Ten Things You Need to Know Today: Monday 24 Sep 2012

Business secretary Vince Cable has announced that the government will put £1bn in equity and guarantees into setting up a bank designed to increase the amount of lending to businesses which have struggled for credit since the financial crisis. The bank will funnel the money through "existing lenders" and will start within 18 months.

Dame Maggie Smith won the Emmy for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey in Los Angeles last night. Damian Lewis won the Outstanding Lead Actor award for his role in the drama series Homeland. The awards were dominated by the US TV series Hatfields and McCoys, Homeland, and Game Change.

The US State Department yesterday condemned Pakistani railways minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour's offer of $100,000 for the death of the American maker of the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims, which has sparked riots worldwide and was denounced by the White House as "disgusting and reprehensible". The bounty, it says, is "inflammatory and inappropriate".

Britain is braced for more wild weather and the environment agency has issued more than 130 flood alerts in England and Wales as wind and rain continue to batter the country. The storms, caused by an offshoot of Hurricane Nadine, have killed three people and caused travel chaos in some places.

A man is being treated in a London hospital for a disease similar to the SARS virus, which killed hundreds of people in 2003 and sparked fears of a pandemic. The 49-year-old patient was brought to the UK from Qatar by air ambulance. He is the second person to be diagnosed with the new disease; the first, who is now dead, was in Saudi Arabia. It is not yet known whether the two cases are linked.