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Annmarie Fertoli: NATO's chief says Turkey's president has dropped his objections to Sweden's bid to join the Alliance. Plus, our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, has been detained in Russia for more than a hundred days. Washington Post writer Jason Rezaian reflects on his own wrongful detention in Iran and sends a message to our colleague.

Jason Rezaian: As time goes on, knowing that your plight is being raised on a hourly, daily, weekly basis, whatever it is, is a kind of lifeline, it's like oxygen.

Annmarie Fertoli: It's Monday, July 10th. I'm Annmarie Fertoli for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that moved the world today. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has given his approval for Sweden to join at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That's according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Erdogan's approval paves the way for the alliance to complete an historic expansion launched in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Erdogan had blocked Sweden's NATO bid for over a year, but he told officials he would drop his objections after hours of meetings ahead of this week's NATO Summit in Lithuania. That is where President Biden is after kicking off his four-day visit to Europe today with a meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and King Charles III, his first in-person discussions with the monarch since his coronation. Our White House reporter, Andrew Restuccia, is covering the President's trip. I spoke to him shortly before he caught a flight to Vilnius for the NATO Summit.

Andrew Restuccia: In the meeting with the Prime Minister, they discussed the war in Ukraine and boosting economic cooperation between the US and the UK. But really this today was a sort of preview of what's to come on the rest of the trip, the centerpiece of which is a meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania. The focus of that meeting is going to be twofold. One, the war in Ukraine, trying to show support for Ukraine more than a year into the war. At the same time, Ukraine and several other countries are pressuring other members of the alliance to support Ukraine's access in to NATO. President Biden has been reluctant to do that too quickly, because he fears that doing so would potentially lead to a widening of the war, a compulsion by members of NATO to defend directly Ukraine from Russia.

Annmarie Fertoli: The Kremlin says that just days after Wagner's short-lived revolt against Moscow, the group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. A Kremlin spokesman said the men discussed Wagner's aborted June mutiny, as well as fighting in Ukraine. The spokesman said Wagner's unit commanders pledged fealty saying they support President Putin and will continue fighting. Monday's announcement marked a sharp turn from Putin's initial public condemnation of Prigozhin and his backers as treasonous rebels. It also signaled a new phase in Russia's internal political maneuvering, as the country's ruling elite contends with mounting losses in Ukraine. The Wagner Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the meeting, and Prigozhin hasn't been seen in public in the more than two weeks since his abandoned revolt. In the US, the Federal Reserve's regulatory chief has outlined plans to beef up the financial cushions for larger banks after a series of mid-size bank failures earlier this year. In a speech today, Michael Barr, the Fed's vice chair for supervision, said the biggest banks could be required to hold an additional two percentage points of capital, or $2 for every $100 of risk-weighted assets. Capital is the buffer that banks must hold to absorb potential losses. Barr said the exact amount of additional capital would depend on a bank's business activities, with the biggest increases expected to be reserved for the largest, most complex US mega banks. The biggest banks say they already have far more capital than they would need in any crisis. Lawmakers in Massachusetts are considering what would be the nation's first near total ban on buying and selling cell phone location data. Reporter Byron Tau explained to our Tech News Briefing podcast how the Location Shield Act would work.

Byron Tau: So, apps would still be able to collect things like location in order to deliver you food, or show you the weather, or send a car your way. But they would not be able to transfer that data to other parties. They couldn't trade it, they couldn't sell it. It's, generally speaking, a pretty expansive ban on the selling or the trading of location information on people inside the state of Massachusetts.

Annmarie Fertoli: Location data is typically collected through mobile apps and other digital services, and doesn't include information like names or phone numbers. But often a device's movement patterns are enough to determine the possible identity of its owner. In a recent public hearing, the proposal drew opposition from a trade association representing the tech industry, which said it would put the state out of step with others. The European Union has approved a plan that will allow tech giants to keep storing data about Europeans on US soil. President Biden said the deal reflects a joint commitment to data privacy and will create greater economic opportunities in the US and Europe. The Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework will allow companies to continue data transfers that are central to their business in Europe, to do things like sell online ads and measure traffic to their websites. The deal is the culmination of lengthy negotiations with the US, but it's still expected to face a legal challenge from European privacy advocates who have long said that the US needs to make substantial changes to surveillance laws. And Ozempic is under review by European drug safety regulators after they received reports of suicidal thoughts linked to the popular weight loss drug, and another medicine in the class called Saxenda. Suicidal behavior isn't listed as a side effect for either drug. The drugs maker Novo Nordisk said its studies of the drug and continued monitoring of their use have not shown a link to suicidal thinking or thoughts of self-harm. The US Food and Drug Administration said it doesn't comment on external research or individual reports, but may evaluate them. Coming up, Jason Rezaian, Washington Post writer and host of the podcast 544 Days, reflects on his detention in Iran and offers support to our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained for more than a hundred days in Russia. Our conversation, after the break. Our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, has been detained in Russia for over a hundred days now. He was detained on March 29th while on a reporting trip and accused of espionage, a charge, The Journal, the US government and his family vehemently deny. Evan's story has been garnering attention from journalists, lawmakers, and advocates around the world. Among them is Jason Rezaian, he's a Washington Post writer for Global Opinions. He was also wrongfully detained. In his case, in Evin Prison in Iran for 544 days, the title of his podcast about that experience. He joins me now to talk about it and as we mark more than a hundred days since Evan's detainment, help us understand some of what our colleague might be going through right now. Jason, welcome and thank you so much for being here.

