What to watch for today
More of a mess for European labor? The euro zone’s statistical agency will release its latest read on European employment and labor costs in the fourth quarter.
EU summit continues. European leaders continue to debate whether austerity policies are helping or hurting a euro area in crisis. France is already spoiling for a fight. Later tonight, euro-zone finance ministers will meet to decide what to do about Cyprus (paywall).
A data look at the US economy. Inflation, industrial production, and consumer confidence data are all on the docket.
JP Morgan bosses talk about the London Whale. Executives involved in or close to a trade that cost the bank more than $6 billion last year will testify in front of a US Senate panel. A Senate report on the bank’s attitudes to risk makes for pretty spicy reading, as reports on banking go.
While you were sleeping
Samsung Galaxy S4 has a raft of new features. The South Korean electronics giant released its latest smartphone, which follows eye movements, can be controlled without touching it, translates into several languages and, judging by the size, can be used for self-defense. It will be available from the end of April.
China bought a big chunk of African gas. China National Petroleum Corporation will pay $4.2 billion for 20% of a Mozambique gas field belonging to Italy’s Eni, giving China a fresh source for its growing energy thirst.
A rosy US jobs picture. 10,000 fewer Americans filed jobless claims last week, in a sign that labor prospects are continuing to brighten.
Widely-expected East Asian appointments confirmed. Chinese lawmakers elected Li Keqiang as prime minister for the next decade, by 2,940 votes to 9, a slightly less overwhelming majority—in Chinese terms at least—than Xi Jinping’s 2,952 to 1. In Japan, parliamentarians confirmed Haruhiko Kuroda as governor and Kikuo Iwata and Hiroshi Nakaso as his deputies, even though the largest opposition party voted against Iwata.
Shipping company caught red-handed. It’s not only banks dealing with Iran that face sanctions. The US Treasury imposed them on Dimitris Cambis, of Impire Shipping Limited, whom it accuses of helping the National Iranian Tanker Company sell oil in the international markets.
An American journalist helped hack into a newspaper. A deputy social media editor at Reuters was indicted on charges of assisting hackers to deface the website of the Los Angeles Times.
Federal Reserve scrutinized JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Although both banks passed last week’s stress tests, the Fed demanded that they revise their capital plans within the month, without outright rejecting them. Only Ally Financial and BB&T got flat-out rejected.
Quartz obsession interlude
Zach Seward on how Iranians are the real victims of Google’s decision to kill off Google Reader: “RSS readers take raw feeds of data—headline, text, timestamp, etc.—and display that information in a stripped-down interface along with many other feeds, which is what makes them so efficient. Less obvious is how many RSS readers, including Google’s, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That’s because it’s actually Google’s servers, located in the US or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
China’s been hacking—but for how long? The military was talking about it in 1995.
The myth of the lone inventor. You’re never working all by yourself.
Can anyone save Groupon from itself? Its problem is greed.
Why quackery survives. Reason never seems to eliminate unreason; it just leads to different kinds.
Surprising discoveries
Scientists think they’ve really found the God particle. Physicists thought they had discovered the Higgs boson—the particle that could be responsible for all mass in the universe—last year, but now they are pretty sure that they got it right.
Plutonium without the WMD. The US produced the first non-weapons grade plutonium in 25 years in order to power space probes.
There might be fish in your Guinness beer. Sorry, vegans.
Indiana once tried to change the value of pi to 3.2. And other crazy moments in the history of 3.141592653… to commemorate International Pi Day on March 14 (yes, 3.14).
Our best wishes for a productive day. Please send any news, comments, atomic particle discoveries, and censorship-avoidance techniques to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates during the day.