Quartz Daily Brief—AirAsia flight located, Gitmo prisoners released, India blocks Github, smelly passwords
Good morning, Quartz readers!
What to watch for today
Negotiations in Ukraine. Separatists are meeting with government forces in Luhansk in an attempt to reach some sort of peace agreement. But Kiev clearly isn’t too hopeful: The 2015 budget boosts defense spending to over 5% of GDP.
New Year’s flight strike. French unions are asking their members working for easyJet to take today and tomorrow off because they feel they’re not getting their fair share of the budget airline’s massive 21.5% increase in annual profits.
Spain’s small businesses get pinched. A Franco-era rent control law is set to expire, putting 65,000 small store owners at risk.
A bit of a Midwest slowdown. The Chicago purchasing managers’ index, which gives a reading on manufacturing levels in the Midwest, is expected to slow to 60.1 this month, from 60.8 in November. That’s still well above the 50 mark that separates expansion from contraction.
While you were sleeping
Air Asia flight 8501 has been located on sonar. Indonesian search officials said wreckage from the missing airliner has been found 100-200 km (60-120 miles) from where the plane was last seen on radar. The recovery operation, which has found seven bodies so far, has been hampered by bad weather.
A threat from ISIL prompted India to block Github. Indian authorities blocked access to the widely-used software repository along with a handful of other sites, after the Islamic State extremist group posted “anti-India” content on them, according to an official with the ruling BJP. Github is a crucial site for many software developers, in India and beyond.
Five prisoners were released from Guantanamo Bay. Three Yemenis and two Tunisians were sent to Kazakhstan after spending more than 12 years at the US detention center. That brings the number of detainees released this year to 28, the highest since 2009.
An abandoned ship full of migrants docked in Italy. Ambulances were on hand at the port of Gallipoli to treat 700 migrants, possibly from Syria and Kurdish regions of the Middle East. The ship’s crew abandoned the vessel at sea, leaving it headed towards the Italian coast on autopilot.
China’s factory activity contracted. The final reading of the HSBC/Markit purchasing managers’ index, which monitors small- and medium-sized companies, fell to a seven-month low of 49.6 in December, from 50 in November. A number below 50 denotes a contraction in manufacturing activity.
Singapore’s GDP growth slowed. Prime minister Lee Hsien Loong said the city-state’s economy grew by 2.8% in 2014, down from 3.9% a year earlier and below expectations of 3% growth. China’s slowing economy reduced export volume, and a clampdown on cheap foreign labor pushed up business costs.
BlackBerries are in vogue again at Sony Pictures. The company has turned to the unglamorous smartphones and other vintage equipment—including a machine to manually create paychecks—as it tries to recover from its recent hacking crisis, according to a new detailed account (paywall) in the Wall Street Journal.
Quartz obsession interlude
Jason Karaian on a profession that needs a tighter leash. “Are all bankers liars? Of course not. Then again … in an experiment recently published in the scientific journal Nature, bankers distinguished themselves by their dishonesty. Asked to report the results of unsupervised coin flips in return for financial rewards, bankers bent the truth more than any other group.” Read more here.
Matters of debate
Nerds can be entitled too. They may not be alpha males but they can still be sexist.
The NYPD has gone too far. A work slowdown has taken bitterness to a dangerous new level (paywall).
Craft brews need saving from themselves. Their fixation on hoppiness risks alienating beer lovers.
Putin is behaving like a medieval king. But taking his rivals’ family members hostage could backfire.
Cities should buy sports teams. It would be cheaper than building subsidized stadiums.
Surprising discoveries
We could soon use our personal odors to log in. Going beyond fingerprints might keep your data safe.
A woman discovered a dead man in a New York spa. She brushed against his body in a hot tub.
Looking for a few Goodmen. Our favorite economics paper of 2014 has four unrelated authors with the same surname.
An avalanche of salt in Chicago. A brick wall at a Morton Salt plant collapsed, destroying 11 cars.
The US is under 30 states of emergency. Including one from the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.
Please note there will be no Daily Brief tomorrow (Jan. 1), but it will return on Jan. 2. Happy New Year!
Our best wishes for a productive day. Please send any news, comments, scavenged salt, and not-too-hoppy brews to [email protected]. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.