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Bloomberg
19 hours ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Are UK Retirement Homes Worth the Investment?
Subscribe to Merryn Talks Money on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to Merryn Talks Money on Spotify Retirement homes often market themselves as the golden solution for later-life living. But behind the spa days and sociable lounges lurk some harsh financial truths. So, are they really worth it?
ITV News
a day ago
- Politics
- ITV News
Donald Trump says 'nasty' London mayor Sadiq Khan has done a 'terrible job' as Starmer intervenes
Donald Trump has described London's Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan as a 'nasty person' who has done 'a terrible job', as Sir Keir Starmer jumped to his defence. Speaking to reporters, the US president said: 'I'm not a fan of your mayor. I think he's done a terrible job, the Mayor of London… a nasty person.' The Prime Minister intervened to say: 'He's a friend of mine, actually.' Mr Trump went on to say: 'I think he's done a terrible job. But I would certainly visit London.' The comments came during Mr Trump's five-day-long private trip to Scotland. We're now Talking Politics more than ever before... Every Monday, Tom Bradby dials Washington to get the latest analysis of Donald Trump's era-changing orders with Washington Correspondent Dan Rivers in DC and a range of informed US experts and insiders. On Wednesday Political Editor Robert Peston joins Tom to bring you the insider knowledge and key talking points from Westminster. And every Friday, Tom and Robert are answering our viewer and listener questions in our special Q&A episode. Got a question for the team? Email talkingpolitics@ You can hear Talking Politics wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and watch every episode on YouTube. Hit subscribe on any of those platforms to ensure you never miss an episode.
The Wire
a day ago
- Health
- The Wire
Assure Clinics Launches Podcast ‘Beyond the Mirror' to Normalize Hair Transplants and Inspire Confidence
Assure Clinics, a leading name in India's hair transplant and skincare industry, has launched a powerful new podcast titled Beyond the Mirror. The series aims to break the silence and stigma surrounding hair loss while fostering honest conversations around self-image, confidence, and personal transformation. The podcast features compelling real life stories from individuals who have undergone hair transplant procedures at Assure Clinics. Listeners are taken on intimate journeys, emotional and physical, that are often left untold. Through these stories, Beyond the Mirror creates a safe and relatable space for anyone dealing with hair loss, encouraging acceptance, education, and empowerment. 'In today's image conscious world, hair loss can deeply affect self esteem, mental health, and social confidence,' said Founder and Chief Surgeon at Assure Clinics. 'With Beyond the Mirror, our goal is not just to showcase successful treatments, but to humanize the hair restoration journey and remind people they are not alone. These stories are not just about hair; they are about hope, healing, and reclaiming your identity.' Each episode features in depth interviews with people from diverse backgrounds including corporate professionals, young adults, homemakers, influencers, and even senior citizens who candidly share their experiences with hair loss, the decision to seek treatment, and the emotional highs and lows they encountered along the way. The podcast also aims to dispel myths and misinformation about hair transplants. Listeners will gain insights into modern techniques, recovery timelines, and long term results, as well as a behind the scenes look into the medical expertise and advanced technology at Assure Clinics. With the growing visibility of public figures such as celebrities, athletes, and influencers openly discussing their hair restoration experiences, Beyond the Mirror comes at a time when the cultural narrative around beauty and self worth is beginning to shift. Assure Clinics is positioning itself at the forefront of this change by promoting vulnerability, strength, and authenticity. 'Confidence is deeply personal. Sometimes, a small change like addressing hair loss can make a world of difference in someone's life,' Dr. [Insert Name] added. 'This podcast is part of our broader mission to make that transformation more accessible, relatable, and stigma free.' Beyond the Mirror is now streaming on all major platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts. It is ideal for: Individuals exploring hair transplant or cosmetic procedures People experiencing hair loss and seeking support or inspiration Medical professionals and wellness experts tracking hair care innovations Anyone drawn to real, human centered stories of transformation About Assure Clinics Assure Clinics was founded with a mission to make advanced hair and skin treatments more accessible, transparent, and results driven. With 15 state of the art centers across India, as well as a growing international presence including Dubai, Assure Clinics has become a trusted name in the aesthetic healthcare space. Backed by a team of highly skilled dermatologists and surgeons, the brand has helped thousands of patients restore not only their hair, but their confidence and quality of life. Beyond the Mirror marks yet another milestone in Assure Clinics' journey, redefining hair restoration as not just a medical procedure but a path toward self discovery, acceptance, and renewal. For more information, kindly visit:
Vox
2 days ago
- Business
- Vox
The real reason we tip
