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Indian tax authorities and market regulator are considering widening their probe of United States trading giant Jane Street Group to investigate it for tax evasion in addition to an earlier charge of price rigging in the Bombay Stock Exchange’s benchmark Sensex, according to media reports.
The tax evasion charge comes on the heels of market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), seizing 48.43 billion rupees ($570m) and banning four Jane Street-related entities from operating in the market for alleged price manipulation in the National Stock Exchange (NSE).
SEBI’s order has roiled the Indian markets, raising questions about regulator surveillance and investor protection in the world’s largest options trading market. Trading in India’s weekly equity index options has slumped by a third on the ban on Jane Street, the Reuters news agency reported on Thursday.
Trading of equity options lets investors buy or sell a stock at a predetermined price and date. As the Indian market rapidly grew to handle more than half of all global options trades, retail investors entered the market too.
Questions of price manipulation have dogged this rapid rise but remained vacuous until a New York court case in April 2024, where Jane Street alleged that its rival, Millennium Partners, had stolen its algorithms that helped it make in the Indian options market. A whistleblower, Mayank Bansal, then made presentations to SEBI showing Jane Street’s trading patterns. Bansal had agreed to speak to Al Jazeera about his interaction with SEBI on the matter, but then backtracked.
On July 3, in a detailed interim order, the regulator said that “by preponderance of probability, there is no economic rationale that can account for this sudden burst of large and aggressive activity … other than the intent to manipulate the price of securities and index benchmark”.
SEBI has alleged that Jane Street accumulated large long positions in stocks that are a part of the NSE’s Bank Index and built large short positions in index options at the start of trade. Around market closing time, it would reverse its trades in the cash and futures segments, pushing down the index and earning large profits in the options segment.
This activity was blurred by its offshore entities making some of these trades.
“Lawyers [can] push back with SEBI on jurisdiction-related issues, but when underlying [Indian] securities are issued, SEBI can take action,” Joby Mathew, managing partner at the law firm Joby Mathew and Associates and a former legal officer at SEBI, told Al Jazeera.
Jane Street has disputed SEBI’s findings and has hired lawyers to represent it before SEBI in the case. It has deposited the 48.43 billion rupees ($563m) of allegedly ill-gotten gains in an account pending the investigation and final report.
“Such processes typically take eight to 24 months,” especially in “complex manipulation cases”, Sumit Agarwal, a former SEBI officer and cofounder of Regstreet Law Advisors, told Al Jazeera in an emailed response.
But the investigation can only be part of a broader questioning of Jane Street and the regulator’s role in identifying and curbing such trades sooner and protecting retail investors.
‘Highly speculative and volatile’
As India’s options market grew, retail investors were drawn to it, enticed by the growing volumes, the prospect of quick gains and less fettered trades than the equities market, where a rapidly rising stock could hit circuit breakers, leading to a halt in trading to prevent manipulation.
Retail investors were drawn to India’s burgeoning options market [File: Rajanish Kakade/AP Photo]
Mathew says his clients from the options trading segment range from students to award-winning cardiologists who may not have a refined knowledge of the market but were sold on the idea by traders or social media influencers. Most ended up losing money.
Deven Choksey, managing director at the Mumbai-based stock brokerage KR Choksey Shares and Securities, says retail investors form nearly half the Indian options market, while Jane Street and other sophisticated institutions form a little more. “It’s like a bullock cart facing a race car. Their meeting is bound to cause accidents.”
If Jane Street is found to have manipulated the market, its earnings would have come through losses for retail investors.
Bhargavi Zaveri, a financial regulations researcher formerly at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy and currently a doctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore, says retail investors have made losses in the options segment, but the total amount is not clear.
Identifying and compensating investors can be hard in such cases. So even if the final order goes against Jane Street and the 48.43 billion rupees fine goes into an investor protection fund, it may be hard to distribute it onwards to retail investors who incurred losses. The best protection may be to stem irregular trades early, experts say.
“SEBI has a surveillance system and they can well monitor the markets in a timely way.,” says Choksey.
SEBI’s interim order is based on trades made by Jane Street between January 1, 2023 and March 31, 2025, a period in which retail investors may have incurred substantial losses, going by SEBI’s estimates.
