Good morning, Quartz readers!
What to watch for today
The fallout from the “Panama Papers.” In the wake of a massive leak of documents from a secretive Panama law firm detailing world leaders’ offshore companies, over 70 current and former world leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, have been connected to tax havens. Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, is facing calls for a snap election after his offshore assets were revealed.
The US president meets with the NATO secretary-general. Barack Obama and Jens Stoltenberg are in Washington to discuss security issues, including ISIL, the European migrant crisis, and tensions in Eastern Europe with Russia.
Virgin America is sold. The $2.5-billion deal is expected to be announced (paywall) after the Seattle-based Alaska Air beat rival JetBlue in a frenzied bidding war. The acquisition would allow Alaska Airlines to expand in the lucrative hubs of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Hillary Clinton celebrates higher wages in New York. The Democratic presidential contender will attend a rally in Manhattan with New York state governor Andrew Cuomo to celebrate passing a law that will raise wages for some New York City employees to $15 an hour by 2018. (California recently agreed to raise its minimum wage.)
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Over the weekend
Greece began to deport migrants. The first boatloads of migrants arrived in Turkey, as part of a one-in, one-out exchange plan between the EU and Turkey that has been broadly criticized as inhumane and illegal by aid agencies.
Tesla got 276,000 orders for the Model 3. CEO Elon Musk tweeted the figure at the end of Saturday, just two days after unveiling the company’s first mass-market electric car. This could translate to revenue of over $10 billion, but the company is under immense pressure to ramp up its production capacity if it’s to begin delivering cars by the end of next year.
The long Foxconn-Sharp drama ended. After four years of negotiations, the two companies inked a $3.5-billion deal giving Foxconn a controlling stake in Sharp. It combines the world’s largest assembler with a well-known electronics company eager to lead the emerging “Internet of Things” market.
A bad day for al-Qaeda-linked terror leaders. Abu Firas, a leader of the al-Nusra Front, was killed in an airstrike in Syria’s Idlib province on Sunday. In Nigeria, the leader of Ansaru, a splinter group of Boko Haram, was captured—the US had a $5-million bounty on Khalid al-Barnawi’s head. Today is the two-year anniversary of the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by Boko Haram—219 have still not been found.
A film critical of China was named the best at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Ten Years, which depicts a dystopian future for Hong Kong under the rule of China’s Communist Party, took the top award at the city’s annual film ceremony. Mainland media has condemned the film and curbed coverage of the awards.
Quartz obsession interlude
Akshat Rathi on a 19th-century disease on the rise in the UK. “The outbreaks of the fever today have less severe effects than the ones Victorians suffered. No one, for instance, has yet been killed by the disease. And, yet, its return has baffled scientists.” Read more.
Matters of debate
Climate change makes it less moral to have kids. It’s not necessarily fair to bring someone else into the world without asking first.
Ethical robots are advancing our understanding of morality. The creation of such machines is developing concepts within human ethics.
Republicans pushing back against LGBT equality are playing a shortsighted game. The party’s anti-gay stance undermines its pro-business efforts, and such divides can’t be easily dismissed.
Surprising discoveries
Indian hackers are protecting our online data. Tech geniuses in small towns in India earn big sums helping Facebook and Google find bugs and security flaws.
The boom in romance novels has created a demand for cover models. Some of these models have built up their own fan base (paywall).
The Taliban has launched a smartphone app. But plans to spread its propaganda to a digital audience were stalled by “technical difficulties.”
Asia’s airlines are going all out to hire female pilots. They are rethinking their gender bias as the travel boom will necessitate finding over 200,000 new pilots in the next two decades.
NASA wants to send an inflatable house to space. The agency hopes it will give astronauts in the International Space Station a little privacy.
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