The owner of Politico is said to be seeking $1 billion in a deal with Axel Springer.

Axel already has a partnership with Politico as a joint owner in Politico Europe, which the German company has been trying to sort out what to do with. Since it doesn’t control the entity, it can’t expand the business without Mr. Allbritton’s consent. A deal with Politico could solve that issue while also expanding Axel’s presence in the United States, the people said.

A merger with Politico could scuttle Axel’s talks to acquire Axios, the competing news start-up founded by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz, all early veterans of Politico. (Mr. VandeHei and John F. Harris started Politico in 2006 after they left The Washington Post.) Axios’s leadership has not aggressively pursued the deal, according to one of the people.

Mr. Allbritton, a major player in Washington media whose family owned a television empire, funded Politico. He eventually sold off his family’s TV stations to Sinclair Broadcast Group for nearly $1 billion. After debt, the family netted about $500 million in the sale.

Politico had a chance to sell to Axel several years ago when it was a much smaller operation, but Mr. Allbritton did not want to do so at that time, the people said.

Mr. Allbritton has lately become focused on trying to maintain Politico’s stable of stars and expand the business. But the media landscape has shifted dramatically, and the so-called talent economy has allowed big-name journalists to start their own ventures.

This year, three of Politico’s top staffers — Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and John Bresnahan — left to start Punchbowl, a political news site. Mr. Sherman and Ms. Palmer were the well-known hands behind Politico’s biggest franchise, the Playbook newsletter.

In February, Politico’s chief executive announced he would depart. Then, in June, Carrie Budoff Brown, a longtime editor at Politico who led the U.S. newsroom for half a decade, said she would be leaving to join NBC News. Politico’s nearly 400 journalists are also in the throes of a unionizing effort that could severely add to the cost of the business.

Mr. Allbritton has been weighing the prospects of a lucrative payday against maintaining full control over a well-read news site in the nation’s capital.

The merger discussions were earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The extent of Afghan holdings at the institution is not clear, though it is common for foreign governments to hold accounts at the New York Fed, both for security reasons and to enable smooth cross-border payments and dollar-based transactions. The New York Fed does not, as a matter of policy, acknowledge or discuss individual account holders, a Fed official said.

It is unlikely that the Taliban would be able to retrieve any Afghan assets stored with the Fed. When current events affect the status of accounts, the New York Fed and the State Department determine who can have access based on a compliance manual the central bank branch disclosed several years ago. Likewise, under the Federal Reserve Act, the secretary of state must recognize individual representatives of foreign account holders.

Separately on Tuesday, a group of 18 lawmakers sent a letter to the Treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, urging her to intervene in the scheduled release of $650 billion in International Monetary Fund emergency reserves this month. The allocation, of so-called special drawing rights, would potentially give Afghanistan and the Taliban access to $450 million.

“The potential of the S.D.R. allocation to provide nearly half a billion dollars in unconditional liquidity to a regime with a history of supporting terrorist actions against the United States and her allies is extremely concerning,” wrote the lawmakers, led by Representative French Hill, a Republican from Arkansas. It is not clear what Ms. Yellen could do at this point to intervene, and it is up to the I.M.F. to determine how a country is recognized.

The acting governor of Afghanistan’s central bank, Ajmal Ahmady, said on Monday that he had received a call on Friday saying it would get no further shipments of U.S. dollars. The central bank supplied less currency to the markets on Saturday, a move that “further increased panic,” he said.

The Treasury Department declined to comment on the letter to Ms. Yellen and the canceled shipments.

The data also showed a drop in sales of home furnishings, electronics and building materials, categories that had seen strong sales growth during the pandemic as people spent heavily on their homes.

Home Depot, which on Tuesday reported weaker-than-expected sales for the three months through Aug. 1, fell 4.3 percent, while Lowe’s fell 5.8 percent and was among the worst-performing stocks in the S&P 500.

“There’s concern about economic momentum cooling,” said Lydia Boussour, lead US economist at Oxford Economics. “It’s likely we passed the peak in consumer spending as the boost from the reopening and fiscal stimulus starts to fade.”

Amazon fell 1.7 percent as the report highlighted a drop in e-commerce sales. Target, which has also benefited from a shift to online shopping during the pandemic, fell 2.9 percent.

Walmart fared better, ending unchanged after it reported that its total revenue rose 2.4 percent to $141 billion in the three months that ended in July, while operating income was up 21 percent to $7.4 billion from a year earlier. Both numbers were higher than analysts had expected.

Tuesday’s broader drop stood out because stocks have been making mostly small moves in recent weeks — mostly higher — even amid concerns about the resurgence of coronavirus infections and new restrictions in the country.

“The Covid pandemic is still casting a shadow on economic activity — it’s still very much with us,” Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said at a town hall event on Tuesday. “We can’t declare victory yet on that.”

Mr. Powell will speak again next week at an annual gathering of economists in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where investors will look for any new guidance on the central bank’s thinking about how and when to start unwinding some of its emergency support for the economy. On Tuesday, Mr. Powell said the Fed was hoping to see the labor market heal further.

