As expected, Apple just unveiled iOS 8 at its annual developers event. The next major software update for iPhones and iPads will be released later this year, most likely in conjunction with Apple's next iPhone.
The upgrade isn't as big of an aesthetic shift as we saw last year with the introduction of iOS 7, but Apple has added some significant new features and tweaks.
Here's a quick look at the new features in iOS 8, which will be released this fall.
Apple has added a new fitness app called Health. Like most fitness apps, it can measure burned calories and sleeping habits. Health works with third-party apps too, so you can choose to sync data with your Nike FuelBand.
It works in conjunction with a HealthKit companion tool for physicians. For example, doctors will be able to use HealthKit to compare a patient's blood pressure against the daily readings picked up by the Health app. Apple is working with the Mayo Clinic on HealthKit.
WWDC
Apple has made some new tweaks to its Mail app on iPhone and iPad. You can now mark messages as read to keep them at the top of your inbox with a single gesture.
In iOS 8 you'll be able to swipe a message you're currently working on to slide it to the bottom of the Mail app. This makes it easier to see the rest of your inbox as you type.
Apple has introduced a new feature for iOS and OS X called Handoff. If you're reading an article or working on your iPhone, you'll be able to pick up exactly where you left off on your Mac and vice versa.
Apple has really made an effort to intertwine iOS more closely with OS X. Another way it's doing that is through the addition of iCloud Drive. It's essentially Apple's take on Google Drive, which means you can store files across all your Apple devices.
Apple made some significant improvements to the Spotlight Search feature in iOS. With iOS 8, you'll be able to view results from the App Store, Wikipedia, directions, and movie times, among other types of search results.
Apple has added smart editing features to its photos app. For example, you can adjust the light, brightness and contrast, and shadows directly from any photo. Apple has also made it easier to search for photos, With iOS 8, you can search by location, date and albums you've set up. These photos sync with iCloud now too, which means they'll be available across devices.
There are some new improvements coming to the iPhone's messaging app with iOS 8. You'll be able to exit annoying group text messages with a new Do Not Disturb feature. You can also name these message threads. By pressing and holding the new microphone button, you can record an audio message and send it via text.
Siri is getting some new features, too. Shazam song recognition is built in, and you can purchase it from iTunes directly through Siri. Apple has also added 33 new dictation languages to Siri.
Apple
Family Share makes it easier to share photos, calendars, reminders, and your location with your family members. You can also purchase content on separate devices using the same account through Family Share.
Apple just announced a slew of new features for iOS, including video, audio, and location tagging for iMessage and the ability to name (and leave!) group chats. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum isn't too happy about the new additions:
His point is that Apple just added features for iMessage that WhatsApp users have had for a long time. WhatsApp users could always record media, like audio or video, and share location data easily through messages.
The fact that Apple has put a huge emphasis on improving iMessage is very telling of the growing power of messaging apps like WhatsApp — which Facebook bought earlier this year for $19 billion — Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Line, and Kik.
The "Godzilla of Earths!" is in the foreground. Behind it is the smaller 'lava world'. Their sun, in the back, appears to have been created only 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
Based on what we know about how solar systems form, researchers thought that a giant rocky planet could not exist. But they just found one that's 17 times Earth's mass. They're calling it the Mega-Earth.
Researchers have always thought Mega-Earths were impossible since any planets that big would attract hydrogen gas, forming a gas planet like Jupiter.
Meet the Mega-Earth
Mega-Earth, also known as Kepler-10c, is 18,000 miles in diameter and 2.3 times as large as Earth. It appears to be as solid as the planet beneath our feet.
Kepler-10c was previously known to astronomers, but they had not yet measured its mass. Due to its size — 2.3 times that of Earth — it was assumed to be a "mini-Neptune," a planet encased in thick gas. But the new observations have confirmed that it is rocky, not gassy.
It orbits an 11 billion-year-old star named Kepler-10 located 560 light years away from Earth. Its year lasts only 45 days.