Regstreet’s Agarwal says, “SEBI’s own 2024 consultations flagged expiry day options as highly speculative and volatile.”
India has fortnightly expiry dates for options, which is when they have to be settled. That is when Jane Street allegedly manipulated prices.
In a February 6 letter, SEBI told Jane Street, “The above trading activity prima facie appears to be fraudulent and manipulative.” But it did not issue its order curbing Jane Street until July 3.
SEBI’s recent measures limiting weekly expiries, tightening spreads and higher margins “reflect a push for greater protection” for retail investors, Agarwal says.
But the best way to protect retail investors would be to have them trade separately from proprietary trading firms in the options segment, Choksey points out.
“India is unique … and in no market will you see so many retail investors. So, SEBI must create product differentiation by customer segment.” to protect retail investors Chiksey says.
Challenges in proving manipulation
In an internal email, Jane Street reportedly told employees it was using “basic index arbitrage trading” and called SEBI’s allegations “extremely inflammatory”. It has hired Mumbai-based law firm, Khaitan and Co, to represent it before SEBI.
Proving price manipulation involves showing intent, which can be hard, and experts are divided on whether a SEBI investigation will be able to demonstrate that. “Trading to incur losses makes no sense, and so it indicates manipulation,” says Mathew, the former legal officer.
But NUS’s Zaveri says it is not so clear. “I think three problems are being conflated here. One, the size of the options segment being manifold the underlying cash segment. Two, that retail investors have made losses on the options segment, which I’m not sure have been quantified. Three, Jane Street arbitraged between an illiquid cash and highly liquid options segment.”
According to her, the three occurrences may not prove the intent to manipulate.
Under Indian law, proving manipulation is challenging and “Jane Street can argue its expiry day trades were legitimate index arbitrage recognised by regulators, making a manipulation finding difficult without clear intent evidence,” Regstreet’s Agarwal says.
Any action by SEBI could affect Jane Street’s reputation. Last month, an investigation by Bloomberg found that Jane Street cofounder Robert Granieri was duped into funding weapons for an attempted coup to overthrow the government in South Sudan.
If SEBI’s final order lays out any action against Jane Street, “they may well have to disclose it in their filings, which will affect them elsewhere in the world”, says Mathew.
Amazon Web Services joined the agentic AI frenzy in a big way this week, revealing at a New York City event Wednesday a host of services and tools dubbed Agentcore that let technologists build and deploy so-called AI agents capable of automating internal tasks while potentially overhauling the way consumers interact with online businesses too.
These agents, to many in the tech industry, are the next evolution in our new AI-powered future, where artificial intelligence not only acts as an assistant, but can autonomously complete complex multi-step actions with just some human intervention in sensitive sectors like healthcare, and no human intervention in lower-risk areas.
But at least in the short term, the real battle between AWS and agentic AI competitors may depend less on technology differentiation, and more on who employs the most quality talent to help guide large corporations on where to even begin with AI agents.
Businesses “are frustrated because they want someone to tell them what to do and how to do it,” Dave Nicholson, chief technology advisor at The Futurum Group, told Fortune. “There isn’t enough [talent] to go around. Humans are the bottleneck.”
Nicholson added that AWS and other cloud and large tech companies will need to heavily lean on partner companies to assist with customer education and implementation too.
The business case for agents was pushed into the forefront last year by Salesforce, with the announcement of a new division it calls Agentforce. Google, OpenAI and other cloud and technology players have since rushed to announce AI agent tools and services geared toward corporations. On Thursday, a day after AWS’s showed off its agent tools, OpenAI announced a new, general purpose agent for users of its ChatGPT product.
Fear of missing out
With just about every CEO these days under pressure to craft an AI strategy, the incoming AI agents may be poised to capitalize on the situation.
“This is the highest level of ‘fear of missing out’ ever among behemoths in the IT industry right now,” Nicholson said. “These are existential decisions being made at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.”
In an interview with Fortune after his keynote presentation announcing a new in-house collection of agent-building services dubbed AgentCore as well as a marketplace for agents, AWS VP of agentic AI, Swami Sivasubramanian said that Fortune 500 execs whose companies don’t start experimenting with the technology risk missing out on a transformational moment as pivotal as the creation of the internet.