Shares of Covid-19 vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer were both higher Tuesday following reports that the Biden administration is likely to recommend booster shots for most Americans. Pfizer rose 3.1 percent, while Moderna gained 7.5 percent, gains that made them among the best performers in the S&P 500. Johnson & Johnson rose 0.9 percent.

Walmart said it was on track to generate a total of $75 billion in e-commerce sales this year.

Often seen as a bellwether for the broader economy, Walmart reported optimistic guidance for the remainder of the year despite signs of inflation and the resurgence of the coronavirus.

The company said it expected its U.S. sales to increase by 5 to 6 percent this year, which is similar to what the company estimated in May when the pandemic seemed to be abating.

Walmart also raised its profit expectations from its earlier estimate in May, saying it expects operating income to increase by 9 percent to 11.5 percent.

Substack, which has more than 500,000 paying subscribers, has attracted a number of top writers, some of whom have defected from mainstream media organizations for six-figure deals or the promise of a lucrative stream of revenue from reader subscriptions. The author Roxane Gay, the tech journalist Casey Newton and the writer Andrew Sullivan are among the writers who have popular newsletters on the platform. Earlier this month, a group of prominent comic book writers and artists joined the service. Mr. Moore said he was a fan of Substack newsletters by Patti Smith, Anand Giridharadas and Garrison Keillor.

The demand for newsletters has led to an increasingly fierce competition across the media industry. Facebook recently started Bulletin, a newsletter service with writers like Malcolm Gladwell and the sports reporter Erin Andrews. Twitter purchased the newsletter platform Revue earlier this year. The New York Times last week introduced seven new newsletters and made a slate of its offerings available only to paying subscribers.

Chris Cuomo apologized in May after it emerged that he had offered advice to Andrew Cuomo’s aides as the governor faced sexual harassment accusations. The host pledged not to discuss his brother’s travails, but CNN kept him on the air, roiling some colleagues who considered his role a glaring conflict of interest.

It did not help that CNN had openly encouraged the brothers’ on-air rapport at the start of the pandemic, when viewers tuned in to see Chris Cuomo interview Andrew Cuomo about his response to the pandemic.

On his Monday show, Chris Cuomo said the situation involving the governor’s scandal was “unlike anything I could have imagined.”

“I’m not an adviser; I’m a brother,” he told viewers. “I wasn’t in control of anything. I was there to listen and to offer my take. And my advice to my brother was simple and consistent: own what you did, tell people what you’ll do to be better, be contrite, and, finally, accept that it doesn’t matter what you intended. What matters is how your actions and words were perceived.”

Chris Cuomo has also faced scrutiny over his involvement in the efforts by Andrew Cuomo’s aides to stave off the growing scandal. On Monday, the CNN host said: “I never attacked nor encouraged anyone to attack any woman who came forward. I never made calls to the press about my brother’s situation. I never influenced or attempted to control CNN’s coverage of my family.”

He said he had no plans to comment further. “This will be my final word on it,” the host said, before cutting to a commercial. “Let’s take a break. We’ll be right back.”

Overall, the British labor market is recovering strongly from the pandemic. The number of people on payrolls rose by 182,000 in July, up 0.6 percent from June. Compared with February 2020, the number of payrolled employees was down by 201,000. At its worst, in November, there were nearly 969,000 fewer employees than before the pandemic.

In the second quarter, the unemployment rate slipped to 4.7 percent from 4.9 percent in the previous quarter. There was a record flow of about 300,000 people from unemployment into employment. There was also a decrease in the economic inactivity rate, as more people were classified as unemployed because they had resumed hunting for a job.

By the end of the second quarter, about two million people were still on furlough in Britain, but that program will end next month. Even as vacancies remain high, policymakers and economists are watching closely to see if there will be a notable rise in the unemployment rate after the furlough program ends or if those workers are able to find jobs.

The Bank of England is not forecasting another increase in the unemployment rate this year but expects it to be about 4.25 percent in 2023. It was 3.8 percent before the pandemic.

“The challenge of avoiding a steep rise in unemployment has been replaced by that of ensuring a flow of labor into jobs,” Andrew Bailey, the governor of the central bank, said this month. “This is a crucial challenge.”

The arrangement was complicated, with the Pershing Square SPAC spending $4 billion to buy a 10 percent stake in the company, which was already being taken public by its parent, Vivendi. The S.E.C. questioned the terms, which raised concerns that Mr. Ackman’s SPAC was not a SPAC at all.

Mr. Ackman abandoned the Universal Music deal last month, admitting in a letter to investors that he had underestimated regulatory and shareholder resistance to the complex transaction. But the new lawsuit asks the court to declare that Pershing Square’s SPAC is an investment company, and to find that it was deliberately mischaracterized to avoid legal requirements to the detriment of investors. The suit is also seeking to rescind contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to members of the company’s board.

If successful, the lawsuit could make professional investors who have found SPACs attractive wary of potential legal challenges, chilling the market. Proving damages will be difficult because the Universal Music deal was scrapped. But more important, perhaps, the case tries to address underlying issues about the motivations of some SPAC sponsors. And its analysis of the meaning of investing in securities — part of any merger or acquisition — raises existential questions about the purpose and treatment of SPACs in general.