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. We've all been there. Maybe it's when you grab a coffee in the morning or when you finish up a dinner out with friends. Maybe it's when you least expect it, like at the merch table at a concert. You tap your card, only to be confronted with the dreaded tip screen. There's a lot of talk about how much to tip and if you even should tip (more on that later), but why do we add gratuity in America in the first place? Nina Mast has the answer. She's an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, DC. The point of the tip is to make up the difference between the minimum wage and the tipped minimum wage. 'The tipped minimum wage is the lower minimum wage that employers can pay tipped workers with the expectation that tips will bring their pay up to the regular minimum wage rate,' she says. 'Under federal law, the tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. So tipped workers need to earn an additional $5.12 in tips to bring them up to the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour.' On this week's episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in podcast, we find out how this system began and why we still have it. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Mast, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. Where does tipping in America come from in the first place? Tipping goes back to the pre-Civil War times in the US. There were wealthy Americans who were vacationing in Europe, and they noticed this practice of tipping where if you had good service, you gave a small extra fee on top of what you paid. Then, tipping started to fade as a practice in Europe but persisted in the US. We can tie that back to the abolition of slavery. Once slavery was abolished following the Civil War, workers who were formerly enslaved in agriculture and domestic service continued to do these same jobs, but employers didn't want to pay them. So instead of actually just paying them their wage, they suggested that the customer paid a small tip to Black workers for their services. That's how tipping started proliferating across service sector jobs and became the predominant way that workers in these jobs were paid. How did the restaurant industry start to do this? It really goes back to the formation of the National Restaurant Association. From the very beginning, going back to the early 1920s, they united around a common goal of keeping labor costs low, essentially lobbying against any efforts to raise wages for tipped workers and to eliminate the tipped minimum wage. It sounds like this whole policy is a direct legacy of trying to keep Black people from getting the same minimum wage as other workers. When were service sectors included in the national minimum wage? It wasn't until the mid-1960s that tipped workers got the same rights as other workers under changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act. In the mid-1960s — this is during the civil rights movement, a few years after the March on Washington, which called for stronger minimum wage protections — amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act established a wage floor for tipped workers. It also increased protections for workers in agriculture, schools, laundries, nursing homes — a lot of sectors in which Black people were disproportionately employed and in which workers of color are still overrepresented even today. This was a big deal. Something like a third of the Black population gained protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act through these amendments in 1966. Even after these amendments, the FLSA continued to exclude farm workers from overtime protections, and domestic workers didn't gain rights until the 1970s. It was a significant change, and a big deal, for tipped workers to be covered, but there was a huge catch in the amendment. It established a lower minimum wage that tipped workers could be paid through the creation of the tip credit system. And that's still what is in use today. This tip credit essentially allowed employers to count the tips that were received by their staff against half of the minimum wage that they were required to pay. In 1996, the FLSA was amended again to raise the minimum wage federally from $4.25 to $5.15. Essentially, that froze the tipped minimum wage at $2.13 an hour, while the non-tipped minimum wage continued to go up. The tipped minimum wage has been stuck at $2.13 an hour since 1991, even though the federal minimum wage has been increased multiple times. And that's still the situation we're in now. Why hasn't this changed? It seems like it would be easier to give everyone the same minimum wage, and you wouldn't have to worry about tipping. I think that's in large part due to the lobbying and advocacy efforts of the National Restaurant Association, its affiliates — groups like the US Chamber of Commerce — and other employer groups that have fought tirelessly to prevent the minimum wage from being raised, both for tipped workers and for other workers. There is a proposal in Congress to raise the minimum wage to $17 an hour by 2030, and it would completely phase out this tipped minimum wage so tipped workers would receive the same minimum wage as everyone else. Some states have already eliminated the tipped minimum wage, but a lot more states haven't been able to do so yet. In most states, the minimum wage for tipped workers is still less than $4 an hour. How does the tip credit system work in practice? Employers are legally required to make up the difference if workers aren't receiving enough in tips to get them up to the regular minimum wage. But in practice, it's extremely difficult to enforce that rule. It's largely left up to the workers themselves to track their hours, their tips, and make some complicated calculations about what they're actually earning per hour per week. Then they have to confront their employer if it seems like they're not actually receiving the minimum wage, which obviously introduces a whole host of issues related to power dynamics. Not only is it difficult to calculate and keep track of, but it's also difficult for workers to demand what they're owed. As a result, it's largely not enforced. Workers who are already earning much lower wages than workers in non-tipped occupations are highly at risk of wage theft. I think as consumers, we're initially taught that tips are a way to reward good service. How should we think about tipping? I think this is a big misconception. People don't realize that they're actually paying the lion's share of their server's wages through their tips. Unfortunately, when you fail to tip your server, you're actually denying them their wage. We don't have the luxury in the US of having the system that you describe where you can pay a tip for particularly good service or pay a smaller tip to indicate that you didn't get good service. How much do you typically tip? I tip 20 percent as a standard, and sometimes, for a really good service, I'll tip more. I think that's basically the standard at this point in the US. It does get tricky, because we've seen a proliferation of tipping across lots of different transactions where a service wasn't necessarily rendered.
