📝 Good afternoon and welcome to Notes on the News. Here’s what you should know today, May 18: It was another terrible day for stocks, a Russian soldier admitted to committing a war crime, and Martin Shkreli is out of prison.

Notes on the News is getting a new name and look later this month. We’ll still land in your inbox at the same time to catch you up on the biggest headlines—and help you make sense of them. We’ll also bring you more ways to connect with our journalism, advice for making better decisions, an easier-to-read format and a surprise or two. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

1. The latest wave of Covid-19 cases is expanding beyond the Northeast, with places from the Midwest to Florida and California reporting rising infections. The seven-day moving average of new cases recently topped 94,000 a day, nearly four times the lows reached in late March, CDC data show, although there hasn’t yet been a major surge in serious illnesses. Still, federal health officials are urging people in hotspots to take precautions to limit the virus’s spread.

• Schools still haven’t spent billions in Covid-relief funds.
• North Korea receives aid from China as its Covid outbreak spreads.

2. The Dow industrials suffered their worst day since 2020. The index slid more than 1,100 points, or 3.6%, as the latest set of disappointing earnings from large retailers raised investors’ fears of a recession. The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite dropped 4.7%.

• The TerraUSD crash could speed up crypto regulation, Binance.US CEO says.
• Is Elon Musk actually going to buy Twitter? Can he just walk away?
• Musk calls ESG “an outrageous scam” after Tesla was removed from an index.

3. Pennsylvania's GOP Senate primary might be headed for a recount. With 96% of the expected vote tabulated, Trump-endorsed celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz and former hedge-fund executive David McCormick were separated by a razor-thin margin. Whoever wins will face off against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a progressive who easily won the Democratic contest despite suffering a stroke four days before the primary.

• ▶️ Trump-backed candidates are in focus nationwide during U.S. primaries.
• ▶️ Arkansas’ governor says the GOP must move past Trump.

4. U.S. women’s soccer players will earn the same as the men. After years of legal pressure, the United States Soccer Federation has reached landmark collective-bargaining agreements with its men’s and women’s national teams to pay all players equally for appearances and game bonuses. The labor pacts give players on both teams significant raises.

5. ​​“Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli was released from prison early. The former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, now Vyera Pharmaceuticals, has been transferred to a halfway house after completing programs that allowed for his sentence to be shortened, his lawyer said. Shkreli originally faced a seven-year term after being convicted of securities fraud in 2017. He also gained notoriety for raising the price of a lifesaving AIDS drug from $17.50 a tablet to $750 a tablet.

• Mental-health startup Cerebral replaces CEO Kyle Robertson, a move he calls illegal.

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Follow the latest developments here.

A Russian soldier pleaded guilty in Ukraine’s first war-crimes trial. The 21-year-old tank-unit officer admitted to fatally shooting an unarmed civilian. The trial proceedings could potentially affect prisoner exchanges, including the hundreds of Ukrainians evacuated from Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant after surrendering to Russian forces.

• What is NATO and why do Finland and Sweden want to join?
• ▶️ How Finland and Sweden would transform NATO’s military capabilities.

The EU aims to end its dependence on Russian energy within five years. The bloc’s $317 billion plan involves negotiating gas supply deals with producers in the U.S., the Middle East and Africa, and massively expanding renewable energy construction. Separately, the EU proposed up to $9.5 billion in short-term funding to help Ukraine pay its bills.

• Germany moves to strip former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of parliamentary office over his ties to Putin.

Russian companies are finding creative ways to skirt sanctions. Businesses have tried everything from altering shipping routes and changing suppliers to moving their entire operations to Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, the U.S. is likely to prevent American investors from receiving payments on Russian debt, a decision that could push Russia toward default.

• Google moves employees out of Russia.
• The U.S. saw signs of a decline in Russian ransomware strikes at the start of the Ukraine war.
• U.S. companies should keep a presence in Russia, Affirm CEO Max Levchin says.

30% — Drop this year in an exchange-traded fund tracking companies that have merged with SPACs. The poor performance of special-purpose acquisition companies has slowed the creation of new ones. Existing SPACs are running out of time to find companies to take public and risk being saddled with sizable losses.

$300 million — Funding raised by the owner of Popular Science in a round led by private-equity firm Blackstone. Recurrent Ventures, which also owns Outdoor Life, Saveur and 21 other publishing brands, said it plans on using the funding to buy additional media properties.

25% — The amount by which meat shrinks when it cooks. A lawsuit alleges McDonald’s and Wendy’s use undercooked patties in their advertisements, allowing them to showcase burgers that are about 15% to 20% bigger than the ones served.

It’s getting harder to take time off to get over Covid-19.

Employers such as Amazon and Walmart have recently cut back the expanded sick leaves they introduced in the early days of the pandemic. The Omicron variant’s often milder symptoms are also prompting many employees with remote-work options to simply power through their illness from home. And some working parents say they are saving sick days in anticipation of needing them if their children test positive or child care is otherwise disrupted.

• 🎧 Unlimited vacation time: The latest corporate perk.
• Diane von Furstenberg discusses a return to office fashion.

There’s a new media mogul tearing up Hollywood.

David Zaslav, the new CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, has wasted no time putting his stamp on the company and isn’t afraid to ruffle the industry’s elite. He and his team have abandoned projects they consider costly and unnecessary, including pulling the plug on CNN+ a month after it launched and canceling a DC Comics superhero movie in development. “It’s not show friends, it’s show business,” he told movie-studio executives in a meeting about recent box-office flops, quoting from the 1996 Tom Cruise movie “Jerry Maguire.”

• YouTuber Logan Paul says not everyone is cut out to be an influencer.
• Planned Parenthood will boost resources to prepare for a patient surge, its CEO says.
• How much do you really save by not having kids?
• ▶️ WSJ reviews the three leading tablet-stylus combos from Apple, Microsoft and Samsung.
• Here’s how to buy baby formula online during the shortage.
• Lawmakers seek to curb the voting power of BlackRock, Vanguard and other big asset managers.

• Go book a vacation without knowing where you’re going: More than a dozen companies offer versions of surprise travel, taking care of all the details of an itinerary down to the destination. Travelers may receive a weather report and packing list a week in advance but often don’t find out where they’re headed until they arrive at the airport. But be warned: Like a blind date, a surprise trip can be a match made in heaven or a total dud.

Today's newsletter was curated by Liz Webber in New York, in collaboration with publishing editor Rich Bellis in New York.

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