The irony is that Pershing Square’s SPAC was more investor-friendly than most. The SPAC was structured so that its sponsors would be paid only if its deal proved successful over time. Most other SPACs give sponsors shares and warrants that pay out regardless of the performance of the company after a merger.

A spokesman for Pershing Square’s SPAC said in a statement that the “litigation is totally without merit” and that the SPAC had never held securities that would require it to register as an investment company, nor did it have any plans to do so in the future.

“You don’t really know how many people are on this journey — starting a family or building a family — until you launch something like this,” she said.

The company, which was founded in 2014, did not reveal current membership numbers. But it said its membership had soared 400 percent since the onset of the pandemic.

“Covid accelerated all digital health companies forward,” Ms. Ryder said, but people are also now “starting to prioritize health equity, women’s health and family health.”

The pandemic helped reveal the weaknesses in the patchwork of child care systems and the gender and racial inequities of the health system, and it made corporate executives focus on supporting and retaining employees with families, she said.

“All the trends kind of converged for us,” she added.

About 15 percent of the in-person referrals made through the platform are for child care support, and since March 2020, about a quarter of the appointments scheduled have been with mental health providers — an indication of the stresses and struggles of working parents.

Ms. Ryder next wants to lower the barrier to quality health care for lower-income families.

“A Medicaid mom who is Black and who is at heightened risk for maternal mortality — she needs a personalized Maven experience just as much as the member who is working at a company in Dallas or New York,” she said.

The financing was led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Lux Capital and included an investment from Oprah Winfrey.

Fearing a housing bubble could lead to a crisis that would reverberate through China’s financial system, regulators last year began to crack down on the borrowing habits of the property sector. The central bank created new rules, called the “three red lines,” that have forced property companies to begin paying off their bills. Evergrande was the primary target.

Evergrande has been selling off parts of its empire to comply. This month it sold stakes in its internet business. Mr. Xu has told investors that the company is working hard to pay off some of its loans and has reduced the debt that incurs interest to $88 billion from $130 billion last year.

The management changes on Tuesday could foreshadow more turmoil.

Evergrande last week confirmed reports that it was in talks with prospective buyers to sell its electric vehicle business and its property management unit, without offering any further details.

Mr. Ahmady was appointed the central bank’s acting governor in June 2020. Before that, he served as a senior adviser to the president for banking and financial affairs, as well as other ministerial positions. Mr. Ahmady was educated in the United States, at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard Business School.

Afghan lawmakers rejected making Mr. Ahmady the permanent central bank chief in December, citing reasons including insufficient fluency in the country’s national languages, Bloomberg reported.

As a temporary caretaker of the economy, Mr. Ahmady focused on price stability, strengthening the financial sector and digitizing payments. The International Monetary Fund forecast the Afghan economy — which relies heavily on international aid — to rebound 4 percent this year after shrinking in 2020, but in June warned that it was facing “formidable challenges” because of the pandemic and “precarious security situation.”

Last week, “currency volatility and other indicators had worsened” before the Afghan government fell, he said, but the central bank had been able to stabilize the economy “relatively well.”

“Then came last Thursday.”

Mr. Ahmady described how he had attended his normal meetings that morning, but by the time he returned home, major cities including Ghazni and Herat were under Taliban control. On Friday, he said, he received a call saying that the central bank would get no further shipments of U.S. dollars, and on Saturday, the bank supplied less currency to the markets, a move that “further increased panic,” he said.

“I held meetings on Saturday to reassure banks and money exchangers to calm them down,” Mr. Ahmady wrote. “I can’t believe that was one day before Kabul fell.”

On Saturday night, he said, he bought tickets to leave the country on Monday “as a precaution.” But on Sunday, he left the central bank and went to the airport, where he saw Afghan politicians.

“I secured a Kam Air flight Sunday 7pm,” he said, referring to an international airline based in Kabul. “Then the floor fell: the President had already left.”

Civil servants and the military immediately left their positions as word of Mr. Ghani’s departure spread, and hundreds of people raced to board an outbound plane. “The plane had no fuel or pilot. We all hoped it would depart,” he wrote.

He then disembarked from the aircraft, and amid of rush of people he ended up on a military plane. Mr. Ahmady did not say who owned the plane he was on or where it was going.

“It did not have to end this way,” he wrote. “I am disgusted by the lack of any planning by Afghan leadership. Saw at airport them leave without informing others. I asked the palace if there was an evacuation plan/charter flights. After 7 years of service, I was met with silence.”

“Nate’s killing it right now,” said Carson Block, who popularized activist short-selling as the head of the firm Muddy Waters.

Blank-check companies, like the ones that took the three firms mentioned above public through a merger, have given Hindenburg a lot of fodder. Critics say the incentives between sponsors of these takeover vehicles and later investors are misaligned. The S.E.C. is looking more closely at these deals with so-called special purpose acquisition companies, which take other companies public with less scrutiny than traditional initial public offerings.

“There are just so many outrageous companies,” Mr. Anderson said. “Some of these companies we have looked at, they don’t have any revenues at all.”