Aug 10 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk sold $6.9 billion worth of shares in the electric vehicle maker, saying the funds could be used to finance a potential Twitter deal if he loses a legal battle with the social media platform.

"In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close *and* some equity partners don't come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock," he said in a tweet late on Tuesday.

Shares of the microblogging site rose 3.5% to $44.35 in early trading, but were still significantly below Musk's offer price of $54.20 per share. Tesla shares were up nearly 4% at $882.

LONDON, Aug 10 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Masayoshi Son is thinking the unthinkable at SoftBank Group (9984.T). His $63 billion technology and telecom empire will slash its stake in Alibaba (9988.HK) to 15% from 24%. The long-overdue shrinkage offers a blueprint for what to do next: break up the conglomerate.

This year’s tech selloff has punished the Japanese holding company, pushing it to a $23 billion net loss last quarter. Son’s new watchword is discipline: His Vision Funds, effectively giant venture-capital vehicles, invested just $600 million in the three-month stretch ending in June, compared with some $21 billion a year earlier.

The same focus on cash preservation seems to have informed the decision unveiled on Wednesday to cut the Alibaba holding, which has a totemic significance at SoftBank as one of the world’s most lucrative tech investments. Through derivatives deals with banks, Son could have retained the Alibaba stake by settling so-called prepaid...

Aug 9 (Reuters) - Facebook-parent Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) said on Tuesday it had raised $10 billion in its first-ever bond offering, as it looks to fund share buybacks and investments to revamp its business.

The offering would help Meta, the only one among big technology companies without debt on its books, to build a more traditional balance sheet and fund some expensive initiatives, such as its metaverse virtual reality. read more

Aug 10 (Reuters) - U.S. consumer prices were unchanged in July due to a sharp drop in the cost of gasoline, delivering the first notable sign of relief for weary Americans who have watched inflation climb over the past two years.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) was flat last month after advancing 1.3% in June, the Labor Department said on Wednesday in a closely watched report that nevertheless showed underlying inflation pressures remain elevated as the Federal Reserve mulls whether to embrace another super-sized interest rate hike in September. read more

The reading was the largest month-on-month deceleration of price increases since 1973 and followed on the heels of a roughly 20% drop in the cost of gasoline since mid-June. Prices at the pump spiked in the first half of this year due to the war in Ukraine, hitting a record-high average of more than $5 per gallon on June 14, according to motorist advocacy group AAA. read more

LONDON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - An investment manager of a collapsed 100-million-pound ($121 million) Cayman Islands-based legal financing fund was on Wednesday convicted by a London jury of fraudulent trading, fraud by abuse of position and money laundering.

Timothy Schools, a 61-year-old former lawyer who founded Axiom Legal Financing Fund in 2009 to provide loans to law firms pursuing no-win-no fee lawsuits, siphoned off nearly 20 million pounds of investor money to buy luxury properties and cars, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said in a statement.

His lawyer, David Hanman of Cobleys Solicitors, said he would not be commenting ahead of his sentencing on Thursday.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - San Francisco-based blockchain payments company Ripple Labs Inc, which is embroiled in a high-profile battle with the U.S. securities regulator, is interested in potentially purchasing assets of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network, according to a company spokesperson.

"We are interested in learning about Celsius and its assets, and whether any could be relevant to our business,” the spokesperson said, declining to say if Ripple was interested in acquiring Celsius outright.

Ripple has continued to grow through the crypto market turmoil and "is actively looking for M&A opportunities to strategically scale the company," the spokesperson said.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - TUI (TUIGn.DE), one of the world's largest tour operators, took a 75 million euros ($77 million) hit in the third quarter from flight disruption across Europe, pushing it to a loss on Wednesday.

Incoming Chief Executive Sebastian Ebel said there would be significant but lower costs related to air disruption in the fourth quarter, with air traffic normalising in recent days.

"The whole system is still very fragile, and we have days with hardly any disruptions, and we have weeks and days with a lot of disruptions," Ebel, who is replacing long-time chief Friedrich Joussen in October, told journalists.

