Gideon Lichfield

Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the republic of Chechnya in southern Russia, has issued a statement on Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service where he frequently posts casual photos of himself and has over 116,000 followers. In the statement, written in Russian, he criticizes the way that US authorities have handled the search for Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsanaev, the two Chechen brothers who are suspected of carrying on the Boston Marathon bombing.

Censorship or investor war? That’s a subject of debate in Russia, after a fund managed by a Russian businessman with close ties to the Kremlin acquired 48% of the country’s largest social-networking site, V Kontakte (“in touch”), which is similar to Facebook.

Earlier today, a Boeing 737-800 belonging to Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air hit the water as it was coming in to land and broke into two. Luckily, injuries were relatively light.

Before I went to Moscow as a correspondent a decade ago, a colleague recommended a book, Negotiating with the Soviets, by Raymond Smith. It outlines the Russian negotiating strategy: Act furious, establish a position of power, make outrageous demands, and then bargain down from there.

“Share of homes with guns shows four-decade decline” was the headline in the New York Times a couple of days ago. Similar reports in various news outlets picked up on the apparent slide in US gun ownership, on the eve of the National Rifle Association’s annual convention. “Even as the conversation on guns remains contentious,” the Times wrote, “a broad shift away from gun ownership is under way in a growing number of American homes.”

CERNOBBIO, ITALY— Jim O’Neill, famed for coining the term “BRICs” and for his fierce devotion to football club Manchester United, retires as chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management next month. Of late, O’Neill has also been famed for his bullishness on everything from global equities to Chinese growth to European recovery; he even has a positive spin on the strong showing for populist ex-comedian Beppe Grillo in Italy’s recent election, which most economic observers perceived as a disastrous vote against common sense.

Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s vice-president, has just reported the death of president Hugo Chávez this afternoon at 4.25 p.m, Caracas time. Earlier in the day he had given a speech lambasting the “enemies” of Venezuela whom he accused of poisoning the president, who died after a prolonged battle with cancer. He seemed to be preparing the people for the president’s death.

Since Hugo Chávez went to Cuba in December for cancer treatment, reports on the Venezuelan president’s health have been vague and focused on his valiant struggle to recuperate. In the last couple of days, however, officials have been releasing grimmer news.

And so it ends. Groupon’s colorful founder and chief executive was ousted Thursday, and informed the troops in a tweet and a characteristically irreverent letter, which we’ve taken the liberty of enhancing with a few illustrations:

Guillermo Cochez, until recently Panama’s ambassador to the Organization of American States, has been giving interviews to a variety of media outlets saying that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is dead.

Good morning, Quartz readers!

Moody’s decision yesterday (Feb. 22) to knock the UK’s sovereign debt down a notch has, of course, got all of us journalists cranking our hamster wheels. But as a good many journalists have also pointed out over the past few months, these downgrades are often meaningless, irrelevant or even downright misleading, and this one in particular. So why do they generate so many headlines?

So you want to build a giant spaceship?

Trading opened today on the Iraqi stock exchange on mobile-phone operator Asiacell, which raised 1.485 trillion Iraqi dinars ($1.3 billion) by putting a 25% stake up for public offering. That’s the biggest IPO in the Middle East since the Saudi Arabian Mining Co. went public more than four years ago. The shares popped in the first day of trading, rising by 10%—the maximum allowed in one day under exchange rules—before settling back to close about 6% up.

What to watch for today

The exit polls are out, and the big surprise of Israel’s general election is not the winner but the runner-up. Yesh Atid (“There is a Future”), a center-left party formed just last year by TV personality Yair Lapid, is predicted to win 18 or 19 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. For Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, the incumbent prime minister, this may prove rather convenient, allowing him to form a more manageable governing coalition than he was expecting.

The hostage crisis at a gas field in Algeria ended this morning with a raid by Algerian forces, killing the last of the Islamic militants who stormed the facility on Jan. 16. Algerian officials estimate the total death toll in the stand-off to be 32 militants and 23 hostages. The militants had said their action was a retaliation for the recent French intervention against Islamist rebels who staged a coup in northern Mali last year.

Martyrs tend to be made quickly, before the dust has settled on their lives, or their deaths. Such is the case with Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old digital activist who apparently hanged himself at his home in New York City on Jan. 11. His family and friends say Swartz, who was prone to depression, felt hounded by prosecutors who were threatening him with up to 35 years in jail for computer hacking. Though Swartz was little known outside the circles of the geek world—and was hardly a celebrity even in internet terms, with a modest 7,000-odd followers on Twitter at the time of his death—there has been an outpouring of online tributes and media articles about him.

Good morning, Quartz readers!

Good morning, Quartz readers!

Cue, an app for organizing your online personal information, collects data about its users and has come up with a number of interesting discoveries, among them: it is taking people around 10% longer, on average, to answer their email than it did a year ago.

(Updated 7.00am ET, Jan. 2)

Update (5.30pm ET): Though Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are said to have reached a deal, the Majority Leader, the Democrats’ Harry Reid, hasn’t signed off on it yet, reportedly. Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal quips: “As a member of the MSM [mainstream media], I’m already figuring out how to blame House GOP if Reid ends up being the stumbling block.”

Google published its annual Zeitgeist survey a couple of weeks ago, which tracks the year’s most popular searches in different countries. It breaks them down by category—people, movies, shopping, etc.—and for most countries, one of the categories is “How to…?” We took the top result for each country that had this category and translated them where necessary. (In a couple of cases, we weeded out spurious results caused by quirks of language.)