Interestingly, this solar system is more than twice as old as our own — it was born less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
"We were very surprised when we realized what we had found," study researcher Xavier Dumusque, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a press release.
We've always thought a rocky planet is the best place to look for life, since life on a gas giant is hard to imagine. From what they've observed, the planet may also have an atmosphere with thin clouds, another good sign.
A mysterious system
Researchers had previously thought that this kind of planet impossible.
Not only did they think something that big would be a gas giant, but they didn't even think the elements that make up a rocky planet existed in our universe when this solar system was born: The early universe had only the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements were forged from these lighter ones in stars over billions of years.
Because of this, many scientists hadn't been looking for rocky planets in these very old solar systems.
"Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life," study researcher Dimitar Sasselov, of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, said in a release.
The mega-Earth isn't the only weird planet in its solar system. There's also a 'lava-world' 1.5 times Earth's size whose year lasts only 20 hours.
Rs62b is the amount of income tax, sales tax and federal excise duty paid by the country’s largest cigarette manufacturer in 2013 — about the same as the income tax paid by all salaried Pakistanis last year. CREATIVE COMMONS
KARACHI:
One of the worst times of the year for cigarette manufacturers is around the annual World No Tobacco Day on May 31 when they face renewed calls for increasing taxes on the tobacco industry.
Notwithstanding its unmistakeable failure to tax all sectors of the economy equitably, the government invariably responds by hiking the ‘sin tax’ on cigarettes every year to adjust the market price of the ‘undesirable product’.
But do sin taxes actually discourage people from smoking? Many economists believe the slowdown in the sales of cigarettes – at least in the developed world – is largely because of the effectiveness of anti-smoking awareness campaigns, rather than increased taxes on tobacco products.
In Pakistan, for example, the tobacco sector is heavily taxed. The largest cigarette manufacturer, Pakistan Tobacco Company (PTC), paid income tax, sales tax and federal excise duty of Rs62 billion in 2013, which is about the same as the income tax paid by all salaried Pakistanis last year.
This amount equalled Rs23 billion in 2006, which means the sum of government levies that PTC pays every year has increased at an annualised rate of 15.2% during the last seven years. However, its after-tax profit increased at an annualised rate of only 7.3% over the same seven-year period. This shows the company’s earnings grew at about half the rate of its contribution to the national exchequer over the last seven years.
But did the astounding level of taxes on tobacco consumption – up to 81% on each pack of cigarettes – actually reduce the sale of cigarettes in Pakistan? The answer is a resounding no.
According to data compiled by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), positive growth was recorded in the sale of cigarettes during seven out of the last 10 years in spite of heavy taxation on the tobacco industry.
In 2011-12, the latest year for which complete data is available, Pakistan produced 61.9 billion cigarettes. In contrast, 58.2 billion cigarettes were produced in the country 10 years ago (2001-02), which is about 3.7 billion cigarettes less than the 2011-12 figure.
According to a report by Euromonitor International, one out of every four cigarettes sold in the country is ‘illicit’ with the Pakistani economy ranking third in illicit cigarette trade among all Asia-Pacific countries.
These horrific statistics should not be surprising. One consequence of such lopsided tax policies is that they increase the temptation for otherwise law-abiding people to violate the law.
After all, few people will willingly pay an unreasonably inflated retail price for a pack of cigarettes when far cheaper options are easily available. Checking smuggling is challenging because it requires law enforcement. In contrast, piling taxes on a lawful, yet demonised, segment of the documented economy is a quick fix that most governments find hard to resist.
Other than their economic impact, it is important to take into account the moral aspect of sin taxes. Should the government be allowed to use tax policy as a tool for social engineering? What can possibly stop a future right-wing government from expanding the scope of sin taxes to generate more revenues by imposing high levies on, for example, cinemas and theatres? Should the government be in the business of defining whether something is good or bad for an individual?
Smoking should be discouraged, but only through awareness campaigns by civil society. It is one’s family, friends and community at large that should shape an individual’s behaviour, not tax policy.
