Good morning. The U.S. Treasury Department’s decision to crack down on cryptocurrency platform Tornado Cash for allegedly being used to launder stolen funds—and the subsequent freezing of millions of dollars in assets by one of the largest U.S. stablecoins in compliance with the order—has prompted concerns of excessive government pressure from many crypto participants, reports Risk & Compliance Journal's Mengqi Sun, particularly those in the decentralized finance sector.

Citing these U.S. sanctions against Tornado Cash, Dutch authorities Friday said they had arrested a suspected developer of Tornado Cash in Amsterdam on Wednesday, alleging the 29-year-old man is involved in concealing criminal transactions and facilitating money laundering through Tornado Cash. The Dutch authorities in a statement didn’t disclose the suspect’s identity and said they aren’t ruling out more arrests.

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The Treasury Department’s action Monday against Tornado Cash, a platform based on open-source, self-running software protocols, is unprecedented, crypto industry participants add, as the U.S. has previously only sanctioned wallet addresses and centralized services.

Crypto industry analysts say the sanctioning of protocols—essentially computer code—has become a key policy issue for the industry, which is increasingly concerned about the impact of broadening government intervention on the potential growth of crypto and the additional burden of compliance in a sector that sells itself on its privacy and decentralization.

Sign up for the next WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum on Nov. 16 for discussions on the critical issues facing corporate risk & compliance professionals, including keeping up with sanctions, screening for forced labor, and proposed U.S. rules on climate change and cybersecurity. Register here for a discounted ticket.

An appeals court upheld a decision by a lower court to overturn the foreign bribery conviction of a former Alstom SA executive whose alleged role in an Indonesian bribery scheme was the focus of a nearly decadelong prosecution.

The ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Friday affirms a decision by District Judge Janet Bond Arterton to partly overturn the verdict of jurors who in 2019 found Lawrence Hoskins guilty of helping to orchestrate a scheme to bribe Indonesian officials to secure a $118 million power contract.

At issue throughout the government’s case against Mr. Hoskins was whether the executive, a U.K. citizen who worked for the French trainmaker in Paris, fell under the jurisdiction of U.S. antibribery laws. The latest ruling is likely to put more defined limits on which types of individuals—specifically foreign nationals—the U.S. government can charge with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Two proposed rules on sustainability- and climate-related disclosures drew responses from more than a hundred companies, weighing in on the benefits of a global baseline for disclosures and the drawbacks of revealing information that could put a company at a competitive disadvantage.

The International Sustainability Standards Board, which sets climate-disclosure rules, is considering two proposals that would require companies to disclose sustainability- and climate-related risks. Together, the proposals drew more than 1,300 comments, including from chief financial officers at Caterpillar Inc., Intel Corp., Levi Strauss & Co. and Verizon Communications Inc.

The House passed a climate and healthcare bill Friday that will soon head to President Biden’s desk, the culmination of a yearlong push Democrats hope will motivate their voters in the midterm elections but that Republicans cast as harmful government overreach.

• Climate Bill’s Success Hinges on Timely Renewable-Projects Build-Out
• Wall Street, Like the Climate Bill, Bets on Both Green Energy and Fossil Fuels

FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to a search warrant released by a Florida court Friday.

• Trump Organization Given October Trial Date in New York Tax-Fraud Case
• Trump’s Final Days Draw Scrutiny as Handling of Documents Investigated

With two bills advanced through Congress in recent weeks, the Biden administration has grown the federal government’s imprint on major sectors of the U.S. economy—including semiconductors, energy and health—and further buried the idea once widely held in Washington that private markets should be left alone, without government involvement.

Later this year—any day now really—the global population is projected to cross eight billion people. The United Nations recently pegged the date as Nov. 15, but we don’t know with any exact precision.

