Letters

Midterm Disinformation Has Taken Over Pennsylvania

WEST CHESTER, Pa. — Disinformation has long been a feature of American politics. Mudslinging, smear campaigns, dirty tricks. Yet wading through the muck ahead of this year’s midterm elections in one fiercely contested state, Pennsylvania, shows just how thoroughly it now warps the American democratic process.

In July, a tweet made the rounds spreading a falsehood about voting. “BREAKING: Pennsylvania will not be accepting mail-in ballots,” declared someone using an account called the Donald J. Trump Tracker.

In September, mysterious letters began arriving in mailboxes in Chester County, on the old Main Line west of Philadelphia, falsely telling people that their votes might not have been counted in the last election.

No, the Democratic candidate for United States Senate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, does not have tattoos of the Crips, the notorious street gang from Los Angeles, as Newt Gingrich said on Fox.

contentious primaries, Pennsylvanians have experienced a deluge of false or misleading posts, photographs and videos on social media, as well as increasingly partisan, bitter and at times unhinged claims on television, radio and live streams to a degree that no one recalled seeing before.

“I’m not saying the politics was ever, you know, perfect,” Michael Nutter, the mayor of Philadelphia from 2008 to 2016, said in an interview, lamenting the seemingly bottomless depth of the problem.

“I think what’s changed is you go back 100 years and you’d have had to put a whole lot more effort into spreading lies,” he said. “Now, you can just push a button.”

FactCheck.org.

A lot of attention has focused on a stroke that Mr. Fetterman suffered in May, just as he clinched the Democratic nomination. The stroke left him with an auditory processing disorder, a condition that affects the brain’s ability to filter and interpret sounds, which Republicans have said makes him unfit for office. His speech has also become more halting, and he stumbles over his words, as he did multiple times in the debate last week against his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, the television personality known as Dr. Oz.

Opponents used his verbal gaffes in misleading ways. A video montage by a Republican campaign operative, Greg Price, exaggerated the effects of the stroke, while a Twitter account impersonating BuzzFeed falsely claimed that Mr. Fetterman had apologized for urinating on a campaign staffer. Mr. Price did not respond to requests for comment.

Other false claims have, again, questioned the machines that count votes, while a recent flurry of posts on Telegram, the app created in Russia, have incorrectly accused the state’s top election official of not complying with legal rulings about mail-in ballots. ActiveFence, a cybersecurity company, said that these claims have spread across platforms, garnering tens of thousands of impressions.

Jill Greene, the state representative for Common Cause, the national good-government organization, said that the many unfounded and untruthful claims posed a challenge for voters.

pledged to remove or marginalize false posts ahead of the midterms.

A doctored post on Facebook, to cite one of scores of examples, showed Mr. Oz kneeling to kiss the star of Donald J. Trump along the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (In the original, he was kissing his own star.)

being repeatedly told that the American election process is deeply corrupted.

In fact, Mr. Mastriano’s candidacy has from its inception been propelled by his role in disputing the 2020 presidential election lost by Mr. Trump.

county by county, but election experts say they do not reflect factors as benign as changes in addresses.

“They’re in search of solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist,” Kyle Miller, a Navy veteran and state representative for Protect Democracy, a national advocacy organization, said in an interview in Harrisburg. “They are basing this on faulty data and internet rumors.”

Some Republican lawmakers have leaned on false claims to call for changes to rules about mail-in ballots and other measures intended to make it easier for people to vote. Several counties have already reversed some of the decisions, including the number and location of drop boxes for ballots.

Mr. Miller, among others, warned that the flurry of false claims about balloting could be a trial run for challenging the results of the presidential election in 2024, in which Pennsylvania could again be a crucial swing state.

In Chester County, a largely white region that borders Delaware and Maryland that is roughly split between Republicans and Democrats, the effort to sow confusion came the old-fashioned way: in the mail.

