Good morning, Quartz readers!
What to watch for today
Google, Twitter, and Facebook testify before Congress. Executives will face hard questions from a Senate subcommittee about their role in Russia’s attempt to influence the US presidential election. More broadly, policymakers are concerned about the monopoly powers of companies which have captured much of the stock market’s gains this year.
Can Samsung keep thriving in chaos? The South Korean tech giant expects to set a new record with quarterly operating profits above $12.3 billion, despite a leadership void since its de facto heir landed in jail on corruption charges. The company’s semiconductor and display units, like the OLED screens used in the iPhone X, are even more profitable than phones.
Australia shuts down a refugee detention center. More than 700 asylum seekers are refusing to leave the country’s controversial Manus Island facility in Papua New Guinea, even if Australia follows through on its threat to cut off water, food, and power supplies. Refugees report being assaulted by local residents.
While you were sleeping
SoftBank is reportedly pulling out of Sprint-T-Mobile merger talks. The Nikkei newspaper reported that SoftBank’s board could not reach an agreement with T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom on who would control the combined US mobile carriers, after years of up-and-down negotiations. Shares of Sprint, owned by the Japanese tech firm, plunged on the news.
Two former Trump aides were arrested and another pled guilty in the Russia probe. Former campaign chair Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates pled not guilty to money laundering, tax fraud, and conspiracy, in the first batch of charges from special counsel Robert Mueller. Foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos admitted to lying to the FBI about his communications with the Kremlin.
HSBC is taking off in Asia, but at a cost to shareholders. The region saw the biggest revenue gain among the bank’s five major regions, fueling the bank’s third consecutive quarter of revenue growth. But operating expenses are creeping higher: The firm paid out $300 million in extra performance-related pay.
Trump’s transgender military ban was partially blocked by a federal court. A judge ruled that plaintiff’s lawsuits against the measure are likely to succeed, preventing the Pentagon from enforcing the US president’s executive order against transgender soldiers serving openly.
Kenya’s president won a lopsided victory. Uhuru Kenyatta was re-elected with 98% of the vote, in a contest that is unlikely to heal the country’s growing divide. The opposition boycotted the election, which came after days of protests and killings in the capital Nairobi and in western Kenya.
Quartz obsession interlude
Annalisa Merelli looks into what’s killing America’s new mothers: “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—by several times over. Gender, class, race—and across all, a fragmented, mainly private health system—conspire to work against maternal health. In many ways, it’s a litmus test of the health of health care in the US.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
Trump is turning the Fed into a reality show. His selection process disrespects the institution and undercuts his eventual pick—reportedly current Fed governor Jerome Powell (paywall).
Changing the topic won’t work for sexual harassers. Actor Kevin Spacey’s pivot to discuss his own sexuality is offensive—and it didn’t save “House of Cards” from cancellation.
Do robots have free speech? The Russian-backed bots that influenced the 2016 election raise a host of questions about who and what qualifies for constitutional protections.
Surprising discoveries
The alt-right is creating its own language. Quartz analyzed billions of comments to define terms like “hypergamy,” “femoids,” and “meeks.”
Google is fixing its inaccurate cheeseburger. CEO Sundar Pichai said the company “will drop everything” to address the Android emoji that stacks the cheese beneath the burger.
There’s a planet where it snows sunscreen. Titanium dioxide, the active ingredient in sunblock, falls from the sky on Kepler-12Ab, a scorching-hot planet six times the size of Jupiter.
Japan’s Halloween is a celebration of cuteness and grossness. From pumpkin decorations to faux-moldy hamburgers, the holiday is now bigger than Valentine’s Day and second only to Christmas.
An AI learned to write horror stories. “Shelley” generates spooky, off-putting plots after studying 140,000 original horror posts from Reddit.
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