Good morning. A global financial watchdog added Myanmar to its list of countries where businesses and financial institutions are at high risk of exposure to money laundering and terrorist financing, potentially accelerating the country’s economic isolation that was triggered by a military coup last year.

The Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based intergovernmental body whose 39 members include almost all of the world’s major financial centers including the U.S., China and a number of European nations, said on Friday that Myanmar failed to address a large number of deficiencies in its anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing systems. As a result, it said the Southeast Asian country was added to what is informally known as the FATF blacklist.

The list consists of just two other nations, Iran and North Korea, which the FATF says have “significant strategic deficiencies in their regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing, and financing of proliferation.” While the designation doesn’t automatically trigger sanctions, FATF urges member countries to scale up due diligence measures that can make it harder for businesses and banks to work in Myanmar.

Rights groups say the junta has killed more than 2,300 people and arrested over 15,000 since seizing power on Feb. 1, 2021. Western governments responded with sanctions targeting army leaders and their businesses, but stopped short of overarching restrictions in an effort to preserve economic gains Myanmar had made during its short-lived transition to democracy and to avoid cutting it off from the global economy. But Friday’s action by the FATF suggests it may be difficult to walk that fine line.

Speakers at the WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum on Nov. 16 include Brian Nelson from the U.S. Treasury Department and Robert Silvers from the Department of Homeland Security, along with multiple experts on corporate risk and compliance. Sign up here for discussions on economic sanctions, forced labor, climate change regulation, whistleblowers and cybersecurity.

The United Nations unanimously approved sanctions Friday against Haiti’s most powerful gang boss who is blocking fuel and aid to the impoverished country for a sixth week as it struggles with a cholera outbreak and increasing hunger.

The U.N. resolution calls for member nations to freeze gang leader Jimmy Cherizier’s assets and ban him from their countries.

The U.S. has a law aimed at preventing the nation’s thousands of obscure but powerful federal officials from using their influence on regulations, policies and investigations to benefit themselves.

With penalties up to $50,000 and five years in prison, the law is supposed to ensure that officials in the executive branch don’t work on any matter that could affect their personal finances.

It doesn’t. It has exceptions. Violations often go unpunished. When a problematic holding is identified, if the official resists selling it, the rules often are waived. The result is a system that largely relies on government employees to police their own stock investing.

• The Securities and Exchange Commission said Mattel Inc. agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle claims over misstatements the toy maker made in its 2017 financial statements.
   
• Kroger Co. and Albertsons Cos. said their $20 billion deal to create a new supermarket giant will help them compete with larger rivals in an evolving grocery industry dominated by Walmart Inc. and targeted by Amazon.com Inc.
   
• The Nasdaq Stock Market has quietly halted listings of small-cap Chinese companies, holding up approval letters and demanding more information about related parties in deals, after a series of meteoric run-ups—and dramatic collapses—in IPOs this year.
   
• The criminal tax-fraud trial of the Trump Organization is set to begin with jury selection Monday, offering a rare look into an opaque company that prosecutors say illegally paid some executives in cars, apartments and cash.
   
• With less than three weeks left in Charles Rettig’s term as Internal Revenue Service commissioner, President Biden hasn’t picked anyone to replace him, leaving the tax agency without a leader to spearhead the $80 billion agency expansion that Democrats just pushed through Congress.
   
• Harvey Weinstein once presided over red carpets and award ceremonies in this city. His most recent appearances have been through a courthouse back door, where he is escorted by police officers and kept away from photographers.

Companies have paid out eye-popping sums in recent years to settle claims they violated Illinois’s biometric privacy law. Last week, a historic legal judgment against BNSF Railway Co. highlighted that data lapses by third-party contractors also don’t come cheap.

A jury’s award of $228 million to truck drivers whose fingerprints were scanned without proper consent signaled that businesses can’t blame data violations on vendors, privacy lawyers say.

Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act provides little distinction between companies and contractors that process data on their behalf, upping the ante for firms as they vet potential vendors’ data practices and structure contracts.

The new slate of China’s top leaders, packed with allies of Xi Jinping, has some economists fearing a further erosion of checks on the power of a Chinese leader who has overseen the biggest expansion of state control over the economy in decades.

On Sunday, China unveiled the leaders who will sit on the country’s most powerful decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee. All six men who took the stage with Xi Jinping are seen as loyalists of the Chinese leader.

• Chinese Stock Traders Told Not to Disrupt Market Around Congress
• How Xi Jinping Transformed China—and His Challenges Ahead
• Japan, Australia Deepen Security Ties in Response to China’s Rise

For nearly five years, Houston oil executive Jose Pereira was jailed in Venezuela, spending long stretches in isolation in an underground cell, deprived of medication and surviving on chicken scraps and rice.

He was freed earlier this month, after high-level talks between the Biden administration and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime. Mr. Pereira’s experience provided a rare window into the treatment of foreign prisoners accused of white-collar or political crimes in Venezuela, who the U.S. has said are tried in kangaroo courts and used as bargaining chips in negotiations with Washington.

• Venezuela Opposition Parties Aim to Remove Juan Guaidó as Leader

• Federal Reserve officials are barreling toward another interest-rate rise of 0.75 percentage point at their meeting Nov. 1-2 and are likely to debate then whether and how to signal plans to approve a smaller increase in December.
   
• Iran’s labor unions are helping antigovernment protests maintain momentum by calling for strikes at oil facilities, schools and factories, opening another front in the upheaval inside the country.
   
• Ukrainian officials have said recent Russian airstrikes knocked out nearly one-third of the country’s electricity-generating power stations and damaged some of the country’s crucial central-heating systems.
   
• Iran’s decision to send armed drones to aid Russia’s war in Ukraine jeopardizes years of engagement with the West and marks a risky gambit by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to disrupt an international system that he sees as stacked against Tehran, analysts said.

• Here is what some of the world’s corporate leaders said this week about the economy, consumer spending and advertising trends.
   
• A number of finance chiefs at some of the country’s biggest companies have left their jobs in recent weeks, an exodus that comes amid the pressures that high inflation and the Covid-19 pandemic have had on corporate balance sheets and the economic outlook.
   
• Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. has warned Canada it is prepared to block the sharing of Canadian news content—like it did in Australia last year—unless the Liberal government amends legislation that would compel big digital companies to compensate domestic media outlets.
   
• Banks that committed to help finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter Inc. plan to hold all $13 billion of debt backing the deal rather than sell it, according to people familiar with the matter, in another blow to a market that serves as a crucial source of corporate funding.
   
• Former U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak took a major step toward becoming Britain’s next prime minister after his main rival for the job, Boris Johnson, pulled out of the race late Sunday, averting a contest between the two men that threatened to split the ruling Conservative Party and further roil financial markets.

• Procter & Gamble Co. is ramping up advertising on premium brands. Verizon Communications Inc. is raising prices on wireless plans, while Whirlpool Corp. has slashed production of appliances.
   
• The backup of container ships off Southern California’s coast that was at the heart of U.S. supply chain congestion during the Covid-19 pandemic has effectively disappeared.
   
• The new U.S. restrictions on exports of chips and related items to China are aimed at using America’s strength in critical areas of the semiconductor supply chain to weaken China’s advanced-chip development.
   
• Royal Philips NV said it would cut 4,000 jobs in a bid to turn around its embattled business, as it grapples with supply-chain challenges and the fallout from a huge recall of devices used to treat sleep apnea.