What to watch for today
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.
Investing heavyweights share their picks. Carl Icahn, David Tepper, and George Soros are among the hundreds of investors who will disclose what US stocks they owned in their quarterly 13F filings (pdf). The billionaires’ reports are closely watched for insights into investment trends and strategies.
A supermoon to remember. The moon will look bigger and brighter tonight. It could appear especially large near the horizon, and will be the largest full moon since 1948. Tides will be a bit higher, too.
Over the weekend
Trump brought the alt-right into the White House. He appointed Stephen Bannon, head of the often-bigoted Breitbart News, as “chief strategist and senior counselor.” In other news he made Reince Preibus, chairman of the Republican Party Committee and often at odds with Bannon, the White House chief of staff.
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallied against South Korea’s president. They want Park Geun-hye to step down amid allegations that she let her friend and spiritual advisor Choi Soon-sil meddle in state affairs. On Sunday prosecutors said they want to question Park as a witness.
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.”
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. 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. On Saturday at least 52 people were killed from an explosion in a Muslim shrine in the Pakistani province of Balochistan. The ISIL attack occurred a day before the one-year anniversary of the terrorist group’s attack in Paris, where ISIL gunmen killed 130 people.
VW admitted that Audi cars can deceive tests. VW conceded that technology built into its Audi-branded vehicles 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 news feeds.
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, electric corsets, and Sunday doodles to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter for updates throughout the day or download our iPhone app.