Good morning. TikTok is facing what it views as perhaps its biggest crisis yet, with the world’s most popular app facing an intense backlash over the perception it favors pro-Palestinian and, at times, antisemitic content.

Citing anti-Israel posts that surfaced on TikTok since the Gaza conflict began and a decades-old Osama bin Laden letter that circulated this week, Washington lawmakers have renewed calls to ban the app in the U.S. TikTok executives view this ban attempt more seriously than previous ones, according to people inside the company, and have rushed to respond to what they view as an inaccurate and unfair narrative.

• The background: All social-media platforms have been flooded with disinformation, gory content and propaganda since the conflict broke out in early October and have struggled to enforce their respective policies against such posts. But TikTok, where a sizable percentage of young people now get their news, has received the most scrutiny. TikTok is unlike other social-media platforms because it is owned by a Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and thus vulnerable to shifting political winds.
   
• TikTok's response: Top executives set up meetings with Jewish leaders and celebrities to tell them they take their concerns seriously. They published a post that argues it has been fair in moderating pro-Israel and pro-Palestine videos. When a venture capitalist tweeted that his independent research had found TikTok favors pro-Palestinian content—and said he is convinced it explains why more young people are opposing Israel—TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew personally called him to argue the point.

Also:

• Several Schools Under Investigation for Allegedly Failing to Protect Jewish, Muslim Students

Lifecore Biomedical avoids U.S. prosecution over alleged Mexico bribes

Lifecore Biomedical, a pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturer, won’t face a U.S. bribery prosecution after coming forward to report a former subsidiary’s alleged illegal payments in Mexico.

The U.S. Justice Department formally declined to charge Lifecore over bribes that a then newly acquired subsidiary allegedly paid to Mexican government officials, according to a so-called declination letter the Justice Department released Friday.

Washington is lousy at managing classified documents—and has been for years

The classified-documents scandals that have rocked the current occupant of the White House and his immediate predecessor have revealed the startling extent to which top officeholders of both major parties stretching back decades mishandled secret papers.  

Documents marked secret were found in papers donated by former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, Edmund Muskie, Madeleine Albright, Dean Acheson and Cyrus Vance, along with about a dozen members of Congress, former ambassadors and leading scientists, according to notes released by National Archives and Records Administration, the agency that preserves important documents including of the Declaration of Independence.

• A ransomware gang wanted its victim to pay up, so it went to the SEC. New disclosure rules potentially heighten risk for corporate victims of cybercrimes.
   
• Famed litigator David Boies will step down next year as chair of the law firm he co-founded 26 years ago, as the firm seeks to move past some turbulent years and questions about its future.
   
• Microsoft said it is hiring Sam Altman to helm a new advanced artificial-intelligence research team, after his bid to return to OpenAI fell apart Sunday with the board that fired him declining to agree to the proposed terms of his reinstatement. OpenAI unexpectedly pushed out the co-founder as chief executive officer, saying he wasn’t being “consistently candid in his communications” following a series of clashes over the company’s direction with some members of the company‘s board. 
   
• Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg took responsibility and apologized for the agency’s workplace culture in a video to staff Friday, while indicating he doesn’t plan to bow to pressure from Republican senators to resign.
   
• Bayer faces a payout of $1.56 billion after a Missouri jury found in favor of the plaintiffs who blamed its Roundup weedkiller for causing their cancers.
   
• The recent hack of a Chinese banking giant reignited Wall Street’s long-running fears of disruptions to the short-term cash markets underpinning the global financial system.
   
• Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the family of dual Russian-U.S. citizen Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist for RFE/RL, are now mounting a vigorous campaign for the U.S. State Department to determine she has been wrongfully detained, a designation that would effectively commit the U.S. government to work to secure her release.

Israel to allow limited delivery of fuel into Gaza

Israel said it would allow limited fuel deliveries into the Gaza Strip after supplies ran out and plunged the enclave into a communications blackout.

The Israeli war cabinet decided a small amount of fuel could be transported into the strip, although it would be limited to a single delivery of two diesel tankers, or 60,000 liters, for the United Nations to operate water and sewer systems in southern Gaza.

Benny Gantz, head of Israel’s National Unity party and a member of the war cabinet, said Friday afternoon the fuel would arrive in the strip within the next 48 hours, though Egyptian officials said talks had stalled, casting uncertainty over the timing or whether any deliveries would happen at all.

• Israel Shifts to Tougher Phase of Its Gaza War
• Israel, Hamas Close In on Hostage Deal 
• For Postwar Gaza, Differences Grow Over Palestinian Leadership Role

• European governments are boosting their assistance to Ukraine as worries grow that Washington’s failure to approve new aid could cause Ukraine to lose ground in the war against Russia.
   
• China’s housing market has a big problem: millions of unfinished homes that were sold but not delivered. Solving that is crucial for a recovery, but the problem keeps getting bigger. More property developers are defaulting on their debt and adding to the logjam of construction delays and stalled residential developments across the country.
   
• For decades, the U.S. hasn’t had to worry much about China’s submarines. They were noisy and easy to track. The Chinese military, meanwhile, struggled to detect America’s ultraquiet submarines. Now, China is narrowing one of the biggest gaps separating the U.S. and Chinese militaries as it makes advances in its submarine technology and undersea detection capabilities, with major implications for American military planning for a potential conflict over Taiwan.
   
• Javier Milei, a libertarian political outsider who pledged to flatten Argentina’s political establishment, won the presidency Sunday by an overwhelming margin in a major shift for a country buffeted by one of the world’s highest rates of inflation and mounting poverty after years of populist rule. Milei will take office in early December with the task of reversing unsustainable spending policies that have depleted government coffers and caused inflation and interest rates to soar.
   
• The U.S. office sector’s credit crunch is intensifying. By one measure, it’s now worse than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

• Elon Musk agreed with a post on X that said Jewish people hold a “dialectical hatred” of white people, eliciting a new round of criticism that he promotes antisemitic views. Apple and several major entertainment companies stopped advertising on X after Musk's actions. 
   
• The Estée Lauder family built a beauty empire. A succession rift threatens it. 
   
• Russia’s Ministry of Justice has filed a lawsuit with the nation’s Supreme Court to recognize the international LGBT movement as extremist and ban its activities inside the country, in the latest assault on a community that has increasingly become a target of hostility in Russia.
   
• The Republican head of the House Ethics Committee filed a resolution to expel Rep. George Santos (R., N.Y.) on Friday, putting a possible vote within weeks a day after the panel released a scathing report finding the lawmaker stole money from his campaign.
   
• The Food and Drug Administration said it is screening cinnamon shipments from several countries as part of its investigation of illnesses potentially linked to pouches of cinnamon-flavored applesauce.
   
• The United Auto Workers union has secured worker backing for new labor contracts at all three Detroit automakers, bringing a tense round of negotiations between the two sides one step closer to wrapping up.
   
• Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor and lawyers for people detained at Rikers Island asked a judge to take the rare step of ordering a federal takeover of the troubled New York jail complex, saying city officials could no longer manage a facility dominated by brutal conditions.

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.

You can reach us by replying to any newsletter, or email David at david.smagalla@wsj.com.