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A Texas judge strikes down the FTC's ban of non-competes. Plus, Russia's struggle to oust Ukrainian troops from its territory spotlights a serious manpower shortage. And the Obamas lend their star power to the Democratic National Convention. America's ready for a new chapter. Ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.
It's Wednesday, August 21st. I'm Kate Bullivant for The Wall Street Journal filling in for Luke Vargas, who's in Chicago reporting from the DNC. Here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. A Federal Trade Commission regulation, which was aimed at banning employers from making workers sign non-compete agreements, has been struck down by a federal judge in Texas.
The landmark ban was issued in April and was part of FTC Chair Lina Khan's effort to crack down on tactics that restrict workers' ability to switch jobs. US District Judge Ada Brown, a Donald Trump appointee, said the FTC's authority to police unfair competition couldn't be used to ban an entire category of conduct. She barred it from enforcing the rule, which was meant to come into effect after Labor Day.
An FTC spokeswoman said the agency is weighing an appeal and that it will continue working to block non-competes that, quote, restrict the economic liberty of hardworking Americans.
We go to Russia now, where Ukraine is holding onto territory it gained in a surprising incursion into the southwestern region of Kursk two weeks ago. Its forces have struck three bridges there in recent days, a sign they plan to retain this foothold longer term. Journal reporter Matthew Luxmore says the fact Russia hasn't been able to push the Ukrainians out shows just how serious a manpower shortage Moscow is facing.
He told us Moscow has been going to extremes to hunt down army deserters to fill its depleted frontline ranks. Our reporting suggests that around 50,000 Russian soldiers have deserted and there's more than 10,000 criminal cases launched against soldiers who have either refused orders to fight or fled their military base or even fled the battlefield in Ukraine. So Russia is obviously scrambling.
And one of the most radical measures it's taken over the past year is to actually hunt down Russian deserters who have fled to other countries, including Armenia and Kazakhstan. These are men, in most cases, very young men who specifically fled the military because they did not want to fight in Ukraine, sometimes for political reasons, other
other times out of fear of being killed. And it's not an ungrounded fear because Western officials and Ukrainian officials say Russia has lost around half a million dead and wounded in the war so far. So the fears for those men who we've spoken to are quite real. Matthews says that Moscow's move to track down troops serves primarily as a deterrent to would-be deserters.
These arrests of deserters abroad and even the kind of coercion of men who fled military service and are now in Russian custody, those are fairly small numbers. The real question is whether Russia may announce a new mobilization to actually mobilize tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of men to join the military.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is betting its future on cancer drugs. After a pandemic-fuelled bonanza thanks to a vaccine developed with BioNTech, its sales have fizzled, with its stock currently worth less than half the high it hit during the pandemic.
Journal pharma reporter Jared Hopkins says Pfizer needs to make a recent $43 billion wager on cancer drug maker Cgen a success. The Cgen acquisition was key because Cgen pioneered a new class of drugs called antibody drug conjugates. And the science for this technology has really advanced in recent years.
Cancer drugs also, just in general, the innovative ones, can command a premium. The company already says it's seeing signs of the deal sort of paying off. The acquisition of C-GEN gave Pfizer some approved drugs already.
So the company is seeing some revenue, but the deal could really start to pay off in the second half of this decade. Pfizer expects Segen drugs to generate $10 billion in annual sales by 2030. And now let's take a look at what's moving markets today. Shares in JD.com have ended the day sharply lower in Hong Kong after Walmart said it was looking to sell its more than 10% stake in the e-commerce giant.
According to a person familiar with the process, the stake is worth up to $3.7 billion. Bloomberg first reported the sale. JD's US-listed shares are trading down in off-hours trading. And at 2pm Eastern, the Federal Reserve will release the minutes from its July meeting, which could provide more insight into central bankers' thinking on monetary policy.
Coming up, the Obamas take the stage at the DNC and we look at how Kamala Harris is doing among different voter groups. Stick around for our dispatch from Chicago after the break. This message comes from Wall Street Journal sponsor C3.ai.
C3 Generative AI enables rapid access to secure, traceable, hallucination-free insights from enterprise systems, all while using any LLM, helping enterprises turn the invisible into the obvious. Learn more at C3.ai. This is Enterprise AI.
Former President Barack Obama closed out the second day of the Democratic National Convention last night, making the case for electing Vice President Kamala Harris as president. In the final speeches of the night, he and former First Lady Michelle Obama warned Democrats to brace for a tough fight with Donald Trump, while also calling on them to bring down the political temperature. Wrong!
For all the incredible energy we've been able to generate over the last few weeks, for all the rallies and the memes, this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country. But can Obama's winning approach from past elections work this time around? Our Luke Vargas is in Chicago, part of a team of Wall Street Journal reporters and editors covering the event. He brings us this report.
