Good morning, Quartz readers!
What to watch for today
Catalonia’s independence deadline is here. Catalan president Carles Puigdemont has until the end of the day to confirm independence, then three days to rectify that decision. Spain has threatened to trigger a constitutional amendment preventing secession and could do so if Puigdemont chooses not to move forward on Catalonia’s bid for autonomy.
The Pope will speak for the hungry. In honor of World Food Day 2017, Pope Francis will join world leaders to call on the international community to invest in food security and rural development in order to change the future of migration. It will be the first time the head of the Catholic Church will attend the UN event in person.
Netflix reports third-quarter earnings. Analysts are looking for signs that the streaming video company’s investment in original content is paying off. Netflix bumped up prices on two of its subscriptions earlier this month, citing a need to invest in more movies and exclusive TV shows.
Over the weekend
Truck bombings in Mogadishu killed over 200 people. The number of casualties and injured is expected to rise in what officials are calling Somalia’s deadliest terror attack since al-Shabab launched its insurgency a decade ago. So far, no group has claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attacks. President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo called for the country to “unite against terror,” imposing a three-day period of national mourning.
Austria’s government took a right turn. Sebastian Kurz, the 31-year-old leader of the right-leaning People’s Party, became Europe’s youngest leader after a snap election on Sunday. Austria has spent over a decade operating under a centrist coalition government. A People’s Party win signifies a substantial shift in national politics, preceded by the hard line on immigration Kurz took while serving as foreign minister.
The Motion Picture Academy gave Harvey Weinstein the boot. The 54-person board voted on Saturday to remove Weinstein, effective immediately. The move sends “a message that the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over,” the Academy said in a statement. The Academy still counts Roman Polanski (who fled the US some 40 years ago after he was found guilty of raping of a 13 year old) and Bill Cosby (who has been accused of molesting 60 women) as members.
Wildfires continue to rage in California. Over the weekend, firefighters made progress quelling the infernos in Northern California, but they are still far from fully contained. The bad news is that the death count continues to rise, and scores of homes have been reduced to ash. The good news is that winds from the southwest are expected to bring cooler temperatures and more moisture into the area, which should help put an end to the disaster this week.
NAFTA talks didn’t go so well. The Trump administration reportedly demanded big changes at recent negotiations to modernize the trade agreement. Canada and Mexico seem averse to the demands, and negotiation deadlines are likely to be extended. A lot is on the line; analysts say a reversal of NAFTA (paywall) would trigger “a decline in real GDP, trade, investment, and employment in the US, Canada, and Mexico.”
Quartz obsession interlude
Youyou Zhou analyzed 141 hours of cable news to figure out how mass killers are really portrayed. “Are there ingrained racial biases that surface when TV news outlets report these tragedies? Is this double standard persistent, or merely anecdotal? Quartz reviewed the language used to describe the killers of 27 mass shootings in the US, beginning with the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
Humans are so immersed in immorality that they can be entirely unaware of it. A philosopher’s moral crisis over eating meat offers a master class on how to question your instincts.
We shouldn’t necessarily try to save moribund languages. In many cases, sentimental value isn’t enough to justify the social costs.
Dollar diplomacy is dead. The geopolitical alliances that have propped up the US dollar’s fading global dominance are now fraying badly.
Surprising discoveries
Tropical forests are now bad for climate change. In 2016, they caused the largest atmospheric CO2 increase in 2,000 years.
Amazon can’t beat dollar stores. Investors think there are only a handful of businesses safe from the e-commerce giant.
A woman got a VW for a packet of McDonald’s sauce. The car was exchanged for a single serving of Szechuan sauce, a rare McD’s offering turned into a cult obsession by the TV show Rick and Morty.
Most countries are named for one of four things. Turns out we’re really uncreative when it comes to what we call home.
You can thank a murderer for the Oxford English Dictionary. From his insane asylum cell, William C. Minor did much of the research key to putting the dictionary together.
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