“Agents are fundamentally going to change how we work and how we live,” Sivasubramanian said when asked how execs at Fortune 500 companies can be sure that their investments in building or deploying AI agents isn’t supplanted by a new shiny technology of the moment next year. The executive provided an example of how AI technologies will make it feasible for an agent to, for example, not only plan an itinerary for a trip, but do all of the bookings too.
“You can give it a high level objective, like, ‘Hey, create me a 10 day itinerary in December to visit Australia,’” he said. “It actually understands the objective. Breaks it down into…I need a flight, I need activities to go see in these cities, and then, based on my preferences, it creates a customized itinerary, and actually also secures reservations by calling APIs.”
That’s the type of personal, tangible, example that gives this AWS executive and other proponents of AI agents, the belief that many customer experiences can be overhauled, or created from scratch, with this technology — in ways that might even be hard to envision now.
Agentic rolemodels needed
Slick as some of these scenarios may sound however, the reality is that there are currently few examples of corporations using agents at massive scale. The green field of opportunity is sure to be attractive for some, but it’s also a big challenge for the companies selling agentic products and tools since there are not many real-world examples to guide or inspire.
Amazon Web Services’ market leadership in cloud computing should serve as some advantage, providing a large existing customer base to sell to. And because those companies’ operations are already dependent on AWS, they have more patience for any bumps Amazon experiences as it refines its AI agent business.
“They’re more likely to get two or three strikes,” Nicholson said of AWS and its AI agent rollout.
But it’s an open question whether AWS’ initial focus on heavily marketing its new agentic tools to software developers versus the executives with the purse strings will prove problematic.
“They have disjointed messaging,” Mark Beccue, an analyst at the research firm Omdia, told TechTarget. “When talking about agents, you must have the complete story.”
AWS’ Sivasubramanian said that most C-suite customers that he meets with naturally look inward to how their own organization runs when considering where and how to deploy AI agents first to help automate, or reduce the time to complete, boring, repetitive tasks.
This, of course, raises the question of when and how AI agents will disrupt or displace jobs and in which areas. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently weighed in on the overall AI boom in an employee memo, saying that while these technologies will both eliminate current roles while creating new ones, “we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce [over the next few years] as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.” On Thursday, a day after AWS’ agent-focused summit, the company carried out layoffs of at least hundreds of employees.
A day earlier, Sivasubramanian, perhaps not surprisingly, struck an optimistic tone when discussing a new world full of AI agents that now Amazon — and many rivals — are rushing to bring to fruition.
“Yes, in the short term, if you look at [past] transformations, there were actually changes on the specific job categories [in which people worked], “but then we as humans have really adapted to these changes and then started working on different things. You don’t find people who are doing Y2K engineering anymore.”
The identities of more than 100 British officials, including members of the special forces and MI6, were compromised in a data breach that also put thousands of Afghans at risk of reprisal, it can be reported.
The latest fallout from the breach was kept secret by an injunction until Thursday, when the order was lifted in part by a High Court judge.
That allowed media organisations to reveal that detailed case notes in the database contained secret personal data of special forces and spies.
The government had already admitted on Tuesday the data of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had worked with the British during the 20-year war in Afghanistan and had applied to resettle in the UK had been inadvertently leaked.
Many were judged to be at risk of serious harm or even death as the Taliban sought retribution against those who had worked with the British government during the conflict.
This was part of the reason the information was protected by a so-called “super-injunction” – a kind of gagging order that prevents the reporting of even the existence of the injunction.
The data breach occurred in February 2022 but was not discovered by the government until August 2023, when someone in Afghanistan who had obtained the data posted part of it on Facebook and indicated he could release the rest.
The BBC revealed on Wednesday that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had offered to expedite a review of the individual’s application and brought him to the country after he posted the data – a sequence of events that government sources said was “essentially blackmail”.
The MoD declined to comment on the actions of the individual but said that “anyone who comes to the UK under any Afghan relocation schemes” must go through “robust security checks in order to gain entry”.
The discovery of the breach in 2023 forced the government to covertly set up the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) – a resettlement scheme for those affected, who were not told about the breach despite the risk to their security.
The scheme has already allowed 4,500 Afghans and family members to move to the UK and a further 2,400 people are expected, at an estimated cost of £850m.
