Hip-hop iconin disruption at the University of Southern California.

The influential rapper, record producer and headphone magnate has made a $70 million donation to USC with longtime music partner Jimmy Iovine.

The vision and generosity of Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young will profoundly influence the way all of us perceive and experience artistic media. USC provides an extraordinarily rich academic, research and artistic environment, USC President C.L. Max Nikias said in a statement. We are committed to encouraging our students to use their intellectual and creative resources to effect change in all segments of society. Our goal is to ensure that the academy is the most collaborative educational program in the world.

Iovine and Young first announced the donation in May, but now some specific details surrounding the program have emerged. For example, some of the required coursework will include, "Advanced Methods in 2-D and 3-D Visualization," "Creativity," "Design Theory" and "The Entrepreneurial Mindset."

The USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation will accept 25 students in the fall of 2014 who will be asked to specialize in a broad array of multimedia and creative pursuits. Or, as Valley Wag puts it, nearly every Silicon Valley buzzword simultaneously.

More specifically, the program will focus on four core areas of study: Arts and Entrepreneurship, Technology, Design and Marketability, Concept and Business Platforms and Creating a Prototype.

The academys core education will create a common, multilingual literacy and fluency across essential disciplines, said Erica Muhl, inaugural director of the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academyfor Arts and dean of the USC Roski School of Fine Arts. This big picture knowledge and skill will equip graduates with a leadership perspective that is unparalleled in an undergraduate degree, and that will be applicable to virtually any industry.

Of course, Young and Iovine arent just throwing their money blindly into higher education with purely altruistic intentions. Theyre hoping one of their future students will come up with the next great invention to help bolster the pairs ever-expanding business empire.

If the next start-up that becomes Facebook happens to be one of our kids, thats what we are looking for, Iovine told .

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Texas lawmakers passed sweeping changes to the state's $116 billion teacher pension system on Sunday, including the first cost-of-living increase in a dozen years and a new requirement that school districts pay part of the expense.

The state, the teachers themselves and the school districts will increase contributions, making the Teachers Retirement System of Texas less reliant on market returns.

Without the changes, the healthcare account alone would have faced a $1 billion shortfall by 2017, supporters of the legislation said.

"We were upside-down earlier, because we were relying too much on investment returns," said state Senator Robert Duncan, Republican of Lubbock, who authored the legislation. "This puts us in a situation where we are actually having long-term fixed contributions rates that should support this system for a long time."

Teacher contributions to the Teachers Retirement System of Texas would increase over the next four years from 6.4 percent of their pay to 7.7 percent, and school districts would contribute 1.5 percent of total salary costs, up from zero.

The state contribution would increase from 6.4 percent of covered payroll to 6.8 percent starting in September.

Those three sources are expected to add some $600 million to the pension fund over the first two years, according to state documents.

The last time the state passed a cost-of-living increase for retired teachers was in 2001.

Under the plan passed Sunday, teachers who have been retired since early 2004 will see a three-percent increase in benefits, affecting some 195,000 teachers, or 60 percent of those in the system.

The law increases their monthly benefits by an average of $42, though it caps that increase at $100.

Teacher groups said they were disappointed the legislation decreased the pension and health benefits of hundreds of thousands of current employees who had already earned those benefits under the existing system.

Current employees with less than five years of service by August 2014 will have to work two extra years to get full retirement benefits under the new plan. The legislation raises the minimum retirement age for those employees from 60 to 62, according to the Texas branch of the American Federation of Teachers.

It also raises to 62 the minimum age at which a retiree is eligible for the TRS-Care health benefits beyond catastrophic coverage, reducing the benefits for hundreds of thousands of current employees, the group said.

That new requirement does not apply to members who by August 2014 meet a rule of 70, or age plus years of service equal to 70 or more, or have at least 25 years of service credit.

"One of our goals was to continue the stability of the system, and that has been done with the increased state contributions," said Linda Bridges, president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. "There's still more work to be done to improve the system for retirees and active members."

The Texas teachers' pension fund offers a defined-benefit plan and serves more than 1.3 million employed and retired teachers. The average annual teacher benefit is $22,764.

The pension fund is one of the world's largest private equity investors and has invested billions of dollars with firms including Apollo and KKR.

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Philip Barbara)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a case involving whistleblowers at Fidelity Investments, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider whether mutual fund employees are subject to the same whistleblower protections as workers at publicly traded companies.