Jason Rezaian: Thanks for having me on, Annmarie. I appreciate it.

Annmarie Fertoli: Jason, I'd like to start with your reaction when you heard that an American journalist had been detained in Russia on an espionage accusation, the first time that's happened since the Cold War. Do you remember what was running through your mind when you first heard about Evan?

Jason Rezaian: I do. I woke up that morning. I was doing a fellowship at the time at Harvard, at The Institute of Politics, a fellowship that your colleague, Jerry Seib, had done a couple of semesters before me. And it just so happened that my student chief of staff, who organized my seminars, had also worked on Jerry's staff. Although Jerry and I know each other and have the common experience of being held in Evin Prison, I didn't have any contact information for him. So, I called this student early in the morning, rustled him out of bed and said, "I need Jerry's contact info right now." Reached out to Jerry and essentially said, "Look, I will make myself available as much as possible to The Wall Street Journal family on this." Over the days and weeks ahead, ended up having a lot of conversations with people at different parts of the organization, whether it was in the news leadership, friends of mine who were correspondents in different parts of the world, people in the comms department, just because I'd been through something similar. But that first initial reaction, that first initial gut instinct was throw myself into trying to help, because I'd been through something probably more similar than anybody else in recent years.

Annmarie Fertoli: And you have spoken out publicly since then about Evan. Many people spoke out about you when you were in prison. How important is it to know that people outside are rooting for you?

Jason Rezaian: I think it's incredibly important, and it's not something that you're going to know on the first day. It takes time and opportunities to engage with information and people who are outside the walls of the prison for you to develop this understanding that, "Whoa, I haven't been forgotten. That's good." Then, as time goes on, knowing that your plight is being raised on a hourly, daily, weekly basis, whatever it is, is a kind of lifeline, it's like oxygen.

Annmarie Fertoli: Jason, in an interview that our video colleagues did with Evan's family, his sister, Danielle, expressed the hope that he was making friends during his detainment, even though she admitted that might sound like an odd thing to say. I wonder what you think of that and what your experience was like in that regard, making connections in prison, and how significant that was.

Jason Rezaian: It's a hard thing to wrap your head around when you are not thrust into that position. But one of our most basic instincts in life is to connect with other humans. Oftentimes, our captors will use that against us. But I think, in my case, and I'm hoping in Evan's case, there is an understanding that while you can connect with somebody, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're on your side. I will say that building connections with people is a defense mechanism. These social skills of learning how to navigate a situation to make it more comfortable for yourself is a really key element of self-care. When I heard Danielle say that, I agreed with her a hundred percent, I think this notion that we get locked up by adversarial forces and we're going to be defiant the whole time, and stand up to them, and spit in their face, or call them jerks, or whatever, it's just an indication of you don't know what it's really like inside those circumstances. You have no idea how long you're going to be stuck there. And to the extent that you can, you try and make yourself as comfortable as possible, knowing that that's one way to get you through the day.

Annmarie Fertoli: How would you advise Evan, if you could talk to him, what would you say?

Jason Rezaian: I would say steel yourself. It's going to take a while. It's already taken a while. A hundred days is a long time. Just saying it out loud makes me kind of sick to my stomach that he's had to endure this. I remember where I was emotionally and psychologically at a hundred days. But also that you have wells of strength within you that you don't even realize are there. If you ask any one of your colleagues to put themselves in Evan's shoes, it's a hard thing to do. But I can tell you that I wasn't somebody who thought that I was equipped to handle 544 days of the kind of psychological torture and imprisonment that I endured. But you figure out a way and he's figuring out a way. The other thing that I would tell him is that when he gets out, the amount of support that he has received from his family, incredibly strong people, from his colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, from the community of journalists, and from people in the US government, he was never forgotten. He's been cared from the day that he was arrested. And we will all continue caring for him as soon as he gets home.

Annmarie Fertoli: Jason, there are so many parallels in your reporting in Iran and Evan's reporting in Russia and what was going on at both times. I wonder what it was like for you to become the story yourself. How did it change you personally and as a journalist?

Jason Rezaian: It's changed me in a lot of ways, some of which I'm still not really comfortable with. I put myself in that situation to tell the story of other people, to illuminate realities that we don't get to see far away from Tehran or far away from Moscow. And I recognize that in Evan's work as well. I had a choice when I came back to continue in journalism or to leave it behind. I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to continue. But I also knew that doing so would inevitably mean having to confront in very public ways what happened to me. It would've been really awkward to just kind of sweep it under the rug and say, "Yeah, I'm back, and now I'm covering whatever I wanted to cover." I knew it would chase me. For that reason, I decided to first and foremost go back and report out my own story. I did that obviously in a book and a podcast. People ask me if that was therapeutic, not at all. It was very difficult to put myself back in into those moments to interview people about what they did or didn't do on my behalf, to understand mistakes and different moments that could have changed the outcome of my ordeal. But I'm really glad that I did that, because now it's given me the confidence and I think the standing to comment on cases like Evan's in a way that I hope is helpful.

Annmarie Fertoli: Well, Jason, I want to thank you so much for speaking with me and for continuing to share and speak out about your own story and advocate for those in similar positions. Thank you so much.

Jason Rezaian: Thanks for the opportunity.

Annmarie Fertoli: And that's What's News for this Monday afternoon. We'll be back tomorrow morning. If you like what you hear, please, rate and review us. I'm Annmarie Fertoli for The Wall Street Journal.