The news at a glance

Tech: Apple pads its shareholders’ wallets

In a major shift from the Steve Jobs era, Apple announced this week that it would give some of its $100 billion cash pile to shareholders, said Jessica E. Vascellaro in The Wall Street Journal. The company will pay a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share beginning in July, and initiate a $10 billion stock buy-back program later this year. Jobs long argued that the company’s cash should be invested in growing the company; the last time Apple paid a dividend was December 1995, a year before Jobs returned to the company’s helm. But with record profits boosting Apple’s bottom line, shareholders have been “clamoring for a cut” of the company’s runaway success. Even with these payments and stock purchases, which will cost about $45 billion over three years, “we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business,” CEO Tim Cook said.

Apple used its announcement to make “an aggressive pitch for a corporate tax holiday,” said Brendan Sasso and Bernie Becker in TheHill​.com. The company, which has lobbied hard for a reduction in the 35 percent U.S. tax rate on overseas profits, said it intends to keep $60 billion of its cash parked offshore until the rate is lowered.

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Entertainment: Disney loses big on John Carter

Disney’s John Carter is “officially a money-wasting debacle,” said Paul Bond in The Hollywood Reporter. The studio said this week that it expected to lose $200 million on the big-budget flop, and would as a result post a loss of $80 million to $120 million for the second quarter. The film, about a Civil War–era soldier who battles aliens after being transported to Mars, cost $275 million to make and another $100 million to market, but earned just $30 million in its U.S. opening weekend. This is the fourth consecutive year the studio has had to take a large write-down because of a major box-office dud.

Bailouts: Government turns profit on mortgages

A mortgage bailout program initiated at the height of the economic crisis has turned out to be “less costly than originally feared,” said Glenn Somerville in Reuters.com. The Treasury Department said this week that it made $25 billion in profits from the sale of $225 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities it purchased in 2008 and 2009 to stabilize the housing market. Treasury official Mary Miller said that success marked “another important milestone in the wind-down of the government’s emergency financial crisis response efforts.”

Companies: UPS buys up a European rival

UPS, the world’s biggest delivery company, is buying Dutch rival TNT Express for $6.77 billion in what is “by far the company’s biggest deal ever,” said Samantha Bomkamp and Toby Sterling in the Associated Press. Europe’s No. 2 delivery company is “a valuable prize” that will allow Atlanta-based UPS to better compete with Germany’s DHL, the Continent’s current market leader. With the purchase, UPS’s international sales are expected to rise to 36 percent of its business, from 26 percent.

Baseball: Mets owners settle with Madoff trustee

The owners of the New York Mets “scored a major legal victory” this week when the trustee for Bernard Madoff’s victims abandoned the bulk of his claim against them, said Richard Sandomir and Ken Belson in The New York Times. Irving H. Picard had sought $1 billion from Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, arguing that they enriched themselves through Madoff’s Ponzi scheme despite warnings that he was a fraud. But on the eve of a federal trial, Picard settled for $162 million, and even that may be canceled out: Wilpon and Katz are seeking up to $178 million in reimbursement for their own losses in the collapse of Madoff’s scheme.