Good morning. Facebook Inc. sought the recusal of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan from the agency’s deliberations on whether to file a new antitrust case against the company, arguing she couldn’t be impartial because of her long history of criticizing it and other big-tech firms.

“For the entirety of her professional career, Chair Khan has consistently and very publicly concluded that Facebook is guilty of violating the antitrust laws,” the company said Wednesday in a formal recusal petition filed with the FTC. “When a new commissioner has already drawn factual and legal conclusions and deemed the target a lawbreaker, due process requires that individual to recuse herself,” Facebook said in the petition.

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An FTC spokeswoman declined to comment. Ms. Khan has said previously that she would consult with FTC ethics officials if recusal questions arose.

Facebook’s request comes two weeks after a similar recusal petition was filed by Amazon.com Inc., which is facing multiple investigations at the FTC. It is the latest sign that giant technology companies are favoring aggression over a conciliatory approach with Ms. Khan, who built her career advocating for bold antitrust action to rein in the dominant players in Silicon Valley.

Arctaris Impact Investors LLC has hired a former chief compliance officer for Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase & Co. as it prepares to register as an adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Alan Halfenger will serve as Arctaris’s general counsel and chief compliance officer, the fund said on Tuesday. The hire is part of a push by Arctaris to build out its infrastructure, including its compliance program and internal controls, as it prepares to grow.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. are considering moves to gradually open up their services to one another, as Beijing’s tech crackdown makes it harder for China’s two online giants to maintain the virtual barriers they have built in recent years.

That would mark a big shift for China’s consumer internet, which has largely split into two camps built around the arch rivals. The restrictions mean, for example, that customers can’t use Tencent’s payment system to buy goods on an Alibaba platform.

The moves come as Beijing seeks to tame China’s tech giants. In April, the country’s State Administration for Market Regulation fined Alibaba a record 18.2 billion yuan, the equivalent of $2.8 billion, for forcing vendors to sell exclusively on its platform, in a practice known as “er xuan yi,” or “choose one out of two.”

Alibaba was also ordered to carry out a comprehensive revamp and submit “self-examination compliance reports” in the next three years.

• The European Union and China presented sweeping plans to limit greenhouse-gas emissions that will increase costs for industry and consumers, but they drew criticism from environmentalists as not going far enough to slow climate change.

Smaller audit firms are winning more customers among midsize U.K. companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, a trend that comes as regulators are working to make the country’s audit sector more competitive.

The Big Four accounting firms—Deloitte, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG—continue to dominate the market for audits of financial statements of large companies. The firms last year audited the books of all companies in the FTSE 100, which is made up of the 100 biggest U.K. companies by market capitalization, according to the Financial Reporting Council, the country’s accounting regulator. That is unchanged from 2019.

While the U.S. geared up for Independence Day celebrations on the weekend of July 4, technology providers around the world raced to repair customers’ computer systems after a cyberattack on Kaseya Ltd., believed to be the largest ransomware attack ever.

In the days after the July 2 attack on Miami-based Kaseya, employees of Dutch technology service provider VelzArt worked in shifts around the clock, driving around the Netherlands to pick up computers from the offices of nearly 100 clients and bring them to back to VelzArt for repairs, said VelzArt’s director, Wesley Born.

• The head of the U.K.’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, said the agency is doubling the resources it devotes to tackling threats from Russia, China and Iran—and faces a growing challenge from right-wing extremists, many of whom are teenagers.
   
• Johnson & Johnson is recalling most of its Neutrogena and Aveeno spray sunscreens from U.S. stores after detecting benzene, a potentially cancer-causing chemical, in some samples.
   
• General Motors Co. is advising owners of its previously recalled Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles to once again park outdoors after two cars that had been repaired caught fire.
   
• Businesses reported prices increased at an above-average pace as the U.S. economy’s recovery further strengthened going into the summer, the Federal Reserve said in a report released Wednesday.
   
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s farewell visit to Washington this week will broadcast a new, friendlier tone between the U.S. and Europe after the acrimony of the Trump era but will likely do little to reverse the long-term divergence of interests in the trans-Atlantic relationship.

Companies largely maintained their focus on supply-chain sustainability goals in 2020 despite the Covid-19 pandemic, and social issues such as worker welfare and supplier diversity gained more attention, according to new research.

Some 82% of the executives surveyed said the pandemic, which triggered lockdowns and a cascading series of shortages in consumer products around the world, didn’t affect or even increased their commitments to supply-chain sustainability during 2020. The study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals was published Wednesday.

A sweeping executive order signed by President Biden last week laid out his administration’s priorities for promoting competitive markets and limiting corporate dominance. Among the dozens of provisions included in the order are directives aimed at railroads and ocean shipping.

The administration says the relatively small number of major players in the ocean-shipping trade and the U.S. freight-rail business has enabled companies to charge unreasonable fees. In the case of the seven Class 1 freight railroads, consolidation has given some railroad companies control of most of the freight tracks in parts of the country.

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

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