Letters dated Sept. 12 began arriving in mailboxes across the county, warning people that their votes in the 2020 presidential election might not have counted. “Because you have a track record of consistently voting, we find it unusual that your record indicates that you did not vote,” the letter, which was unsigned, said.

The sender called itself “Data Insights,” based in the county seat of West Chester, though no known record of such a company exists, according to county officials. The letters did include copies of the recipients’ voting records. The letters urged recipients to write to the county commissioners or attend the commission’s meetings in the county seat of West Chester, in September and October. Dozens of recipients did.

The county administrator, Robert J. Kagel, tried to assure them that their votes were actually counted. He urged anyone concerned to contact the county’s voter services department.

Even so, at county meetings in September and October, speaker after speaker lined up to question the letter and the ballot process generally — and to air an array of grievances and conspiracy theories.

They included the discredited claims of the film “2000 Mules” that operatives have been stuffing boxes for mail-in ballots. One attendee warned that votes were being tabulated by the Communist Party of China or the World Economic Forum.

“I don’t know where my vote is,” another resident, Barbara Ellis of Berwyn, told the commissioners in October. “I don’t know if it was manipulated in the machines, in another country.”

As of Oct. 20, 59 people in Chester County had contacted officials with concerns raised in the letter, but in each case, it was determined that the voters’ ballots had been cast and counted, said Rebecca Brain, a county spokesman.

Who exactly sent the letters remains a mystery, which only fuels more conspiracy theories.

“It seems very official,” Charlotte Valyo, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party in the county, said of the letter. She described it as part of “an ongoing, constant campaign to undermine the confidence in our voting system.” The county’s Republican Party did not respond to a request for comment.

Disinformation may not be the only cause of the deepening partisan chasm in the state — or the nation — but it has undoubtedly worsened it. The danger, Ms. Valyo warned, was discouraging voting by sowing distrust in the ability of election officials to tally the votes.

“People might think, ‘Why bother, if they’re that messed up?’”

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Impac Mortgage Holdings, Inc. Announces Completion of Exchange Offers Relating to its Preferred Stock

IRVINE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Impac Mortgage Holdings, Inc. (NYSE American: IMH) (the “Company”) today announced the completion of its previously announced offers to each holder of the Company’s 9.375% Series B Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Stock, par value $0.01 per share (“Series B Preferred Stock”) and each holder of the Company’s 9.125% Series C Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Stock, par value $0.01 per share (the “Series C Preferred Stock,” and together with the Series B Preferred Stock, the “Preferred Stock”) to exchange all outstanding shares of Preferred Stock for certain stock and warrant consideration (the “Exchange Offers”).

In conjunction with the closing of the Exchange Offers, the Company will issue approximately (A) (i) 6,142,213 shares of Common Stock and (ii) 13,823,340 shares of the Company’s 8.25% Series D Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Stock, par value $0.01 per share (the “New Preferred Stock”) in exchange for the shares of Series B Preferred Stock tendered in the Exchange Offer for the Series B Preferred Stock, and (B) (i) 1,188,106 shares of Common Stock, (ii) 950,471 shares of New Preferred Stock, and (iii) 1,425,695 Warrants to purchase the same number of shares of Common Stock in exchange for the shares of Series C Preferred Stock tendered in the Exchange Offer for the Series C Preferred Stock.

In addition, in connection with the petitions (the “Plaintiff Series B Award Motions”) for a court award of attorney’s fees, expenses or other monetary award to be deducted and paid from the Company’s payment of distributions or other payments to the holders of the Company’s Series B Preferred Stock in the matter Curtis J. Timm, et al. v Impac Mortgage Holdings, Inc. et al. (the “Maryland Action”), the Company will deposit, no later than November 2, 2022, approximately (i) 13,311,840 shares of New Preferred Stock and (ii) 4,437,280 shares of the Company’s Common Stock in the custody of a third party custodian or escrow agent (the “Escrow Shares”). The allocation of the Escrow Shares will be made by instruction from the Circuit Court of Baltimore City upon final disposition of all outstanding matters in the Maryland Action, including the Plaintiff Series B Award Motions.

