Good morning. The Biden administration has formed a panel of senior administration officials and private-sector experts to investigate major national cybersecurity failures, and it will probe as its first case the recently discovered Log4j internet bug, officials said.

The new Cyber Safety Review Board is tasked with examining significant cybersecurity events that affect government, business and critical infrastructure. It will publish reports on security findings and recommendations, officials said. Details of the board will be announced Thursday.

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The board, officials have said, is modeled loosely on the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates and issues public reports on airplane crashes, train derailments and other transportation accidents. The new panel’s authority derives from an executive order that President Biden signed in May to improve federal cybersecurity defenses.

The cyber board isn’t an independent agency like the transportation board and will instead reside within the Department of Homeland Security. It will have 15 members—three times as many as the full complement of the transportation board—from government and the public sector who don’t need to be confirmed by the Senate. It lacks subpoena power, unlike the transportation board.

A near-equal split has emerged among businesses on imposing their own vaccine mandates following an attempt by the Biden administration to put in place a federal requirement on large employers, according to the results of a new survey.

In a poll of nearly 500 employers, consulting group Mercer LLC found that 44% had a mandate in place and 6% were planning to implement one, despite a Supreme Court ruling overturning the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test requirement.

Meanwhile, 9% of the employers surveyed said they were still considering whether to impose a mandate and 42% said they aren’t considering a mandate, according to the poll. The Supreme Court ruling has given employers the flexibility to design a policy that’s best suited to their particular workforce, Mercer said.

—Dylan Tokar

AXA SA has appointed Andrew Wallace-Barnett as group chief compliance officer, the Paris-based insurance and asset-management company said Thursday.

Mr. Wallace-Barnett, who previously served as head of investor relations, will begin his new job on Sept. 1 and report to group Deputy Chief Executive George Stansfield.

Mr. Wallace-Barnett first joined AXA Australia in 1988 as a corporate actuary. In 2005 he became chief risk officer of AXA France, and in 2008 was appointed to serve as chief risk officer of AXA US. He has served as head of investor relations for the group since 2014.

Mr. Wallace-Barnett in his new compliance chief role will succeed Ian Johnson, who is retiring after a 30-year career at AXA, the company said.

–Richard Vanderford

Paxos Trust Co., a provider of blockchain-related technology, has hired former Block Inc. compliance chief Ben Gray to serve as its general counsel.

Mr. Gray previously oversaw global compliance and legal teams at Block, a payment services company formerly known as Square. In his new role, he will take over day-to-day leadership and expansion of Paxos's international compliance and legal departments, Paxos said Thursday.

Paxos is looking to bolster its compliance competency as its success “hinges on the ability to build compliant products within established regulatory frameworks,” Paxos Chief Executive Charles Cascarilla said.

—Richard Vanderford

The emerging global minimum-tax agreement would make domestic tax breaks less valuable for some U.S.-based companies, potentially limiting the effectiveness of incentives for research, exports and low-income housing, businesses are warning.

Their concerns stem from proposed international rules about how nations can use tax breaks to aid companies’ home-country operations, under the global deal that puts a 15% floor under corporate tax rates. To create a level playing field, the rules let other countries impose taxes if multinational companies pay too little at home. U.S. policy makers are still assessing any impact, but companies are starting to raise alarms.

“It’s a big deal,” said Mary Bennett of law firm Baker & McKenzie LLP. “There are a number of companies that have been paying close attention.”

Dr. Califf had served as FDA commissioner at the end of the Obama administration following an 89-4 Senate confirmation vote. He has support from some Republican senators and a bipartisan group of former commissioners for a second stint.

• Sarah Bloom Raskin, President Biden’s nominee to become the Federal Reserve’s top bank regulator, said that she wouldn’t use the position to restrict lending to the oil-and-gas industry, after she has previously called for more-aggressive regulatory moves away from high-emission investments.
   
• A Senate panel advanced bipartisan legislation Thursday that would limit the ability of Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to impose rules and fees on developers using their consumer-app stores.
   
• A Georgia judge questioned the fairness of the financial industry’s dispute-resolution process in a ruling stemming from a Wells Fargo & Co. customer’s claim that the bank botched his investments.
   
• Court proceedings in Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times kicked off Thursday, in a rare defamation trial against a leading news outlet that could have broad ramifications for the future of media law.

Islamic State, the terrorist organization that once made Raqqa the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate, has regrouped in the three years since it lost its territory in Iraq and Syria, launching a comeback in recent weeks that suffered a blow Thursday with the killing of its top leader.

Since a U.S.-backed coalition dislodged Islamic State from power in 2019, the jihadist group has transformed into an underground insurgency with the ability to stage deadly attacks. It still has tens of millions of dollars to finance its operations, here in the desert and around the world, U.S. officials say.

People in northeast Syria say Islamic State has ramped up extortion and smuggling in recent months, while maintaining a steady drumbeat of gun and bomb attacks on soldiers and civilians. The group’s black flags have appeared in places in northeast Syria, witnesses say.