The accidental leak was the result of someone working at UK Special Forces headquarters in London inadvertently emailing more than 30,000 resettlement applications to an individual outside of government, thinking that he was sending data on just 150 people.
After the lifting of the super-injunction on Tuesday, a secondary injunction had prevented the revelations about special forces and security services personal being compromised.
But that was also lifted on Thursday that barristers representing both the MoD and a group of media organisations reached a compromise that meant journalists could report the additional facts.
Defence Secretary John Healey told Parliament on Tuesday that the breach was a “serious departmental error” and acknowledged that it was “just one of many data losses” relating to the Afghan relocation schemes.
The shadow defence secretary, James Cartlidge, apologised on behalf of the former Conservative government, which was in power when the leak was discovered.
The MoD has refused to say how many people in Afghanistan may have been harmed as a result of the data breach. The Taliban government said on Thursday that it had not arrested or monitored Afghans affected by the leak.
An MoD spokesperson said: “It’s longstanding policy of successive governments to not comment on special forces.
“We take the security of our personnel very seriously, particularly of those in sensitive positions, and always have appropriate measures in place to protect their security.”
President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has seen division within its ranks of late on a number of issues ranging from the bombing of Iran and the “Big Beautiful Bill” to the controversy around the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Now, we can add another to the list: The question of whether it’s “fair use” for AI companies to use copyrighted material without permission to train their AI models.
In the view of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley – widely seen as a MAGA ally, though he has at times broken with President Trump on certain issues – the answer is no.
At a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Sen. Hawley on Tuesday (July 16), legal experts accused AI companies such as Meta and Anthropic of outright piracy in their efforts to hoover up as much data as possible for their generative AI tools.
“As AI companies scrambled to outpace each other, many of them turned to illegal pirate websites – massive repositories of tens of millions of stolen copyrighted works – to get text for their AI models,” lawyer Maxwell Pritt of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP told the subcommittee.
“By pirating these works for free rather than buying or licensing them from copyright owners, AI companies have built a multibillion-dollar industry generally without paying a single cent to either the creatives whose works are powering their products or the publishers responsible for introducing and providing those works to the public.”
Pritt accused the US’s leading AI companies of “what is likely the largest domestic piracy of intellectual property in our nation’s history. That piracy includes hundreds of terabytes of data and many millions of works, including, for example, at least 12 books authored by members of this subcommittee.”
Pritt, who said he’s litigating cases against AI companies such as Meta, OpenAI, GitHub and Midjourney, said company documents show that, at Meta, “Mark Zuckerberg himself made the call” to pirate vast amounts of copyrighted material.
Meanwhile, documents at Anthropic – which is fighting a copyright infringement case brought by music publishers including Universal Music Group – “show a blatant disregard for our copyright laws, preferring to pirate books to avoid or delay the ‘legal/practice/business slog,’ as Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei put it.”
“As AI companies scrambled to outpace each other, many of them turned to illegal pirate websites – massive repositories of tens of millions of stolen copyrighted works – to get text for their AI models.”
Maxwell Pritt, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP
Pritt presented internal communications from Meta showing staff were aware that their practices were illegal.
“It’s the piracy (and us knowing and being accomplices) that’s the issue,” one Meta employee was quoted as saying, while another wrote: “If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as [book piracy site] LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.”
Sen. Hawley made no secret of where he stands on the issue.
“AI companies are training their models on stolen material, period… And we’re not talking about these companies simply scouring the internet for what’s publicly available. We’re talking about piracy,” Sen. Hawley said.
“Are we going to protect [Americans’ creative community], or are we going to allow a few mega-corporations to vacuum it all up, digest it, and make billions of dollars in profits – maybe trillions – and pay nobody for it? That’s not America.”
Hawley’s stance places him at odds with President Trump, who has been seen as siding with tech companies in the AI race. The Republicans’ recent “Big Beautiful Bill” initially included a provision that would have prevented US states from regulating AI at the state level, before being stripped out of the bill.
In many of the lawsuits filed by copyright holders, AI companies are defending themselves by claiming that their unauthorized use of copyrighted content amounts to “fair use” under US copyright law. Two recent rulings by federal judges came down on opposite sides of that argument.
In a case brought by book authors against Anthropic, Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California concluded that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the books did indeed count as “fair use” – but its use of pirated books did not count as fair use. Anthropic will now have to face a hearing to determine the size of the damages it must pay.
