Good morning. Boeing Co. Chief Executive David Calhoun and other current and former directors are asking a Delaware judge to clarify a legal opinion indicating she had found that the plane maker’s board “publicly lied” about its handling of the 737 MAX.

In a motion for clarification filed late last week, defense lawyers for Mr. Calhoun and the directors say the judge’s Sept. 7 ruling “contains categorical statements that the board and Mr. Calhoun misled the public about the board’s safety oversight.”

[Continued below...]

“The court could not have meant to make findings that adopt plaintiffs’ view of the case at this early stage of litigation without access to the complete record of transcripts and testimony that will tell the full story,” the defense lawyers wrote. They said the judge’s ruling went further than it needed in establishing that the plaintiffs had met certain legal thresholds to proceed.

Two Boeing shareholders are suing the company’s board, alleging directors failed to sufficiently properly monitor safety matters during the aircraft’s development and in the aftermath of fatal accidents. The ruling earlier this month, by Vice Chancellor Morgan Zurn of Delaware’s Court of Chancery, let the shareholders’ lawsuit proceed, allowing it to overcome Boeing’s attempt to dismiss it.

• Boeing Raises Outlook on Travel Rebound

Join us on Oct. 12 for the WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum. The virtual program includes sessions on anti-money-laundering laws, emerging risks, compliance and cryptocurrencies, lessons from Wirecard and workshops on ESG reporting and responding to ransomware. You can register here.

Analog Devices Inc. has hired a new chief legal officer, the analog semiconductor company said Tuesday.

Janene Asgeirsson will serve as the Wilmington, Mass.-based company’s new senior vice president, chief legal officer and corporate secretary. Ms. Asgeirsson will oversee Analog’s legal matters, including mergers and acquisitions, governance and compliance, as well as the company’s internal audit and risk functions as its chief risk officer, the company said.

The hiring of Ms. Asgeirsson comes as Analog faces evolving risks, according to the company’s recent quarterly report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The semiconductor maker also entered into an agreement to buy rival Maxim Integrated Products Inc. last year.

Cybersecurity is the top risk finance professionals say they are facing these days, according to a survey by the Association for Financial Professionals released on Tuesday.

Forty-seven percent of the 272 financial industry professionals surveyed cited cybersecurity, including ransomware and phishing, as the greatest challenge their organization faced.

The proportion is well up from the 12% of respondents who named cybersecurity as the most difficult issue in 2010, but down from 53% last year. The decline may be attributable to businesses bolstering their cybersecurity defenses during the pandemic, said Tom Hunt, director of treasury and payment services for AFP.

Strategic risk–including competition, industry disruptions and changing customer behavior–was the second most challenging to manage, at 37%, followed by business operation interruptions, at 34%. Environmental and sustainability were cited less often by financial professionals, at just 9% of respondents.

—David Smagalla

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said he was taking a hard look at cryptocurrency-trading platforms in a hearing Tuesday in which he called for more funding for the regulatory agency.

Mr. Gensler also reiterated his openness to potentially banning payment for order flow, a practice in which stockbrokers sell customers’ trades to high-speed trading platforms.

The official appeared before the Senate Banking Committee to outline a far-reaching policy agenda that would shake up some Wall Street firms’ business models and require heftier disclosures from public companies. 

Since being confirmed by the Senate in April, Mr. Gensler has laid out a regulatory agenda that some experts say would amount to the most significant revamp of U.S. securities law in decades.

Alternative data describes a range of information that can help investors model the future performance of a company, including consumer transactions, social-media activity and internet search activity. The San Francisco-based company agreed to settle the SEC investigation without admitting to or denying the agency’s allegations. The firm’s co-founder and former chief executive officer, Bertrand Schmitt, will pay a $300,000 fine and was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for three years, the SEC said.

• South Korea fined Alphabet Inc.’s Google around $177 million for obstructing other companies from developing rival versions of the Android operating system, the latest challenge to the U.S. technology giant’s dominance in mobile software.
   
• Theranos Inc. gave investors far rosier revenue projections than what the company’s finance staff expected the company to bring in, jurors heard Tuesday during the second day of witness testimony in Elizabeth Holmes's criminal fraud trial. 
   
• A Beijing court ruled against the accuser in a closely watched sexual-harassment case Tuesday, delivering a blow to Chinese civil-society activists who have fought to sustain a fledgling women’s-rights movement.