Two Fidelity whistleblowers asked the court to decide whether the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which prevents public companies from retaliating against whistleblowers, applies to private companies serving under contract as advisers to public companies.

Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted in 2002 after accounting problems brought down energy company Enron Corp and communications provider WorldCom Inc.

Mutual fund companies have argued they should be exempt from the law because the funds themselves technically have no workers apart from their boards of directors and instead hire private management companies to invest their money.

Fidelity is the second-largest mutual fund company in the United States, investing $1.7 trillion of U.S. investment assets.

In the Fidelity case, plaintiff Jackie Lawson, who worked at Fidelity from 1993 until 2007, complained that she alerted supervisors to problems, including the alleged improper retention of $10 million of fees, only to be passed over for a promotion and threatened with punishment for insubordination.

Another plaintiff, Jonathan Zang, who ran several mutual funds from 1998 to 2005, alleged Fidelity gave him poor reviews and fired him in retaliation for his complaint that a new pay plan for Fidelity portfolio managers inaccurately and illegally described how pay was calculated.

Fidelity argued that Lawson and Zang worked for affiliates such as its Fidelity Management & Research arm, rather than a public company that Sarbanes-Oxley was meant to cover.

In a 2012 ruling, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston sided with Fidelity. The court noted that other whistleblower statutes in the Energy Reorganization Act and the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act specifically extend coverage to contractors, unlike Sarbanes-Oxley.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor supported Lawson and Zang, submitting briefs on appeal that supported the extension of whistleblower protections to mutual fund employees.

U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli filed a brief urging the court to wait for other cases to be decided before addressing the legal question.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments and decide the case in the court's next term, which starts in October and ends in June 2014.

The case is Lawson v. FMR, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-3.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Howard Goller, Gerald E. McCormick and John Wallace)

The company revealed the Xbox One, its next-generation entertainment console, during a presentation Tuesday at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

Don Mattrick, Microsoft's president of interactive entertainment business, called it an "all-in-one home entertainment system." He said the company has spent the past four years working on the next-generation Xbox.

The console was demonstrated using voice control to switch back and forth between watching live TV, listening to music and browsing the Internet, as well as simultaneously running apps.

It's been eight years since the launch of the Xbox 360. The original Xbox debuted in 2001, and its high-definition successor premiered in 2005.

For the past two years, Microsoft has led the gaming industry in console sales with the Xbox 360.

In recent years, Microsoft expanded the scope of the Xbox 360 beyond just games, adding streaming media apps and the family-friendly Kinect system.

Xbox has been the exclusive home to such popular gaming franchises as sci-fi first-person shooter "Halo," racing simulator "Forza" and alien shoot-'em-up "Gears of War." In recent years, Microsoft expanded the scope of the Xbox 360 beyond just games, adding streaming media apps and the camera-based Kinect system.

Nintendo kicked off the next generation of gaming last November with the launch of the Wii U, the successor to the popular Wii system. The Wii U features an innovative tablet-like controller, though its graphics is on par with the previous-generation Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo said the console sold just 3.45 million units by the end of March, well below expectations.

Sony was next, teasing plans for its upcoming PlayStation 4 without showing the actual box at an event last February in New York. The reaction to that console, which featured richer graphics and more social features, was mixed.

Microsoft didn't waste any time showing off the Xbox One console, new Kinect sensor and Xbox controller at the beginning of Tuesday's presentation.

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Online:

http://www.xbox.com

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang.

A British security official said the situation involving the Pakistan International Airlines flight did not appear terror-related, though police were still investigating, but the incident further rattled the U.K. just days after a soldier was killed on a London street in a suspected terror attack.

The security official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation.

A Pakistani official briefed by British police and PIA security on the investigation said the two suspects, speaking Urdu, allegedly threatened to "destroy the plane" after an argument with crew. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the case on the record.

Flight P709 was traveling from Lahore, Pakistan, to Manchester Airport when it was diverted by the fighter jets to Stansted Airport. The U.K. Ministry of Defense confirmed that Typhoon jets were launched to investigate an incident involving a civilian aircraft but gave no further details.

Passenger Nauman Rizvi told Pakistan's GEO TV that two men who had tried to move toward the cockpit during the flight were handcuffed and arrested once the plane landed. Rizvi said that after the men were taken away, the flight crew told passengers there had been a terrorist threat and that the pilot had raised an alarm.

Essex Police said they were notified at 1:20 p.m. local time (12:20 GMT, 8:20 a.m. EDT) that a threat had been made to an aircraft. The force said that after the Boeing 777 landed at 2:15 p.m., armed officers entered it and arrested two British nationals, aged 30 and 41, on suspicion of endangering the aircraft.

