Good morning, Quartz readers!
What to watch for today and over the weekend
Berkshire Hathaway convenes its annual shareholders’ meeting. Warren Buffett will hold his “Woodstock for Capitalists” in Omaha, Nebraska. Yahoo will stream the weekend event live for the first time.
A bad day to be an oil giant. Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil producer, is expected to post a significant decline in first-quarter profit due to low crude prices. Chevron is also expected to post a loss.
South Korean president Park Geun-hye visits Tehran. Her two-day state visit starting Sunday is intended to deepen ties with post-sanctions Iran, as leaders discuss issues such as energy and engineering. It will be the first such visit since the nations established diplomatic relations in 1962.
While you were sleeping
China raised its exchange rate by the most in 11 years. The central bank fixed the rate at 6.4589 to the US dollar—a 0.56% rise from Thursday—in what analysts believe was a knee-jerk reaction to the US dollar’s weakness in the wake of the Bank of Japan’s decision against further monetary easing.
Australia nixed a Chinese land deal. The government won’t approve a Chinese consortium’s offer to buy the S. Kidman estate—a landmass equivalent to the size of Ireland. Treasurer Scott Morrison said that while the country welcomes foreign investment, the government needed to be sure it didn’t run contrary to national interest.
Colombia legalized gay marriage. Gay couples were already allowed to have civil partnerships, but now they will have the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples. It is now the fourth country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriages, following Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
North Korea sent another US citizen to prison. Six weeks after it jailed an American undergraduate student, Pyongyang sentenced a Korean-American businessman to 10 years of hard labor for spying and stealing state secrets.
The Royal Bank of Scotland posted a first-quarter loss. The British bank said it made a net loss of £968 million ($1.4 billion) for the first three months of 2016, up from £459 million in the same period last year. A £1.2-billion dividend payment to the UK government, which owns 73% of the bank, dragged down an otherwise profitable period that saw operating profits rise to £421 million.
AstraZeneca took its medicine. The London-based pharma company reported a 12% drop in core operating profits to $1.59 billion, while total revenues rose 1% (paywall) to $6.12 billion, thanks to strong growth in China and new drugs for heart disease and lung cancer. It faces $1.5 billion in restructuring costs in 2016, and expects a decline in profit and sales thanks to patent expirations on drugs, including its best-selling Crestor cholesterol medication.
Quartz obsession interlude
Adam Epstein on how the NFL draft became one of the biggest nights in American sports. “The draft, perhaps more than any actual live game, benefits from the advent of internet-connected screens… It’s designed to be consumed in nuggets, on any device, in any room of your house. It’s a series, not an episode, and each season of this hit show offers viewers its own unique twists and turns.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
Thirteen years after its creation, iTunes is terrible. Apple’s media software is bloated, confusing, and ugly.
History’s greatest philosophers weren’t that great. They just happened to be born early.
Our failures are more telling than our successes. A Princeton professor posted a CV listing all the prestigious programs that rejected him.
Surprising discoveries
Half of all western European men share a single ancestor. A new genetic study traces the lineage of one bronze age king.
Gucci won’t allow paper replicas to be burnt. It warned Hong Kong shops about selling paper versions of its bags for ancestor sacrifices in temples.
A robot monk teaches about Buddhism. “Xian’er” was created by China’s most tech-savvy temple.
Construction workers in Seville unearthed a haul of ancient Roman coins. The coins, weighing 1,300lb in total, are stamped with the inscriptions of emperors Maximian and Constantine.
Finland’s mail carriers will start mowing lawns on Tuesdays. The postal service is short on funds, and it’s a slow day for mail.
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