Brother, We Can Ask You to Spare a Dime

Civil Rights ▶ A Supreme Court move bolsters the rights of panhandlers ▶ “You cannot declare a downtown zone a no-free-speech zone”

Don Norton and his wife, Karen Otterson, have been arrested about 50 times while panhandling in downtown Springfield, Ill., over the past eight years. In 2013 they sued Springfield for infringing on their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. The city had passed an ordinance prohibiting verbal requests for money in the city’s historic district, just a short walk from Abraham Lincoln’s home, tomb, and presidential library. A federal appeals court took Norton and Otterson’s

At Apple’s annual developers conference last June, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook unveiled Apple Music, a $10-a-month streaming service meant to compete with the likes of Spotify and Pandora. Since then, Apple Music has received tepid reviews and achieved only a roughly 1 percent adoption rate among active Apple devices. Several of the executives brought in to steer the music strategy are gone.

At this year’s conference, Apple will begin the marketing blitz for a vastly different version of the streaming service, say three people familiar with its development. Better integration with itunes downloads; deeper onlineradio playlists; an interface people might actually like. Apple has been slow to adapt to the shift from music downloads to streaming, and this reset could signal an acknowledgment that it’s stumbled in integrating Beats Music, the streaming service it bought two years ago. An Apple spokesman declined to comment for this story.

Cook is counting on services like Apple Music for good news as slowing iphone sales batter the company’s stock. But such services, from Apple Maps to icloud to Siri, haven’t been its strong suit. “When it comes to software, Apple performs with less elegance. Apple Music is underwhelming,” says Colin Gillis, an