Analytica obtained that information without users’ consent from a researcher who had been allowed by Facebook to deploy an app on its social media network that harvested data from millions of its users.

The ensuing Cambridge Analytica scandal fueled government investigations into its privacy practices, lawsuits and a high-profile U.S. congressional hearing where Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by lawmakers.

In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion to resolve a Federal Trade Commission probe into its privacy practices and $100 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims that it misled investors about the misuse of users’ data.

Investigations by state attorneys general are ongoing, and the company is fighting a lawsuit by the attorney general for Washington, D.C.

Thursday’s settlement resolved claims by Facebook users that the company violated various federal and state laws by letting app developers and business partners harvest their personal data without their consent on a widespread basis.

The users’ lawyers alleged that Facebook misled them into thinking they could keep control over personal data, when in fact it let thousands of preferred outsiders gain access.

Facebook argued its users have no legitimate privacy interest in information they shared with friends on social media. But U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria called that view “so wrong” and in 2019 largely allowed the case to move forward.

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A rough year for U.S. stocks is winding down, but the market’s pain may be far from over, as investors brace for an expected recession in 2023.

With only a handful of trading days left in 2022, the benchmark S&P 500 index (.SPX) is down 19.8% year-to-date and headed for its biggest annual decline since 2008, as the Federal Reserve mounts its most aggressive monetary policy tightening cycle in decades to fight surging inflation.

While inflation is yet to be tamed, Wall Street’s focus is shifting to the potential consequence of the Fed’s rate hikes: a 2023 economic slowdown.

Firms projecting at least a mild recession include BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, Barclays and Oxford Economics. Fund managers in a BofA Global Research survey named a deep global recession and persistently high inflation as the market’s biggest risks, with a net 68% forecasting a downturn as likely in the next year.

Recession worries are also filtering into asset prices, while the Treasury yield curve has been inverted since early 2022, a signal that has preceded past downturns.

“The consensus is pretty clear that there is going to be a recession in 2023,” said Chuck Carlson, chief executive officer at Horizon Investment Services. “The issue is how much has the market already discounted a recession, and that’s where it gets a little bit thornier.”

Concerns that the Fed will maintain its hawkish stance helped drive the S&P 500 down 1.45% on Thursday.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of recessions, typically declares them in hindsight, and consistent job growth this year makes it less likely that a recession has already started.

If a recession starts next year, stocks could be set for another swoon: A bear market has never bottomed before the beginning of a recession, historic data showed.

“If we’re not in a recession now but we’re going into one that would mean that a retest of the October lows and a break of them is quite possible in the first half of the year,” said Ed Clissold, chief U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research.

The S&P 500 marked a 2022 closing low of 3,577.03 in October, just over 6% below its current level.

Stocks perform poorly during economic downturns, with the S&P 500 falling an average of 29% during recessions since World War Two, according to Truist Advisory Services. The index was down just over 25% in October from its Jan. 3 record closing high.

Stocks could also see a bigger move than usual next year. The S&P 500 has swung by at least 10% in either direction in the year after a decline of 15% or more, according to Bespoke Investment Group.

Investors are also gauging to what degree slowing growth has been factored into corporate earnings.

Consensus analyst estimates project S&P 500 earnings to rise about 5% in 2023, and to post at least a slim year-over-year gain in every quarter next year, according to Refinitiv IBES.

Yet earnings fall by an average annual rate of 24% during recessions, according to Clissold, leaving plenty of downside for profits if a slowdown hits.

“Stocks generally follow earnings,” said Matt Peron, director of research at Janus Henderson Investors. “If rate hikes take about a year to flow through the system, we are still six months away from the real teeth of it.”

One wild card may be whether consumer prices, which rose less than expected in November for a second straight month, subside quickly enough to allow the Fed to stop raising rates as soon as Wall Street anticipates.

While many investors believe rates will peak sometime in the middle of 2023, policymakers earlier this month said the benchmark interest rate will need to rise next year to a higher level than previously anticipated to cool consumer prices.

“The market focus is shifting from inflation concerns to growth concerns,” said Mona Mahajan, senior investment strategist at Edward Jones. “If there are any inflationary shocks that are unforeseen, that will derail the narrative.”

Nevertheless, strategists polled by Reuters last month expect the S&P 500 to end 2023 at 4,200, some 10% above current levels.

One way that could happen is if a recession hits early in 2023 and ends quickly. Bear markets on average have bottomed four months before the end of a recession, according to Clissold, of Ned Davis.

If a recession finishes by the end of 2023, “by the time we get into the second half of the year, we could be looking at a new bull market,” he said.

A deep freeze enveloping most of the United States early on Friday combined with a massive winter storm brewing in the Midwest to leave two-thirds of the nation under extreme weather alerts, confounding travel plans for millions of Americans.

Heading into the Christmas holiday weekend, the looming storm was forecast to develop into a “bomb cyclone,” unleashing heavy, blinding snow from the northern Plains and Great Lakes region to the upper Mississippi Valley and western New York.

Numbing cold intensified by high winds was expected to extend as far south as the U.S.-Mexico border.