Vox
3 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
What the right's war on college is really about
Project 2025 laid out the battle plan pretty clearly: Get rid of the Department of Education, shut off federal funding, take control of the accreditation system, and take down diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. And, in the end, change what students are encouraged to study and what professors are allowed to teach. So why is this happening? And is it working? Michael Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of several books about college, including Beyond the University and The Student: A Short History. He's also one of higher education's most vocal defenders, and one of the few prominent university presidents willing to take a moral and political stand against authoritarian overreach from the government, which he sees as an attack not just on colleges and universities, but on civil society itself. I invited Roth onto The Gray Area to talk about the political backlash against universities and why it matters. We also discuss where American universities have gone wrong, what needs to change, and what he thinks college is actually for in the world of AI. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You said recently that the federal government is 'trying to destroy civil society by undermining the legitimacy of colleges and universities.' That's a pretty dramatic statement. What do you mean? I think it's extraordinarily clear that the Trump administration is hell-bent on destroying civil society — that arena of our culture and our polity that has sources of legitimacy independent of the ideology of the person in the White House. You see that in the attack on law firms. You see it in the attack on the press. The war on universities is similar. They're not really going after universities that have egregious issues of civil rights violations. They're going after the high-profile, high-legitimacy institutions like Harvard, like UVA, like the other Ivy League schools, with the exception of Dartmouth. They're doing that because these schools have a claim on our allegiance or our respect that is not founded in the ideology of those currently in the White House. When you say 'destroying,' what do you mean? What is the administration actually doing? Well, they start with easy things, right? Trans women athletes. There are fewer than 10 trans athletes in the country in NCAA varsity sports. That's a winning issue for a variety of reasons. The White House is going to determine who plays volleyball, and then they're going to determine how to teach Mideast or near Eastern Studies. They're going to say, If you don't teach near Eastern Studies the way we want you to with appropriate respect for Israel, then you're not going to get money for Alzheimer's research. What happens is that everybody in higher education starts moving away from anything that might offend those in the White House. You have this slide from the university as fostering an oppositional culture, which it has in the United States for a long time, at least since the Second World War, towards the universities as institutions in which people with money, power, diplomas, and legitimacy start trying to anticipate what they should say to not annoy — or even to please — the president and his friends. I don't think President Trump really cares about Alzheimer's research at Harvard, but he wants to make sure that people at Harvard — and then everyone who doesn't have the resources that Harvard has to fight — line up. I think that's why you don't see a lot of opposition from colleges, universities right now because everyone has already started lining up. As you know, a lot of people shrug their shoulders at all of this. They think, What's the big deal? These campuses are full of privileged people with predictably extreme views, views that aren't representative of most of the country, so who cares? To that sort of reaction, what do you say? Well, it's been an orchestrated reaction. I think that at UVA, the fastest-growing major is computer science and the fastest-growing minor is data science. Hardly the stuff of 'woke' lunatics. At Harvard, the most popular majors are the ones that lead to Wall Street. Again, this notion that Harvard or UVA is filled with people with extreme views who are unrepresentative of America — they're unrepresentative of America because they're really smart. 'Yes, universities have real problems, but I don't think that those problems are what has led to the assault on…the ability of schools to educate students the way they see fit.' It's unfortunate because in a democracy, you can be really proud of people who excel, even though they do things we can't do. When I watch, I don't know, Patrick Mahomes, play quarterback and escape a crazy rush, I'm filled with admiration. Or the elite fighters in the Navy SEALs or the Army Rangers — we don't think of them as elitist, we just think of them as exceptional. But at some of these schools, we resent them for having created an environment where people like those guys can thrive and the rest of us don't have access to it. In a healthy democracy, you allow people to experiment with ideas, art, science, and politics, it's never totally open-ended. Of course, there are always some guardrails. What we're seeing now is a concerted effort to bring those guardrails in so that people have to resemble those in power. That is unusual in the history of the United States. You used the word 'orchestrated.' Do you think this is completely manufactured? Even if some of this backlash is cynical and engineered, and no doubt a lot of it is, how much have universities contributed to it through leadership failures or bad policies? Yeah, it's a fair question. Yes, universities have real problems, but I don't think that those problems are what has led to the assault on free speech, on freedom of association, and on the ability of schools to educate students the way they see fit. The problems of universities are political problems and we haven't done a good job in solving them. Let me just mention two quick things. One problem is the ideological conformity or the ideological narrowness of faculty in most colleges and universities, especially at those like mine and the highly selective schools in the Northeast. All over the country, university faculty are mostly people left-of-center, and that has gotten much worse over time. I think it's about prejudice on the part of the faculty, not only prejudice, but