D.F. King & Co., Inc. served as the Information Agent and Solicitation Agent for the Exchange Offers and the accompanying solicitation of consents from the holders of Preferred Stock, and American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC served as the Exchange Agent.

This announcement is for informational purposes only and shall not constitute an offer to purchase or a solicitation of an offer to sell the shares of Preferred Stock, an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any shares of the Company’s Common Stock, par value $0.01 per share, warrants to purchase Common Stock, or shares of the Company’s 8.25% Series D Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Stock, par value $0.01 per share, or a solicitation of the related consents. The Exchange Offers were made only through, and pursuant to the terms and conditions set forth in, the Company’s Schedule TO, Prospectus/Consent Solicitation and related Letters of Transmittal and Consents.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements, some of which are based on various assumptions and events that are beyond our control, may be identified by reference to a future period or periods or by the use of forward-looking terminology, such as “may,” “capable,” “will,” “intends,” “believe,” “expect,” “likely,” “potentially,” “appear,” “should,” “could,” “seem to,” “anticipate,” “expectations,” “plan,” “ensure,” “desire,” or similar terms or variations on those terms or the negative of those terms. The forward-looking statements are based on current management expectations. Actual results may differ materially as a result of several factors, including, but not limited to the following: acceptance of a plan for regaining compliance with the NYSE American’s listed company standards; impact on the U.S. economy and financial markets due to the outbreak and continued effect of the COVID-19 pandemic; our ability to successfully consummate the contemplated exchange offers for our outstanding preferred stock and receive the requisite consents for the proposed amendments to our charter documents to facilitate the redemption from holders of our outstanding preferred stock who do not participate in the exchange offers; any adverse impact or disruption to the Company’s operations; changes in general economic and financial conditions (including federal monetary policy, interest rate changes, and inflation); increase in interest rates, inflation, and margin compression; ability to successfully sell aggregated loans to third-party investors; successful development, marketing, sale and financing of new and existing financial products, including NonQM products; recruit and hire talent to rebuild our TPO NonQM origination team, and increase NonQM originations; volatility in the mortgage industry; performance of third-party sub-servicers; our ability to manage personnel expenses in relation to mortgage production levels; our ability to successfully use warehousing capacity and satisfy financial covenants; our ability to maintain compliance with the continued listing requirements of the NYSE American for our common stock; increased competition in the mortgage lending industry by larger or more efficient companies; issues and system risks related to our technology; ability to successfully create cost and product efficiencies through new technology including cyber risk and data security risk; more than expected increases in default rates or loss severities and mortgage related losses; ability to obtain additional financing through lending and repurchase facilities, debt or equity funding, strategic relationships or otherwise; the terms of any financing, whether debt or equity, that we do obtain and our expected use of proceeds from any financing; increase in loan repurchase requests and ability to adequately settle repurchase obligations; failure to create brand awareness; the outcome of any claims we are subject to, including any settlements of litigation or regulatory actions pending against us or other legal contingencies; and compliance with applicable local, state and federal laws and regulations.

For a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see our latest Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q we file with the SEC and in particular the discussion of “Risk Factors” therein. This document speaks only as of its date and we do not undertake, and expressly disclaim any obligation, to release publicly the results of any revisions that may be made to any forward-looking statements to reflect the occurrence of anticipated or unanticipated events or circumstances after the date of such statements except as required by law.

About the Company

Impac Mortgage Holdings, Inc. (IMH or Impac) provides innovative mortgage lending and real estate solutions that address the challenges of today’s economic environment. Impac’s operations include mortgage lending, servicing, portfolio loss mitigation, real estate services, and the management of the securitized long-term mortgage portfolio, which includes the residual interests in securitizations.

For additional information, questions or comments, please call Justin Moisio, Chief Administrative Officer at (949) 475-3988 or email Justin.Moisio@ImpacMail.com.

