Good morning. Chinese factories that supply Apple Inc. and Nike Inc. and make other products sold in the U.S. are shunning workers from Xinjiang, as Western countries increase scrutiny of forced labor from the remote northwestern region where Beijing has been accused of committing genocide against local ethnic minorities.

Lens Technology Co., a Chinese maker of smartphone touch screens and supplier to Apple and other companies, phased out Uyghur factory workers transferred from Xinjiang through a state-backed labor program last year, according to former staff and shop owners near one of its factories. The company has also ceased hiring Uyghur workers, according to current staff.

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Chinese mask producer Hubei Haixin Protective Products Group Co., whose personal protective equipment is sold on U.S. e-commerce sites, no longer employs laborers from Xinjiang, said a company employee who didn’t identify herself before hanging up. The company decided not to renew the contracts of its Xinjiang laborers last September after reports last year alleging the use of forced labor drew negative attention, the employee said.

And a Chinese subsidiary of Taekwang Industrial Co., which makes sneakers for Nike in China, sent workers from the region home in the second quarter of last year, according to a Nike statement that was on the company’s website in June 2020. The company’s statement has been updated since then, but the old version of the statement has been stored by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that keeps a digital library of webpages.

Cryptocurrency operator Circle Internet Financial Ltd. said it has set aside more than $10 million to settle a case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against Poloniex LLC, its discontinued crypto exchange business, according to a regulatory filing.

Boston-based Circle, which announced earlier this month that it will go public in a $4.5 billion special-purpose acquisition company merger, sold Poloniex in 2019 after acquiring it the previous year, according to a regulatory filing to the SEC earlier this month.

The U.S. Senate voted to confirm former U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite to serve as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division.

Mr. Polite, whose nomination was confirmed Tuesday in a 56-44 vote, will oversee several high-profile sections of the Justice Department as head of the criminal division, including those investigating corporate misconduct such as foreign bribery, money laundering and healthcare fraud.

Mr. Polite, a partner at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, served as the federal government’s top prosecutor in New Orleans during the Obama administration. He was nominated by President Biden in April to return to the Justice Department.

He will replace Nicholas McQuaid, a former federal prosecutor and partner for the law firm Latham & Watkins LLP who has been serving in the position on an acting basis. Mr. McQuaid is slated to be the division’s principal deputy.

—Dylan Tokar

The U.K’s Serious Fraud Office has reached settlements with two companies that prosecutors said were involved in the same underlying scheme to pay bribes in connection with multimillion-pound contracts.

The two companies, which the SFO said it couldn’t identify for “legal reasons,” will pay a total of £2.5 million ($3.4 million) in financial penalties, the agency said Tuesday. A judge on Monday approved the deferred prosecution agreements, the SFO said.

“The companies were registered and operated in the UK,” the SFO’s Director, Lisa Osofsky, said in a statement. “Their bribery undermined the fundamental principles of fairness and the rule of law that we expect in this country.”

The settlements represent the country’s 11th and 12th use of a deferred prosecution agreement, which allows prosecutors to suspend criminal charges against a company for a period on the condition that it pay a fine and undertake certain reforms. The agreements were introduced in 2014.

—Dylan Tokar

President Biden said he would nominate Jonathan Kanter to run the Justice Department’s antitrust division on Tuesday, turning to a vocal critic of Google as his administration has taken an aggressive posture on enforcing antitrust laws across industries.

Mr. Kanter is a longtime antitrust lawyer who has represented companies that argue they have been harmed by the conduct of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which dominates internet search and advertising.

• The nation’s three largest drug distributors agreed to pay as much as $1.2 billion to New York state to settle a continuing trial accusing the companies of helping fuel widespread opioid addiction, as negotiators close in on a larger, national resolution of thousands of similar lawsuits. 
   
• Royal Dutch Shell PLC on Tuesday confirmed it would appeal against a Dutch court ruling calling for the oil major to reduce its carbon emissions at a faster pace, saying it was being unfairly singled out.
   
• Tom Barrack, a real-estate investor and longtime ally of former President Trump, was arrested Tuesday in Los Angeles on charges that he acted as a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates and lied to federal investigators.
   
• Harvey Weinstein, the one-time internationally acclaimed Hollywood producer, was extradited to California on Tuesday to face sex-crimes charges, after more than a year of delays because of the Covid-19 pandemic and his health.
   
• The outdoor recreation industry and environmentalists are among those backing bipartisan legislation to use fines and penalties collected for environmental regulations to fund wildlife conservation efforts, including restoring habitats for struggling species.

A skirmish between national security and trade officials in the Biden administration is hindering efforts to forge a digital-services pact with Asian countries, according to people involved in the talks.

National Security Council and State Department officials want to set rules for digital trade in Asia, which could include cross-border flows of information, digital privacy and standards for the use of artificial intelligence in Asia, the people said.

• The U.S. and Germany have reached an agreement allowing the completion of a controversial Russian natural-gas pipeline, according to officials from Berlin and Washington, who expect to announce the deal as soon as Wednesday, bringing an end to years of tension between the two allies.

Hackers working for the Chinese government compromised more than a dozen U.S. pipeline operators nearly a decade ago, the Biden administration revealed Tuesday while also issuing first-of-its-kind cybersecurity requirements on the pipeline industry.

The disclosure of previously classified information about the aggressive Chinese hacking campaign, though dated, underscored the severity of foreign cyber threats to the nation’s infrastructure, current and former officials said. In some cases, the hackers possessed the ability to physically damage or disrupt compromised pipelines, a new cybersecurity alert said, though it doesn’t appear they did so.

Unilever PLC was engulfed in controversy Tuesday after its ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s said it would no longer sell its products in Jewish settlements located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and contested East Jerusalem.

Israel’s government called on the London-listed company to reverse its brand’s decision, with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warning Unilever Chief Executive Alan Jope in a call of “severe consequences” and other politicians calling for a boycott.

Send comments to the Risk & Compliance editor, Jack Hagel, at jack.hagel@wsj.com

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