Good morning, Quartz readers!
What to watch for today
TPP moves on without the US. It pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, but negotiators from the remaining 11 nations are meeting in Japan this week where they hope to finish up negotiations. They also aim to reach a broad agreement at next month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vietnam.
The UN discusses its five-nation army. The 5,000-strong G5 security force, made up of troops from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Mauritania, will be tasked with combating terrorism and human trafficking in the Sahel. It’s supposed to be up and running from 2018, but the Trump administration has so far refused to commit to funding.
The first arrests in the FBI’s 2016 election probe. The investigation into Russian meddling in the last presidential election could bear its first public fruit. A grand jury assembled by FBI special counsel Robert Mueller’s office approved charges against individuals on Friday; they could be taken into custody today. Trump reacted with a flurry of furious tweets.
Over the weekend
The Spanish government sacked Catalonia’s leaders. Madrid moved to take over the region on Saturday, dismissing Catalan lawmakers and calling a snap election for Dec. 21. In the region’s capital Barcelona, hundreds of thousands marched for a unified Spain yesterday, highlighting the divisions within Catalonia.
Kevin Spacey apologized after being accused of unwanted sexual advances. Star Trek actor Anthony Rapp claimed Spacey made a sexual advance on him at a party 31 years ago, when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26. Spacey said he didn’t remember the encounter and offered an apology. He also said he was now openly living as a gay man.
Whitefish’s $300 million Puerto Rico contract was canceled. The Puerto Rico Power Authority nixed a contract to rebuild the island’s energy grid at governor Ricardo Rossello’s urging. The unfavorable terms raised questions about how Whitefish got the deal, as did the firm’s apparent ties to the Trump administration, which tried to distance itself from the affair.
Smartphones forced Nikon to shutter a camera factory. The Nikkei reported that the Japanese firm plans to shutter its plant in China, which churns out entry-level digital cameras. The global market for compact digital cameras has shrunk to a tenth of what it was in the past decade, and Nikon projects a sharp drop in sales of such cameras this year.
HSBC bounced back with help from Asia. The bank reported a pretax profit of $4.6 billion in the third quarter, up from $843 million in the same period a year ago, thanks in part to its expanding market share in Asia. The year-ago period was affected by a one-off loss from the sale of its Brazilian unit, and adverse foreign currency movements.
Quartz obsession interlude
Annalisa Merelli on the US’s maternal mortality rate. ”On that May day, she joined one of the US’s most shameful statistics. With an estimated 26.4 deaths for every 100,000 live births in 2015, America has the highest maternal mortality rate of all industrialized countries… While most of the world has drastically reduced maternal mortality in the past three decades, the US is one of just a handful of countries where the problem worsened.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
There’s precedent for Amazon competing with so many companies. It doesn’t end well. So far Amazon has skirted antitrust laws by trumpeting its ability to lower prices, but it may eventually reach a tipping point.
You should give money directly and unconditionally to homeless people. Begging means they’re already at rock bottom—it’s not up to us to decide what they do with the money.
A “millionaire’s tax” is not the answer to US tax reform. Republicans should argue it makes more sense to close the loopholes and subsidies that distort economic decisions (paywall).
Surprising discoveries
Scientists think they saw the first “interstellar comet” from beyond our solar system. Astronomers have waited decades to see the object they have dubbed A/2017 U1.
Kazakhstan may soon become Qazaqstan. Its president signed a decree swapping its 42-letter Cyrillic alphabet to a 32-letter Latin alphabet, to be fully implemented by 2025.
The tea-infusing business had its own Juicero. Teforia, a $1,000 device that brews loose-leaf tea, had its price slashed to $199 after the company went belly-up on Friday.
China could turn its western desert into “California.” It hopes to build a 1,000-km (621-mile) tunnel to divert a Tibetan river into an arid region in Xinjiang, turning it into an agricultural mecca.
Martin Luther mailed it, not nailed it. The German monk behind the Protestant Reformation likely never nailed his 95 theses to a church door, historians believe. Instead, he sent them to a Catholic archbishop.
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