Thomas Cook is one of the oldest travel agencies in the world, operating their own flights, ships, hotels, etc, whose founders effectively invented modern tourism (listen to this excellent Stuff You Missed in History Class episode for the fascinating and fraught tale of how that happened) but a consolidation in the travel industry combined with private equity chicanery that loaded the company up with $2.1b in debt in order to pay out investors drove the company to its knees, and, last week, it finally died. Read the rest

Bill Shine was forced to resign as co-president of Fox News over his personal mishandling of the rampant culture of sexual abuse, in which he abetted the company's culture of harassment, fondling, and coerced sex by its executives and on-air personalities. Read the rest

Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan has only been on the job since October, but he's earned a 35%, $4.6m raise, despite flat earnings and a series of scandals since Sloan took over from the cartoonishly villainous John Stumpf. Read the rest

Taylor Weyeneth is America's number two official in charge of drug policy. He's a 24-year-old former Trump campaign volunteer whose resume is singularly unimpressive: apart from being a frat brother in good standing at St John's University and organizing a single charity golf tournament, the only real jobs he's ever held were working in his daddy's chia seed factory (which closed when his dad went to jail for illegally processing Mexican steroids) and working as a legal assistant at the New York white shoe law firm of O’Dwyer & Bernstien. Read the rest

In the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster (in which a building full of poor people were roasted alive because their homes had been skinned with a highly flammable decorative element that was supposed to make it easier to look at from a nearby luxury neighborhood), local UK governments have scrambled to replace the deadly cladding on other buildings with something a little less fiery. Read the rest

Toys R Us was taken over in a debt-loading act of financial engineering in 2005; over the years, despite turning a profit, the service on that debt dragged Toys R Us lower and lower until the management team picked by the financial engineers finally bankrupted the company. Read the rest

Equifax CEO Richard Smith announced his voluntary retirement yesterday, two months after the catastrophic breach that permanently leaked 140,000,000 Americans' most compromising financial data. Read the rest

The board of directors thanked Richard Smith "for his 12 years of leadership" as Smith showed himself the door while he reminded the 140,000,000 Americans whose lives he'd destroyed through insanely lax security and months of shambolic inaction that "I have been completely dedicated to making this right." Read the rest

Three high-ranking Equifax executives are being investigated for selling shares of Equifax shortly after the company was hacked, but long before Equifax admitted it had been hacked. They are Equifax Chief Financial Officer John Gamble, President of U.S. Information Solutions Joseph Loughran, and President of Workforce Solutions Rodolfo Ploder.

Equifaxdisclosed earlier this month that it discovered a security breach on July 29. The three executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in early August. The company has said the managers didn’t know of the breach at the time they sold the shares.

To run afoul of laws that prohibit insider trading, a seller has to be aware of nonpublic information, said Stephen Crimmins, a former enforcement lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

From Ars Technica:

[The Equifax breach] very possibly is the most severe of all for a simple reason: the breath-taking amount of highly sensitive data it handed over to criminals. By providing full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers, it provided most of the information banks, insurance companies, and other businesses use to confirm consumers are who they claim to be.” — Dan Goodin, Why the Equifax breach is very possibly the worst leak of personal info ever.

Image: Dwight Burdette/Wikipedia Read the rest

One week after announcing the worst breach in American history, and days after it was revealed that the breach had been caused by simple negligence, Equifax has announced the "retirement" of its Chief Information Officer, David Webb, and Chief Security Officer, Susan Mauldin, though "the company's review of the facts is still ongoing." Read the rest