Good morning. One of the biggest legal fights in the history of insurance has begun. A cavalcade of restaurateurs, retailers and others hurt by pandemic shutdowns have sued to force their insurers to cover billions in business losses. Millions of businesses across the U.S. have “business interruption” insurance. The pandemic, no question, interrupted their businesses.

But insurance companies have largely refused to pay claims under this coverage, citing a standard requirement for physical damage. And more than half of property policies in force today specifically exclude viruses. The firms filing the lawsuits mostly hold policies without that exclusion. Their argument for getting around the physical-damage requirement is that the coronavirus sticks to surfaces and renders workplaces unsafe.

[Continued below…]

“Lawyers and the trial bar will attempt to torture the language on standard industry forms and try to prove something exists that actually doesn’t exist,” Chubb Ltd. Chief Executive Evan Greenberg said on an earnings call in April. “The industry will fight this tooth and nail. We will pay what we owe.”

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed and lawyers anticipate many more. Some plaintiffs’ lawyers speculate the issue could deal losses to insurers rivaling their liability from asbestos litigation about 30 years ago. That was about $100 billion, according to A.M. Best Co. A Wells Fargo Securities analyst puts insurers’ worst-case business-interruption liability at $25 billion, which would match losses from some Category 5 hurricanes.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced some financial institutions to reduce staff or reassign personnel at a time when applications for government relief programs are flooding in, heightening banks’ compliance risks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said. The OCC, which supervises and regulates banks and savings associations, says it would consider the impact of pandemic-related challenges on compliance as it conducts examinations and weighs enforcement.

U.S. authorities have closed bribery investigations into Usana Health Sciences Inc.’s operations in China, the multilevel marketer of nutritional and personal-care products said. The decision was based on Usana Health’s prompt disclosure of the matter, which involved the Salt Lake City-based company’s BabyCare operations in China, and its thorough investigation, cooperation and remediation, Usana Health said in a securities filing.

The Supreme Court gave online companies broad latitude to trademark their website names, rejecting restrictions imposed by the federal government. The court, in an 8-1 ruling Tuesday, sided with the online travel firm Booking.com, which had applied to register four trademarks using its name in connection with travel-related services.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had rejected the marks, on the grounds that “booking” was a generic word that couldn't be trademarked, and adding a .com on the end didn’t change the analysis. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, said the government’s approach was incorrect because the public understands Booking.com to be a distinctive business, not a generic name for an online travel service.

• The Labor Department proposed a new rule for retirement accounts that would allow brokers and other types of financial advisers to provide fiduciary advice and still receive commissions in some cases. The proposed rule would align the regulation of retirement accounts with new SEC standards governing brokers’ interactions with investors in taxable accounts and individual retirement accounts. Consumer advocates say the proposed regulation would weaken standards under the federal law that governs retirement accounts.
   
• Vatican police raided the office that manages St. Peter’s Basilica, seizing documents and electronic equipment as part of an investigation into possible corruption in procurement practices. The extraordinary raid comes a month after the Vatican published new procurement rules intended to prevent corruption and cut costs. 
   
• Eileen Murray, the former co-chief executive of the world’s largest hedge fund, will take over as chairperson of Finra at the organization’s annual meeting in August. Wall Street’s self-regulatory arm also said Maureen Jensen, the former CEO at the Ontario Securities Commission and Eric Noll, CEO at Context Capital Partners, will also join its board.
   
• U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on the United Nations Security Council to extend a five-year ban on conventional weapons trade with Iran that is set to expire in October, while his Iranian counterpart warned of dire consequences of such an action.
   
• A New York judge granted President Trump’s younger brother, Robert S. Trump, a temporary injunction delaying the coming publication of a tell-all book by the president’s niece. The Trump siblings have argued in court papers that the book includes details that, if published, would violate a confidentiality agreement signed by Mary Trump nearly two decades ago.
   
• The Food and Drug Administration released guidance Tuesday outlining conditions for approving a Covid-19 vaccine, including that any vaccine be at least 50% more effective than a placebo in preventing the disease.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell pledged to consider additional relief to prevent lasting damage to labor markets and businesses amid signs that more states are struggling to suppress the coronavirus pandemic. “We have entered an important new phase and have done so sooner than expected,” Mr. Powell said. “While this bounce back in economic activity is welcome, it also presents new challenges—notably, the need to keep the virus in check.”

The U.S. is recording about 40,000 new cases a day of the new coronavirus, and “it could go up to 100,000 a day” if people continue to flout advice on social distancing and face masks, said Anthony Fauci, the top-ranking infectious-disease doctor from the National Institutes of Health. “It could get very bad,” Dr. Fauci told a Senate committee. “This idea of pushing back against scientific data is problematical. And congregating in bars, indoors, is bad news.”

Americans will remain barred from entering the European Union for nonessential travel even as the bloc starts to open up to as many as 15 countries from Wednesday, the EU said.

• India’s decision to ban dozens of Chinese apps is a setback for China’s top tech firms trying to replicate their remarkable domestic success globally, as they are now stymied in what many consider the world’s last great untapped digital market.

In a virtual town hall with marketers and advertising agencies on Tuesday, Facebook executives once again tried to answer complaints that the company hasn’t done enough to counter hate speech and misinformation.

Executives described efforts to make the Facebook and Instagram platforms less hostile and the difficulty of moderating conversations without constraining speech, according to participants. It was just the latest effort by Facebook to show that the social-media giant takes seriously the concerns about its policies.

But the company isn’t only confronting the challenge sparked on June 17, when several civil-rights groups called on advertisers to pull their spending as a way to pressure Facebook into changing the way it handles content. Facebook is also facing discontent from advertisers stretching back years.

• Facebook Bans Large Segment of Boogaloo Movement

• The global head of human resources at Adidas, is retiring from the company following employee complaints about the sportswear giant’s culture and lack of diversity. 
   
• Netflix said it would shift 2% of its cash holdings to banks and credit unions that primarily serve Black communities to improve these financial institutions’ ability to offer loans. The streaming service is taking $100 million of its $5 billion in cash holdings—which it keeps in about 30 banks—to institutions serving Black communities.

• Manufacturing services company Jabil Inc. is jumping into the face-mask field in the U.S. with plans to produce more than a million masks daily, making it the latest industrial operator to turn its factory lines over to equipment aimed at the global coronavirus pandemic.
   
• Microsoft will provide free online classes and job-hunting resources to 25 million people by the end of the year as the global economy reels from the coronavirus pandemic. The training, available to workers around the world, is designed to teach digital skills.