Hard-freeze warnings were posted across the Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, while significant icing was possible from a separate arctic blast hitting the Pacific Northwest.

By late Thursday, most of the Lower 48 states, from Washington state to Florida, were under wind-chill alerts, blizzard warnings or other winter weather advisories affecting more than 200 million people, about 60% of the U.S. population, the National Weather Service (NWS) reported.

The NWS map of existing or impending wintry hazards, stretching from border to border and coast to coast, “depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever,” the agency said.

The bomb cyclone could unleash snowfalls of a half inch (1.25 cm) per hour driven by gale-force winds, cutting visibility to near zero, the weather service said.

Combined with the arctic cold, wind-chill factors as low as 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 40 Celsius) were forecast in the High Plains, the northern Rockies and the Great Basin, the NWS said. Exposure to such conditions without adequate protection can cause frostbite within minutes.

Power outages were expected from high winds, heavy snow and ice, as well as the strain of higher-than-usual energy demands.

One of the greatest immediate impacts, even before the storm fully took shape, was the upending of commercial air traffic during the busy holiday travel period.

More than 5,000 U.S. flights scheduled for Thursday and Friday were canceled, with two major airports in Chicago accounting for nearly 1,300 of the cancellations, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.

One would-be holiday traveler, Brandon Mattis, 24, said Thursday his flight from New York City to Atlanta was canceled due to the coming storm, leaving him “flustered” at LaGuardia Airport in Queens.

Mattis said he searched for alternate routes and was even considering a 21-hour bus ride to Atlanta. “Anything we can do just to get there, we’re going to do,” he told Reuters.

The American Automobile Association had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to travel 50 miles (80 km) or more from home between Dec. 23 and Jan. 2, up 3.6 million travelers over last year and closing in on pre-pandemic numbers.

But that number was likely to be diminished by air and road travel complicated by treacherous weather leading into the weekend.

Even U.S. President Biden urged Americans to think twice about venturing out after Thursday, calling the gathering storm “dangerous and threatening.”

“This is not like a snow day, when you were a kid, this is serious stuff,” he said in comments at the White House on Thursday.

The extreme cold also posed a particular hazard to livestock in ranching-intensive regions of the country. Tyson Foods Inc (TSN.N), the nation’s leading meat producer by sales, said it had scaled back operations to protect employees and animals.

The weather service said relief from the deep freeze was in sight for the northern Rockies and High Plains, where the arctic blast first materialized on Thursday. Temperatures in parts of those regions could rebound by 40 to 60 degrees over the weekend as the cold air mass creeps farther east.

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Fiji’s Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA) said on Friday that it would form a coalition with two other parties, a move that will dislodge current Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama.

“We believe we have agreed on a way forward that benefits this country,” party leader Viliame Gavoka said in a news conference after an internal party vote.

The Pacific island nation’s military was called in on Thursday to help police maintain law and order. read more

To an outsider, it may seem an unlikely time for Ukraine to double down on the battle against corruption, as missiles rain down on cities and citizens fight for their lives.

Nonetheless, anti-graft agencies have revived a years-old investigation into an official scheme they say led to electricity customers overpaying by more than $1 billion, plus a case that stalled in 2020 into the alleged theft of over $350 million in assets and funds from a state-controlled oil company.

They’ve launched new actions too, including this month the arrest in absentia of an ex-state bank boss over his suspected role in the embezzlement of $5 million. He denies wrongdoing.

“Every week, there are one or two big developments plus seven or eight smaller ones that are still important,” said legal expert Vadym Valko, who monitors the work of anti-corruption authorities in Ukraine, which is fighting to rid itself of oligarchs and strengthen its vulnerable institutions.

The activity reflects a parallel war Kyiv is waging against high-level graft, according to Reuters interviews with half a dozen Ukrainian anti-corruption monitors and officials. The drive is deemed urgent enough for the government to devote resources to, even during Russia’s invasion.

Indeed, anti-corruption agencies flag their work almost daily in a flurry of statements and social media posts. In November alone, they reported having launched investigations into 44 new criminal cases, issued 17 notices of suspicion to people being investigated and sent six indictments to court.

In 2022, prosecutors have filed at least 109 indictments in 42 cases, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) told Reuters, adding that 25 convictions had been handed down.

The work can’t wait, according to the people interviewed, because curbing endemic corruption is key to reassuring Western partners preparing to send tens of billions of dollars of aid that will be needed to rebuild the country in coming years.

It would also be crucial, they say, to winning a status that guarantees Ukraine’s long-term security from any future aggression: membership of the European Union, which says getting on top of graft is a must for candidacy talks to begin.

“It’s extraordinarily important right now for Ukraine to demonstrate itself as a predictable partner,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, first deputy head of the parliamentary committee on anti-corruption policy, referring to Western donors.

“In reality there are two wars going on in Ukraine at once: an open one with Russia, and another with the post-Soviet corrupt past that’s happening within.”

The anti-corruption drive is backed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who vowed this month that Ukraine would fight both high-level corruption and Russia’s invasion at the same time.