“Are we going to protect [Americans’ creative community], or are we going to allow a few mega-corporations to vacuum it all up, digest it, and make billions of dollars in profits – maybe trillions – and pay nobody for it? That’s not America.”
Sen. Josh Hawley
Days later, in a case brought by comedian Sarah Silverman and other book authors against Meta, Judge Vince Chhabria of the same district court concluded that training AI models on copyrighted content taken without permission is not fair use – though he ruled against Silverman and the other authors on the grounds that they had made the wrong arguments to prove their case.
David Sacks, President Trump’s AI and crypto czar, has come down on the side of the judge in the Anthropic case who ruled in favor of the “fair use” argument.
“It’s very important that we end up with a sensible fair-use definition like the one the judge has come up with in this Anthropic case, because otherwise we will lose the AI race to China,” Sacks said on a recent episode of the podcast he co-hosts.
At the congressional hearing Tuesday, Pritt argued the AI companies had foreseen these court cases and always planned to use the “fair use” defense. After being caught “flat-footed” by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, AI companies found themselves in a race to release generative AI products, he said.
“The cost-benefit analysis was simple… Expend time and resources to legally acquire the rights to copyrighted books and articles from those who own the rights; or pirate them all for free now from illegal websites and pay litigation damages later – or, even more appealing, pay nothing at all if they can convince the courts to excuse their unprecedented commercial piracy as fair use.”Music Business Worldwide
I hung up the phone with a giant grin plastered across my face. One of my oldest friends, who I’ve known since I was 14, just called to tell me that he was getting married! And the wedding was going to take place in just a few months in July. In Barcelona.
There was just one slight problem. I was nowhere near Barcelona. In fact, I was exactly 7,919 miles away on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Which meant that I needed to book a flight literally across the world during the busiest travel season of the year.
As you can guess, flying 30 hours from Honolulu to Barcelona was not going to be cheap. But I knew exactly what to do. After all, I’ve been flying around the world for almost a decade. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two.
It was time to put my travel hacking skills to the test. So I got to work.
How I Booked a First Class Ticket Around the World for $5.60
With just a few months until the wedding, I knew I needed to book a flight fast. Unfortunately, Honolulu to Barcelona is not an easy route to fly. Without a direct route, I was looking at two layovers and almost 30 hours of travel time.
Option 1: Pay $500 or so for the flight in cattle class. 30 hours from airport to airport? Hell to the no.
Option 2: Pay $8k for a first class ticket. Yeah, I don’t think so.
Option 3: Pay 5 bucks and let my points do the heavy lifting. Yes please!
Now look, I’m not against flying economy. If I can score a good deal and fall asleep, then I’m happy to pay for a cheap seat. But with 30 hours of travel time ahead of me, and with enough long-haul flights behind me, I knew it was going to be one long, hellish ride in economy.
So I checked my points balance to see what I had.
Travel hacking isn’t just about collecting miles. It’s about knowing when, where and how to maximize your points in order to save the most on travel.
Throughout the years, Chase has been my primary bank of choice. I have their Sapphire Reserve, Preferred, Ink Business Plus and MileagePlus Explorer cards. Come to think of it, that probably makes me the ultimate Chase fanboy.
And as a result, I’ve racked up millions of points over the years. And these were points that I could use towards my flight to Barcelona.
See, it’s not necessarily about getting points to prepare for a specific trip. It’s about collecting points for the sake of having them on hand to use when special or extenuating circumstances come around.
So, What, Exactly, Is Travel Hacking?
Travel hacking is a strategic way of accumulating award points and then redeeming them in a way that gets you the most bank for your buck. And sometimes you can even get all bang without spending a buck at all.
Which, yep, means free—or nearly free—travel. I’m talking free flights, free upgrades to first class and even free hotel stays.
Travel hacking is more than just collecting frequent flyer miles and hotel points. It’s about knowing when, where and how to maximize those points in order to save big on travel.
Once you have enough points, you’ll be able to redeem them for discounted or free flights, also known as award fares. Essentially, you can think of your points as a special currency.
Trust me, travel hacking is easy to master. You can use your points to unlock a world of cheap travel, as long as you’re strategic about it. To be totally honest, getting the points is the easy part. The real trick lies in learning how best to redeem them.
