Good morning. A patchwork of state and federal laws governing the use and sale of marijuana is creating compliance challenges for U.S. firms that manage accounts for investors and trade securities for them, reports Risk & Compliance Journal’s Mengqi Sun.

Uncertainty about how to navigate the evolving legal landscape has prompted some brokerages to bar existing clients from trading securities of marijuana businesses, or even turn away prospective clients who have investments in the industry, brokers say.

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Eleven U.S. states have legalized the recreational use of marijuana for adults and 22 more allow it to treat certain medical conditions with prescriptions, leading to a crop of new marijuana businesses in those states. But the use, sale or possession of marijuana is illegal under federal law in the U.S.

Canada’s legalization of recreational marijuana sales last year established the country as the leading financial market for the industry, and most cannabis stocks are listed on Canadian exchanges. U.S. investors aren’t prohibited from investing in marijuana securities, but brokerages remain reluctant to trade them while the drug remains illegal under U.S. law.

Brokerages also are avoiding or keeping closer tabs on investors whose income is derived from marijuana businesses—even if they are buying or selling shares of companies that have no connection to the pot industry.

• A federal appeals court dealt President Trump another setback in his effort to keep his tax records secret, ruling Monday that the president’s accounting firm must comply with a New York grand-jury subpoena for his financial information. The 3-0 ruling rejected Mr. Trump’s attempt to block Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. from subpoenaing the president’s financial information from his longtime accountant, Mazars USA LLP.
   
• Erik Prince, a private security contractor and informal adviser to President Trump, is in talks to buy a Ukrainian aerospace manufacturer that the U.S. is trying to prevent China from acquiring, according to officials briefed on the matter. The Trump administration has approached Mr. Prince and at least one other potential buyer from the private sector about Motor Sich, a U.S. official said. In recent weeks, Mr. Prince has discussed the company with Ukrainian officials and visited the company’s main plant, according to people briefed on the matter.
   
• Twitter has suspended accounts linked to Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah and Palestinian group Hamas after U.S. lawmakers criticized the social-media company for allowing those entities to remain active on the platform even though the State Department has designated both as terrorist organizations. Twitter, on its messaging platform, shows that accounts including Hamas’s English and Arabic language accounts had been suspended for violating its rules.
   
• A panel of academics and former credit-ratings-firm executives urged the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday to finally end the industry’s “issuer pay” business model in which entities that sell bonds also pay for ratings.
   
• The Environmental Protection Agency proposed easing 2015 rules for disposing of coal ash and wastewater from coal-fired power plants. The proposed new rules would give power plants more time to keep using unlined coal-ash waste ponds and would allow the discharge of limited amounts of wastewater from coal plants, including through new treatment systems the EPA evaluated as part of the proposal.

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McDonald’s said its top human-resources executive has left the company, days after the burger giant fired its chief executive, Steve Easterbrook, because of his relationship with an employee.

McDonald’s said Chief People Officer David Fairhurst had left the company on Monday, without providing any details. The company said it fired Mr. Easterbrook on Friday after a board investigation into his relationship with an unnamed employee. McDonald’s said it has a longstanding policy barring employees from relationships with direct or indirect reports.

A roughly 15-year veteran of the company, Mr. Fairhurst had worked with Mr. Easterbrook for McDonald’s in the U.K. and was promoted to the top human-resources job soon after Mr. Easterbrook became CEO in 2015.

The National Rifle Association for years has used unorthodox means to arrange Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre’s costly travel, including his use of private jets for almost every trip.

Handling the arrangements is a woman who isn’t registered as a travel agent and who settled unrelated civil charges that she defrauded small businesses at the same time she was working as an NRA contractor, records show.

Inside the NRA, accountants were instructed to pay travel bills from her company without the usual detailed supporting documentation, which was held in a private file in the NRA’s treasurer’s office, said people familiar with the matter. The bills totaled about $2 million in one recent year, according to one of these people.

The travel setup, which hasn’t been previously reported, encapsulates elements of the NRA’s internal practices that some legal experts have said raise questions about the gun-rights group’s governance—including revelations this year of steep spending on Mr. LaPierre and lax controls on outside vendors.

For months, Moscow has pursued what current and former U.S. law-enforcement and diplomatic officials describe as part of a stepped-up and evolving campaign to prevent Russians arrested on criminal hacking charges from being extradited to the U.S.

Russia has relied on a variety of techniques—whether leveraging the legal system or resorting to more coercive means, such as bribery—to pressure other countries to impede U.S. extradition efforts, current and former U.S. officials said.

“Russia uses every tool at its disposal, including these more coercive steps” to prevent its citizens arrested abroad on hacking charges from being extradited, said Chris Painter, the former top cybersecurity official at the State Department under President Obama. “It can sometimes seem like a throwback to the Soviet era in terms of the tactics they are using.”

• A Chinese law professor has raised a rare legal challenge over how facial-recognition technology is deployed in a country where surveillance cameras are increasingly part of everyday life. Guo Bing accused a wildlife park and zoo in the eastern technology hub of Hangzhou of violating his consumer rights by requiring members to register their faces as part of a new entrance system. On Friday, a court in Hangzhou accepted Mr. Guo’s case.

Under Armour shares fell nearly 19% after the company confirmed it was the subject of a federal investigation into its accounting practices. Executives declined on an earnings call Monday to provide details about the probe or explain why Under Armour hadn’t previously disclosed its existence. David Bergman, a longtime company executive who took over as Under Armour’s CFO in February 2017, said the company was prohibited from discussing the matter.

Public companies aren’t required to disclose every regulatory or law-enforcement investigation. The decision about what to tell shareholders turns on the magnitude of the problem and how likely it is to become a legal liability. “If the company feels like it has the better argument, and that the investigation isn’t going to turn up an allegation of a violation, then they are justified in not disclosing it,” said Marc Leaf, a partner at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP who previously worked at the SEC.

• The auditing standards board of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants is working to modernize standards governing nonfinancial information to include cybersecurity and environmental, social and corporate governance issues.

• Air pollution in India’s capital surged to its worst levels in years, covering the city in a thick smog that has become an annual public-health emergency despite government vows to tackle the problem. Hundreds of flights were diverted, delayed and canceled over the weekend due to poor visibility, schools and offices were closed and officials rushed to implement a battery of emergency measures to try to reverse the eroding air quality. 
   
• Vale’s top managers received an anonymous email warning about the safety of the miner’s dams two weeks before a deadly disaster, a note that prompted the chief executive to pursue the writer’s identity and call the person a “cancer,” a police document shows. Authorities said they are focusing on then-CEO Fabio Schvartsman’s response as they investigate whether a culture of retaliation at the company contributed to the Jan. 25. mine-dam collapse in Brumadinho, Brazil that killed 270 people.

Sprint lost 91,000 of its most lucrative phone connections in the latest quarter, as the No. 4 U.S. carrier struggled to retain subscribers and compete with its larger rivals for new customers.

Sprint also posted a bottom-line loss for the quarter as a result of its plans to reimburse the government for subsidies it improperly collected for so-called Lifeline subscribers. Lifeline provides phones to low-income Americans.

The Federal Communications Commission said in September that Sprint collected “tens of millions” of dollars in federal subsidies for 885,000 Lifeline subscribers that weren’t using the service, and referred the issue to its enforcement unit.

Apple will commit $2.5 billion toward affordable housing in California, the latest tech giant to pledge a large sum to help address concerns that Silicon Valley’s successes have pushed people out of the area. 

Apple’s announcement follows similar, though smaller, commitments by several other tech titans—including Facebook, Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft—to address affordable housing.

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