“The story of reform continues,” the actor turned wartime leader, who was elected in 2019 on pledges to clean up Ukraine, said in his nightly address.

“It continues even during this kind of war.”

Anti-corruption efforts, which continued after the Feb. 24 invasion, were stepped up over the summer under a new director of SAPO, according to the experts and officials.

Oleksandr Klymenko took the position in July after Zelenskiy publicly demanded that his appointment be confirmed because the committee that had selected him more than half a year earlier still hadn’t formally signed off on the move.

“Without a full-fledged head of such an institution, its full-fledged functioning is impossible,” Zelenskiy said at the time.

Klymenko has provided the administrative muscle to kickstart some cases that had been gathering dust, while also advancing new ones, the people said.

For example, SAPO announced in late September that Klymenko had reopened the case over the scheme that allegedly overcharged electricity consumers. It had been repeatedly opened and closed for two years due to procedural errors and shortcomings, SAPO prosecutors said at the time of the hold-ups.

In announcing its revival, Klymenko’s office said the case files hadn’t been reviewed by prosecutors thoroughly enough and assigned a new team to the investigation, which involves at least 15 suspects, mostly current and former officials.

In late October, anti-corruption officials announced they had issued new notices of suspicion in the case, when suspects are informed they are being investigated.

In the alleged plot to take more than $350 million from the oil company, prosecutors in early September issued eight people with notices of suspicion that had been awaiting approval from SAPO since early 2020.

New anti-corruption cases include a probe launched in October into a former tax chief suspected of taking more than $20 million in kickbacks. Reuters was unable to contact the ex-official for comment.

A SAPO spokesperson said Klymenko was not prepared to comment on his work. The agency did not comment on the individual cases and the recent flurry of activity, but said it was currently working on 693 cases with its sister agency, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

PROSECUTORS: $2,500 A MONTH

The United States, which is supplying Ukraine with billions of dollars of weaponry to fight Russia, supports Kyiv’s concurrent drive to root out corruption.

“We are actively engaged with the government of Ukraine to ensure accountability, even amidst the challenging conflict environment,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson said.

There is the prospect of more money on the way as donors weigh the scale of their contributions to Ukraine’s anticipated reconstruction, a project largely dependent on foreign aid.

Central Bank Governor Andriy Pyshnyi said this month he expected 18 billion euros ($19 billion) from the EU and $10 billion from Washington next year in immediate budgetary aid alone.

Beating graft won’t be easy in a country where experts say much of it is rooted in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Despite the progress of recent years, Ukraine still ranks 122 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index.

Andrii Borovyk, executive director of Transparency’s Ukraine office, welcomed the current anti-corruption drive but said the true measures of success would be the number of convictions and the state’s success in recovering proceeds from corruption as well as its enforcement of asset declarations.

“We’ll need to see what the final output will be,” he told Reuters.

The stakes have never been higher since Kyiv embarked on an anti-graft campaign after the 2014 “Maidan” revolution cemented Ukraine’s pro-European course.

Both SAPO and NABU were established in 2015. SAPO oversees investigations launched by NABU and sends them to the anti-corruption court, which began its work in 2019.

Collectively, they comprise the core of Ukraine’s anti-graft law enforcement infrastructure, a collection of professional outfits where employees are comparatively well-paid.

SAPO prosecutors, for instance, earn at least $2,500 per month, or six times more than the Ukrainian monthly average. Business is brisk; the agency is currently in the process of hiring eight new prosecutors.

NABU is also searching for a new director, which the EU has said is a key position to fill for Ukraine’s anti-graft efforts.

Even amid the turmoil of war, the agencies are now more productive than in previous years, according to Olena Shcherban, deputy executive director of the Anticorruption Action Centre in Kyiv, a nonprofit think-tank partly funded by Western nations that campaigns for reforms and tracks Ukraine’s progress.

“NABU and SAPO are working more effectively now than in the last couple of years combined,” she said.

Anti-corruption authorities in Kyiv are aware that the West is watching.

Kateryna Butko, a civic activist serving on the SAPO selection committee, acknowledged that Ukraine’s fight against graft is often plodding. She added that foreign donors had a clear incentive to ensure it succeeds by continuing to provide strong policy guidance.

“The work of our anti-corruption institutions is a guarantee that Western money won’t be stolen,” she said.

Ordinary Ukrainians will also be watching, as Kyiv’s recent battlefield victories have buoyed hopes that the country can prevail in the war and successfully rebuild.

An October survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found at least 88% of the country believes Ukraine will be a prosperous EU member within 10 years.

Kyiv resident Kateryna, who was visiting the capital’s Christmas tree with a friend, said that securing a military victory was the top priority for Ukraine.

But the 27-year-old, who didn’t give her surname, said it was also important to establish a fair society to live in, instilled with a clear sense that no-one was above the law.

“We don’t have that kind of understanding here yet.”

Ukraine’s Protection Forces have repelled attacks by Russian invaders near 19 settlements in these kinds of locations as Sumy, Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk about the previous working day.

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