Malaysia's Ministry of Minerals and Geoscience said it has approved the export of a consignment of unprocessed rare earth elements.

Franklin Templeton’s fixed-income team, led by global CIO Sonal Desai, warned sustained selling of French government bonds could escalate into a eurozone debt crisis potentially more severe than the crisis of the early 2010s and said markets are unprepared. On Tuesday the 10-year French yield premium to German Bunds topped 150bps for the first time since January 2012. Desai said France — the eurozone’s second-largest economy (GDP ~€3.0t) with roughly €3.6t of debt — would present a far larger stress test for the EU than past sovereign cases; its debt stock is more than ten times Greece’s, making simple bailout options infeasible.

PHP development team disclosed two severe security vulnerabilities Tuesday and released a patched version Wednesday after reports of active exploitation, urging users to update immediately. Operators preemptively took numerous sites offline to protect systems, including the Port of Rotterdam website, Dutch government portal Overheid.nl, the Dutch football association, five major Dutch party sites and several hospital websites. PHP underpins a large share of the web (W3Techs: ~75% of sites with identifiable server-side languages use PHP; ~43% of sites run on WordPress), expanding the attack surface for e-government portals, CMS-driven media, e-commerce platforms and hosted services and raising the risk of short-term online service disruptions.