A fire in a cable connecting the British and French power systems has sent already overheated British electricity rates soaring Wednesday.

National Grid, the British electric power company, said the fire occurred at a facility in Sellindge, near the English Channel, and that the cable would be out of service for about a month.

The cause of the fire was said to be under investigation.

The Kent Fire and Rescue Service said Wednesday morning it was fighting the blaze with as many as 12 fire engines and making “progress,” though firefighters were expected to remain on the scene for hours.

News of the outage jolted the markets. A measure of wholesale electricity, British day-ahead power prices, reached as high as 481.88 pounds per megawatt-hour, according to Epex Spot, a trading platform. That level is several times what is normal, though prices have been soaring in recent days.

A fire in a cable connecting the British and French power systems has sent already overheated British electricity rates soaring Wednesday.

National Grid, the British electric power company, said the fire occurred at a facility in Sellindge, near the English Channel, and that the cable would be out of service for about a month.

The cause of the fire was said to be under investigation.

The Kent Fire and Rescue Service said Wednesday morning it was fighting the blaze with as many as 12 fire engines and making “progress,” though firefighters were expected to remain on the scene for hours.

News of the outage jolted the markets. A measure of wholesale electricity, British day-ahead power prices, reached as high as 481.88 pounds per megawatt-hour, according to Epex Spot, a trading platform. That level is several times what is normal, though prices have been soaring in recent days.

A report released on Tuesday that examined poverty in the United States has invited comparisons of the effectiveness of government stimulus in response to the two most recent economic emergencies: the 2009 financial crisis and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the pandemic, the share of people living in poverty in the United States fell to a record low last year — a finding that economists and policymakers across the political spectrum have hailed as a sign that the emergency stimulus program worked.

Robert Reich, the Berkeley economics professor who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, tweeted that the data proved government aid was effective in fighting poverty. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, head of the conservative American Action Forum and a former adviser to Senator John McCain, told the DealBook newsletter that the recent stimulus was “the best policy response to a recession the U.S. has ever seen.”

But there is still room for interpretation....

When the next SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Kennedy Space Center this week, it’ll be a space mission unlike any that has come before.

There will be four people inside the capsule on top of the rocket, just like the last two SpaceX missions that took NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. But this time, none of the four passengers work for NASA or any other space agency.

This mission, called Inspiration4, is the brainchild of Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4, a company that provides payment processes services. Three other people — none of whom Mr. Isaacman knew before he recruited them for the launch — will join him on a trip that will circle Earth for three days before splashing down off the coast of Florida.

We are excited to announce the first in a series of DealBook Dialogue conference calls, which will feature industry experts taking your questions about the big issues of the day. Join us on Tuesday, Oct. 5, for a deep dive into cryptocurrency’s impact on the environment. Are the opportunities worth the costs? For more information and to R.S.V.P., free of charge, click here.

Living on the South Carolina coast means living under the threat of dangerous weather during storm season. But the added peril of the pandemic made Ann Freeman nervous.

“What do I do if there’s an evacuation or there’s a storm and you have all this coronavirus and problems with hotels?” Ms. Freeman said. “So I said, ‘Maybe now is the time.’”

That’s why Ms. Freeman spent $12,400 last year to install a Generac backup generator at her home on Johns Island, a sea island near the Charleston peninsula. The wait — about three months — seemed long.

But she was lucky: The wait is twice as long now.

Demand for backup generators has soared over the last year, as housebound Americans focused on preparing their homes for the worst, just as a surge of extreme weather ensured many experienced it.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A key whistle-blower against Theranos, the blood testing start-up that collapsed under scandal in 2018, testified on Tuesday in the fraud trial of the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

The whistle-blower, Erika Cheung, worked as a lab assistant at Theranos for six months in 2013 and 2014 before reporting lab testing problems at the company to federal agents at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2015. Her first day of testimony revealed to a jury what those following the Theranos saga most likely already knew: The company’s celebrated blood testing technology did not work.

In a crowded courtroom, Ms. Cheung said she had turned down other job offers out of college to join Theranos because she was dazzled by Ms. Holmes’s charisma and inspired by her success as a woman in technology. Ms. Holmes said Theranos’s machines, called Edison, would be able to quickly and cheaply discern whether people had a variety of health ailments using...

When readers rushed to buy books about race and racism last year, publishers took notice. Now some of the titles they signed are entering the world, with authors, agents and editors anxious to see how they do.

Living on the South Carolina coast means living under the threat of dangerous weather during storm season. But the added peril of the pandemic made Ann Freeman nervous.

“What do I do if there’s an evacuation or there’s a storm and you have all this coronavirus and problems with hotels?” Ms. Freeman said. “So I said, ‘Maybe now is the time.’”

That’s why Ms. Freeman spent $12,400 last year to install a Generac backup generator at her home on Johns Island, a sea island near the Charleston peninsula. The wait — about three months — seemed long.

