Good morning. The sprawling foreign aid bill signed into law by President Biden Wednesday has some regulatory surprises for businesses trying to navigate the U.S.’s far-reaching sanctions on Russia and other foreign adversaries.

Although much of the focus on the aid package has been on the $95.3 billion it provides for U.S. allies and on a potential ban of the video app TikTok, the legislation makes a key change to U.S. sanctions laws: It doubles the amount of time that regulators and prosecutors have to investigate sanctions violations.

• Big change: “It’s a very far reaching and impactful statutory change, and it’s one that happened very quietly and has surprised a lot of sanctions practitioners and people in industry,” said Jason Prince, a partner at law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
   
• Long lookback: The extension of the statute of limitations for sanctions violations in particular could have a big impact on companies. When companies discover a possible sanctions violation, they often do a five-year lookback to see if it was a one-off or whether the problem is a systemic one. Companies may now have to do a 10-year lookback, including for companies they are looking to acquire, said Timothy O’Toole, a member of law firm Miller & Chevalier.
   
• More cases: The change could lead to more cases and bigger fines against companies, lawyers say. The Justice Department last year said it was hiring dozens of new prosecutors to staff a section that investigates criminal violations of economic sanctions and export controls.

Workers get ready to switch jobs. Employers are fighting to stop them.

Millions of workers will have more freedom over where they work should a recent Federal Trade Commission ban on nearly all noncompete agreements take effect.

In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, workers largely cheered the new rule. They say they are already thinking about ways a ban on noncompetes could help them and others change jobs and earn more.

Many major employers, on the other hand, are fighting the decision with a challenge in federal court filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and backed by the Business Roundtable, which represents chief executive officers of some of the country’s biggest employers.

Swedbank to integrate operations tackling financial crime.

Swedbank said it would move its anti-financial-crime unit into its group products & advice division, effective immediately, amid continued probes into alleged shortfalls in its money-laundering oversight.

The move comes as the bank remains under investigation by U.S. financial authorities into historical money-laundering and counter-terrorism work. The bank, which has a major presence in the wider Baltic region as well as in Sweden, last year paid $3.4 million to settle U.S. allegations that its Latvian subsidiary handled transactions in violation of sanctions on Crimea, following the peninsula’s annexation by Russia.

• The Biden administration on Thursday issued sweeping new rules that crack down on power-plant pollution and could force many of the country’s coal plants to shutter unless they undertake costly upgrades. The administration is also consolidating approval power over big power-grid projects to speed upgrades and provide access to a gusher of new clean-energy projects.
   
• Crypto firm Consensys on Thursday sued the Securities and Exchange Commission in an attempt to block the agency from classifying ether as a security.
   
• In a vote Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission classified internet service as a public utility. The definition is part of a new framework the FCC will use to regulate broadband networks.

Mix of slowing growth, firm inflation worries investors.

The latest snapshot of the U.S. economy rattled stock and bond markets with two bits of potentially disappointing data: slower economic growth and still-firm inflation.

Typically, an underwhelming growth figure would boost hopes that the Fed will lower interest rates. But continued price pressures complicated that outlook.

• Persistently High Commodity Prices Could Delay Interest Rate Cuts, World Bank Says

Macron warns Europe ‘can die’ without stronger military, economy.

French President Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe’s decadeslong project of peaceful cooperation might perish if the continent doesn’t shore up critical gaps in its architecture, from its economic underpinnings to its approach to defense and immigration.

Macron delivered the comments in what was billed as a sequel to the landmark address he gave at the Sorbonne University in Paris at the start of his first term. Seven years later—following a pandemic and the outbreak of wars in Ukraine and Gaza—Macron returned to the Sorbonne on Thursday with a foreboding message that cast Europe as a continent at a tipping point, buffeted by great-power rivalries between the U.S., China and Russia.

• Russia has fired several missiles at Ukraine that have crossed into Polish airspace since 2022, a provocative show of force by Moscow that risks igniting a wider war, according to Poland’s president.
   
• German consumer confidence rose to its highest level since May 2022, suggesting the country’s economy may have turned a corner, following similar more upbeat sentiment among businesses published earlier this week.

• The Justice Department is investigating McKinsey’s advice to manufacturers of OxyContin and other opioids. 
   
• Two months after the Change Healthcare hack, its parent company faces a long slog to identify all the people whose personal data was compromised.
   
• One of Europe’s fastest-growing energy companies wants a slice of the U.S. offshore-wind market.
   
• At Moderna, OpenAI’s GPTs are changing almost everything. 
   
• The next ad battleground will be the back seat of your ride-hailing cab.

• Southwest Airlines is pulling out of some airports and cutting costs as it grapples with lackluster earnings and as delays of new Boeing planes dim its prospects for the year.
   
• The National Basketball Association is advancing toward a series of major media deals, with Amazon and Google’s YouTube vying for a new streaming package and NBCUniversal trying to grab one of the main TV deals held by Disney’s ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT.
   
• There is a big gap between how workers envision the timing of retirement and the reality for retirees.
   
• The Supreme Court, hearing a last-ditch appeal from Donald Trump, appeared open Thursday to granting some level of immunity to protect former presidents from being prosecuted for alleged crimes committed while in office.
   
• One NFL draft prospect is moonlighting as an investor.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun, Dylan Tokar @dgtokar and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich.

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