Good morning. The Justice Department has joined a host of federal agencies that now offer the potential of a big financial payout to tipsters who take on the risk of turning over incriminating information about their employer or another company to the government.

• Outline of new program: Under a three-year pilot program launched Thursday, people who turn over original information or analysis relating to a financial crime, bribery or healthcare fraud could be eligible for an award of up to 30% of any assets forfeited by a company as a result of that information.
   
• Filling in the gaps: In a call with reporters on Thursday, Justice Department officials said they sought to design a program that fills gaps between pre-existing award programs. They pointed to a $4.3 billion settlement with global cryptocurrency exchange Binance over its failure to register as a money-transmitting business and a $1.2 billion settlement with commodities giant Glencore over foreign bribery violations as examples of cases that other award programs didn’t cover.
   
• Background: Financial awards for whistleblowers have become common in the U.S., with regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service paying awards in the tens of millions of dollars to tipsters whose disclosures lead to fines and penalties. The SEC’s program was launched in 2010 following a landmark financial overhaul law. The IRS has had the ability to pay whistleblowers since 1867.

GPB Capital co-founders found guilty of fraud.

A jury convicted two founders of GPB Capital Holdings, David Gentile and Jeffry Schneider, Thursday of criminal charges in the largest fraud case involving a private-equity firm since the collapse of Abraaj Group in 2018, WSJ Private Equity reports.

The case. The federal jury found both men guilty of securities fraud and conspiracy charges over their handling of around $1.7 billion raised from roughly 17,000 mostly individual investors in the U.S. Gentile was also convicted of wire fraud. The charges centered on how the New York firm raised investment funds and how it falsely portrayed the performance of some car dealerships it acquired to induce new investors to put money into GPB funds.

U.K.’s SFO charges five former Glencore employees.

The U.K. Serious Fraud Office charged five former employees of global mining and trading company Glencore with conspiracy to pay bribes.

All five were charged in connection to oil contracts being awarded in Cameroon, Nigeria and Ivory Coast from 2007 to 2014. Two of the former employees also were charged with falsifying invoices sent to Glencore’s London office that were marked as service fees paid to a Nigerian oil consulting firm from 2007 to 2011.

The charges against the former Glencore employees follow settlements in the U.K. and U.S. with the commodities firm, which in May 2022 paid at least $1.2 billion and pleaded guilty to bribery charges in the U.K. and to conspiracy to violate U.S. anticorruption laws.

• Don Lemon is suing Elon Musk and X for breach of contract after the owner of the social-media platform canceled a short-lived partnership deal following a testy interview.
   
• An antitrust verdict against the National Football League that resulted in a $4.7 billion award in damages to customers of the league’s “Sunday Ticket” television package was overturned by the judge in the case.

Autocrats wield hostage-taking as potent weapon against West.

Authoritarian states around the world are arbitrarily imprisoning foreign citizens, using them as bargaining chips to achieve geopolitical goals.

Hostage-taking by nation-states—something practiced more often by terrorists and insurgents in the past—has become more and more frequent in recent years. The phenomenon poses a new challenge to Western democracies, especially as rivals like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, all of which have engaged in such behavior, grow closer together amid raging conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Climate cash pivots to new reality of a hotter, wetter planet.

Efforts to address the cause of climate change have fallen short so far. That is leading to a big push to treat the symptoms.

More money. Government and private money is pouring into plans to control flooding, address extreme heat and shore up infrastructure to withstand more severe weather caused by climate change.

But still a problem. Nearly all of the spending on climate change has gone to prevention, including reducing fossil-fuel use and developing technologies to lower carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those mitigation efforts haven’t been enough.

• By opening the door wider to an interest-rate cut in September, the Federal Reserve is on a collision course with the presidential election.
   
• A bipartisan tax bill that sailed through the House six months ago reached a dead end as the Senate killed the once-promising deal Thursday and turned it into fodder for campaign-trail finger-pointing.
   
• The Bank of England cut its key interest rate for the first time in over four years.
   
• U.K. retail footfall levels slipped in July, when consumers shifted their spending to holidays and leisure activities from shopping, according to a study.
   
• Japan’s Nikkei Stock Average posted its largest single-day drop in more than four years Friday, driven down by signs of cooling in the U.S. economy and an interest-rate increase by the Bank of Japan.
   
• The Biden administration is scrambling to salvage prospects for a Gaza cease-fire after the political leader of Hamas was killed in a strike in Tehran.
   
• Young Africans, pummeled by the rising cost of living and dissatisfied with bad governance and a dire lack of opportunities, are driving a wave of protests that has now swept through at least three countries across the continent.

• Russia freed wrongly convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as part of the largest and most complex East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War, in which he and more than a dozen others jailed by the Kremlin were exchanged for Russians held in the U.S. and Europe, including a convicted murderer.
   
• The effort to bring home The Wall Street Journal reporter and others unfolded on three continents, involving spy agencies, billionaires, political power players and his fiercest advocate—his mother.
   
• Ex-Marine Paul Whelan spent years in Russian prisons as Washington and Moscow stumbled into a new era of hostage diplomacy.

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