The government’s job is to protect people’s values, not determine them.
A protest outside a Walmart store in Los Angeles in November 2013. Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters/Corbis
Walmart workers and supporters in the trade union movement say they intend to stage a new series of protests over wages and conditions at America's largest private employer, in which they will target the firm's family-friendly ethic ahead of its annual shareholders meeting next week.
Hundreds of so-called “Walmart moms” who work at stores across the US plan a number of strikes in 20 cities nationwide. Others will travel to Arkansas, the company’s home state, to provide a visual presence to shareholders, workers’ rights groups said on Thursday.
The actions will follow a series of “Black Friday” rallies last year, which came after a House of Representatives committee report found taxpayers were subsidising workers at just one Walmart store to the tune of $1m a year in food stamps and other public-assistance programmes, because of the low wages they took home.
Walmart, which is coming in for increasing criticism over its treatment of staff and other issues, most recently for how it handled an overseas bribery investigation, is expected to face close scrutiny from shareholders after this month posting a fifth-straight quarter of negative same-store sales.
The company made a $16bn profit last year; the Walton family, which owns more than half of Walmart, is worth almost $145bn. The company pays 825,000 workers, around two-thirds of its workforce, less than $25,000 a year.
The campaigners, who include current Walmart workers as well as members of the alliance Our Walmart, are demanding wages of more than $25,000, more full-time openings and an end to retaliation against workers who speak out against conditions.
Earlier this year, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaintagainst Walmart for, it said, illegally retaliating against 60 workers who had engaged in legally protected strikes or protests.
At a press call organised by Our Walmart on Thursday, two mothers spoke of their struggle to bring up their families on the low wages they were paid by the company. One said she supplemented her low wages with food stamps. They stressed they were “not anti-Walmart” and appreciated their jobs, but wanted the company to publicly commit to changes that would help working families.
Linda Haouska, 52, a mother of two from Illinois who has worked for Walmart for eight and a half years, said her son told her he would forego his prom night because he knew she could not afford to rent him a tuxedo.
“That is no conversation that a mother, especially one working for a company as successful as Walmart, should have with her child,” said Haouska. “We are helping our company make $16bn annual profits, we are helping the Walton family with their [$145] billion.”
Haouska said Walmart claimed to be a “family orientated company”, yet it would not provide fixed schedules or guaranteed full-time work for many mothers who work there; she added that she had a fixed schedule, because she worked a night shift.
“We are Walmart moms, we are not a political cause, we are real people who are struggling to provide happy stable homes for our kids,” she said.
Lachandra Myrick, a mother of two who has worked at a Walmart store in Illinois for almost a year, said she earned $375 every two weeks, relies on food stamps to get by and is trying to find scholarships and grants to get her son through school. She recently took on a night-shift job and said her daughter wears hand-me-downs and she has to choose between buying shoes for her son or her daughter.
“Working at Walmart, taking care of my family is hard and nearly impossible” Myrick said. She plans to take part in one of the strikes next week.
Ellen Bravo, the executive director of Family Values @ Work, a group that advocates for policies such as paid sick days and family leave insurance, said many mothers were struggling to provide for their families and accused Walmart of “creating a financial crisis for many families in America”.
Also on Thursday, Walmart hit out at a proxy advisory company, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which had urged shareholders to vote against its executive compensation package and to vote for an independent chairman. ISS had cited a failure of the board to provide shareholders with specific information related to the bribery investigation outside the US.
Our Walmart has had some recent successes with campaigns to press for changes at the company. Following a campaign on pregnant women's rights, Walmart changed its policies to allow pregnant women to be given less physically demanding duties.
Walmart's shareholders meeting is on Friday 6 June at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville.
No-one from Walmart returned a call from the Guardian seeking comment in time for publication.
Hedge funds can only have 'sophisticated investors' as customers, meaning clients with assets of more than at least $1m. Photograph: Alamy
Hedge funds, those financial funds run by extraordinarily rich men, are going mainstream. Not content to be investments for just the super rich and super connected, they are starting to offer services to the average investor.
