Day: September 28, 2025

Moscow – Russia launched a significant overnight attack on Ukraine, targeting military installations, which resulted in four civilian fatalities, including a 12-year-old girl, along with several others injured, reports 24brussels.

The Russian Ministry of Defence confirmed that the offensive involved “hundreds” of drones and missiles and primarily hit Kyiv and surrounding regions including Zaporizhzhia, Khmelnytskyi, Sumy, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, and Odesa. This coordinated strike has left at least ten individuals wounded as well.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the assault, describing it as a “vile” act. He noted that approximately 500 drones and 40 missiles were utilized during the attack. “Russia launched another massive air attack on Ukrainian cities while people were sleeping,” stated Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, emphasizing the toll on residential areas and civilian safety.

Damage reports indicated that critical civilian infrastructure, including residential buildings and industrial sites such as a rubber factory, were heavily impacted. An air raid alert was issued in the Kyiv region in response to the ongoing threats.

How did Zelensky describe the scale of Russian strikes?

Zelensky detailed the severe impact of the attacks, noting that they specifically targeted urban areas. He remarked on the extensive damage inflicted upon civilian infrastructure during the bombing raids.

Why did Poland scramble fighter jets after Russian strikes?

The attack prompted immediate military responses from neighbouring Poland, which scrambled fighter jets early Sunday morning as part of defensive measures. This action was taken to secure Polish airspace in light of the threats posed by the strikes in western Ukraine. Poland’s military activated ground-based air defence systems to protect its citizens, particularly in regions bordering Ukraine.

This latest escalation underscores ongoing tensions in the region as Ukraine continues to defend its sovereignty against external aggression while seeking support from allies. Furthermore, the implications of such attacks on regional security and international relations remain significant.

• Racquel Oden has worked in global banking for over two decades.
• Some of the advice she gives family and friends is to focus on retirement as soon as possible.
• She also says to prioritize investments over student loan debt and CDs over regular savings accounts.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Racquel Oden, US head of wealth and private banking at HSBC. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve worked in global banking for HSBC, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Merril Lynch, and many more. Over the years, I’ve given my clients plenty of advice on saving, budgeting, investing, retirement, and financial planning.

When it comes to my family and friends, the most important financial advice I give them is to start putting away money as soon as possible.

You’re never too young to start saving or investing — and there are many things that even Generation Z could be doing now to help themselves reach their financial goals, whether that’s saving up for a down payment for a house, a dream trip abroad, a lavish wedding, or even an early retirement.

If you’re working, you should be focused on retirement and your personal savings

I know it sounds far away, but you should always be saving for retirement by paying into your 401(k).

Simultaneously, you should also be getting to the point where you have enough in your personal savings account to support your living expenses for the next six months in case you happen to lose your job for whatever reason. This money is what I call short-term cash on hand, what you can use to pay your basic needs — things like your apartment rent, car payments, grocery bills, etc.

You’re ready to invest once you have more than short-term cash on hand

I think for a lot of young investors, they’re unsure of when to start investing. We often think, “I need to have all this money to invest.”

I want to take that stigma away. Any amount of money will work better for you in money markets than in a savings account, which doesn’t provide much or any interest. Once you have more than short-term cash on hand, you can create another account in preparation for investing.

Create a financial plan with the help of a financial advisor

What’s great about sitting down with a financial advisor is that most banks do not initially charge for this service.

Making a plan is a point of entry into investing, and it’s a comfortable one because you get to sit down and ask yourself, “What do I want to achieve with my finances? Do I want to buy a home, plan a wedding, or take that next big trip?” With this plan, you can think beyond just retirement.

I encourage people to think of their lives in terms of different buckets — for example, saving for a house can be one bucket. Each of these buckets or larger financial goals has a different time horizon. Creating a larger financial plan can help you understand the timeframes for each goal better and remove some of the anxiety around investing.

Always seek out accurate financial resources and screen out the non-factual ones

We like watching TikTok and surfing Instagram, but do yourself a favor and ground yourself with the basics before you look through those places.

Reach out to traditional resources, like financial advisors at your bank. You can follow social influencers for some things, but not for something as crucial as your finances. Become comfortable with the traditional sources of this info, like banks — it doesn’t mean you ultimately have to pick them or choose their services.

You can shop around and find the right financial advisor for you.

Make your money work for you

Checking and savings accounts are the lowest interest-bearing accounts out there, right now. Short-term vehicles like CDs, or Certificate of Deposit, a type of savings account that earns a fixed interest rate, can be better options than a regular savings account.

CDs can be a great option, allowing you to make a short investment of, say, nine months or so and earn an interest of 4% in some cases. But you must remember these interest rates are always changing, so stay on top of them.

Prioritize investing and savings over paying off your student loan debt

I encourage clients to, of course, pay their minimum monthly payment that’s due. But the concept of paying off student loan debt should not be something you’re concerned about because having cash on hand — and making sure your cash is working for you — is the smarter way.

