Good morning. A federal appeals court threw out a sweeping antitrust judgment against Qualcomm, ruling the Federal Trade Commission didn’t prove the dominant cellphone chip maker engaged in illegal monopolization.

Qualcomm “has asserted its economic muscle with vigor, imagination, devotion, and ingenuity. It has also acted with sharp elbows—as businesses often do,” Judge Consuelo Callahan of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.

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Ian Conner, director of the FTC’s bureau of competition, said the ruling “is disappointing and we will be considering our options.” The commission could ask for a rehearing of the case with the full court participating, or potentially seek Supreme Court review. But the FTC’s strategic options are complicated because the commission itself has been divided over the lawsuit, and the Justice Department, which shares antitrust authority, has opposed it.

“The opinion goes a long way toward saying that antitrust has no role to play in reviewing patent use and misuse,” said Wayne State University law professor Stephen Calkins. But the ruling, he said, also adopted a flawed analysis of how to evaluate alleged harms to customers, which could give the FTC an opening to ask for the case to be reconsidered.

The former head of Mexico’s state-oil company Petróleos Mexicanos accused former president Enrique Peña Nieto and his former finance minister of instructing him to funnel millions of dollars in bribes to the 2012 presidential campaign, part of Mexico’s highest-profile corruption probe in decades, the country’s Attorney General said Tuesday.

Emilio Lozoya, who is also facing corruption charges, filed a complaint against Mr. Peña Nieto and former Finance Minister Luis Videgaray for allegedly ordering him to illegally finance Mr. Peña Nieto’s campaign and bribe legislators to secure passage of sweeping overhauls, including the opening of the energy industry to private investment, Attorney General Alejandro Gertz said in a video statement.

• Two U.S. agencies are examining investments sold by YieldStreet Inc., an online platform that pitches itself as giving people the chance to get in on deals usually reserved for the largest investors. “We do not believe that we are the target of any investigation,” YieldStreet said in a written statement. The company said it notified authorities in different countries about what it believes to be a fraud scheme that YieldStreet was ensnared in.
   
• A federal appeals court is letting investors keep roughly $1 billion they received from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. after its 2008 bankruptcy filing triggered the liquidation of dozens of collateralized debt obligations.
   
• The State Department’s office of the inspector general concluded that an emergency declaration facilitating $8 billion in weapons sales to U.S. allies in the Gulf last year complied with the law.

TikTok skirted a privacy safeguard in Google’s Android operating system to collect unique identifiers from millions of mobile devices, data that allows the app to track users online without allowing them to opt out, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. The tactic, which experts say was concealed through an unusual added layer of encryption, appears to have violated Google policies limiting how apps track people and wasn’t disclosed to TikTok users. TikTok ended the practice in November, the Journal’s testing showed.

The findings come at a time when TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is under pressure from the White House over concerns that data collected by the app could be used to help the Chinese government track U.S. government employees or contractors. TikTok has said it doesn’t share data with the Chinese government and wouldn’t do so if asked.

• Virtu Financial Inc., one of the world’s largest high-speed trading firms, said it lost $6.9 million to hackers who seized control of the email account of one of its executives and used fake emails to send two fraudulent wire transfers to bank accounts in China. The incident shows how even tech-savvy firms can fall victim to “social engineering” attacks in which hackers impersonate trusted people to trick employees into performing actions harmful to their companies.

A study of $650 billion of commercial mortgages found that the mortgaged properties’ net income often falls short of the amount underwritten by lenders. The underwritten amount should be a conservative estimate of how much a property earns. Instead, the actual net income trails underwritten net income by 5% or more in 28% of the loans, according to the study of nearly 40,000 loans by academics at the University of Texas at Austin.

The study, which shows risks in the $1.4 trillion market for commercial mortgage-backed securities, suggests that loans sold to investors before the pandemic frequently featured overstated income and could have more trouble staying current in case of a downturn. The findings also corroborate a complaint last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that commercial mortgage loans frequently feature inflated financials.

