What to watch for today
Mounting pressure on Park. Following another massive demonstration in Seoul this weekend against South Korean president Park Geun-hye, prosecutors said she will be questioned on Tuesday or Wednesday as a witness in a widening probe of alleged political corruption.
Barack Obama in Athens. The outgoing US president, prepared to face global questioning about the Nov. 8 US presidential election, makes his final scheduled foreign trip. First stop: Greece, where he is expected to deliver a major speech on globalization. Later in the week he’s in Germany for meetings with European leaders, and then Peru for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.
New volatility controls in Hong Kong futures. A five-minute cooling off period for contracts with wild price swings is coming to Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing’s derivatives market. The new mechanism, used by the market since August, will now also apply to Hang Seng Index Futures, Mini-HSI Futures, H-shares Index Futures, and Mini-HHI Futures contracts.
Over the weekend
France and the UK went their own way on Donald Trump: Germany and Belgium joined an emergency meeting to coordinate a common EU response to Trump’s election, but France and the UK—facing right-wing populist movements of their own—found separate reasons not to attend the Nov. 13 confab in Brussels. UK foreign minister Boris Johnson called it a “collective whinge-o-rama.”
Hillary Clinton blamed the FBI for her defeat to Trump. Clinton blamed her loss on FBI Director James Comey’s public discussion of the investigation into her private email server just before the election. Though no information surfaced to alter the FBI’s earlier decision to close the investigation, Clinton told fundraisers her campaign was unable to recover from the story’s reappearance in the media.
Colombia and FARC announced a new peace deal. Six weeks after Colombian voters rejected a peace deal with Marxist FARC rebels, the government and the rebels announced a revised pact. Voters thought the original deal to end FARC’s brutal 52-year revolt let the rebels off too easy. Details of the new deal were not immediately released, but they reportedly require the rebels (paywall) to surrender profit from criminal businesses.
ISIL took responsibility for a deadly bombing in Pakistan. At least 52 people were killed after an explosion in a Muslim shrine in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. The ISIL attack on Nov. 12 occurred a day before the one-year anniversary of the terrorist group’s attack in Paris, where ISIL gunmen killed 130 people.
VW admits that Audi can deceive tests. VW conceded that technology built into its Audi-branded cars can fool government emissions testing equipment. Bild, the German newspaper, reported that regulators are investigating Audi’s deceit. VW has already agreed to pay $14.7 billion in the diesel scandal involving 11 million cars.
Quartz obsession interlude
Chase Purdy on how one progressive movement found a way to make change. “A 2001 schism splintered the vegan community into two camps: absolutists who tout veganism as an all-or-nothing moral imperative, and pragmatists who quietly advocate for incremental change. The vegan movement’s brain finally outgrew its heart, and in less than two decades the pragmatic vein of the movement has morphed into one of the biggest disruptors of the American food system.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
Facebook has no excuse for forgoing fact-checking. The social network should hire professionals to weed out the worst of the fake stories infecting its newsfeeds.
Angela Merkel is the last defender of European liberalism.The German chancellor is now the only leader embracing globalization (or holding back populism?) on the continent.
Sundays are for doodling. The mind-freeing ritual of drawing abstract shapes is the only kind of creative exertion fit for the end of the weekend.
Surprising discoveries
Your immune system “imprints” on the first strain of influenza it encounters. Everyone born before 1968 is immune to some flus that younger generations are not.
Electric corsets and belts were the FitBits of the 19th century. Doctors thought people could literally zap themselves into better health.
The average Netflix subscriber streams 600 hours of video a year. Individual Netflix-watching has nearly doubled since 2011.
Amazon drivers in the UK “feel compelled to defecate” in their vans. They say they don’t have time to stop for loo breaks.
The US government preserves the genes of more than 31,000 “agriculturally important” species. Honeybee sperm was just added to the bank.
Our best wishes for a productive day. Please send any news, comments, honeybee sperm, and Sunday doodles to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter for updates throughout the day or download our iPhone app.