Step 1: Find the Airlines with the Best Routes Available
So, my first step was to figure out which airlines flew from Honolulu to Barcelona. And that’s where flight comparison websites like Google Flights and Skyscanner really shine. They search through multiple travel sites to show airlines that fly the best route for the most affordable price.
In this case, price wasn’t so much of an issue, since I knew I wanted to redeem points to pay for it. So, mostly, I was looking to see which airlines flew the most efficient route. It was a long flight, so finding an easy flight path was important.
I found a few flight options that looked appealing, but they were pretty much all on either United Airlines or Turkish Airlines, which is actually just a partner of United.
So United it was.
Step 2: Look for Different Ways to Book Award Fares
The fastest way to redeem your points is to book an award flight is through your credit card’s online portal. You can search dozens of airlines, hotels and activities in one go. And, if you don’t have enough points available, you can spend what you have and charge the rest to your card.
But booking through the online portal comes with disadvantages. The value of the point is fixed, so the required number of points could fluctuate depending on the flight price. Under most circumstances, you should never do this. They almost never offer the best deal, but I always check it just to get a baseline idea of what a “regular” award fare would look like.
Knowing that I would be redeeming my Chase points, I checked their booking portal to see what they were offering. And, as I expected, Chase’s point valuation was too low. They wanted nearly 300,000 points for a mixed-class flight in business (a mix of economy and business seating) and more than 900,000 for a flight in first! That’s way more than I was willing to part with—and I knew I could do better. A lot better.
By doing a little of my own research, I also learned that these business class flights were actually in United Polaris. And while there is a slight difference in service, Polaris First and Polaris Business are essentially the same product. For those who want to get technical, they are different flight classes, yes, but really, I consider any seat in Polaris to be first class.
Inside the Chase Ultimate Rewards Booking Portal. These Turkish Airlines flights are actually run by United
Another way to redeem points is to transfer them to your airlines loyalty program. This turns your reward points directly into frequent flyer miles that can be used towards the flight purchase or an upgrade with that airline.
But, when booking a flight using frequent flyer miles, flexibility is key. The airline might enforce blackout dates or have limited seat availability for award travel. So it’s best to keep your travel dates open.
And while you’re more likely to get a better return by transferring the miles, it’s not always the case. You’ll need to do the math to see where you get more bang for your buck.
Step 3: Use Point Valuations to Find the Best Award Fare
Knowing that United had the best flight between HNL and BCN, and knowing that the Chase Booking Portal didn’t offer a very good point valuation on this flight, I decided to check the United website directly.
You see, the value of a point depends on the credit card and the frequent flyer program. For example, Chase Ultimate Rewards points can be redeemed for between 1 and 1.5 cents each if booking through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal.
But here’s the thing—you might be able to stretch your points even further by transferring them into a frequent flyer program with an airline. And that’s exactly what I did.
According to everybody’s favorite tipster, The Points Guy, Chase Ultimate Rewards points should have a value of 2.1 cents each when transferred to an airline. That’s more than twice the potential value than if you book through the portal!
Using this baseline of 2.1 cents per point, I could make sure the flight I redeemed either matched or exceeded that valuation. And since I bank with Chase, all my points transfer to the United MileagePlus program at a 1:1 ratio.
Step 4: Book the Flight with the Best Point Valuation
So, how did my points break down?
On the United website, my flight cost $8,967 one way. I then searched for an award fare (which United makes very easy), and there were quite a few options. I could spend 70,000 points for a ticket in economy or 165,000 points for a ticket in United Polaris—their version of first/business class with lie-flat beds.
HNL to BCN in cash
Based on the 2.1 cent valuation and 1:1 transfer ratio, if I booked using 165,000 points, the cash value of the flight dropped down to $3,360.
In other words, an $8,967 ticket in United Polaris actually only cost $3,360 if I paid using points directly through United MileagePlus. But in reality, the flight only cost me $5.60.
HNL to BCN award fares
I logged into my Chase account, transferred the points to my United MileagePlus account (it’s an instantaneous transfer), and booked the flight for 165,000 points—all of which I earned absolutely free.