President Michel Aoun has asked departing Prime Minister Hassan Diab and his cabinet to remain in office as a caretaker government with limited powers until a new administration can be formed. With no apparent agreement on who should be the next prime minister, Mr. Aoun was left with little choice but to keep Mr. Diab’s government in place, analysts said.

• Russia registered the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine, President Vladimir Putin said, marking a milestone in the fight against the new coronavirus but amid safety concerns in the West over the country’s accelerated clinical evaluations. The U.S., meanwhile, reported fewer than 50,000 new coronavirus cases for the second day in a row, even as the number of cases world-wide surpassed 20 million.
   
• The U.K. recorded a steeper second-quarter contraction than its peers, a performance that means it suffered the worst economic hit from the coronavirus in Europe as well as reporting the highest death toll.

Employers considering President Trump’s plan to allow deferred payment of payroll taxes face a series of costs and uncertainties. The president wants employers to stop collecting the 6.2% levy that is the employee share of Social Security taxes for many workers, starting Sept. 1 and going through the end of the year. But his move, announced in a memo Saturday, doesn’t change how much tax employees and employers actually owe. Only Congress can do that.

Employers are waiting for the Treasury Department and the IRS to issue formal rules to turn the president’s weekend statements and directives about the payroll-tax collection suspension into action. Those details will be crucial as companies decide whether and how to implement the plan, and many employers might not even bother if they have a choice. Treasury and IRS officials declined to comment about the timing or content of the rules.

Eastman Kodak’s wild stock-market ride produced what might be the biggest contribution on record to a religious nonprofit, the product of a well-timed gift by Kodak board member George Karfunkel. A securities filing said the gift took place the day Kodak stock closed at its highest level since 2014. Using the average of the stock’s high and low that day of $38.75, which is how the Internal Revenue Service values stock gifts, the donation was worth $116.3 million. A Kodak spokeswoman said Mr. Karfunkel’s gift and its disclosure are within the scope of an internal review.

• Kodak Chief Says Company Supports Federal Decision to Halt Loan

• McDonald’s board is coming under scrutiny from some investors and corporate-governance groups for failing to fully uncover the extent of former Chief Executive Officer Steve Easterbrook’s inappropriate relationships with employees when concerns first emerged last year.
   
• General Motors Chief Financial Officer Dhivya Suryadevara will leave the company for online commerce firm Stripe Inc., a surprising departure for one of the auto maker’s fastest-rising stars. GM faces a variety of challenges as it looks to recruit a new finance chief.

Long after cruise-ship passengers caught in the coronavirus pandemic returned home, thousands of crew members were still stuck on the vessels. Crew members and officials in 13 countries described dangerous conditions for employees on ships owned by the world’s largest cruise lines.

Some ships allowed employees to congregate in restaurants and bars, serve themselves in buffet lines and hold parties, some crew members said. Even ships with Covid-19 outbreaks often didn’t enforce such basic precautions as social distancing, they said.

• Chief executives at 27 of the biggest companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Amazon and Google owner Alphabet, have committed to hiring 100,000 low-income and Black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers by 2030—an effort that comes during a monthslong wave of protests about racial inequality.
   
• Hoteliers and robotics companies say delivery bots are cutting down on potentially unsafe interactions between hotel staff and room guests by offering contactless room service. And cleaning robots are vacuuming hallway floors while cleaning crews spend more time than ever sanitizing rooms.

Facebook said it removed nearly 40% more content that it categorized as terrorism in the second quarter compared with the first three months of the year. Facebook removed about 8.7 million pieces of such content—which includes, according to the company’s definition, nonstate actors that engage in or advocate for violence to achieve political, religious or ideological aims—in the second quarter of this year, up from 6.3 million in the first quarter.

That increase “was largely driven by improvements in our proactive detection technology to identify content that violates [Facebook’s] policy,” a company spokeswoman said.