A good example comes this week from hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, who is famous on Wall Street but not yet a household name. He wants to start a small fund with a public listing to collect money from the public that he can then invest.
Ackman's new fund itself is not a hedge fund, but because he is a giant in the hedge-fund world, regular investors may be attracted to the mystique of a world that usually locks them out.
Hedge fund bullies
Let's be clear: the average investor should not be too excited. Hedge funds are certainly powerful, but it is not clear they all deserve the power or are using it well – not based on performance at least.
When I was a trader at a big bank, several years ago, I learned about that power of hedge funds. In a moment of luck, I made $1m in 10 seconds trading with a large hedge fund. They made a bad bet – buying bonds from me that dropped in price seconds later. I was up a cool $1m and they were down $1m.
That didn't sit well with them. Hours after the trade I received a tap on the shoulder from a senior member of my bank, asking me to rewrite the trade and give half of my profit back to the hedge fund.
Bill Ackman wants to start a small hedge fund to collect and invest money from the public. Photograph: Brian Snyder /Reuters
My bank was doing the fund a favor. The hedge fund was an important and connected client, and the trade was, well, embarrassing to them. That embarrassment might jeopardize other business with the bank, threatening millions in fees. Over my objections, my bank renegotiated the terms of the trade to give the hedge fund a better price.
It was a perfectly legal, but unusual concession. It was also a lesson: hedge funds can even bully the biggest banks in the country.
Where the real power lies
Hedge funds, to the regular citizen, seem shadowy and strange. Super secretive, absurdly paid, massive investment firms that manage, in total, close to $2.2tn. Who are these guys and why do they deserve the royal treatment and enormous pay?
They're bad boys of finance, with lots of money. Hedge fund managers are often glamorized as super wealthy hotshots with special insight into how to invest. They are also generally rich. Collecting-modern-art rich. Last year, the total pay of the top 10 hedge fund managers was $15bn. One gentleman, David Tepper, was paid $3.5bn.
Wall Street increasingly attracts PhDs in fields such as mathematics and physics, as well as international political leaders and officials. Photograph: Cameron Davidson/Corbis
Because of their reputations, hedge fund managers can collect money – anywhere from a few million to a few billion – from rich people and big institutions like pension funds and college endowments. Demand is only increasing; in the last 20 years, hedge funds have collectively grown by 1,000 times.
'Sophisticated investors'
Hedge funds have almost complete freedom, for one reason: the government allows them to approach only the very rich, with assets of at least more than $1m – and usually, over $10m. These are called "sophisticated investors". The assumption is that lots of money gives you enough investing knowledge to lose it however you'd like.
Michael Steinberg, a portfolio manager at the SAC Capital Advisors hedge fund, and his lawyer exit federal court in Manhattan. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Because hedge funds deal only with the sophisticated investor, they have almost no restrictions on what they can invest in, or how they can invest, short of breaking the law. They can put their money in everything from the stock market to farmland to gold mines.
For the privilege of exclusivity, they charge their "sophisticated investors" huge fees. The general rule is "two and 20"; the hedge funds pay themselves 2% of all the assets they oversee, and 20% of any gains in a given year.
For that kind of cash, you'd expect them to deliver.
Why the rich love hedge funds: the edge
Are these sophisticated investors making sophisticated investments? It's hard to find the proof that they are.
That hedge funds can charge such high fees for such average returns has economists and many others confused. It's not exactly rational.Theories abound.
People may invest in hedge funds for many reasons, but there is something simpler at work: the idea that you'd rather be with hedge funds than against them. Sophisticated investors assume hedge funds have an informational edge, either legal or illegal. They're so well connected and so informed, the thinking goes, that they must know something we don't.
Hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam convicted of insider trading in 2011. Photograph: Emmanuel DunandAFP/Getty Images
It is not a bad assumption, as far as assumptions go.