After a few clicks, 165,000 points and a five-buck credit card charge, I had a first-class flight to Barcelona, all the way from Hawaii. Not bad, eh?
How to Easily Earn Miles and Points
This kind of travel is actually really easy. Yes, it takes time to accumulate points, but if you start soon—even if you don’t have a trip planned—you’ll have the miles on hand for whenever you decide to take off in the future.
But how do you even earn those points in the first place? Despite what you might think, you don’t actually have to travel in order to get them!
1. Wait for a Big Sign-Up Bonus with a Credit Card
The fastest way to earn reward points is to sign up with a credit card that has a generous signup bonus for new customers. The number of reward points differs between companies and can change depending on the time of year. So it’s always best to wait for a special deal that offers the maximum number of bonus points.
Keep in mind that you’ll only earn the points after spending a certain dollar amount in the first few months. But if you score a good signup bonus, and you know you can meet the minimum spend requirement, there’s almost no reason not to.
Something really important to note is that signing up for credit cards does not negatively impact your credit score. Many people don’t sign up for credit cards because they think it’s going to hurt their credit score, but that’s actually not true. You might get a small ding on your credit report and, okay, your score might drop by a couple points (literally, just a couple points), but that’s short-lived.
Since credit scores are highly influenced by your credit utilization, opening a new credit card can actually increase your credit score. With a higher credit limit and a lower utilization percentage, there is actually more to gain.
Many travel hackers—myself included—open and close credit card accounts on a rotating basis, just for the sake of earning sign-up bonuses, all while earning potentially millions of points per year (seriously). And they do this while maintaining excellent credit scores.
2. Earn Points on Everyday Purchases
Once you have one of these credit cards, you should be charging literally everything to your card. Most offer at least one point per dollar spent. However, there are other cards that will double or even triple the number of points you earn.
Some cards—like my personal favorite, the Chase Sapphire Reserve—offer three points for every dollar you spend on travel. So, whether you’re taking an Uber or booking a flight, you stand to earn three times as many points when you book on your card.
Other cards offer similar multiplier bonuses when you charge at bars, restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations, office supply stores, and more. Each card offers different bonuses, so it’s important to do your research and get the cards that make most sense for how and where you spend.
This is by far one of the easiest ways to maximize your points. By simply using your credit card on ordinary purchases, you can rack up mass amounts of points in a short period of time.
3. Shop Through the Online Shopping Portal
Almost every airline loyalty program or credit card company has an online shopping portal that connects directly the brands and shops you know and love. If you’re a big online shopper, then you can earn bonus miles just by clicking through the portal first. This is another one of the easiest ways to earn points without ever taking a flight.
Inside the Chase Shopping Portal
Living on the east coast of the States, United was the airline that most often connected me to the places I wanted and needed to go. So I installed the MileagePlus Shopping extension in my browser, and now, every time I visit a website to buy something, it shows me if there’s a multiplier available for that merchant.
This is when things can start to get really lucrative. When you combine your credit card multipliers with loyalty program multipliers, you can earn a heck of a lot more points.
For example, United MileagePlus offers three points per dollar on all purchases made on Booking.com. So, if you book on a credit card that’s giving you three points per dollar, like the Chase Sapphire Reserve, and you book it through the MileagePlus portal, you’re actually earning SIX POINTS PER DOLLAR on that transaction. That kind of return is insane, and if you think about point valuations, instead of earning the original 1 or 1.5 cents per dollar, you’re earning more than 10 times more at 12.6 cents per dollar.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The MileagePlus Chrome Extension lets me know when point multipliers are available. I’ll earn 6 points/dollar on these purchases!
There are a lot of ways to earn points, but by far, the easiest is through credit card signups, bonuses and strategic spending. These days, anytime I spend a single dollar, I think about how I might be able to maximize that dollar for points. Instead of purchasing blindly, I’m more calculated in how I spend my money, and which credit cards I’m using, which means I’m getting the most bang for every buck I spend.
It might sound intimidating at first, but you have to start somewhere. And when you’re on a 30 hour flight across the world, relaxing in first class with a lay-flat bed and free booze, you’ll never find yourself wondering, “What’s the point?”
Jeremy Scott Foster is an adventure-junkie, gear expert and travel photographer based in Southern California. Previously nomadic, he’s been to ~50 countries and loves spending time outdoors. You can usually find him on the trail, on the road, jumping from bridges or hustling on his laptop working to produce the best travel and outdoors content today.