But she was lucky: The wait is twice as long now.

Demand for backup generators has soared over the last year, as housebound Americans focused on preparing their homes for the worst, just as a surge of extreme weather ensured many experienced it.

One is a 29-year-old physician assistant living in Memphis, a cancer survivor with metal rods in her left leg to replace bones destroyed by a tumor.

Another is a 51-year-old community college professor from Phoenix who fell just short of achieving her dream of becoming a NASA astronaut.

The third is a data engineer living in western Washington who was once a counselor at a camp that offered kids a taste of what it’s like to be an astronaut.

The fourth, 38, is a high school dropout who became a billionaire founder of a payments processing company. He is the one that is paying for a trip into space the likes of which have never been seen before, where no one aboard is a professional astronaut.

The share of people living in poverty in the United States fell to a record low last year as an enormous government relief effort helped offset the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.

In the latest and most conclusive evidence that poverty fell because of the aid, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday that 9.1 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line last year, down from 11.8 percent in 2019. That figure — the lowest since records began in 1967, according to calculations from researchers at Columbia University — is based on a measure that accounts for the impact of government programs. The official measure of poverty, which leaves out some major aid programs, rose to 11.4 percent of the population.

The new data will almost surely feed into a debate in Washington about efforts by President Biden and congressional leaders to enact a more lasting expansion of the safety net that would extend well beyond the pandemic. Democrats’ $3.5...

One is a 29-year-old physician assistant living in Memphis, a cancer survivor with metal rods in her left leg to replace bones destroyed by a tumor.

Another is a 51-year-old community college professor from Phoenix who fell just short of achieving her dream of becoming a NASA astronaut.

The third is a data engineer living in western Washington who was once a counselor at a camp that offered kids a taste of what it’s like to be an astronaut.

The fourth, 38, is a high school dropout who became a billionaire founder of a payments processing company. He is the one that is paying for a trip into space the likes of which have never been seen before, where no one aboard is a professional astronaut.

One is a 29-year-old physician assistant living in Memphis, a cancer survivor with metal rods in her left leg to replace bones destroyed by a tumor.

Another is a 51-year-old community college professor from Phoenix who fell just short of achieving her dream of becoming a NASA astronaut.

The third is a data engineer living in western Washington who was once a counselor at a camp that offered kids a taste of what it’s like to be an astronaut.

The fourth, 38, is a high school dropout who became a billionaire founder of a payments processing company. He is the one that is paying for a trip into space the likes of which have never been seen before, where no one aboard is a professional astronaut.

WASHINGTON — The prospect of the largest overhaul to the global tax system in a century took a step forward this week as top Democrats introduced a plan to rewrite tax rules for multinational companies in a way that would allow the United States to join the rest of the world in an effort to crack down on tax havens.

Passing such legislation will be critical for the Biden administration, which is leading global negotiations aimed at limiting the ability of companies to minimize their tax bills by setting up offices in low-tax jurisdictions. The White House says this corporate strategy deprives economies of much-needed revenue.

Finance ministers from around the world have been working for months to complete a plan to end what they describe as a race to the bottom on corporate taxation before an October deadline. More than 130 countries have agreed to adopt a global minimum tax of at least 15 percent and are discussing a change in how taxing rights are allocated so...

The share of people living in poverty in the United States fell to a record low last year as an enormous government relief effort helped offset the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.

In the latest and most conclusive evidence that poverty fell because of the aid, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday that 9.1 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line last year, down from 11.8 percent in 2019. That figure — the lowest since records began in 1967, according to calculations from researchers at Columbia University — is based on a measure that accounts for the impact of government programs. The official measure of poverty, which leaves out some major aid programs, rose to 11.4 percent of the population.

The new data will almost surely feed into a debate in Washington about efforts by President Biden and congressional leaders to enact a more lasting expansion of the safety net that would extend well beyond the pandemic. Democrats’ $3.5...

The clouds swirled, the wind roared and the waves beat at the hull of the schooner Apollonia, but the ship stayed its course down the Hudson River in New York. Captained by Sam Merrett, it was carrying ayurvedic condiments from Catskill; spelt flour, hemp salves and malted barley from Hudson; wool yarn from Ghent; and other local goods for the hundred-mile trip south to New York City.

“It’s a case of start-up syndrome, the issue of saying yes to everything and seeing what sticks,” Mr. Merrett, 38, said over the phone from somewhere near Peekskill, the waning winds of Tropical Storm Henri roaring in the background. “In this case, it was delivering 3,600 pounds of malted barley to a port in Poughkeepsie in pouring rain.”

In the age of flight shaming, car shaming and even meat shaming, conscientious consumers with disposable incomes are growing ever more aware of their carbon footprints and interested in buying local. Producers are experimenting with cleaner, greener...

