Good morning. In mid-2019, Israel’s military used a precision strike on a narrow street to kill a Hamas commander whom it called Iran’s money man in Gaza.

The commander ran an off-the-books system of remittances in which trusted agents shuttled physical cash and goods across borders to settle customers’ balances. This so-called hawala network, as it is known in the Middle East, funneled tens of millions of dollars in financing from Iran to Hamas’s military wing.

His replacement, a Palestinian businessman called Zuhair Shamlakh, changed strategy to evade the Israelis: He turned to digital currencies.

Shamlakh’s money exchanges increasingly sent digital tokens to operators abroad to settle hawala balances, according to current and former Israeli law-enforcement officials along with former U.S. officials. Crypto sent to the digital wallets controlled by the Hamas-affiliated money exchanges could also be swapped for cash at their offices in the Gaza Strip.

• What this did for Hamas: This pivot helped Hamas and affiliates such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad to receive large sums from Iran during the two years that preceded the attacks on Israel in October, the officials said. It was an attempt to use a new financial technology to lessen the risks of moving physical money and goods.
   
• Crypto under the microscope: Hamas’s use of digital currencies has intensified scrutiny on the crypto industry. While crypto transactions are visible on public blockchain ledgers, many foreign platforms that customers use to trade digital currencies have weak compliance controls or are designed to conceal their identities.

California startup-diversity law may touch private-equity, growth investors.

California’s new law to make venture-capital firms provide data on the gender and racial makeup of the startups they back could have a far wider reach, legal analysts told The Wall Street Journal’s Chris Cumming.

Lawyers say other types of money managers need to take notice—even those that aren’t venture investors and aren’t based in California.

Compliance will require a lot of work, and many private-investment firms that are covered by the law don’t yet appear to be aware that it applies to them, said Kevin Bettsteller, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who focuses on private-fund regulation. “No one is quite sure how it will affect sponsors,” Bettsteller said. “The headlines are about venture capital, but it goes far beyond that.”

• A group of former FTX executives, including one who served as a key witness against Sam Bankman-Fried, are teaming up to build a new cryptocurrency exchange that aims to solve the problems that doomed their previous employer.
   
• Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents, longtime Stanford Law professors, have an uphill battle ahead in trying to overturn their son’s conviction.
   
• A toxic work environment at the FDIC, one of the nation’s top banking regulators, has for years caused employees to flee from an agency they say enabled and failed to punish bad behavior.
   
• Scammers are capitalizing on the rush of consumer interest in artificial-intelligence tools to steal U.S. small businesses’ social-media-account passwords, Google alleges in a new lawsuit.
   
• Canadian fashion and retailing mogul Peter Nygard was found guilty in a Toronto court on Sunday of four counts of sexual assault.

As Chinese tastes change, farmers everywhere rip up and replant.

China’s appetite for foreign produce has grown in recent decades along with the wealth of its consumers. The amount of food the world’s second most populous nation imports has risen to over $200 billion a year—more than any other country—from about $15 billion two decades ago, according to the World Trade Organization.

Feeding China’s massive middle class presents a historic opportunity for countries seeking to boost the incomes of people in poor, rural areas. But it also poses a quandary: how to tap in to its huge market without becoming dependent on a trade partner that can be fickle.

Moody’s changes outlook on U.S. ratings to negative.

Moody’s Investors Service on Friday said it was revising the outlook on the U.S. government’s ratings to negative, while affirming the long-term issuer and senior unsecured ratings at Aaa.

Moody’s said a key driver to the outlook change was its assessment that downside risks to the nation’s fiscal strength have increased “and may no longer be fully offset by the sovereign’s unique credit strengths.”

• As employers clamored to hire from a limited pool of workers, Americans in lower-paying industries gained leverage to obtain some of the largest pay raises and perks. Now, that leverage is weakening.
   
• House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) unveiled a two-step short-term spending proposal that would keep money flowing to federal agencies into early next year, in a bid to stave off a partial government shutdown late next week.
   
• Foreclosures are surging in an opaque and risky corner of commercial real-estate finance, offering one of the starkest signs yet that turmoil in the property market is worsening.
   
• The chance of a full-scale war breaking out between Israel and forces in Lebanon increased in recent days, Israeli officials said, even as fighting continued around the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital, crippling the facility where doctors said hundreds of civilians were sheltering and more patients were dying.
   
• The path to a U.S.-China summit was strewn with gamesmanship.
   
• The energy transition is getting a dose of reality. Offshore wind projects are being scrapped, and renewable-energy companies’ share prices are tanking. In the U.S., automakers are reining in electric-vehicle plans as demand falters.
   
• China's massive funding of renewables has drawn odd newcomers and led to a glut of solar components that is rippling through the industry and stymying attempts to build such manufacturing elsewhere, particularly in Europe.

Boeing says information from system published online by cyber criminals.

Boeing said Friday that information from its systems had been released by a “criminal ransomware actor.”

The aerospace company said in a statement that its parts and distribution business had experienced a cybersecurity incident recently. The company said it was confident the incident did not threaten aircraft or flight safety.

• FOMO in the stock market is back. A lightning-fast rebound has driven the S&P 500 up in nine of the past 10 sessions and 7.2% over the past two weeks, the best such stretch of the year. Now, many investors are betting the rally has legs.
   
• Meta Platforms has struck a preliminary deal to sell a new, lower-priced version of its virtual-reality headset in China, regaining a foothold among consumers in the country 14 years after Facebook was shut out.
   
• WeWork has filed for bankruptcy, but a second wave of co-working spaces is here to fill the void.
   
• When it comes to the future, Elon Musk’s best-case scenario for humanity sounds a lot like Sci-Fi Socialism.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun, Dylan Tokar @dgtokar and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich.

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