Good morning. The Biden administration on Thursday said it would ban sales in the U.S. of software built by Russian antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab, acting on longstanding concerns that the software firm poses a significant national-security threat.

U.S. officials described the ban as a “full prohibition” on selling to U.S. businesses or individuals. Additionally, the administration is adding Kaspersky Lab to a list that limits U.S. suppliers from doing business with the company.

• ‘It’s about technology’: “When you think about national security, you may think about guns and tanks and missiles. But the truth is increasingly, it’s about technology,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Thursday during a media briefing. Installing software from adversaries like Russia and China, she said, “makes all Americans vulnerable.”
   
• Past purge: Kaspersky Lab didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The firm, whose software was purged from U.S. federal government networks during the Trump administration, has repeatedly denied that it works with Russia or any government to facilitate cyber espionage or other malicious cyber activity.
   
• Protecting critical infrastructure: The moves are the most significant action taken to date by the U.S. government against Kaspersky Lab, a company with hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Officials declined to disclose an estimated number of Kaspersky Lab customers in the U.S., but said it included critical infrastructure and state and local entities.

Banks pressed to screen for money flow from fentanyl precursors.

Financial institutions are under pressure to guard against financial activity related to the production and sale of illicit fentanyl, amid a campaign by the Biden administration to respond to more overdose deaths.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s financial crimes watchdog issued an alert on Thursday asking banks to screen for money flows related to the production of illicit fentanyl. Banks are required to screen transactions by their customers and report suspicious activity.

• Eli Lilly is stepping up its campaign against fake and counterfeit weight-loss drugs with more lawsuits against sellers of unapproved products that market themselves as Mounjaro and Zepbound.
   
• The Internal Revenue Service is planning to deny billions of dollars of what it says are improper claims for a popular pandemic-era tax credit for employers.
   
• The Supreme Court rejected a challenge from conservative activists to a one-time tax on certain foreign investments, but left unresolved questions about whether some leading Democratic revenue-raising ideas are constitutional.
   
• Disputes over credit-card charges, once a measure of last resort, have surged as shoppers learn how easy it is to deploy them. Last year, consumers disputed about 105 million charges with credit-card issuers in the U.S., worth an estimated $11 billion.

‘Only pirates do this’: China wields axes and knives in South China Sea fight.

The Chinese coast guard used crude weapons against Philippine military boats in the latest confrontation in the South China Sea, marking a sharp escalation in China’s use of forceful tactics against a U.S. ally.

While the Taiwan Strait is seen as the main flashpoint in the great-power rivalry between the U.S. and China, the turmoil in the South China Sea is raising a potentially nearer-term risk of conflict between the two countries. The U.S. and the Philippines have a mutual defense treaty that extends to armed attacks on Filipino forces in the South China Sea.

Car dealers are in turmoil as cyber incidents strike software provider.

Thousands of car dealers around the U.S. lost access for the second straight day to software that helps underpin their day-to-day operations, disrupting their ability to sell or repair cars.

CDK Global, which provides the technology to auto dealers, said it experienced cyber incidents that first affected service to dealers on Wednesday. The company shut down most of its systems while it assesses the situation, a spokeswoman said.

• Digicel, Haiti’s largest cell phone operator and biggest foreign investor, has been able to keep 85% of its cell towers functioning and its mobile services online by carefully navigating gang territories and engaging warlords, said Maarten Boute, the Belgian-born chairman of the company in Haiti.
   
• Tropical storm Alberto lashed into Mexico’s Gulf Coast Thursday, bringing heavy rain and flooding to parts of Mexico and southern Texas but causing little damage.
   
• The Bank of England left its key interest rate at a 16-year high Thursday, but signaled it may follow a growing number of its European peers by lowering borrowing costs over the coming months. Switzerland’s central bank Thursday cut its key interest rate for the second straight meeting.
   
• Across southern Europe, an unprecedented tourism boom driven largely by American tourists is turbocharging growth in places that had become bywords for economic stagnation. But some economists think it could end badly.
   
• Saudi Arabia faces increasingly hard fiscal choices, with growing bills for planned futuristic megaprojects and an economic overhaul—and narrowing ways to pay for them.

• Delta, Macy’s and “fallen angels” are slashing debt and fortifying balance sheets to recoup their investment-grade ranking, a halo they lost in 2020.  
   
• A healthy-food startup backed by NBA stars Chris Paul and Kevin Love is mired in legal accusations brought by another investor and the company’s executives.
   
• Can farmland in the tropics be turned back into the carbon-packed forests they once were? Microsoft and other investors are betting on it.
   
• Tech billionaires want to build a brand new city outside San Francisco. First, they have to convince local voters.

Before Deloitte, Shepard was the head of financial crime compliance at Commerce Bank, a white-collar defense attorney and U.S. Justice Department prosecutor.

• Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable listed company because of the demand for its AI chips. It is leading a tech boom that brings back memories of the dot-com boom.
   
• President Biden’s re-election campaign is making a larger investment in North Carolina than recent Democratic presidential efforts, laying the groundwork for an alternative path to retaining the White House.
   
• The Biden administration will rush the delivery of air-defense interceptors to Ukraine by halting delivery to allied nations, the White House said.
   
• Emerson College said pro-Palestinian protests are partly to blame for an expected drop in enrollment for the incoming fall class.
   
• Women’s clothes finally have pockets. What took so long?
   
• Donald Sutherland, an actor with cross-generational appeal who starred in hits including “M*A*S*H” and the “Hunger Games” movie franchise, has died, his son said Thursday. He was 88.

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