that faculty members hire folks with whom they're comfortable. They hire people whose political views they're more comfortable with. I think that's a problem that should be fixed by the faculty itself. They should be aware of their prejudices and counteract them as best they can. I think that's a significant problem. The broader cultural problem is that American higher education has defined its quality on the basis of the number of people that are excluded from it. We prize being highly selective. I used that phrase myself a few moments ago. What does that mean? We reject most people who want to go there. That's a very American thing. It's not only American, but you want the thing you can't get access to. That's a traditional capitalist bourgeois fact that lots of people want the thing that they have trouble getting access to. Colleges and universities have cultivated condescension rather than democratic practices. I think the basic problem that elite colleges in particular have right now is that people outside of these institutions increasingly think they are places where ideology has been confused with inquiry, where education has been confused with activism. Is this a problem for you? Or is this just what free speech ought to look like? Well, I think it is both of those things. It is a problem when schools define activism or civic engagement in an ideologically restricted way. I think it's an intellectual problem. I think it's a moral problem for schools. I'll give you an example. I gave a talk at a conference and a guidance counselor from a high school said, 'If one of my students was applying to Wesleyan and she said her engagement was protecting the rights of the unborn, it would be professional malpractice for me to allow her to put that in the application.' Now, I guess I was naive. I was shocked by that. That was to me a slap in the head that I needed because I have no reason to doubt that he was right. I think that's the way in which the soft despotism of prejudice constricts free speech. I've been fighting against it now for the last decade or so, both as a person who has access to the media and writes articles about such things, but also as a teacher, adding more conservative voices into my own classes. I've always privileged the kind of mavericks and philosophy or political theory, but now I'm also adding to my classes criticisms of those voices or those progressive thinkers. Students are totally capable of dealing with the issues. They may not on their own gravitate towards conservative critiques of progressivism, but once exposed to them, they're perfectly happy and willing, able to deal with a variety of perspectives. All of that is to say that a school can define a civic purpose, I think, that's not in tension with its educational purposes. Most schools in the United States ever since the 1700s have had a civic purpose as part of what they do. I think it's nonsense that some college presidents are saying, 'Oh, we're just for the pursuit of truth.' Colleges in America have always been about character and civics. We can embrace that, but we can't do it in a parochial way. If we do it in a parochial way, we're limiting the educational potential of our students to explore ideas that may not be currently fashionable in their generation or among the faculty. Let's zoom out from this a little bit because there's a more fundamental question that we've wrestled with on this show, which is: What is college actually for? Is it just job preparation, a credentialing machine, or is it more? I believe that college is for three things. The first is to discover what you love to do — what makes you feel alive when you're working. It's important for students to have the freedom to make that discovery because at a selective school, they say, Well, I got As in this subject, but they may not like doing that, or they've never tried engineering, astronomy, poetry. A place where they can discover the kinds of things that give them meaning when they do those things. The second thing is to make the person who's discovering what they love to do get much better at what they love to do. We can do a better job of that. Grade inflation drives me nuts, makes me feel like the old man that I am. I think we need to kick the student in the butt because a lot of the time they think they're pretty good at something and maybe they're pretty good, but they can get a lot better. I think it's really important that every student works really hard. It's so against the grain of the American consumer view of higher education, which is that it should be this time in your life where you get to have so much fun. You make your friends, you get married, have a lot of sex, and that's fine. That's discovering what you love to do in a way, but I think students should go to a school where there are people who are making you better at what you love to do. The third thing is that you learn how to share what you've gotten better at and you love to do with other people. That usually means selling it. It means getting a job where you can continue to practice the things you love to do and that people will pay you for doing it. People will say to me, Well, I discovered I love poetry, so I sit in the basement and write poems. No, no, no. I mean, you've got to get better at it and then you've got to be able to take it out into the marketplace, out into the world. If you have those three things — discovering what you love to do, getting much better at it, and learning to take it out into the world and finding a job where these things are aligned — that is a way that college can help people thrive long after they graduate. Are you worried that AI is a threat to the model of education you just described? It can be a tool for the model I just described. I mean, I use AI all the time when I'm trying to find out information about things or get various takes on an issue. I think it's really helpful. I do worry that the joy that I've tried to describe of thinking for yourself in the company of others or discovering what you love to do and getting better at it — that you might not have that experience because you can outsource it to a bot. Now, take athletes as a counterexample. If I say to somebody on the football team, Instead of hitting that guy or running laps, why don't you just play Madden or something. Have a very good AI version of football, put your immersive thing on and you don't have to play. I think they'll look at me like I'm crazy because it's an embodied practice.