HONG KONG, Aug 10 (Reuters) - China's Lenovo Group (0992.HK) recorded its smallest revenue growth in nine quarters as the world's biggest PC maker saw sales of the devices ease after a pandemic-fuelled boom, and it was also hit by COVID-19 lockdowns at home.

The results vindicate Lenovo's strategy of emphasising development of its non-personal computer (PC) businesses such as smartphones, servers and information technology services, which together now make up more than a third of its sales.

Lenovo's total revenue during the April-June quarter was $16.96 billion, up 0.2% from the same quarter a year ago though it was in line with an average Refinitiv estimate of $16.87 billion drawn from seven analysts. That was the smallest increase since the March 2020 quarter.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - Crown Estate Scotland opened on Wednesday the registration window for an offshore wind leasing process that aims to lower emissions from Britain's North Sea oil and gas production.

The public corporation's Innovation and Targeted Oil and Gas Decarbonisation (INTOG) seabed leasing round will allow developers to apply for seabed rights for innovative projects of 100 megawatts (MW) or less, as well as to provide low-carbon electricity to power oil and gas installations in the North Sea.

The maximum capacity of all the projects that can be awarded exclusivity to supply oil and gas installations is 5.7 gigawatts (GW) and 500 MW for innovative projects, Crown Estate Scotland said.

TOKYO, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Japan's Honda Motor Co (7267.T) raised the outlook for its full-year operating profit on Wednesday thanks to weaker yen, but warned against over-optimism as it saw the chips shortage continuing and was concerned about an economic slowdown.

The mixed view from Honda reflected sentiment held widely among Japanese carmakers that although demand is strong and recovery from COVID-19 is underway, they have yet to completely shrug off negative factors hindering operations.

Honda raised its operating profit forecast to 830 billion yen ($6.15 billion) from 810 billion for the year ending March 31.

LONDON, Aug 10 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Masayoshi Son is thinking the unthinkable at SoftBank Group (9984.T). His $63 billion technology and telecom empire will slash its stake in Alibaba (9988.HK) to 15% from 24%. The long-overdue shrinkage offers a blueprint for what to do next: break up the conglomerate.

This year’s tech selloff has punished the Japanese holding company, pushing it to a $23 billion net loss last quarter. Son’s new watchword is discipline: His Vision Funds, effectively giant venture-capital vehicles, invested just $600 million in the three-month stretch ending in June, compared with some $21 billion a year earlier.

The same focus on cash preservation seems to have informed the decision unveiled on Wednesday to cut the Alibaba holding, which has a totemic significance at SoftBank as one of the world’s most lucrative tech investments. Through derivatives deals with banks, Son could have retained the Alibaba stake by settling so-called prepaid...

TOKYO, Aug 10 (Reuters) - SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T) said on Wednesday it would book a gain of $34.1 billion by cutting its stake in Alibaba Group Holding (9988.HK), as the investment behemoth looks to shore up its cash reserve to weather the market downturn.

The Japanese company will reduce its stake in Alibaba to 14.6% from 23.7% by settling prepaid forward contracts. Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares were down 1.3% in early trade.

SoftBank booked a $50 billion loss at its Vision Fund investment arm in the first half of the year as its tech bets soured, with Chief Executive Masayoshi Son on Monday pledging to further reduce investment activity and cut costs.

KAMPALA, August 10 (Reuters) - Ugandan IT student Andrew Njuki spent years hunched over English-language textbooks, often grappling with material that would have been easier to grasp in his mother tongue Luganda.

As of May, the 27-year-old has been able to copy-paste his online teaching materials into Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google translation service and read them directly in Uganda's official language Luganda, spoken by millions across the east African country but not taught in schools.

"To understand something better you need to first understand it in your mother tongue," said Njuki, who also finds the service handy for surfing the internet and social media.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - CAE Inc (CAE.TO) shares fell as much as 14% on Wednesday after the 737 MAX simulator maker's quarterly profit missed market expectations on charges in its defense business.

Labor shortage and supply-chain pressures also forced the company to cut its annual outlook for adjusted operating income growth to mid-20% from mid-30%.

U.S. aerospace companies including Boeing Co (BA.N) have struggled with their defense businesses, partly due to fixed-price contracts, even as their commercial aviation business benefited from a rebound in travel demand.