Website: http://ir.impaccompanies.com or www.impaccompanies.com

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Who Gets the Last Word on Steve Jobs? He Might.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis meticulously curated the memory of her husband after he was assassinated, reimagining President John F. Kennedy as a fallen King Arthur in a modern-day Camelot.

Now some historians wonder if Laurene Powell Jobs is also trying to frame the legacy of her late husband, Steve Jobs, a complicated and transformational figure who was shadowed by his flaws as a father and belligerence as a boss.

Last month, Ms. Powell Jobs introduced the Steve Jobs Archive. It aspires to reinvent the personal archive much as Mr. Jobs, in his years running Apple, remade music with the iPod and communication with the iPhone.

Rather than offering up a repository of personal correspondence, notes and items for public research and inquiry, as other influential figures have done, Ms. Powell Jobs, who did not respond to requests for comments, said at a conference last month that the Steve Jobs Archive would be devoted to “ideas.” Those ideas are primarily Mr. Jobs’s philosophies about life and work.

Harvard Business School’s 25 greatest business leaders of the 20th century left behind personal archives that are open to the public in libraries or museums, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Asa Candler, who built Coca-Cola.

Other iconic business founders such as Walt Disney, Sam Walton and Ray Kroc entrusted their papers to the companies they built, allowing those collections to become the cornerstone of corporate archives.

Walt Disney Company, make personal correspondence, notes, speeches and other items available to authors for research.

“We don’t censor,” said Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney archives. “We just vet.”

The new Jobs archive debuted with a minimalist website containing eight pieces of video, audio and writing that express what the archive calls Mr. Jobs’s “driving motivations in his own words.” The items, three-quarters of which were already public, can be accessed by clicking through maxims made famous by Mr. Jobs, including “make something wonderful and put it out there” and “pursue different paths.”

The next steps for the archive are shrouded in the kind of mystery associated with the way Mr. Jobs ran Apple. About all that’s been publicly disclosed is that Ms. Powell Jobs hired a documentary filmmaker to gather hundreds of oral histories about Mr. Jobs from former colleagues. Where that material will be stored and who will have access to it has not been revealed.

She married Mr. Jobs in 1991, two years after meeting him as a graduate student at Stanford. Since his death, she has used her estimated $16 billion fortune to fund the Emerson Collective, a philanthropic and commercial operation that owns The Atlantic magazine and funds an organization trying to reduce gun violence in Chicago.

During his life, Mr. Jobs admired and encouraged historians to preserve the history of his Silicon Valley predecessors such as Robert Noyce, who co-founded the chip maker Intel. But he put little value on his own history, and Apple has seldom commemorated product anniversaries, saying it focuses on the future, not the past.

Stanford spent years cataloging items such as photos of a barefoot Mr. Jobs at work, advertising campaigns and an Apple II computer. That material can be reviewed by students and researchers interested in learning more about the company.

Silicon Valley leaders have a tradition of leaving their material with Stanford, which has collections of letters, slides and notes from William Hewlett, who founded Hewlett-Packard, and Andy Grove, the former chief executive of Intel.

Mr. Lowood said that he uses the Silicon Valley archives to teach students about the value of discovery. “Unlike a book, which is the gospel and all true, a mix of materials in a box introduces uncertainty,” he said.

After Mr. Jobs’ death in 2011, Mr. Isaacson, the author, published a biography of Mr. Jobs. Some at Apple complained that the book, a best seller, misrepresented Mr. Jobs and commercialized his death.

Mr. Isaacson declined to comment about those complaints.

Four years later, the book became the basis for a film. The 2015 movie, written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Michael Fassbender, focused on Mr. Jobs being ousted from Apple and denying paternity of his eldest daughter.

according to emails made public after a hack of Sony Pictures, which held rights to the film. She and others who were close to Mr. Jobs thought any movie based on the book would be inaccurate.

“I was outraged, and he was my friend,” said Mike Slade, a marketing executive who worked as an adviser to Mr. Jobs from 1998 to 2004. “I can’t imagine how outraged Laurene was.”