A recent run-up in consumer prices cooled slightly in August, signaling that although inflation is higher than normal, the White House and Federal Reserve may be beginning to see the slowdown in price gains they have been hoping for.

Policymakers have consistently argued that a surprisingly strong burst of inflation this year has been tied to pandemic-related quirks and should prove temporary, and most economists agree that prices will climb more slowly as businesses adjust and supply chains return to normal. The major question hanging over the economy’s future has been how much and how quickly the jump will fade.

Tuesday’s data suggested that a surge in Delta-variant coronavirus cases is weighing on airfares and hotel rates, but it also showed that price increases for key products — like cars — are beginning to moderate, helping to cool off overall inflation. The Consumer Price Index rose 5.3 percent in August from the prior year, data released by the Labor...

The plan sounded simple enough.

The federal government has long owned more real estate than it knows what to do with — buildings that sit empty and sites that are underdeveloped — but it must jump through hoops before it can sell its holdings. So surplus properties languish while taxpayers foot the bill for maintenance.

The solution, springing from legislation passed in 2016, was an independent agency that would quickly identify underused properties and expedite their disposal.

But nothing has been simple about the Public Buildings Reform Board, as the little-known agency is called.

It took three years for the five existing board members to be sworn in, and two empty seats remain, including that of the chairman. The Government Accountability Office reported that the board did not adequately document how it went about selecting properties for sale. The board was sued when it sought to sell a Seattle building that is a repository of important tribal...

One is a 29-year-old physician assistant living in Memphis, a cancer survivor with metal rods in her left leg to replace bones destroyed by a tumor.

Another is a 51-year-old community college professor from Phoenix who fell just short of achieving her dream of becoming a NASA astronaut.

The third is a data engineer living in western Washington who was once a counselor at a camp that offered kids a taste of what it’s like to be an astronaut.

The fourth, 38, is a high school dropout who became a billionaire founder of a payments processing company. He is the one that is paying for a trip into space the likes of which have never been seen before, where no one aboard is a professional astronaut.

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection of past columns.

We expect a lot from rich, smart and powerful technology companies, but they aren’t immune to mismanagement. And when genius fails, it can be jarring to those companies’ employees and destructive to the people left in the wake of the mistakes.

A Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) yesterday detailed the ways that Facebook essentially lets influential people flout the company’s rules, which apply to everyone else. In one example cited in the article, Facebook initially allowed the soccer star Neymar to post nude photos of a woman without her permission, despite its rules against such behavior.

It has been clear for some time that Facebook has given preferential treatment to some high-profile people, including Donald Trump. What The Journal’s reporting shows is that Facebook’s use of kid gloves for V.I.P.s is a systemic practice that affected millions of people,...

It is a story that now happens just about every September: Apple introduced new iPhones that have slightly bigger screens, faster speeds and better cameras — but no new major advances.

In a prerecorded infomercial, Apple executives framed the improvements in the new iPhone 13 as significant innovations, but they result in a device that looks and performs much like the iPhones that Apple touted last year.

Apple said the new iPhones have a brighter screen, longer battery life and more powerful cameras and computer processors. Having already pushed the screen nearly to the edge of the device, Apple slightly increased its size by reducing the small notch at the top of the screen. Apple kept the same flat-edge design of the phone that it has used in other recent models.

Apple is hoping that by adding new features and making slight design improvements, customers will keep shelling out more money. It is a strategy that has worked for a long time. The iPhone, now in...

The share of people living in poverty in the United States fell to a record low last year as an enormous government relief effort helped offset the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.

In the latest and most conclusive evidence that poverty fell because of government aid, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday that 9.1 percent of Americans were poor last year, down from 11.8 percent in 2019. That figure — the lowest since records began in 1967, according to calculations from researchers at Columbia University — is based on a measure that accounts for the impact of government programs. The government’s official measure of poverty, which leaves out some major aid programs, rose to 11.4 percent.

The new data will almost surely feed into a debate in Washington about efforts by President Biden and congressional leaders to enact a more lasting expansion of the safety net. Democrats’ $3.5 trillion plan, which is still taking shape, could include paid...

The plan sounded simple enough.

The federal government has long owned more real estate than it knows what to do with — buildings that sit empty and sites that are underdeveloped — but it must jump through hoops before it can sell its holdings. So surplus properties languish while taxpayers foot the bill for maintenance.

The solution, springing from legislation passed in 2016, was an independent agency that would quickly identify underused properties and expedite their disposal.

But nothing has been simple about the Public Buildings Reform Board, as the little-known agency is called.

It took three years for the five existing board members to be sworn in, and two empty seats remain, including that of the chairman. The Government Accountability Office reported that the board did not adequately document how it went about selecting properties for sale. The board was sued when it sought to sell a Seattle building that is a repository of important tribal...