Hedge funds trade in the gray area of information
Information is everything to trading. Knowing more, knowing it quicker, or being the only one to know, will make you money. It’s often the only guaranteed way to try to outsmart the markets.
Hedge funds strive for that edge, certainly the legal one. Every trader does. Yet with less regulation and less observation, hedge funds can do it in a far more aggressive manner.
They do it by hiring the best and the brightest. Some have more PhD’s than many college math or economic departments.
Information has a direct relation to currency on the New York Stock Exchange. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty
They do it by trying to know everything about whatever they are trading. A country has laws making it illegal to run polls the week prior to elections? No problem. Hedge funds will hire their own pollsters for private polls.
They do it by hiring, and paying very well, people with connections. The number of former officials and present officials who have hedge-fund ties is staggering. It is almost now considered normal. Leave public service related to politics and finance? Go directly to hedge fund. Do collect large payment.
Larry Summers, after his stint at the Treasury, and before his job of chief economic adviser to President Obama, spent two years working for one of the largest and most opaque hedge funds, DE Shaw. He was paid close to $5m for that work.
Wall Street is about collecting and trading in information. Yet the rules concerning trading in information, what is legal what is illegal, are notoriously gray. So hedge funds hire teams of lawyers to navigate and at times push right into the gray.
Larry Summers worked for DE Shaw after heading the Treasury under the Clinton administration. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Now hedge funds are trying to expand their services, hoping that their reputation for having an edge will also appeal to investors who are not ultra-wealthy. There's even a hedge-fund TV channel for advertising their financial wares.
Before throwing in any money, the average investor should be careful. Hedge funds are opaque. Don't put in any money you can't lose.
The biggest cautionary tale
Keep Bernie Madoff in mind.
Madoff was not technically a hedge-fund manager, but he acted like one. His fund’s eerily consistent strong performance and his reputation as an investment hotshot attracted lots of money, and many investors who were convinced Madoff had an edge. His returns also attracted skepticism that perhaps his fund was doing something illegal.
The skepticism was justified. Madoff was just outright running a $17bn Ponzi scheme:
According to reports, some of those who put their faith in Mr Madoff suspected that he was engaged in wrongdoing, but not the sort that would endanger their money.
Many of the losses came from investors who were in no position to suspect Madoff was doing anything illegal. Even though they had money, they weren't sophisticated enough. In the end, no one was.
That's not to say all hedge funds are bad. Not even close. There are thousands of hedge funds, and there was only one Bernie Madoff.
The main lesson, instead, is to know as much as possible about where your money is going, and don’t let the allure of secrecy fool you. In a mutual fund you can see every stock. In a hedge fund, you often only have a black box built by someone with a reputation.
The bottom line: investors, sophisticated or not, can't know in detail what many hedge funds are doing. But as long as the mystique exists, perhaps many don’t want to know
Shinseki said he had previously been wrong to say the problem was limited and isolated Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
President Obama has accepted the resignation of his embattled secretary of veterans affairs after an admitted failure to prevent a systemic cover-up of dangerous backlogs in waiting lists across the nation's largest hospital network.
Eric Shinseki, a former army chief of staff who famously stood up to Donald Rumsfeld over Iraq troop deployments, becomes the second Obama cabinet member in two months to be forced out over a failed government healthcare program.
But unlike Kathleen Sebelius, who was allowed to stay on as health and human services secretary while fixing chronic problems with the roll out of the Affordable Care Act, Shinseki was forced out just weeks after revelations began to emerge of falsified records at a VA healthcare facility in Phoenix.
Sloan D Gibson, the deputy undersecretary for veterans affairs, will take over as acting secretary.
Gibson, who Obama said would have a "steep learning curve" as interim secretary and may be replaced within months, is a former infantry officer and banker who joined the VA as Shinseki's deputy just seven months ago from the United Services Organization, a non-profit which provides entertainment and services to troops.