It was just a year ago that ZF Friedrichshafen introduced an all-new generation of sleek, performance-focused e-drives. Sized only a touch larger than a can of soda, the 48-V Centrix mid-motor disappeared away into the bike frame where it was barely identifiable to the untrained eye. This year, ZF has upgraded the Centrix spec sheet, rewriting a number of major categories that aren’t “dimensions” or “weight.” The updated Centrix packs 25% more power and boosts torque to triple-digit territory, making its performance-to-size even sharper out on the road and trail.
As we looked at last year, the Centrix motor is something of a bottom bracket beer can, extending roughly the same length as a 12-oz can while swelling less than an inch (2.5 cm) more in diameter. When it debuted, it packed 600 watts of peak power, along with an impressive 90 Nm (66 lb-ft) of torque, a solid bit of twist for an ebike motor.
A year later, ZF ups both figures. Torque essentially follows the greater bike motor market into triple-digit territory, joining the likes of the DJI Avinox and Mahle M40 motors in hitting a 105-Nm (77-lb-ft) ceiling. Peak power takes an even more dramatic leap, spiking from 600 watts to 750 watts via the update.
Along with boost, the new “Race” profile pushes the ZF e-drive up to maximum performance
ZF Friedrichshafen
ZF’s one-two increase keeps the Centrix closely competitive with the greater ebike drive market. Other drives have also recently made the jump to or past 750 watts, including Bosch’s 750-W Performance Line CX-R and Mahle’s 850-W M40 (linked above).
Even more impressively, ZF has increased those numbers without increasing the Centrix motor’s compact packaging. The drive unit maintains its soda can size and weighs the same 5.5 lb (2.5 kg) as it did a year ago. In fact, no new hardware is necessary at all and current ZF Centrix owners can access the upgraded output via an app update.
At just 2.5 kg, the ultra-compact ZF Centrix motor fits neatly in the bike frame
ZF
For reference, the DJI Avinox and Mahle M40 both weigh in right around that same 5.5 lb, but each has a more traditional oblong shape that creates a beefy bottom bracket area that clearly distinguishes ebike from standard bike. ZF is in line with the likes of TQ and Star Union in incorporating a round, handheld form factor that better hides away between the cranks.
Cyclists will be able to access the Centrix’s full power and torque by selecting the newly added “Race” profile in the ZF Ride app. It kicks open the full 105 Nm and 750 watts for performance-oriented mapping right up to the regulated top speed of 15.5 mph (25 km/h), at which point pedal assistance cuts out.
The new “Wet” profile in ZF’s Bike Eco System reduces power and adjusts output for slick, tricky terrain
ZF Friedrichshafen
Also newly added to the e-drive control system is a “Wet” profile that scales power and acceleration back for wet riding conditions and a “Ride” profile designed to provide an optimal level of pedal assistance and control through dry conditions.
ZF began series production of the Centrix drive system this past (Northern Hemisphere) spring, just ahead of announcing the updates at last month’s Eurobike 2025 show.
new video loaded: U.K. Plans to Lower Voting Age in Major Electoral Reform
transcript
transcript
U.K. Plans to Lower Voting Age in Major Electoral Reform
The British government said it wants to lower the voting age to 16 as part of a plan that has been described as the country’s largest expansion of voting rights in decades.
“I’m really happy about it because I’ve always been kind of frustrated just watching politics and not being able to do anything. And I know loads of other people who feel the same, who are really interested in politics and get frustrated at watching all the older people vote. And I just think it would be really amazing because so many of these policies affect younger people.” “I think it’s really important to give the younger generation an opinion and a vote on a lot of the issues that are facing the U.K. today. So yeah, if I was back in my day, if I was 16 or 17 and I got the opportunity to vote, I think that would be really, really good. It would have got me thinking about the political issues, the economical issues as well, at an early age.” “I think it’s a great opportunity for us to have more of a say in our future. And because at the end of the day, we decide who we vote in, and then this affects our decisions that affect us, whether it be health care, education and ultimately, jobs in the end.”
Recent episodes in International
International video coverage from The New York Times.
International video coverage from The New York Times.
