The US government has unveiled new federal rules that include a ban on the sale of e-cigarettes to people aged under 18.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will also require manufacturers to submit products to the agency for review.
Cigars, pipe tobacco and hookah tobacco are also subject to the new rules.
On Wednesday, California introduced new anti-smoking legislation that also regulates e-cigarettes.
This morning at the Hulu Upfronts in New York, Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins confirmed the recent report from The Wall St. Journal which indicated that the company was developing a live television streaming service to complement its current on-demand offering. While Hopkins was light on details like pricing, content, channel selection, and product, he did say that the new service would arrive in 2017.
The service will offer a combination of feeds from broadcast television and cable TV, the CEO said.
The Indian government has rejected a request by Apple to import and sell refurbished iPhones in the country, Bloomberg reports.
It’s a major setback to Apple’s India strategy, a major component of which was reusing old iPhones as a low-cost option in addition to selling new iPhones, which are too expensive for many Indians.
Indian smartphone companies opposed Apple’s application, according to Bloomberg.
Millions of people who work long hours today will soon get more money … or more free time. Or not.
By mid-May, the Department of Labor is expected to formally expand the number of workers entitled to overtime pay.
The changes are intended to give a fairer shake to very low-paid salaried workers who don’t get overtime even though they put in well over 40 hours a week. Why? Because they have some ‘managerial duties.’
But some employers could find ways around the new rules.
v.20 n.16 – Released April 25, 2016
Mitsubishi Motors has admitted falsifying fuel economy data for more than 600,000 vehicles sold in Japan.
Tyre pressure figures were falsified by employees to flatter mileage rates, the company said.
Almost 470,000 vehicles that Mitsubishi made for Nissan were affected and the issue was uncovered after Nissan found inconsistencies.
The announcement sent shares in Mitsubishi down more than 15% in Tokyo.
A Supreme Court order issued today closes the book on (or perhaps merely ends this chapter of) more than a decade of legal warfare between Google and the Authors Guild over the legality of the former’s scanning without permission of millions of copyrighted books. And the final word is: it’s fair use. Related Articles As “Paying The Writer” Gets Easier, Whither Bookstores? Pronoun, A Self-Publishing Platform For Authors, Is Ready To Serve Humanity With Publishing Tools Like These, Who Needs Enemies?
The order is just an item in a long list of other orders that appeared today, and adds nothing to the argument except the tacit approval of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals 2015 decision — itself approving an even earlier decision, that of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2013. So in a way, it’s old news.
The current state of Bay Area housing bears resemblance to the years leading up to the dotcom bubble in 2000 and the 2008 housing market collapse. At the peak of the housing bubble in 2007, the median sale price for a home in San Francisco was $895,000 while renters were paying just over $2,400 a month on average.
There’s no doubt that the Bay Area real estate market is white-hot once again and it’s largely due to the surging tech industry. Over the last few years, San Francisco has begun looking more and more like Silicon Valley, with companies like Google, Twitter, Airbnb and LinkedIn scooping up office space.
Nine years since the 2007 peak, housing prices, home values and rental rates are once again climbing to unsustainable levels. In 2015, home values jumped by more than 14% and the median sale price, meanwhile, is hovering around $1.1 million.
According to the California Realtors Association’s Housing Affordability Index, just 20% of residents living in the nine Bay Area counties can afford to pay that much for a home. Renters aren’t faring any better, with the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco hitting a whopping $3,490 as of January 2016.
This past Thursday, The United States Department of Homeland Security issued an alert advising people running Apple’s QuickTime program on Windows computers to immediately uninstall the software. QuickTime was once a popular package for playing video and audio clips on computers, but it has since been eclipsed by other technologies.
Unfortunately, security vulnerabilities continue to be discovered in the QuickTime software — including two critical ones announced just this past week that could allow criminals to hack into computers with QuickTime installed if the devices’ users either run malware or visit a malicious webpage (which a criminal can induce via phishing, offering some “great deal” and spreading word of it on social media, etc.). Without security patches being issued by Apple, QuickTime software poses a serious danger to those running it.
Shareholders delivered a stinging rebuke to BP on Thursday by rejecting the oil company’s decision to give CEO Bob Dudley a 20% pay hike last year. About 59% of them voted against Dudley’s pay and benefits package — worth $19.6 million — at an annual meeting in London. But he will still get the money.
The bumper payout came despite an annual loss of $5.2 billion, a collapse in the group’s share price, and plans to shed 7,000 jobs by the end of 2017.
Dispatches From The Front 