After receiving preliminary investigations – both from the independent inspector general and Shinseki himself – pointing to similar “systemic” problems elsewhere in the network of public hospitals treating 10m veterans, Obama bowed to overwhelming political pressure and decided to replace Shinseki after an hour-long meeting at the White House on Friday.
“A few moments ago the secretary offered me his own resignation, and with considerable regret, I accepted it,” the president said after confirming that the investigations had found “misconduct was not limited to a few VA facilities but many across the country”.
But Obama paid extensive tribute to Shinseki's other accomplishments at the department and acknowledged that political and media pressure had played a major part in his reluctant decision.
“[Shinseki] does not want to be a distraction because his priority is to fix the problem and make sure the vets are getting the care they need... and I agree, we don't have time for distractions,” said the president. Asked if Shinseki had become a political scapegoat, he added “the distractions were in part political”.
The president, who sat on the Veterans Affairs committee while serving in the Senate, also painted a bleak picture of the giant organisation responsible for support for veterans and their families.
It was a "big organisation that's had problems for a very long time,” said Obama, revealing that his White House investigator Rob Nabors found the problems with recording waiting lists were compounded by “computer systems dating back to 90s".
He also inadvertently referenced one of the underlying reasons for the overstretch, suggesting there may need to be a “surge” of doctors to help treat the backlog of veterans.
Surges of troops into both Iraq and Afghanistan have greatly added to the burden on VA facilities as have decisions by Shinseki to recognise more post-traumatic stress cases and exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war.
At least 116 members of Congress have called for Shinseki's resignation in recent days, including 35 Democrats, though House leaders Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner previously both expressed concern that his departure may not solve the problem.
But a growing sense of betrayal among veterans themselves has built in recent days, leading even close allies such as Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth, a former VA official who lost her legs while serving in Iraq, to demand Shinseki’s replacement.
Shinseki pledged to take personal responsibility for “a systemic, totally unacceptable, lack of integrity” in veterans healthcare facilities on Friday, just minutes before the hastily scheduled White House meeting with the president.
Speaking to a conference of homeless groups, the veterans affairs secretary revealed that his internal investigation had now confirmed a report by the independent inspector general that the problems spread far beyond initial revelations in Phoenix.
Evidence of a systemic cover-up of hospital backlogs was cited last week by the White House as a factor in determining how far up the chain of command accountability should go, but Obama said he wanted to see the IG and internal review before deciding how to respond.
In his most contrite public comments yet, Shinseki said he had previously been wrong to say the problem was limited and isolated, but claimed he had been “too trusting” of other officials in the department who misled him.
“I can't explain the lack of integrity among some of the leaders of our healthcare facilities.
“This is something I rarely encountered in 38 years in uniform,” the former army chief of staff at the homeless conference in Washington.
“So I will not defend it because it is indefensible, but I can take responsibility for it and I do.”
He added: “Given the facts I now know I apologise as the senior leader of the department of veterans affairs.”
Shinseki announced he was removing the senior leadership at the Phoenix medical facility where the scandal over cover-ups of lengthy waiting lists first emerged.
He also asked Congress “to support Bernie Sanders' proposed bill giving VA's sec greater authority to remove senior leaders”.
Earlier, Shinseki had struck a defiant tone before the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans event, receiving three standing ovations for describing his success in reducing veterans homelessness by 24% during his well-regarded time in office.
But despite saying we can still “do big things”, he embattled cabinet secretary went on to “address elephant in the room” in language that was an ominous preview of the meeting with Obama.
“After Wednesday's release of an interim IG report we now know that VA has a systemic, totally unacceptable lack of integrity within some of our veterans health facilities … our initial findings of ongoing internal review of other VA healthcare facilities also show that to be true,” said Shinseki.
“That breach of integrity is irresponsible, indefensible and unacceptable. I said when this situation began weeks and months ago that I thought the problem was limited and isolated because I believed that. I no longer believe it, it was systemic. I was too trusting and I accepted as accurate reports that I now know to have been misleading.”
He added: “Leadership and integrity problems can and must be fixed, and now.