In November 2015, a month after the movie’s release, Ms. Powell Jobs had representatives register the Steve Jobs Archive as a limited liability company in Delaware and California. She later hired the documentary filmmaker, Davis Guggenheim, to gather oral histories about Mr. Jobs from former colleagues and friends. She also hired Ms. Berlin, who was Stanford’s project historian for its Apple archives, to be the Jobs Archive’s executive director.

Mr. Guggenheim gathered material about Mr. Jobs while also working on a Netflix documentary about Bill Gates, “Inside Bill’s Brain.” Mr. Slade, who worked for both Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates, said he sat for an interview about one executive, stopped to change shirts and returned to discuss the other one.

Ms. Berlin assisted Ms. Powell Jobs in gathering material. They collected items such as audio of interviews done by reporters and early company records, including a 1976 document that Mr. Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, called their declaration of independence. It outlined what the company would stand for, said Regis McKenna, who unearthed the document in his personal collection gathered during his decades as a pioneer of Silicon Valley marketing and adviser to Mr. Jobs.

Ms. Powell Jobs also assembled a group of advisers to inform what the archive would be, including Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive; Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer; and Bob Iger, the former chief executive of Walt Disney and a former Apple board member.

Mr. Cook, Mr. Ive and Mr. Iger declined to comment.

Apple, which has its own corporate archive and archivist, is a contributor to the Jobs effort, said Ms. Berlin, who declined to say how she works with the company to gain access to material left by Mr. Jobs.

The archive’s resulting website opens with an email that Mr. Jobs sent himself at Apple. It reads like a journal entry, outlining all the things that he depends on others to provide, from the food he eats to the music he enjoys.

“I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being,” he wrote.

The email is followed by a previously undisclosed audio clip from a 1984 interview that Mr. Jobs did with Michael Moritz, the journalist turned venture capitalist at Sequoia. During it, Mr. Jobs says that refinement comes from mistakes, a platitude that captures how Apple used trial and error to develop devices.

“It was just lying in the drawer gathering dust,” Mr. Moritz said of the recording.

It’s clear to those who have contributed material that the archive is about safeguarding Mr. Jobs’s legacy. It’s a goal that many of them support.

“There’s so much distortion about who Steve was,” Mr. McKenna said. “There needed to be something more factual.”

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Store Shelves Are No Longer Bare, but Baby Formula Remains in Short Supply

More than six months after one of the largest infant formula manufacturing plants in the United States issued a recall and was then shut down because of contamination concerns, a newborn staple remains in short supply.

In parts of the country, parents and their families are scrambling to locate precious containers of formula for their babies and many large retailers remain out of stock of popular brands. Some companies like Walmart and Target are limiting the number of containers that can be purchased at one time.

While the situation has improved since mid-July, the out-of-stock figures for powder formula on store shelves in late August remained at 23 percent, still above the 10 percent it was before the recall and shutdown, according to the Chicago-based market research firm IRI.

infections in four babies — two of them fatal — who had consumed formula manufactured at the plant. On Feb. 17, two days after the shutdown, Abbott recalled batches of three powdered formulas over complaints of serious bacterial contamination. (Abbott has said that there is no “conclusive evidence” to link the company’s formulas to the illnesses.) That disruption made it clear just how dependent Americans were on a few formula manufacturers, and the Biden administration found itself scrambling to figure out how to make more product available.

ending around Nov. 14, the F.D.A. said it would release guidance this month on how the new companies can continue to sell in the United States past this fall.

“Parents in the U.S. have been looking for a better product than what they were being offered,” said Will McMahon, one of the members of the family who owns the British baby formula Kendamil. The company has spent the last three years working through the formal process, including clinical trials, necessary to get its organic infant formula approved by the F.D.A.

Kendamil was one of the earliest formulas to get its application approved by the F.D.A. in the wake of the Sturgis plant shutdown, and the company has begun sending two million cans of formula to the United States.

dropped in early August after it said the F.D.A. had notified it that it was “deferring further consideration” of its application to import formula into the United States.

resume manufacturing of Similac formulas at its plant in Sturgis.

