Good morning. The Federal Trade Commission said it wants to give consumers more power to fix devices such as smartphones and home appliances, voting to step up efforts targeting manufacturers if the agency determines repair restrictions are illegal.

The FTC unanimously adopted a new policy Wednesday laying out concerns about device-repair restrictions and said it would investigate them. The bipartisan vote followed an executive order signed July 9 by President Biden directing the FTC to consider writing rules to address “unfair anticompetitive restrictions on third-party repair or self-repair of items.”

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Manufacturers restrict the repair of their equipment by limiting the availability of parts and repair information, steering consumers to their own repair networks, claiming patent and trademark rights and designing products in ways that make repairs more difficult, according to the FTC.

Consumer-advocacy groups and repair companies want policymakers to back what they call “Right to Repair.” They argue manufacturers in a range of industries, from Apple Inc. smartphones to Deere & Co. tractors, make it too hard for consumers to get the parts and information needed to fix devices. They also say that manufacturers design products in ways that make repairs difficult and restrict competition among repair technicians, which can make fixes more expensive.

Also: the noncompete clause is under review.

States unveiled a historic $26 billion settlement with drug companies to resolve thousands of opioid-crisis lawsuits, paving the way for communities across the country to secure a jolt of funding to address an epidemic in painkiller addiction that hasn’t abated.

The nation’s three largest drug distributors—McKesson Corp., AmerisourceBergen Corp. and Cardinal Health Inc.—and drugmaker Johnson & Johnson have been negotiating the deal for more than two years, but Wednesday’s announcement signifies an important milestone that could clear the way for money to be received by states as soon as early next year.

The U.S. and Germany detailed an agreement allowing the completion of a controversial Russian natural-gas pipeline, the State Department said on Wednesday, giving Germany a victory on energy supplies while limiting concessions to the U.S. and Ukraine.

The deal gives Germany long-sought access to expanded energy supplies and allows Russia to double its deliveries of natural gas directly to Germany, bypassing an existing route through Ukraine, which has opposed the pipeline.

• Local health authorities in hot spots around the U.S. are seeking to blunt the highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19 by trying to boost vaccination rates while largely stopping short of reinstituting rules and restrictions.

Finance chiefs are still trying to get employees to move away from Microsoft Excel, the ubiquitous spreadsheet program loved and loathed by accounting professionals. While many still see it as a helpful tool, some CFOs say finance teams rely on it too much, often for tasks that Excel isn’t well-suited to handle. That can lead to mistakes and wasted time.

Microsoft Corp. moved Excel and its other Office products to the cloud a decade ago and has offered a number of new features and updates since. But some finance chiefs still want to reduce their reliance on the application in favor of programs that more efficiently automate data collection and analysis. They say there are limitations to Excel’s effectiveness, with users having a tough time keeping track of changes and verifying financial information.

A 22-year-old British man was arrested Wednesday in Spain on charges related to last year’s hack of Twitter that led to the brief takeover of more than 130 accounts, including those belonging to Joe Biden, Bill Gates and Kim Kardashian.

Joseph O’Connor was arrested at the request of U.S. law enforcement, the Justice Department said. He is the fourth person to be charged in connection with the July 2020 hack, which hijacked high-profile Twitter accounts to post messages that solicited donations to a bitcoin wallet for causes such as Covid-19 relief efforts. Federal prosecutors have said the pleas for donations were a scam.

• JPMorgan Chase & Co. is giving Chief Executive Jamie Dimon 1.5 million reasons to stay at the bank for five more years. The bank’s board of directors granted Mr. Dimon, 65 years old, a retention bonus in the form of 1.5 million options that he can exercise in 2026, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday. The award requires Mr. Dimon to stay at the bank the whole time and hit certain performance targets to receive the full amount.
   
• Adam Aron, the chief executive officer of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. who has embraced the movie-theater company’s recent status as a darling of enthusiastic day traders, will also serve as its chairman, AMC said on Wednesday.
   
• As the U.S. reopens, plenty of once-cropped corporate types are opting to keep their flowing tresses. Soon enough, men with a passing resemblance to apostles, rock stars and Beat poets could populate boardrooms.

• The U.K. government set the stage for a new clash with the European Union after Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he wants to renegotiate the parts of the Brexit agreement dealing with the politically sensitive question of Northern Ireland.
   
• When German politicians flocked to the scenes of last week’s devastating floods that left more than 170 in the country dead, they all agreed on one thing regardless of their partisan persuasions: The record rainfalls and ensuing disaster were the product of climate change.
   
• PG&E Corp. said Wednesday that it plans to bury 10,000 miles of power lines to reduce wildfire risk throughout Northern California at an estimated cost of up to $20 billion, reversing its earlier stance that doing so would be prohibitively expensive.

• The severe flooding in central China cut power temporarily at Apple Inc.’s biggest iPhone manufacturing site as water seeped into some areas and the site’s operator gave many workers time off, said factory employees there.
   
• The U.S. has extended its border restrictions with Canada and Mexico for another month as the Delta variant surges across the U.S. and the vaccination rate lags behind the Biden administration’s goal.
   
• Corporate technology chiefs say they are keeping an eye on rising consumer prices and their potential impact on employee hiring and retention in a competitive market for talent.

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

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