Good morning. The office of New York State’s comptroller said it would vote against re-electing Best Buy’s chairman and other key board members next year over questions regarding the retailer’s commitment to the LGBTQ community.

• More outside pressure: The comptroller’s office serves as trustee of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which is a small shareholder in Best Buy with less than 1% of its shares. But the statement by the comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, joins a swirl of efforts by outsiders to pressure companies over their positions on social issues.
   
• Origin of the dispute: The Best Buy dispute began when a conservative activist group submitted a shareholder proposal asking the company to assess whether its work with certain LGBTQ advocacy groups was hurting its business.
   
• Best Buy response: The group withdrew the proposal after Best Buy said it would screen future donations by its employee affinity groups to ensure they wouldn’t support the causes that the group called concerning.
   
• Aftermath: Best Buy has also said that it remains committed to LGBTQ rights and hasn’t changed its positions on affinity groups’ donations. On Tuesday, DiNapoli said Best Buy’s position remained unclear. “Despite our efforts to engage with Best Buy on its commitments to LGBTQIA+ employees and the wider community, management and the Board continue to ignore our requests for full transparency on the company’s actions,” he said in a statement.

Microsoft to pay $14.4 million to resolve leave discrimination claims in California.

Microsoft has agreed to pay $14.4 million to resolve allegations of penalizing employees for taking protected forms of leave with the California Civil Rights Department.

The CRD on Wednesday said that Microsoft had allegedly retaliated and discriminated against employees over taking parental, disability, pregnancy and family care leaves, which are prohibited in state and federal law from employer interference.

• The European Union confirmed plans to impose additional tariffs on electric cars made in China, dashing hopes of a solution sought by several carmakers whose executives fear reprisal from an escalating trade war.
   
• Discover Financial Services said it, along with certain subsidiaries, entered a settlement agreement to resolve class actions filed by merchants allegedly affected by a card product misclassification.
   
• Congress might be gridlocked and the postdebate White House reeling, but at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts showed himself firmly in charge.
   
• The Biden administration has racked up a string of initial losses in its effort to extend federal protections against discrimination to gay and transgender students.
   
• Canada authorized the implementation of a digital-services tax, a move that threatens to trigger trade retaliation from Congress and the Biden administration.
   
• Netflix, Walt Disney, and other U.S. streaming companies have asked a Canadian court to stop plans by authorities to force them to fork over 5% of their sales in the country to help finance local broadcast news and other domestic content.
   
• Two of Sam Bankman-Fried’s former lieutenants face the prospect of prison time over their role in his campaign-spending operation. But other insiders from the FTX CEO's orbit were closely involved with his political-donation binge, including members of his family, according to previously unreported emails seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Beijing and Moscow go from ‘no limits’ friendship to frenemies in Russia’s backyard.

When Vladimir Putin visited this arid capital as part of a recent jet-setting charm offensive in Asia, local officials decorated the boulevards with posters of the Russian leader’s face—an expected tribute in a former Soviet republic where Moscow still casts a large shadow.

But beneath the posters was evidence of a shift with gloomy implications for Moscow’s international heft: More and more cars with Chinese brand names such as BYD and Geely are zooming around the streets of Uzbekistan as the number of Russian Ladas dwindles.

China has seized on the Ukraine invasion to chip away at traditional Russian spheres of influence. In Central Asia, as in the Arctic, Moscow’s reliance on Beijing to sustain its war machine forces it to acquiesce to the encroachments.

Fed officials signaled no hurry to cut rates.

With elevated inflation preventing Federal Reserve officials from feeling confident enough to cut interest rates, some policymakers at their meeting last month called for careful attention to signs the labor market might weaken faster than anticipated.

“A number of participants remarked that monetary policy should stand ready to respond to unexpected economic weakness,” said the minutes of the Fed’s June 11-12 meeting, which were released Wednesday with a customary three-week delay.

• U.S. Crude Oil Inventories Fall More Than Expected

• An embattled President Biden pressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hammer out a Gaza cease-fire deal, telling the Israeli leader in a phone call on Thursday that now is the time to save the lives of hostages held by Hamas.
   
• Companies ranging from small automotive technology suppliers to major carmakers Ford and Volkswagen are pushing to shape coming rules from the Commerce Department that could limit how the U.S. auto sector uses tech from Chinese companies.
   
• Google and Microsoft have vowed to slash emissions by the end of the decade, but new disclosures show their numbers are moving in the wrong direction, according to WSJ Pro Sustainable Business.
   
• Milking cows has been a tough business in the past decade, with volatile prices, costs rising and workers hard to find. Now America’s dairy farmers face a new problem: bird flu.
   
• Lithium prices are plumbing multiyear lows in a market awash with the battery material, and it’s unlikely they have hit rock bottom yet.
   
• China’s central bank has signed agreements with major brokers to borrow “hundreds of billions” of yuan worth of government bonds, a move analysts say is likely aimed at stabilizing plummeting long-term bond yields.
   
• German industrial production slumped in May as car manufacturing tailed off, after an uptick in the sector at the start of this year faded away.

• Recent Supreme Court rulings that curtailed the power of executive agencies could reshape the U.S. regulatory landscape.
   
• Accounting oversight board member Christina Ho, often the sole voice of dissent, has voted against more rules than anyone in the watchdog’s two-decade history.
   
• The hack of car dealer software provider CDK Global could be a wake-up call for airlines, banks and healthcare providers, which also rely on a handful of dominant vendors.
   
• Commercial web browsers weren’t built for business. New enterprise browsers aim to provide the security controls and user experience needed for work.

• President Biden is entering a crucial stretch in which he needs to demonstrate to Americans that he has the capacity to serve a second term and tamp down Democrats’ worries about his ability to defeat Donald Trump in November’s election.
   
• Britain’s Labour Party won a landslide election victory as voters handed its leader Keir Starmer one of the biggest parliamentary majorities in British history, placing a center-left government into Downing Street for the first time in 14 years.
   
• China is taking tentative new steps to help disrupt the global supply chain fueling the opioid crisis after intensifying criticism from the U.S. that its chemical factories are partly responsible for the deadly scourge.
   
• The head of America’s biggest retail bank has a warning for its 86 million customers: prepare to pay for your bank accounts.
   
• Marko Kolanovic found himself in the loneliest place on Wall Street.
   
• It’s getting harder to outsmart the digital minders at work.

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