FRANKFURT, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Germany's Commerzbank (CBKG.DE)has resolved a brief network problem that resulted in a temporary shutdown of its online and mobile banking services, a spokesperson said on Wednesday.

Germany's No. 2 bank has had such problems in the past, with one in 2019 causing disruptions for eight hours.

Earlier on Wednesday, Commerzbank announced the outage on its Twitter feed, saying it was "working at full speed" for a solution.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk sold $6.9 billion worth of shares in the electric vehicle maker, saying the funds could be used to finance a potential Twitter deal if he loses a legal battle with the social media platform.

"In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close *and* some equity partners don't come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock," he said in a tweet late on Tuesday.

Shares of the microblogging site rose 3.5% to $44.35 in early trading, but were still significantly below Musk's offer price of $54.20 per share. Tesla shares were up nearly 4% at $882.

PANIPAT, India, Aug 10 (Reuters) - India opened its first factory to produce ethanol from rice straw or stubble on Wednesday as part of measures to reduce its reliance on oil imports and meet its net zero carbon goal.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the project will help cut pollution in India's capital New Delhi, which has been blanketed by smog from stubble burning in recent winters, as well as in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab.

India, one of the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has set a 2070 goal for net zero carbon emissions and has expedited steps to switch to cleaner energy to cut projected emission by a billion tonnes by 2030.

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK, Aug 10 (Reuters) - For the first time, investors seeking to pour cash into U.S. clean energy projects can count on at least a decade of generous federal subsidies, offering them long-sought confidence in the staying power of the world’s third biggest renewables market.

Tax credits for wind and solar projects have underpinned explosive growth in U.S. installations over the last decade. But they have often had short time horizons, leaving project developers scrambling to meet looming deadlines and spooking risk-averse investors.

The long-term tax credit commitments for wind and solar, wrapped up in a $430 billion bill passed by the U.S. Senate on Sunday, were joined by new credits for energy storage, biogas and hydrogen. Developers of wind and solar projects will also be able to get more support if they use U.S.-made equipment or build their projects in poorer areas. read more

LONDON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - An investment manager of a collapsed 100-million-pound ($121 million) Cayman Islands-based legal financing fund was on Wednesday convicted by a London jury of fraudulent trading, fraud by abuse of position and money laundering.

Timothy Schools, a 61-year-old former lawyer who founded Axiom Legal Financing Fund in 2009 to provide loans to law firms pursuing no-win-no fee lawsuits, siphoned off nearly 20 million pounds of investor money to buy luxury properties and cars, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said in a statement.

His lawyer, David Hanman of Cobleys Solicitors, said he would not be commenting ahead of his sentencing on Thursday.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - TUI (TUIGn.DE), one of the world's largest tour operators, took a 75 million euros ($77 million) hit in the third quarter from flight disruption across Europe, pushing it to a loss on Wednesday.

Incoming Chief Executive Sebastian Ebel said there would be significant but lower costs related to air disruption in the fourth quarter, with air traffic normalising in recent days.

"The whole system is still very fragile, and we have days with hardly any disruptions, and we have weeks and days with a lot of disruptions," Ebel, who is replacing long-time chief Friedrich Joussen in October, told journalists.

Aug 10 (Reuters) - San Francisco-based blockchain payments company Ripple Labs Inc is interested in potentially purchasing assets of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network, according to a company spokesperson.

"We are interested in learning about Celsius and its assets, and whether any could be relevant to our business,” the spokesperson said, declining to say if Ripple was interested in acquiring Celsius outright.

"Ripple has continued to grow exponentially" through the recent crypto market turmoil and "is actively looking for M&A opportunities to strategically scale the company," the spokesperson said.

TOKYO, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Japan's Honda Motor Co (7267.T) raised the outlook for its full-year operating profit on Wednesday thanks to weaker yen, but warned against over-optimism as it saw the chips shortage continuing and was concerned about an economic slowdown.

The mixed view from Honda reflected sentiment held widely among Japanese carmakers that although demand is strong and recovery from COVID-19 is underway, they have yet to completely shrug off negative factors hindering operations.

Honda raised its operating profit forecast to 830 billion yen ($6.15 billion) from 810 billion for the year ending March 31.