BRUSSELS—Margrethe Vestager, the Danish politician who has been the public face of the European Union’s regulatory push against Silicon Valley, has been nominated for a second, five-year term as the bloc’s competition commissioner.

The move was a surprise. Ms. Vestager was expected to hand over the competition role—a powerful post with hands-on responsibilities for investigating and enforcing anti-competition issues—as she ascended to a higher role in the commission. She will also take on an influential new role in shaping...

European bankers are squealing in fear that they’ll be stuck with even steeper negative interest rates by the European Central Bank this week. The banks quite rightly fret that lower rates hit their profits, and they want the ECB to help. To avoid trouble in future, it should.

Negative rates are clearly bad for banks in principle, lowering lending rates while deposit rates remain stuck at zero. That squeezes profits.

Worse,...

Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan told investors at an event in London on Monday that Novartis has committed to notify the Food and Drug Administration within five business days of any “credible allegation” of manipulation of data that had been submitted to the agency for drug approval.

The FDA last month said the Swiss company could face criminal penalties for holding back a data-manipulation concern with Zolgensma during the gene therapy’s approval process. Novartis notified the FDA of the concern in late June, a month after the drug was approved, despite the issue being known inside the company since the middle of March.

Dr. Narasimhan has said the company wanted to investigate the specifics of the manipulation before bringing the concern to the agency. He said he was made aware of the issue in early May after an initial investigation found the allegations were credible.

But the timeline of those decisions has raised suspicions from the agency, and...

An activist investor’s attempt to force a strategy revamp at AT&T Inc. spotlights the diverging paths the two largest U.S. wireless carriers have taken in search of growth.

Elliott Management Corp.’s detailed criticism Monday of decisions made by AT&T’s leaders effectively praises rival Verizon Communications Inc.’s focus on upgrading its wireless network over becoming a media giant.

While...

Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to take space in a first-of-its-kind three-story warehouse, a new type of distribution center that could reduce delivery times in congested cities to hours rather than days.

While common in densely-populated Asian and European cities, modern warehouses with multiple floors have been absent until recently in the U.S., where higher land and construction costs deterred developers.

But...

Some investors are shifting money from stocks into corporate bonds, a sign that concern about slower earnings growth isn’t leading to worries about the ability of companies to pay back their debts.

Last month, investors pulled a net $46.2 billion from stock funds, the biggest monthly outflow this year, and added $13.5 billion to taxable bond portfolios, according to data provider Lipper.

The...

Global stocks slipped as investors moderated their expectations about how much central banks are likely to cut interest rates in the coming days.

In the U.S., futures for the S&P 500 dropped 0.2%. The contracts don’t necessarily predict moves after the market opens.

European stocks ticked down, with the Stoxx Europe 600 falling 0.4% in morning trade, with losses across most regional indexes. The German DAX fell 0.1% and France’s CAC 40 fell 0.4%.

Asian markets were muted Tuesday, with the Shanghai Composite down 0.1% and Japan’s Nikkei 225 up 0.4%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was flat.

Analysts expect the European Central Bank will cut 10 basis points from benchmark interest rates when it meets on Thursday. The Federal Reserve will meet next week, and is broadly expected to lower rates by 25 basis points.

As of mid-September, the market had been pricing in a 20-basis-points cut, as well as renewed quantitative easing, said Gareth Isaac, chief...

FRANKFURT—European Central Bank President Mario Draghi hopes to end his eight-year term with a bang. Some fear it could conclude with a fizzle.

In the run-up to his departure on Oct. 31, the central banker has signaled plans for a large, final burst of monetary stimulus to prop up a eurozone economy that is tottering under the pressure of trade tensions.

But...

SEOUL—North Korea vowed to reconvene nuclear talks with Washington later this month and signaled it was ready to engage in comprehensive discussions, a pledge that was followed hours later by the test-firing of two short-range projectiles.

Pyongyang, in state-media report on Tuesday, said it was ready for talks with the U.S. about relinquishing the regime’s nuclear arsenal. The remarks were attributed to First Vice Minister Choe Son Hui, one of the Kim regime’s most prominent interlocutors with the U.S. Ms. Choe said formal...

President Trump declared that talks were dead between the U.S. and the Taliban, the insurgent movement in Afghanistan, and warned the U.S. could do “certain things” that would cost millions of lives in a move to end the war, a step he said he doesn’t want to take.

The comments, made to reporters as he departed the White House for an appearance in North Carolina on Monday, cast new doubt on the future of the 18-year U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan after more than a year of talks between the Washington and the Taliban...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran destroyed a facility this summer where it had conducted secret nuclear-weapons experiments, the latest volley in his campaign imploring world powers to heap more diplomatic pressure on Tehran.

In a seven-minute televised address in Jerusalem in both Hebrew and English, Mr. Netanyahu showed satellite images of the alleged facility in central Iran, south of the city of Isfahan, from late June and late July that he said demonstrated that Iran destroyed the site. He said Iran...

A California federal judge on Monday restored a nationwide injunction that blocks the Trump administration from enforcing restrictions designed to curb asylum claims by Central Americans seeking entry into the U.S.

U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar in Oakland said in a 14-page order that blocking the rules across the U.S. was the only practical way to proceed while the asylum restrictions are challenged in court. The judge previously ruled that the restrictions were likely unlawful.

