Good morning. As Shanghai’s lockdown to stamp out a raging coronavirus outbreak extends into its fourth week, logistics services in the Yangtze River Delta industrial area have faced severe disruptions. Transport of goods into Shanghai, one of China’s biggest manufacturing and export hubs, has almost ground to a halt.

Trucking has been worst hit, as strict local pandemic policies and arbitrary implementation of rules choke off the transport of goods. At Shanghai’s port, normally the busiest container port in the world, empty containers are stacked on docks waiting for trucks to deliver cargo.

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The logistics snarls in and around Shanghai further add pressure to an already battered global supply chain and to rising prices of goods in the U.S. They also complicate the Chinese government’s efforts to reopen factories shuttered due to lockdowns. Logistics managers expect weeks to months before some international shipments return to normal.

On April 1, Shanghai authorities locked down the entire city to stem the spread of the virus, asking its more than 25 million residents to stay at home. In recent days, the city’s Covid case numbers have been on a gradual declining trend after hitting a peak of around 27,700 about a week ago. On Wednesday, Shanghai reported about 18,500 Covid-19 cases.

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The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday announced settlements with two companies that officials said violated U.S. sanctions by purchasing Cuba-origin explosives.

Denver-based mining company Newmont Corp. agreed to pay $141,442 to settle the apparent violations of U.S. sanctions on Cuba, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said. Chisu International Corp., a Parkland, Fla.-based explosives distributor, agreed to pay $45,908. The Treasury said it considered neither case was egregious.

In Newmont’s case, a wholly-owned subsidiary in Suriname bought the Cuban goods in four separate transactions through a third-party vendor, OFAC said. Newmont voluntarily disclosed the violations to authorities after discovering them.

Chisu, which didn’t voluntarily disclose its violations, procured the explosives on behalf of a U.S. company, OFAC said. It noted the violations primarily occurred because Chisu, a small company largely run by a single person, didn’t understand the prohibition against dealing in Cuban merchandise.

—Dylan Tokar

Binance Holdings Ltd., the largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, continued to beef up its regulatory and compliance teams with the appointment of two former regulators as the firm faces regulatory scrutiny.

Steven McWhirter, previously a strategy and engagement manager at the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority, is joining Binance as its regulatory policy director, the company said on Thursday. Mr. McWhirter was involved in several policy working groups during his nine years at the FCA, including working on its crypto guidance efforts, Binance said.

Binance also hired Seth Levy, who most recently was global head of market surveillance at hedge fund Citadel LLC, as its new head of market surveillance. Mr. Levy, who also spent almost 10 years at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s self-regulatory arm, will oversee Binance’s efforts to build a risk-based surveillance infrastructure and system for trading digital assets worldwide.

The two hires follow the promotion last week of Chagri Poyraz to global head of sanctions at the crypto exchange. Mr. Poyraz, who joined Binance as director of sanctions compliance in January, will help build the firm’s global sanctions and anti-bribery programs.

—Mengqi Sun

Russia ramped up oil shipments to key customers in recent weeks, defying its pariah status in world energy markets. One increasingly popular method for delivery: tankers marked “destination unknown.”

Oil exports from Russian ports bound for European Union member-states, which historically have been the biggest buyers of Russian crude, have risen to an average of 1.6 million barrels a day so far in April, according to TankerTrackers.com. Exports had dropped to 1.3 million a day in March following the Ukraine invasion. Similar data from Kpler, another commodities data provider, showed flows rose to 1.3 million a day in April from 1 million in mid-March.

But an opaque market is forming to obscure the origin of that oil. Unlike before Russia invaded Ukraine, oil buyers are worried about the reputational risk of trading crude that is financing a government Western leaders accuse of war crimes.

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is facing internal scrutiny over two occasions in which she pressed a U.K. tabloid to shelve a potential article about her then-boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, according to people close to the executives.

In 2016 and 2019, Ms. Sandberg contacted the digital edition of the Daily Mail, which was reporting on a story that would have revealed the existence of a temporary restraining order against Mr. Kotick that had been obtained by a former girlfriend in 2014, according to people involved in the article and the campaigns to stop its publication. Among other concerns, Ms. Sandberg’s legal and public-relations advisers, both inside and outside Facebook, worried that a story would reflect negatively on her reputation as an advocate for women.

• French prosecutors issued international arrest warrants for Carlos Ghosn as well as four individuals they say are linked to an auto dealer in Oman, alleging they helped the fallen auto titan funnel millions of euros from Renault SA, according to people familiar with the matter.
   
• Recreational marijuana sales began Thursday in New Jersey, marking the first time cannabis is legally available for nonmedical purposes in the New York City and Philadelphia regions.
   
• Florida lawmakers gave final approval to a bill that would end a special tax district that allows Walt Disney Co. to govern the land housing its theme parks, sending the measure to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has made clear he would sign it.

The U.S. and its allies are constrained in their efforts to reduce Russian energy revenue because of the risks posed to the global economy, while a push to remove Russia from international organizations like the Group of 20 major economies lacks international consensus, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.

As to further sanctions, Ms. Yellen said that some of them—such as a ban of Russian energy imports by European countries—would be difficult to enact. European countries are far more reliant than the U.S. on Russian energy. The U.S. already has banned imported oil and other energy sources from Russia.

• Wage inflation in the technology sector is accelerating, pressuring companies to boost compensation for key roles by 20% or more as they compete for a limited pool of workers skilled in areas such as cloud computing and data science.
   
• S&P Global Ratings’ latest effort to tweak the way it determines the creditworthiness of insurers has managed to anger insurance companies, state insurance regulators and rival ratings firms.
   
• Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell signaled the central bank was likely to raise interest rates by a half percentage point at its meeting next month and indicated similar rate rises could be warranted after that to lower inflation.
   
• New applications for U.S. unemployment benefits fell slightly last week as employers clung to workers in a tight labor market.
   
• China’s arms sales, military training and investment in African infrastructure projects are increasingly giving Beijing a foothold on the continent, according to a new analysis by an open source intelligence company.

The nation’s biggest oil industry trade group has drafted a proposal urging Congress to adopt a carbon tax, which would put a surcharge on gasoline and other fossil fuels to discourage greenhouse-gas emissions.

• CNN is shutting down its streaming service CNN+ about a month after it launched, a sign of its new owners’ lack of faith in the viability of a subscription-based stand-alone news platform.
   
• A group of New York city and state pension funds that collectively own more than $5 billion of Amazon.com Inc. stock are urging fellow shareholders to vote against re-election of two board members for what the institutions say are failures to adequately protect worker safety.
   
• For Netflix Inc., the era of carefree spending is over.
   
• Elon Musk said he has lined up $46.5 billion to fund his bid for Twitter Inc., answering the biggest question that had loomed over his takeover offer.

Carl Icahn is urging BlackRock Inc. and other big index-fund managers focused on socially conscious investing to support his proxy fight at McDonald’s Corp. for better treatment of pregnant pigs.

• Toshiba Corp. on Thursday put itself up for auction after pressure from foreign shareholders and said it would solicit bids from investors including those who want to take the company private.
   
• Activision Blizzard Inc. said it is moving to add two women to its board of directors, months after allegations of workplace discrimination and a toxic culture at the videogame company led to lawsuits and federal investigations.
   
• Buffeted by continuing losses, Gabe Plotkin’s Melvin Capital Management plans to shrink and take the unusual step of starting to charge incentive fees again even though clients remain significantly underwater on their investments.