Emma Tucker

1. FROM MY DESK

The financial arms race in college sports has made a voice as unlikely as Jolin Ellison's heard loud and clear-especially when backed by a husband with a net worth of roughly $200 billion.

The University of Michigan alumna and her husband, (Oracle) co-founder Larry Ellison, have contributed about $10 million to the school's Name, Image and Likeness system. But her involvement goes far beyond writing checks. Jolin helped land star athletes, hosted a workout and barbecue at her home for young local players, and, former staff members said, called and texted Michigan athletics staff with unsolicited feedback.

In email exchanges with the Journal-her first public comments to a news publication about her involvement in Michigan athletics-Jolin said that she never critiqued or questioned coaches. She said she is just a fan.

As player payrolls skyrocket, Jolin's rising profile shows how affluent boosters are wielding greater influence over college athletics.

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2. TODAY'S HEADLINES

-- Affordability is back in the spotlight just before midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

-- President Trump's mild response to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates was the clearest sign yet that Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has, for now, reset a relationship in which the White House treated the central bank as an adversary.

-- Hackers used Anthropic's Claude to break into OpenAI, exposing growing risks in automated cyber threats.

-- Christine Lagarde helped block Binance's foothold in Europe.

-- North Korea is sending women to Russian factories in the line of Ukrainian fire.

3. LIVE FROM THE MARKETS

Follow our live financial coverage all day.

-- Stocks Spencer Jakab is watching: Backup power provider Generac Holdings got a jolt Thursday courtesy of Amazon, making it the S&P 500's top-performing stock. A large contract for generators to be used in the online shopping and cloud computing giant's data centers included the right to buy hundreds of millions of dollars in new Generac shares. (Get Spencer's Markets A.M. newsletter in your inbox.)

-- Meta's AI agent has a trust problem, writes Asa Fitch.

4. READ IT HERE FIRST

Red and blue America have found something to agree on: Flock cameras must go.

In the liberal city of Asheville, N.C., progressives fear the Trump administration could use Flock Safety cameras to spy on political dissidents, transgender residents and undocumented immigrants. Almost 100 miles south, Republicans in conservative Oconee County, S.C., view the same AI-enabled license-plate readers as a threat to constitutional privacy rights. Both communities recently voted to stop using Flock cameras. Though political opposites, they have landed on the same side of a fast-growing national backlash: a fight against government surveillance that has forged rare common ground in America, report Laura J. Nelson and Kris Maher. Just this year, more than 100 governments in blue and red towns have paused or ended Flock contracts, according to DeFlock, an opposition group.

5.

The U.S. and China want AI guardrails. But their ideas couldn't be more different.

With apocalyptic fears over AI reaching a fever pitch, Trump and China's Xi Jinping plan to discuss the technology at a summit in Washington next week. The tension is that the U.S. and China are in a heated race to dominate AI and view safety issues very differently. In the U.S., the discussion has centered on guarding against a powerful model that slips beyond human control, an autonomous weapon that acts on its own, or a tool potent enough to help a rogue actor build a weapon. In China, AI safety increasingly points somewhere else-at threats to the political order the Communist Party sits atop. The gap makes a durable dialogue a tall order, report Lingling Wei and Yoko Kubota.

Go inside what's driving D.C. Washington Coverage Chief Damian Paletta brings you an expert guide to the politics, power and people in the nation's capital. Sign up for our politics newsletter.

6. SEE THE STORY

They spent $50 million creating their own Four Seasons. Now it's for sale.

Dwayne and Terese Clark are listing their waterfront home in Bellevue, Wash., for $71 million-a sum that would set a record for the Pacific Northwest. The couple invested $50 million over nearly two decades into the 2.3-acre Lake Washington property. "What we've tried to do is create our own Four Seasons resort," Dwayne Clark said of the compound, which features a piazza, a wellness retreat, two docks and a garage that doubles as a ballroom.

7. HAPPENING TODAY

-- Saoirse Ronan stars as a pushed-to-the-brink teacher in the dark comedy "Bad Apples," now in theaters. Check out our arts & culture calendar for more.

-- Today's paper

8. THE NUMBER

$3,167

The average refund owed to nearly two-thirds of individual income tax filers by the Internal Revenue Service last year. While most taxpayers look forward to the spring check, reporter Laura Saunders is on a mission to stop the agency from issuing her one. Fearing processing delays and service snafus, she is adjusting her year-end strategy to owe money next April instead.

9. AND FINALLY...

There's a class war raging over low-flying helicopters headed to the Hamptons.

A surge in helicopter traffic has set off an unusual type of class warfare in Westchester County: Call it the 1% vs. the rest of the single-digiters, the uber-rich against the not-quite-rich-enough. Many of the choppers are heading to the Hamptons. Flyers' attempts to beat traffic and get a few more hours at the exclusive summer enclave are interrupting dinners and rattling the windows of residents who believed they had earned a slice of suburban tranquility.

10. BEYOND THE NEWSROOM

-- Opinion: The House approved the late GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham's bill to put more pressure on Vladimir Putin for his marauding in Ukraine. Your move, Trump.

-- WSJ | Buy Side: Our new analysis found the best pet insurance companies based on coverage, price-shock protection, premium stability over time and more.

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Today's newsletter was curated and edited by Morgan Smith and Natasha Dangoor in collaboration with Editor in Chief Emma Tucker. Got a tip for us? Here's how to submit.

This article is a text version of a Wall Street Journal newsletter published earlier today.