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Good morning and welcome to Notes on the News. It's Thursday, July 1. I’m Alex Janin, a reporter at the Journal, and I’m filling in for Tyler Blint-Welsh. Here's what you should know today: The Trump Organization and its CFO have been charged with tax-related crimes, Robinhood agreed to pay a $70 million settlement, and the Delta variant is delaying restriction easing. Let me know what you think by replying to this email. Thanks for reading. |
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| PHOTO: PATRICK T. FALLON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES |
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1. Jobless claims are projected to resume their decline. Worker filings for jobless benefits, a proxy for layoffs, are expected to have continued their fall in data due this morning. Claims are down by more than 40% since the first week of April, but remain well above pre-pandemic levels. U.S. stock futures were up this morning, pointing to a strong start to the third quarter. |
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2. Robinhood wants you to use its app to buy its stock. In its initial public offering, the popular stock-trading app plans to set aside as much as 35% of shares for individual investors, as part of a strategy to bring IPO investing to the masses. See more below. |
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3. Amazon seeks recusal of FTC chairwoman in probe. The Federal Trade Commission has an open, wide-ranging antitrust investigation into the online tech giant's business practices and Lina Khan has been a leading critic. "A reasonable observer would conclude that she no longer can consider the company’s antitrust defenses with an open mind," Amazon said. See more below. |
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4. Private-equity firms put retirees’ annuities in higher-risk investments. Insurance companies that owe billions of dollars to retirees in annuity payments are taking some additional risk with investments, new analysis shows. To offset that risk, they on average hold more cash than traditional insurers, and have higher capital levels. |
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5. Xi Jinping says China won’t be bullied. The Chinese leader marked his ruling Communist Party’s 100th anniversary with rousing appeals for national unity and defiance against foreign pressure, a rallying cry for one-party rule aimed at reinforcing his authority for years to come. |
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6. Majority of New Yorkers say Gov. Andrew Cuomo shouldn’t run again. As investigators review sexual-harassment allegations that the governor denies, a new poll found that more than 60% of voters surveyed would rather see him resign immediately or not run for office again. |
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7. Covid-19 Delta variant hobbles global efforts to lift restrictions. In parts of Asia, Australia and Europe, governments are reintroducing travel restrictions and delaying the lifting of lockdowns as health authorities find that restrictive measures that kept earlier lineages of the virus in check aren’t curbing the variant. Compiled by Bryony Watson in London. 📰 Enjoying this newsletter? Get more from WSJ and support our work with a special subscription offer. |
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$70 million— The settlement Robinhood agreed to pay after being accused of misleading customers, failing to supervise technology that failed and approving ineligible traders for risky strategies. The online brokerage, which launched in 2014, gained millions of new customers during the meme-stock trading frenzy and has grown steadily through 2021. It became the subject of anger and scrutiny earlier this year, after restricting trading in some popular stocks that had become so volatile that Robinhood’s clearinghouse told the brokerage to post billions of dollars in additional collateral. 135,000 — The number of test ballots inadvertently included in a preliminary tabulation of ballots in New York City’s mayoral race as of Tuesday night, according to the city’s Board of Elections. The results were removed from the board’s website after Eric Adams, the leading candidate in the Democratic primary, raised questions about the count’s accuracy. The Democratic mayoral primary was the first big test of the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, which requires the board to eliminate candidates and redistribute votes over a series of rounds. A new tally released Wednesday night showed former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia had leaped into second place with 48.9% of the votes, behind Adams with 51.1%. This means that the more than 124,000 absentee ballots that the board still needs to count could determine the outcome of the race. $2.1 billion — The sum the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said it would spend on gender-equality work over five years. It’s the largest-ever charitable donation the foundation has made, cementing the advancement of women’s empowerment as a priority for the organization alongside vaccine development and polio eradication. The announcement comes weeks after Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates announced their divorce. |
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| What Everyone Wants to Know |
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| Allen Weisselberg, behind President Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in 2017. PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS |
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The Trump Organization and its CFO are indicted on tax-related charges. The Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg, its longtime chief financial officer, are expected to appear in court today. It will mark the first criminal charges against former President Donald Trump’s company since the Manhattan district attorney’s office began investigating it three years ago. The initial charges won’t implicate Trump himself, according to his lawyer. The indictment follows a monthslong investigation by the offices of the Manhattan DA and the New York state attorney general into whether Weisselberg and other employees illegally avoided paying taxes on perks from the Trump Organization, such as cars, apartments and private-school tuition. Trump has denied wrongdoing and blamed the investigations on Democrats’ political motivations. |
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A WHO-led team hit a roadblock in investigating farms that supplied the market where early Covid-19 cases emerged. Almost all the animals are gone. In early 2020, Chinese officials ordered farmers who bred or trapped wild animals for food, fur or traditional medicine to stop their trade, so many of them killed, sold or released their stock. That presents a problem for the World Health Organization-led team and other scientists intent on identifying Covid-19’s origins by examining farms that supplied animals to Wuhan’s Huanan food market. If the animals and workers were tested before the farms closed, those findings haven’t been made public. Finding evidence of infection in farmworkers will become increasingly difficult as time goes on, according to a zoologist on the team. The virus is thought to have spread to humans after originating in bats, but the lack of progress in finding an animal source may fuel interest in the alternative theory, that the virus spilled from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another lab in the city. The WHO-led team and many other scientists say the most plausible hypothesis is that the virus is of natural origin. Facebook critics regroup after the digital behemoth wins in court After a federal judge ruled that the FTC didn’t show enough evidence that Facebook is a monopoly, critics of the tech firm are regrouping. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said in his ruling that there is nothing necessarily unlawful about Facebook having a policy of restricting access to its tools and user data. Federal plaintiffs will have the opportunity to refile their case, which aimed to “address anticompetitive mergers and abusive conduct,” according to members of the House antitrust subcommittee. Some House members said the ruling showed the need for their legislation to update antitrust laws for the internet age. Meanwhile, House Republicans and business-friendly Democrats are facing pressure to delay bills that could facilitate the breakup of major tech companies like Facebook. |
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| The cast of Katori Hall’s ‘The Hot Wing King,’ which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama. PHOTO: MONIQUE CARBONI |
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Go buy theater tickets: Broadway is starting to reopen, and seven plays by Black authors are hitting the New York stage this fall. Among the Black authors is Lynn Nottage, the only woman to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for drama. Her play “Clyde’s” tells the story of a truck-stop sandwich shop whose kitchen staffers have all done time. |
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Today's newsletter was curated by Alex Janin in New York, in collaboration with colleagues in New York and London. We hope you’re enjoying Notes on the News. If you would prefer to receive a different newsletter, please check out all your options to keep up with the latest on markets, economics, politics and more. For members, we recommend The 10-Point. |
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