The suspects were taken to a police station where they face questioning, the police said in a statement. The plane will be examined by forensic specialists but no suspicious items have been recovered so far, police added.

"This incident is being treated as a criminal offense," the police statement said, in another indication it was not being seen as a terror case.

Mashood Tajwar, a spokesman for PIA, said 297 passengers and 11 crew members were on the plane. By late afternoon Friday, passengers had disembarked from the plane and were being interviewed, according to Mark Davison, a spokesman for Stansted Airport.

Police across Britain have stepped up patrols in recent days following the suspected terror attack in south London.

Two men with a meat cleaver and knives attacked and killed a British soldier in broad daylight, and gruesome footage that emerged after the attack showed one of the alleged assailants angrily complaining about the British government and troops in foreign lands.

Those two suspects were shot when police arrived on the scene and have been hospitalized.

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Associated Press writers Paisley Dodds in London and Zarar Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.

Cassandra Vinograd can be reached at http://twitter.com/CassVinograd and Danica Kirka can be reached at http://twitter.com/DanicaKirka

According to The New York Times, "the culture of hacking in China is not confined to top-secret military compounds where hackers carry out orders to pilfer data from foreign governments and corporations." Instead, the practice is commonplace, openly discussed "at trade shows, inside university classrooms and on internet forums."

The Ministry of Education and Chinese universities, for instance, join companies in sponsoring hacking competitions that army talent scouts attend, though "the standards can be mediocre," said a cyber-security expert who works for a government institute and handed out awards at a 2010 competition.

Corporations employ freelance hackers to spy on competitors. In an interview, a former hacker confirmed recent official news reports that one of China's largest makers of construction equipment had committed cyber-espionage against a rival. []

Yet China's relaxed attitude toward cyber-espionage could partially explain why U.S. companies have been the targets of a growing number of hacks from overseas. Earlier this year, , which security experts traced back to Shanghai and the People's Liberation Army, which was purportedly gathering intel regarding a Times story set to be published about top-ranking Chinese officials.

Indeed, the threat of cyber-warfare is a growing concern domestically. Out of fear of an imminent, serious cyber-attack — or perhaps one that's already underway — The Vergethat a former group of government officials and private executives are calling on Congress to "consider passing laws allowing U.S. companies to 'counterattack' against such hackers, whoever they may be."

The controversial idea of giving U.S. companies legal protections to "hack back" against intruders on their networks has been proposed before by some legal experts and companies, and some companies are even alleged to already be engaging in the practice, despite the fact that there is no legal framework in the U.S. permitting it. But the new recommendations from Huntsman's group may be the highest-profile yet, as they come from former Obama Administration officials. []

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Mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner made his first appearance on Thursday since declaring his candidacy, apologizing again for his bizarre, Internet-only infidelity scandal that forced him out of Congress nearly two years ago.

"There may be people who will never vote for me, and I respect that," Weiner told the phalanx of reporters who surrounded him outside a crowded Harlem subway stop. "If citizens want to talk to me about my personal failings, that's their right. I certainly will apologize."

Jason Rolom, a 31-year-old construction worker who lives in Harlem, was not one of those voters. Rolom posed for a photo with Weiner while on his way to work. "I know from the past that he had that scandal, but now he's here to help so I'm going to give him a shot," Rolom said. "Sometimes you've got to let go of the past."

Another man shook Weiner's hand on his way to the subway and exclaimed, "It's a second-chance city, man!"

Weiner, hands on his hips and smartphone strapped to his belt, told reporters he's "encouraged" by how willing voters have seemed to give him a second chance. His fellow politiciansand New York City's unforgiving tabloidshave so far seemed less receptive to his comeback attempt, however.

Sen. Charles Schumer, once Weiner's political ally and mentor, has stayed quiet on the announcement. "Shame on us," Gov. Andrew Cuomo . "I'm not asking people for endorsements," Weiner said on Thursday, adding that he wanted to prove himself.

Weiner announced his candidacy in , saying he would attempt a political comeback for the first time since it was made public that he sent lewd photos to an unknown number of women over the Internet while serving in Congress. The announcement video appears to have been posted earlier than he intended, as it was removed for a while after it first appeared. Weiner also did not emerge from his apartment on Wednesday to address his announcement, another unusual feature of his mayoral campaign rollout. Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Weiner's wife, appears in the video.