Good morning, Quartz readers!
What to watch for today
UK chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond gives his first budget speech. Despite dire warnings about a post-Brexit downturn, growth forecasts in the chancellor’s autumn statement are expected to remain (paywall) at around 2%. But predictions for 2017 and onwards are likely to be downgraded.
The Fed releases its last pre-election minutes. The monetary policy meeting notes are expected to reveal hints that officials were increasingly keen to hike interest rates to 0.5% in 2017. Some markets have already begun pricing in an increase.
The US-China joint commerce commission begins in Washington. The annual meeting to discuss matters ranging from cybersecurity to agriculture will be a less sunny affair than last year, when the TPP (now cratering) and a US-China Bilateral Investment Treaty seemed to be done deals.
While you were sleeping
Lufthansa pilots went on strike. The German carrier was forced to cancel nearly 900 of its 3,000 scheduled flights from German airports on Wednesday—including 51 long-haul flights—after talks with the pilot’s union over pay increases failed. The strike will continue until Friday and is expected to cost Lufthansa between $7 million and $9 million a day.
The Colombian government reached a new deal with FARC rebels. After the first peace deal was rejected in a public referendum in October, the revised agreement will now be sent to congress for approval on Thursday. Opponents of the deal say it still doesn’t punish the rebels enough for the thousands of people they killed during the half-century-long conflict, which has claimed some 220,000 lives.
Airbnb eyed a Chinese home-rental rival. The home-sharing platform is reportedly in talks to acquire Xiaozhu, one of China’s two main home-rental platforms. Xiaozhu was valued at $300 million last year, and claims to have 10 million active users and over 100,000 home listings. Rather like Uber (which ended up selling to local operator Didi Chuxing), Airbnb is struggling to get a foothold in China, where the holiday rental market is projected to hit $1.5 billion by 2017.
Thomas Cook was cautiously optimistic. The London-based travel group said bookings for next summer are up across all markets, though travelers are still avoiding Turkey due to terrorism fears. At $382 million, its operating profit for the year ending September was down a little from last year, but the company will start paying dividends again in 2017 for the first time in five years.
Facebook developed a censorship tool to re-enter China. According to the New York Times, Facebook hopes the software, which would allow a third party to monitor and suppress posts, will help it persuade Beijing to allow it back into the world’s second-largest economy. The site has been blocked there for the last seven years.
Quartz obsession interlude
Dave Gershgorn on the limits of artificial intelligence in the fight against fake news: “Parsing a few paragraphs of text for factuality is nowhere near the complex fact-checking machines AI designers are after. ‘It is incredibly hard to know the whole state of the world to identify whether a fact is true or not,’ says Richard Socher, head of Salesforce Research.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
Global gasoline consumption has peaked. The growing popularity of electric cars will have dire consequences for the oil industry.
America’s office of the first lady should go away. It’s a redundant form of modern royalty that doesn’t serve any purpose.
Donald Trump’s advisors are lying to him. Top aides have manipulated their boss on several occasions.
Surprising discoveries
The world’s largest brewers are pushing non-alcoholic beer. It’s a fast-growing market where profit margins are high and regulation minimal (paywall).
You can adopt a chunk of space debris. It will tweet its location at you to raise awareness about the dangers of space junk.
Everyone is getting high on Thanksgiving. Marijuana sales spike around the US holiday as people seek a way to deal with their relatives.
Yesterday’s Fukushima earthquake was a five-year-old aftershock. Geologists traced its origins back to the devastating 2011 quake.
You can detect self-loathing in the way people speak. Linguistic tics signal psychological distress.
Our best wishes for a productive day. Please send any news, comments, space debris, and Thanksgiving joints to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter for updates throughout the day or download our iPhone app.