What to watch for today
Mark Zuckerberg meets with US conservatives. The Facebook founder sits down with right-wing media outlets to talk about allegations that the site’s trending news curators habitually suppressed stories with a conservative bent.
Protests in Hong Kong. Demonstrators are rallying for greater democracy and press freedom during the visit of Zhang Dejiang, the Chinese government’s third-in-command. Some 8,000 officers have been deployed to maintain security, with activists saying they have to break rules to be heard.
Earnings, earnings, earnings: Tencent, Target, Cisco, Lowe’s, Staples, and Salesforce.com are all due to report quarterly results.
While you were sleeping
Clinton and Sanders split the primaries. Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton won a narrow victory in Kentucky, but rival Bernie Sanders prevailed in Oregon. Republican candidate Donald Trump recorded an easy win in Oregon, the only primary the party held on Tuesday, since all his opponents have dropped out of the race.
Suzuki’s fuel-economy tests were faulty. Hot on the heels of Mitsubishi’s admission that it falsified fuel-economy data, fellow Japanese car maker Suzuki said its testing methods on 16 domestic models also fell foul of regulations. Its shares dropped by 9% on the news.
Landslides in Sri Lanka buried hundreds of people. Officials fear the death toll could be as high as 400, after torrential rains—the worst in six years—caused massive landslides that buried villages in the center of the country. Tens of thousands have been forced to flee their homes and rescuers have struggled to reach mountainous areas.
The London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Börse delayed merger talks. Both sides agreed to ask shareholders to approve the $30 billion deal after Britain votes in a referendum on EU membership on June 23. German officials said they’re concerned the UK may vote to leave, stranding key parts of its market infrastructure outside of the EU’s single market.
The US slapped a huge tax increase on Chinese steel. The 500% increase in import duties comes after American and European steelmakers say that China is flooding global markets with cheap, state-subsidized steel. US steelmakers want to ban all Chinese steel imports, claiming the glut has forced around 12,000 layoffs in the past year.
Japan’s economy rebounded sharply. The world’s third-largest economy expanded by 1.7% in the first quarter, comfortably beating expectations. Surprisingly strong consumer spending was to thank for the result, helping the country avoid recession.
Quartz obsession interlude
Tim Fernholz on the World Bank’s decision to drop “developing country” from its data vocabulary: “The change marks an evolution in thinking about the geographic distribution of poverty and prosperity. But it sounds less radical when you consider that nobody has ever agreed on a definition for these terms in the first place.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
In the future, computers will be trained like dogs. Machine learning could spell the end of software coding as we know it.
Free will doesn’t exist, but that’s not the point. We need to believe we’re morally responsible for our actions, even if biology is actually in charge.
Startup founders are not like Greek heroes. We shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss entrepreneurs whose stories don’t fit epic narrative arcs.
Surprising discoveries
A Polish couple in their 70s caused a stir at a London techno club. The elderly pair drank tea and danced until 5am.
India held its first conference on cows. The wellbeing of the country’s bovines has become a hot topic in policy circles.
Iraq shut down the internet to prevent cheating on exams. For the second year in a row.
A jelly bean mogul is being sued for a gruesome tank accident. Jelly Belly chair Herman Rowland owns an M5 tank from World War 2 that fatally struck a man last year.
Ford is trying to make car seats out of carbon dioxide. The goal is a car made entirely out of sustainable materials.
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