However, if your cash is just sitting in checking accounts, not collecting interest, then pay off the student loan because, in this case, your money is not working for you. You are not gaining any yield on your cash sitting in a checking account. However, lowering debt does bring up your credit score, so this is also something to think about.

Do you have a story to share about financial planning? If so, please reach out to the editor, Manseen Logan, at mlogan@businessinsider.com.

France is in a constant state of revolt. In 2018, the “yellow jackets” blocked the country to protest fuel taxes. Millions took to the streets in 2022 and 2023 to fight a pension reform raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. This year, angry crowds gather again to ask ever shorter-lived governments to renounce planned measures to decrease national debt that stands at 114% of GDP.

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Even polite England is experiencing massive strikes and angry marches. Government approval rates are plummeting everywhere on the Continent. Europe is rich, yet no one can explain why German trains are not on time anymore, or why there is no way to avoid feces floating in Britain’s rivers. America, after years of leading on tech and economic growth, is cutting itself off from global trade to protect manufacturing jobs few actually want to do. Restrictive zoning laws mean young workers are priced out of the housing market.

People are upset and hunting for culprits—incompetent governments, the E.U., the U.S. federal government, billionaires, migrants—fuelling the very populism that makes rational discussions impossible.

But few dare to mention the elephant in the room: an unfair Gerontopia.

France is almost a caricature. French pensions consume about a quarter of the state budget. Current retirees worked when many contributors supported few beneficiaries. Then they lowered the pension age by five years as life expectancy rose by 10. Today, a shrinking workforce struggles to sustain a generation that granted itself guaranteed retirement incomes close to working people’s wages. French pensioners are so rich that those over 70 save a quarter of their income, while workers under 50 save barely half that rate.

As boomers die, many will pass massive inheritances to their children, locking in decades of unfairness. In Western Europe, the size of your house says more about your parents’ wealth than your own job. French governments fill the holes in pension deficits by taxing their own workers. As the country sinks in the OECD’s PISA rankings (international tests of 15-year-olds’ skills), voters blame the youth, smart-phones, Islam, or a political class wasting public money. But the two Prime Ministers who dared to suggest freezing the highest public pensions were immediately voted out of office by both the Left and Marine Le Pen’s far-right.

Britain got there differently. The (much smaller) state pension is guaranteed by the “triple lock,” which ensures it rises faster than the economy. In the 1980s, the U.K. sold off Jaguar, Rolls-Royce, British Airways, and national telecom, gas, oil, utilities and train companies to fund everyday government spending. Now, taxpayers scramble to rescue failing private water companies, build high-speed rail, or improve the electricity grid.

When former Prime Minister Theresa May suggested that wealthier pensioners might pay for their own care by selling assets, she faced a backlash, and ultimately lost an election. Keir Starmer’s popularity started to nosedive when he tried to stop sending £200 checks every winter to the wealthiest pensioners. Child poverty rates are twice as high as pensioners’, but there is no comparable outrage.

The West is not alone in struggling with ageing societies. The median Chinese is 40 years old, only two years below France. As China’s population declines, young workers face a mountain of public sector debt, youth unemployment, and low salaries.

All over the world, fertility rates are falling below the 2.1 replacement rate. Women in Latin America and the Caribbean currently have 1.8 children each, compared to almost six in the early 1960s. Even Africa, still with a rate slightly above four, is following the same downward trajectory. The U.N. regularly updates their population projections downward: Peak Humanity is getting nearer with every iteration (currently mid-2080s).

The rest of the world should learn from Europe’s failures, and not burden its relatively younger and poorer citizens with funding benefits for its relatively wealthy and retired elderly ones. But even Europe can have a second chance.

The working population needs to move through the stages of grief to acceptance of the massive benefits boomers gave themselves. Younger generations will not get this money back. Europe needs a new social contract, at least for future pensions. Instead of being linked to inflation, they could be tied to an index of workers’ purchasing power, housing affordability, and public investment—the opposite of Britain’s triple lock. Reward with lower local taxes those who dare to say yes to housing and infrastructure. This can help better interwine all our economic fortunes.

Shift more taxes away from labour to income. Taxing the value of the land instead of what sits on it encourages development, and land cannot be moved offshore for tax avoidance. Taxing the highest inheritances does the same redistributive job as capital taxation but without hindering innovation. Once people understand “death taxes” apply only to a minority of households, they are not so unpopular.

The entire world must build something other than a Gerontopia.

We will be fewer and older, but there is no reason to be miserable. We could live on a sustainable and comfortable planet, where automation compensates for a dwindling share of working arms and brains. Free trade will be less scary once we stop worrying about factory jobs. We have learned how to make food, water, and electricity, without destroying the planet, but these efforts must be scaled up. And medicine is progressing at astonishing speed.

What if fewer people simply meant more affordable cities, more abundant nature, and an aging society where all of us are better off?