🌏 China spurns iPhones and Teslas

Plus: Interest payments galore.

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Photo: Costfoto/NurPhoto (Getty Images)

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Here’s what you need to know

IPhone sales plummeted in China. Apple’s competitor Huawei is taking a big bite out of the market. Tesla sales are also not doing great in the country.

Denmark’s economy is on a Novo Nordisk high. The maker of Ozempic and Wegovy is doing so well that it’s boosting the entire country’s GDP.

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Amazon will let customers leave its data ecosystem for free. It’s taking a page out of Google’s strategy book… well, actually, a page out of the European Data Act.  

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Silicon Valley’s billionaires are in a food fight over Elon Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit. The Tesla CEO accused the AI startup he helped found of violating its mission to be a nonprofit by partnering with Microsoft.

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Americans are making trillions in interest payments

Americans are paying a lot of money on interest right now: more than $1.1 trillion in the last quarter alone, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

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Graphic: Quartz

In a major shift, nearly half of that spending was not on mortgages. Here’s where those payments are going.

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Dartmouth’s basketball players voted to unionize

In a history-making 13-2 vote, Dartmouth men’s basketball players became the first-ever American college sports team to unionize.

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The election outcome could fundamentally alter NCAA rules. Regulations currently stipulate that college athletes cannot collect a salary from the schools they play for.

In other words: “It could be an existential crisis for the NCAA,” Rebecca Kolins Givan, a labor professor at Rutgers University, told Quartz. Read more about the unionization effort.

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Slow justice is no justice

Image for article titled 🌏 China spurns iPhones and Teslas
Illustration: Vicky Leta
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In October 2021, Shola Usman, business owner and mother of six, was arrested and held in a prison cell in Mabushi Police Station in Abuja, Nigeria without charge. Her assets were confiscated.

She remained there for eight months.

Finally, an app connected her to pro bono legal services — an official petition by her lawyer ultimately caused her to be released from custody on bail, after Nigeria’s Inspector General of Police was made to intervene.

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Chidi M. Nwachukwu talks to human rights lawyer Nelson Olanipekun, whose own experiences led him to create Gavel, whose app helps thousands of detained Nigerians stranded in a justice system plagued by corruption and dysfunction. Read the full story here.


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🤖 AI won’t replace your job — but the person who knows how to use it might

🏝️ Marc Benioff gives $150 million to Hawaii hospitals and says he donated most of the land he bought there

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🪧 Tesla’s only European factory was shut down by a group Elon Musk called the ‘dumbest eco-terrorists on Earth’

🗑️ Credit card late fees will be capped at $8 as Biden looks to crack down on ‘junk fees’

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Surprising discoveries

A Massachusetts library would like to see a picture of your cat, please. In exchange, it’ll forget about that lost or damaged book and reactivate your card.

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The first-ever electric muscle car is here. Dodge is resurrecting its Charger Daytona using a bit of voltage.

There used to be a 26-foot (8-meter) lizard creature that roamed the seas 66 million years ago. It was as big as an orca and had daggers for teeth!

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The Arctic could see ice-free summers as soon as 2035. But unlike ice that took thousands of years to accumulate, sea ice can come back if we figure out how to remove excess CO2 from the air.

One of Jupiter’s moons has enough oxygen to sustain 1 million humans. The thing is, it’s a lot colder there than the Arctic.

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Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, cat librarians, and moon oxygen to talk@qz.com. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner.