The 10 most important things in the world right now

Good morning! Here's what you need to know on Wednesday.

1. Veteran journalist Barbara Walters sat down with Donald Trump and challenged the Republican presidential front-runner on his proposal to suspend all Muslim immigration and tourist travel to the US. In the interview Walters asked Trump, "Are you a bigot?"

2. A married couple who killed 14 people in a California shooting rampage the FBI is investigating as an act of terrorism borrowed about $28,000 from an online lender, a sum deposited into their bank account about two weeks before the attack.

3. Eight US states plus five countries across the globe reportedly want to ban new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2050.

4. Morgan Stanley is understood to be cutting 1,200 staff, including about 470 front-office staff in its fixed income and commodities business.

5. The US is building a new advanced missile defence system. The news comes as Iran launched a ballistic missile of its own in apparent violation of multiple UN resolutions.

6. If humankind successfully lands people on the surface of Mars, we could discover an important clue about the origins of life on Earth - one of the greatest scientific mysteries in human history.

7. Residents in Beijing, one of the world's most polluted cities, are using smog masks to make fashion statements. The city issued a red alert for smog earlier this week.

8. Microsoft and Amazon are squaring up in Europe, competing to control the lucrative cloud storage market. Both companies have strong US offerings and have made moves to build data centres in the UK, Germany, Ireland, and other European countries.

9. A former finance minister claims the Russian government is running out of money. Alexei Kudrin, who was Russia's finance minister from 2000 to 2011, said, that within the next few years, Russia's "reserve funds will be exhausted and they will have to raise taxes."

10. Two men from Afghanistan being trained by the US military have disappeared from an Air Force base in Georgia and are being sought by federal authorities.

And finally ... Actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's epic climate change speech has become a viral hit.

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