French firm TotalEnergies has signed a contract to begin drilling and exploring for gas this year in waters off crisis-hit Lebanon, the company said in a statement.

"TotalEnergies in agreement with its partners Eni and QatarEnergy has signed a firm contract with Transocean to hire the drilling rig that will drill an exploration well on Block 9 offshore Lebanon, as soon as possible in 2023," the group said.

Europe's painful inflation has inched higher, extending the squeeze on households and keeping pressure on the European Central Bank to unleash what could be another large interest rate increase.

Consumer prices in the 20 countries using the euro currency jumped 7% in April from a year earlier, just up from the annual rate of 6.9% in March, the European Union statistics agency Eurostat said Tuesday.

Pfizer topped Wall Street expectations Tuesday even as sales of its top-selling COVID-19 vaccine crumbled in the first quarter.

Revenue from Pfizer's Comirnaty vaccine fell 77% to $3 billion in the first three months of the year, compared with more than $13 billion in the same stretch last year.

First Republic Bank has become the second large regional bank with assets over $200 billion to fail in just a few weeks. Like Silicon Valley Bank, which was seized by the government on March 10, First Republic catered to a wealthy clientele, which helped it grow deposits rapidly but may have also contributed to its undoing. The bank's business model left it susceptible to a sudden rise in interest rates.

Since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank — and Signature Bank the same weekend — investors have wondered who's next. First Republic quickly rose to the top of that list, but investors and analysts worried about banks such as Comerica and KeyCorp, which also had large numbers of accounts with deposits above the federally-insured level of $250,000.

European investigators probing Lebanese central bank chief Riad Salameh's wealth will question officials from two international firms previously tasked with auditing the central bank's accounts, a judicial official said.

In rural Arizona's La Paz County, on the state's rugged border with California, the decision by a Saudi-owned dairy company to grow alfalfa in the American Southwest for livestock in the Gulf kingdom first raised eyebrows nearly a decade ago. Now, worsening drought has focused new attention on the company and whether Arizona should be doing more to protect its groundwater resources.

Amid a broader investigation by the state attorney general, Arizona last week rescinded a pair of permits that would have allowed Fondomonte Arizona, a subsidiary of Almarai Co., to drill more than 1,000 feet (305 meters) into the water table to pump up to 3,000 gallons (11 kiloliters) of water per minute to irrigate its forage crops.

Foreign companies are under growing pressure in China from anti-corruption, security and other investigations as President Xi Jinping's government tightens control over business, clashing with efforts to lure back investors after the pandemic.

This week, Bain & Co. said police questioned staff in its Shanghai office. The consulting company gave no details of what investigators were looking for. Last month, the corporate due diligence firm Mintz Group said its Beijing office was raided by police who detained five employees. Also last month, an employee of a Japanese drug maker was detained on spying charges and the government announced a security review of memory chip maker Micron Inc.

The European economy scraped out meager growth of 0.1% in the first three months of the year, barely gaining momentum after dodging a winter recession as challenges persist from inflation that corrodes people's willingness to spend.

Friday's less-than-stellar figure follows disappointing growth estimates from the U.S. a day earlier that kept alive fears of a looming recession in the world's largest economy.

The Federal Reserve is scheduled Friday to release a highly-anticipated review of its supervision of Silicon Valley Bank, the go-to bank for venture capital firms and technology start-ups that failed spectacularly in March, setting off a crisis of confidence for the banking industry.

The review, due to be released at 11 a.m. eastern, is expected to examine how regulators may have missed warning signs in Silicon Valley Bank's business and whether they could have been addressed before the bank failed. Further, the report is expected to look at what regulators could do better to prevent a similar bank failure in the future.

A restaurant on the outskirts of Nairobi skimps on the size of its chapatis — a flaky, chewy Kenyan flatbread — to save on cooking oil. Cash-strapped Pakistanis reluctantly go vegetarian, dropping beef and chicken from their diets because they can no longer afford meat. In Hungary, a cafe pulls burgers and fries off the menu, trying to dodge the high cost of oil and beef.

Around the world, food prices are persistently, painfully high. Puzzlingly, too. On global markets, the prices of grains, vegetable oil, dairy and other agricultural commodities have fallen steadily from record highs. But the relief hasn't made it to the real world of shopkeepers, street vendors and families trying to make ends meet.