Apple's skinnier iPads and flashy big-screen iMac are sleek and stunning. But the tech giant is making a bigger strategic bet with next week's launch of Apple Pay — the mobile pay service aimed at turning your iPhone into your wallet.

The service, which goes live Monday and has hundreds of banks on board, is "hugely important" says Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett. It puts Apple in the middle of a wide range of consumer transactions, underscoring Apple's value as a brand and giving people a powerful new reason to buy iPhones, iPads and other gadgets.

Argentina launched its first domestically built communications satellite Thursday.

The ARSAT-1 satellite is the first to be constructed with local technology in Latin America. It was built by a crew of about 500 scientists over seven years at a cost of $250 million. The satellite was launched from a base in French Guiana and is to orbit 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth.

Cyprus' finance minister says the bailed-out country will manage to keep its debt well below projections by its international creditors.

Harris Georgiades says debt will peak this year at 105 percent of gross domestic product and will show a modest 2-percentage-point drop in 2015.

Only a couple of families have taken advantage of a new service available at a Saginaw funeral home.

Drive-thru viewings.

A British family were shocked to receive a text message apparently from their dead grandmother, who had been buried with her phone three years earlier.

Lesley Emerson died aged 59 in 2011, and was buried with some of her favorite things including her mobile phone.

Warsaw's National Museum has added state-of-the art multimedia and installed new settings to enhance Europe's only exhibition of Christian-era wall paintings saved by the Poles from flooding in Sudan in the 1960s.

Thanks to a donation by philanthropist Wojciech Pawlowski, the museum was able to arrange the fragile, damaged wall paintings in settings reminiscent of the 8th-century cathedral that they had adorned.

Al Pacino will return to Broadway next year in a new play by David Mamet written with the Oscar-winner expressly in mind.

Producers said Thursday that Pacino will star in "China Doll" directed by Pam MacKinnon starting in October 2015. Additional casting is to be announced later. Pacino will play a wealthy man about to retire and marry a younger woman when his plans are shaken by a phone call.

Apple unveiled a thinner iPad Thursday with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand. The company also released an update to its Mac operating system and introduced a high-resolution iMac model that might appeal to heavy watchers of television over the Internet.

The new iPad Air 2, at a quarter of an inch "thin," also adds many of the features previously available on iPhones. That includes the ability to take burst shots and slow-motion video, and unlock the device with a fingerprint ID sensor instead of a passcode.

If you've upgraded your iPhone or iPad to iOS 8, the new software update for Mac computers will seem familiar.

The Yosemite update to Apple's OS X system, available as a free download starting Thursday, adds several features to bring the Mac in line with last month's iOS 8 update for mobile devices. There's also new functionality to make Macs act more like iPhones.

Joan Rivers died of brain damage from low blood oxygen during a medical procedure to check out voice changes and reflux, the medical examiner's office ruled Thursday.

The comedian, who was 81, died Sept. 4 after she'd been hospitalized for about a week when she went into cardiac arrest during the procedure at a doctor's office.