Officials in the U.S. and European Union are crafting a pledge to reduce global methane emissions by nearly a third by 2030, and pushing several of the world’s largest economies to join them, according to people familiar with the effort.

The agreement would mark the first global commitment to cut emissions of methane, a gas less prevalent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but far more potent at trapping heat. 

U.S. and EU officials have agreed to the deal and plan to announce their commitments Friday at a virtual climate summit that President Biden is hosting ahead of next week’s United Nations General Assembly, according to one of the people familiar with the effort.

• World’s Oil Supply Pressured by Hurricane Ida, Other Outages
• Chevron to Triple Low-Carbon Investment
• BP Taps Renewable Power Specialist in Green Energy Push

• Bill Gates warned six years ago that the biggest potential killer the world faced was a pandemic. Now, he says, not enough is being done to prepare for the next one.
   
• China Evergrande Group moved closer to a potential restructuring of its $89 billion debt burden by hiring outside advisers, while the property developer’s financial problems spilled over into angry protests at several of its offices.
   
• Ximalaya Inc., owner of a popular podcast and audio platform in China, filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong shortly after scrapping plans to list in New York, showing how a Chinese regulatory crackdown on U.S. listings is forcing homegrown tech companies to change course.
   
• Stocks in U.S. casino companies fell Tuesday after the Macau government set expectations for the future of the gambling industry there, including increased regulatory scrutiny over casino operations.

Widespread vaccination was meant to usher in a long-awaited march back to normal. But for Asia-Pacific countries that tamed Covid-19 by enforcing tight controls, entering a post-vaccination world is complicated.

The wealthy Asia-Pacific countries’ phased approach back to normal contrasts with the U.S.’s more aggressive reopening. It more closely resembles approaches taken across much of Europe. Face masks will remain. Gatherings will remain capped, even among the fully vaccinated. Social distancing won’t go away.

• Offices Reopen With Safety Plans, but Big-City Commutes Spook Workers
• U.K. Bets on Covid-19 Booster Shots to Avoid Winter Lockdowns
• Big Truckers Say Vaccine Mandate Could Push Drivers Away

The Biden administration is pushing federal agencies to adopt a cybersecurity philosophy that has become increasingly popular in the private sector amid a growing shift toward cloud computing and a surge in cyberattacks: trust nothing.

The White House Office of Management and Budget last week released a draft blueprint for a so-called zero trust approach to fending off hackers. Implementing a new array of policies, procedures and tools across federal agencies could take significant investment and years of effort, said Theresa Payton, chief executive of Fortalice Solutions LLC, a cybersecurity consulting firm. 

“If it were easy to do, it’d already be done,” said Ms. Payton, who was the White House chief information officer under President George W. Bush. “It’s going to get very expensive, very quick.”

• Elizabeth Denham will step down next month as the U.K.’s data protection regulator, a post she has held since 2016. Ms. Denham has overseen the country’s implementation of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 and after its exit from the EU last year.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Financial Officer Stephen Scherr is retiring from the Wall Street powerhouse.

Mr. Scherr, 57 years old, led the firm’s yearslong push into Main Street banking before being named CFO in 2018. He will be succeeded at the end of the year by Denis Coleman, a leveraged-finance banker who has spent 25 years at the firm.

Mr. Scherr is the latest high-level departure from Goldman. Mr. Scherr was well-liked across the firm and by investors for shedding some of Goldman’s signature secrecy and bringing more transparency and predictability to its financial results. The firm’s stock has more than doubled over the past two years, leading other big banks.

Amazon.com Inc. said it plans to add 125,000 employees in the U.S. and has lifted its average starting wage as it continues to rapidly expand its vast warehouse operations in a tight labor market.

The tech giant on Tuesday said it has opened more than 250 facilities this year and plans to open another 100 across the country in September, deepening its pool of locations used to store, sort and ship its packages.

Already growing quickly, Amazon’s business has boomed since the start of the pandemic as people shopped more online and business flocked to its cloud-computing services. To keep up, it has increased its global workforce by about two-thirds since the end of 2019 to about 1.34 million global employees in June.

• Amazon Union Drive Heads North to Canada

For the past three years, Facebook Inc. has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.

“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”

Send comments to the Risk & Compliance editor, Jack Hagel, at jack.hagel@wsj.com

Subscribe to The Morning Risk Report here.

Follow us on Twitter at @WSJRisk, @_MengqiSun, and @dgtokar.