Monday’s court order almost certainly won’t be the last word in the litigation.

The U.S. has filed criminal charges against a Chinese professor in Texas who had earlier been accused in a civil suit of stealing a U.S. startup’s technology for China’s Huawei Technologies Co., marking an escalation of the Justice Department investigations into issues related to the telecom giant.

The criminal complaint against Bo Mao doesn’t mention Huawei by name, but the case it lays out closely parallels a civil suit filed by Silicon Valley’s CNEX Labs Inc. against Huawei. A Texas jury in June found Huawei had stolen...

WASHINGTON—A planned House Judiciary Committee vote this week marks the start of an aggressive new phase of House Democrats’ oversight of President Trump, putting new force behind a push to determine whether Mr. Trump’s actions during the 2016 presidential campaign and after could form the basis for lawmakers to push him out of office.

The panel also said that former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski would appear next week for a hearing regarding Mr. Trump’s efforts to curtail the now-concluded probe by former special...

Last year, Alibaba’s Vietnam operation put together a plan to win big in toilet paper.

In the company’s home base of China, toilet paper is a popular online purchase and volumes are typically huge. Staff bought hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth and offered it online at low prices, say people familiar with what happened.

But Vietnam’s...

Some of the stocks worst hit by Brexit uncertainty aren’t in the U.K.: They are Irish banks.

The Republic of Ireland’s two largest lenders are among the worst-performing European banks this year, according to FactSet data. Shares in AIB Group PLC and Bank of Ireland Group PLC began a sharp decline when Boris Johnson took over as the U.K.’s prime minister at the end of July. His determination to pull out of the European Union by Oct. 31 fueled investors’ concerns that he would engineer the exit even without a trade deal in...

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stuck to his pledge that the U.K. would leave the European Union on Oct. 31—even as a bill aimed at preventing the country from leaving on that date without an agreement became law.

In his first meeting with his Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, since taking over in July, Mr. Johnson insisted he wanted to leave the EU with an agreement to smooth its departure from the bloc. But although he outlined some ideas, he didn’t give any detail about how he proposed to do it.

A tanker released from Gibraltar despite U.S. objections that it was carrying crude to Syria has unloaded its oil, a top Iranian official said, after the ship dropped anchor near a Syrian port.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Abbas Mousavi, said the Adrian Darya 1 oil tanker “had unloaded its cargo and its owner will decide about its future,” according to the state news agency IRNA late Sunday.

The...

As a new school year starts in Florida, the state’s plan to allow armed teachers as a defense against shootings has fallen flat.

Only seven of Florida’s 67 county school districts—Bay, Gilchrist, Lafayette, Levy, Okeechobee, Putnam and Suwannee—say they have approved or would consider arming teachers, according to a survey of school officials by The Wall Street Journal. Three others—Baker, Jackson and Okaloosa—wouldn’t say whether they have authorized the move.

MOSCOW—Candidates backed by Russia’s opposition won nearly half the seats up for grabs in Moscow’s city elections Sunday, building on a wave of protests this summer that exposed some of the frailties in President Vladimir Putin’s closely controlled political machine, but failed to make significant inroads in local races elsewhere in the country.

Although antigovernment candidates fell short of taking control of the city Duma, the results suggest opposition leader Alexei Navalny had succeeded in building a coherent threat to...

Shale executives are changing the words they use to talk up their prospects, in a linguistic evolution that broadly reflects the industry’s efforts to shift from prioritizing growth to returning cash to increasingly disillusioned investors.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed the transcripts of the earnings calls of 40 public U.S. shale companies—with technical help from financial research firm Sentieo Inc.—and found that fracking’s buzzwords have changed significantly since 2015.

YOKOHAMA, Japan—Nissan Motor Co. Chief Executive Hiroto Saikawa will step down effective Sept. 16, the company said Monday, ending a term marked by controversy over the arrest of former Chairman Carlos Ghosn.

Nissan director Yasushi Kimura announced the move after a board meeting. He said Chief Operating Officer Yasuhiro Yamauchi would take over as acting CEO after Mr. Saikawa’s departure. Mr. Kimura said the board hoped to select a permanent successor to Mr. Yamauchi by the end of October.

WASHINGTON—Are big technology companies using monopoly power to defend and extend their dominance over the U.S. digital marketplace?

That is the core question antitrust enforcers—the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and a number of state attorneys general—are asking as they scrutinize four tech giants for potential violations.

...

Activist investor Elliott Management Corp. disclosed a $3.2 billion stake in AT&T Inc., criticized the company’s strategy and called on the telecommunications giant to shed unnecessary assets.

The New York hedge fund wrote in a letter to the company released Monday that it would seek seats on the company’s board and challenged AT&T to sharpen its focus on its core assets, including its relatively healthy wireless business.

The fund didn’t ask AT&T to sell specific divisions but said the company should review any assets that lack a strategic rationale, including the DirecTV satellite service and Mexican wireless operations.

HONG KONG—The number of tourists visiting the city suffered one of the biggest drops on record in August, one of the clearest indications that months of antigovernment protests are decimating parts of the local economy.

Tourist arrivals in Hong Kong fell 40% last month from a year ago, according to city financial secretary Paul Chan, the worst decline since May 2003 when the city was grappling with the SARS virus that killed hundreds of people. In July, tourist arrivals had fallen 5% from a year ago.