On Monday, Joe Biden passed the torch to the woman that he hopes will be his successor. And last night, in rousing speeches in the city that's become their political home base, Michelle and Barack Obama sought to give Kamala Harris a boost by praising her credentials and going on the attack against her opponent, former President Donald Trump. Here's a 78-year-old billionaire.
who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that's actually been getting worse now that he's afraid of losing the commonwealth. Josh Jamerson is the journal's deputy politics editor. Obama is perhaps the most popular politician left in the Democratic Party. And
And so his coming here was an attempt to embrace Kamala Harris and his star power and tell Democrats that if you voted twice for him, if you supported the policies that he put forward, the only way to really protect those things is to reject Donald Trump. And it's pretty clear that he sees his own legacy intertwined with Harris's candidacy and sees her as a bulwark against Trump's
agenda and what he might do to his own legacy and to President Biden's legacy. Michelle Obama, meanwhile, put herself in Harris's corner with a warning about what could be in store for the vice president. One of the things that I thought was the most interesting about Michelle Obama's speech was her getting Democrats ready for what
She's portrayed to be a pretty ugly election this fall between Kamala Harris, who would be the first black woman president in the United States, and Donald Trump. For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be black.
Well, Democrats can't have Barack Obama as their nominee again, but there is something about his 08 and 2012 campaigns that they would be very happy to see return this year. And that's the multi-ethnic, multi-generational coalition that twice propelled him into office by margins that far exceeded Joe Biden's 2020 victory. So a month after replacing Biden atop the Democratic ticket, how likely is that looking?
Editor Aaron Zittner oversees the journal's polling efforts and joins me now. Aaron, the Obama coalition, that's strong numbers among Black and Latino voters as well as young voters and college-educated white voters, it...
made a lot of people think that for years to come, Democrats would be able to keep taking advantage of demographic trends that were favoring many of those groups. And yet we see in 2016, Hillary Clinton couldn't run back that coalition. And despite winning in 2020, Joe Biden has proved a little better at holding it together. That's what's so surprising about this year. Look at what happened in 2020.
Biden pulled off a very remarkable feat. He reached out to the white, old, industrial, working-class states of the North, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and he barely grabbed those back from Donald Trump. And then he reached across the country to the diverse states of the Sun Belt, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and he flipped Arizona and Georgia. You would think that the future of the Democratic Party...
is in those diversifying states. But what happened? Black and Latino voters and young voters walked away from Joe Biden. And those diverse states kind of fell off the map for Joe Biden. And most analysts said that by the time he quit, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, those diverse states were no longer in play. And his path to victory was through the old path of these white working class states. And that was unexpected.
Which brings us to Harris. In the span of a month, polls are showing that she's back in contention in, I think what are seen as the seven kind of key battleground states of this election. But I'm less clear on whether that's happening on the back of a proper coalition coming around her or just an overall bump in enthusiasm or something else entirely different. She has gone a long way to bringing those voters back and to repairing the problem that Democrats had.
So we see it in our poll. She's up 10 points from where Biden was among black voters. She's up about 10 or 12 points among Latino voters. She's up among young voters, but she's not where Biden was in 2020 with any of those groups. And remember, Biden barely won the election. This election came down to a few tens of thousands of votes. If she's underperforming his numbers among black voters by 10 points,
How does she win Georgia? How does she win North Carolina? She either has to close that gap or she has to find the votes somewhere else. And maybe she can get it. She's running heavily on reproductive rights and the loss of reproductive freedoms. Maybe she gets more women. Maybe she gets more working class women. Maybe she does better in the professional class suburbs. But she's still behind in a number of those states and she has to make up the votes somewhere.
And that somewhere, maybe it could be among young voters. A demo both parties seem to be targeting by opening up their conventions to content creators with massive social media followings that put their own spin on the gathering. These people go direct to their audiences. They have followings of their own, additional avenues to reach people, especially young people. That
That's Journal Tech reporter Megan Bobrowski, who told me some content creators have been paid to attend the conventions as Americans shift where they go for news, information and entertainment from traditional outlets to an array of social channels where the campaigns are fighting for eyeballs. It's really changed since Harris has entered the race. She's a bit younger. She has a team of
Gen Z working on TikTok and on X. And so you see this desire to get information directly out to voters essentially immediately. Who knows how many votes that strategy is good for. But in a close race, Democratic strategist Jess McIntosh told me she's just happy her party's getting creative. I think they're doing a fantastic job of finding voters where they are and
They're not watching three broadcast shows every night. There's a lot of people who get their news from the Wall Street Journal. There's a lot of people who get their news from TikTok. It's important to talk to both audiences, honestly, and I think it's good that they get that.
And that's it for What's News for Wednesday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bark with supervising producer Christina Rourke. And I'm Kate Bullivant for The Wall Street Journal filling in for Luke Vargas. We'll be back tonight with a new show, including more updates from our team at the DNC. But until then, thanks for listening. This message comes from Wall Street Journal sponsor C3.ai.
C3 Generative AI enables rapid access to secure, traceable, hallucination-free insights from enterprise systems, all while using any LLM, helping enterprises turn the invisible into the obvious. Learn more at c3.ai. This is Enterprise AI.