Related: ISIS Leader Killed Himself, Family During U.S. Raid in Syria, Biden Says

• Ukraine is developing indigenous missile capabilities aimed at deterring Russian military action in the future—and that increasingly worry Moscow.
   
• Russia is planning to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine by releasing a staged video depicting attacks by Kyiv military forces, U.S. officials said Thursday, citing newly declassified intelligence.
   
• The Biden administration expects a restored nuclear deal would leave Iran capable of amassing enough nuclear fuel for a bomb in significantly less than a year, a shorter time frame than the one that underpinned the 2015 agreement, U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.
   
• U.S. corporate bankruptcies have fallen to their lowest level in more than 15 years, and that trend could continue despite the Covid-19 pandemic, at least in the near term.
   
• Europe’s central banks signaled growing concern about soaring inflation and a determination to quench it by raising interest rates, a policy shift that creates risks for investors and the world economy.

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA, one of the world’s largest makers of wind turbines, replaced its chief executive—a change-up the company said was triggered by profit shortfalls related to pandemic-era supply-chain disruptions.

The Spain-based company, which is majority owned by a unit of Siemens AG, has struggled alongside many companies with supply-chain issues since 2020. Companies have been hit by the pandemic’s start-stop effect on assembly lines. More recently, they have had to contend with booming demand after Covid-19 lockdowns. In response, many have been forced to delay products, raise prices and issue profit warnings. Few so far, though, have replaced their CEO to cope.

It was the second chief executive change in as many years for Siemens Gamesa, which said Wednesday it was replacing Andreas Nauen with Jochen Eickholt. Mr. Eickholt most recently led the gas and power business at Siemens Energy AG, which is Gamesa’s majority owner. Mr. Eickholt will take over next month.

• Compensation for chief financial officers at large U.S. companies rose 16% in 2021 from the previous year, lifted by a sharp increase in bonus pay, according to an analysis of early proxy filings by employee-benefits advisory firm Mercer.
   
• Australia's Westpac Banking Corp. announced changes to its operating and executive structure, combining the roles of chief risk officer and group executive, financial crime, compliance and conduct. 

Many companies’ climate strategies target “carbon neutrality” by buying enough carbon offsets to balance out their greenhouse gas emissions. But as carbon-neutral product labels proliferate, financial technology startup Klarna Bank AB is among the companies shifting to a different approach.

Having previously bought carbon credits to match its emissions, Stockholm-based Klarna in 2021 decided to work with Swedish nonprofit Milkywire AB to fund a portfolio of 11 projects that it chose with the aim of maximizing the climate impact of each dollar.

The portfolio includes purchases from carbon-removal companies—such as a $100,000 commitment to Husk Ventures SL, which makes carbon-storing biochar from rice husks—as well as nature-protection initiatives and funding for advocacy work, such as $100,000 for Human Rights Watch to lobby against the use of coal. The company plans to continue to back further projects.

• Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc. served up a stark sign of how Apple Inc.’s new ad-privacy policy is roiling the digital-advertising world.
   
• Amazon.com Inc. said profits nearly doubled in the critical holiday period, as the company managed to control labor and supply costs better than expected and saw gains in its cloud-computing and advertising businesses.
   
• Snap Inc. posted its first quarterly profit and signaled it is adjusting to disruptions in the digital-advertising market caused by Apple Inc. privacy policy changes that are affecting Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
   
• Shell PLC Chairman Andrew Mackenzie promised in December that unifying its corporate identity in the U.K. would “allow for an acceleration in shareholder distributions and speed up Shell’s transition to a net-zero emissions energy business.” Within a week of becoming fully British, the company has given financial investors what they were promised, but any green-focused investors aren’t yet so fortunate.
   
• The end of the boom is in sight for America’s fracking companies.

The $75 billion deal that Phil Spencer engineered for Activision Blizzard Inc. is the biggest bet yet that games can go from a side hustle to a core business at the world’s most valuable software company.

A Microsoft Corp. lifer and a lifelong gamer, Mr. Spencer has been the chief architect and evangelist for a bigger videogame strategy inside a company that revived its fortunes in recent years largely by focusing on business customers. His plan has shifted videogames at Microsoft from its two-decade emphasis on its Xbox videogame hardware to a vision of assembling a roster of studios whose games can be played across a range of devices. And Mr. Spencer has tied his game ambitions directly into cloud computing, which Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella has put at the heart of his broader vision.

“He does a great job of balancing business needs with the creative needs,” said Robbie Bach, a retired Microsoft executive who led the early development of Microsoft’s Xbox business starting in 1999. “That is the hardest thing to do.”

• GameStop Corp. said it would launch a marketplace for nonfungible tokens later this year in partnership with an Australian blockchain startup, stepping into a trendy but unproven area of tech as the videogame retailer tries to turn around its struggling business.

• Hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the U.S. continued to fall, with the seven-day average of patients with confirmed or suspected cases easing to 134,000 on Wednesday, down 16% from a Jan. 20 high, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.

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