But as we cross eight billion people, it is worth considering that the world might never make it to 10 billion, or even nine billion, and that the world’s major demographic problems won’t stem from the growing masses but from shrinking countries, aging populations and dwindling workforces.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of using Europe’s largest nuclear power plant to blackmail Kyiv and its allies, urging tougher sanctions against Moscow after recent shelling in the vicinity of the facility prompted warnings of a nuclear accident.

Fighting around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has intensified in recent days as both Russia and Ukraine struggle to make meaningful gains on the battlefield almost six months into a war that has worn both sides down.

• Ukraine Strikes Key Bridge in Russian-Held Territory
• Ukraine’s Food Exports Slowly Pick Up Under Grain-Corridor Agreement

Russia’s gross domestic product declined year-over-year by 4% in the second quarter of 2022, according to preliminary data published by the country’s federal statistics agency on Friday, but marked a much stronger performance than analysts had expected.

• Alexei Miller, Putin Loyalist and Gazprom CEO, Fights Energy War With Europe

A group of U.S. lawmakers flew to Taiwan on Sunday with plans to meet Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, a visit that is likely to rekindle tensions in the region after China encircled the island with live-fire military drills in response to a visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this month.

• China’s Xi Jinping Plans to Meet With Biden in First Foreign Trip in Nearly Three Years

The virus that causes paralytic polio has been found in New York City sewage samples, according to city and state health departments.

Health officials said Friday the finding suggests “likely local circulation of the virus,” which was recently detected in Rockland and Orange counties, both of which are north of New York City.

• Biden Administration Response to Monkeypox Outbreak Was Slow, Officials Say

• As anyone who has lost luggage or waited half an hour for a restaurant check can tell you, America needs way more workers in some parts of the economy. Economists think so too.
   
• Among the investors who bet on cryptocurrency over the past year are pension funds that manage public workers’ retirement savings. Now those funds are navigating the crash.

Five Chinese state-owned companies said they intend to delist their American depositary shares from the New York Stock Exchange, as financial regulators in Beijing and Washington remain at loggerheads over U.S. audit requirements.

In separate filings to Hong Kong’s stock exchange Friday, PetroChina Co., China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd., China Life Insurance Co., and Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co. said they have notified the NYSE that they plan to voluntarily delist their American depositary shares.

Federal health officials’ move this week to relax pandemic precautions gave business leaders the momentum many have been looking for to return to pre-Covid behaviors.

The agency said it no longer recommends that people quarantine after being exposed to the virus, as long as they don’t feel sick, get tested after five days and wear a high-quality mask around others for 10 days.

Many executives and city leaders who had been struggling to break pandemic work-from-home habits see this as a boost to their halting efforts to bring people back into the workplace. They say that previous CDC recommendations made it difficult to enforce their policies, since one exposure could send an entire team home.

• The Democrats’ climate and tax bill increases incentives for buying electric-vehicle chargers, benefiting companies that are already rushing to build or install them. But permitting and supply issues remain, and the financial support won’t be a panacea.
   
• The government’s $42.5 billion plan to expand internet service to underserved communities is stuck in a holding pattern nearly nine months after approval, largely because authorities still don’t know where gaps need to be filled.
   
• Revenue at China’s Huawei Technologies Co. fell 5.9% in the first half of the year compared with a year earlier, as U.S. restrictions continued to pressure its business.
   
• Peloton Interactive Inc. plans to cut about 800 jobs as it looks to reduce its operating footprint and cut costs, the company said Friday.

Max Levchin says the market is wrong about Affirm Holdings Inc., the buy now, pay later company he co-founded a decade ago. It might just take a recession to prove it.

Affirm’s stock is down 77% since hitting its peak in November, compared with a 9% decline in the S&P 500 during the same period. Investors are worried about future costs of borrowing, growing competition and whether Affirm’s borrowers will fall behind on payments during a downturn. The company’s total valuation stands at about $11 billion, down from a peak of $47 billion.

Mr. Levchin is confident that Affirm has safely cracked the code to underwriting more consumers than banks would. Like many lenders, Affirm tightened underwriting standards early in the pandemic. Last year, it began loosening them.