The company also said that it increased production at other U.S.-based manufacturing plants and one in Ireland, and that it would supply the United States with more than eight million pounds of formula in August, an increase from the year before. But it noted it would take six weeks for the Similac product from the Sturgis plant to start to hit store shelves.

But some industry experts say it will take time for Abbott to gain back the market share it once had. “To be frank, there is a lot of consumer mistrust around Similac right now,” said Mr. Dittmeier of the W.I.C. program.

That could be a boon for Reckitt Benckiser, which has been running its formula manufacturing plants at full tilt all summer, hoping to hold on to the market share it has gained at Abbott’s expense. Its market share has climbed to nearly 60 percent from 35 percent before the recall, said Robert Cleveland, who oversees the Mead Johnson nutrition business at Reckitt.

“We remain committed to making as much formula as we can,” Mr. Cleveland said. “We continue to maximize our domestic manufacturing, running overtime and going 24/7.” He added that the company had received approval to bring in formula from its plants in Singapore and specialty formula from its facilities in Mexico.

Still, in late August, when Lori Sharp, a first-time mother in Port Hueneme, Calif., realized she was down to one container of Reckitt’s Enfamil Sensitive infant formula for her 3-month-old daughter, the formula was out of stock on Walmart.com.

Panicking, she scoured more websites and widened her geographic search. She eventually discovered a container of formula at a Target 40 minutes away in Moorpark, Calif. “I went into the store and they actually had four more, but their shelves were so bare,” Ms. Sharp said. “I bought all of them.”

In Georgia, some of the most acute shortages are in rural areas. Jennifer Kelly, who is the family services manager at the early Head Start program in Swainsboro, which is between Macon and Savannah, said trying to find formula earlier this summer had become a “daily chore.”

The 14 babies she watches drink seven different kinds of formula. She and her staff were often driving to Walmart, Walgreens or a local grocery chain or scouring Amazon for some of the more obscure brands.

“It’s not like it was a few months ago when the shelves were bare,” Ms. Kelly said. “I am hoping we are on the other side of this dilemma.”

When the formula shortage was at a crisis point in May, Ms. Robinson of Bucks County, Pa., created a Facebook group that connected parents around the country. The group, called Formula Hunters, does not exchange money to keep out profiteers who have been hoarding formula and seeking to resell it at a markup.

The group operates on the notion that a parent who buys a hard-to-find formula brand and sends it to another parent in the group will eventually be repaid when others do the same for them.

Formula Hunters now has 1,500 members, who are still actively helping each other locate formula. “This has been going on for so many months,” Ms. Robinson said. “The frustration has been high.”

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Visa To Start Categorizing Gun Shop Sales Separately

Visa’s adoption is significant as the largest payment network, and will likely add pressure for Mastercard and American Express to adopt the code.

Payment processor Visa Inc. said late Saturday that it plans to start separately categorizing sales at gun shops.

It’s a major win for gun control advocates who say it will help better track suspicious surges of gun sales that could be a prelude to a mass shooting. But gun rights advocates have argued that step would unfairly segregate legal gun sales when most sales do not lead to mass shootings.

Visa said it would adopt the International Organization for Standardization’s new merchant code for gun sales, which was announced on Friday. Until Friday, gun store sales were considered “general merchandise.”

“Following ISO’s decision to establish a new merchant category code, Visa will proceed with next steps, while ensuring we protect all legal commerce on the Visa network in accordance with our long-standing rules,” the payment processor said in a statement.

Visa’s adoption is significant as the largest payment network, and will likely add pressure for Mastercard and American Express to adopt the code as well.

Gun control advocates had gotten significant wins on this front in recent weeks. New York City officials and pension funds had pressured the ISO and banks to adopt this code.

Two of the country’s largest public pension funds, in California and New York, are pressing the country’s largest credit card firms to establish sales codes specifically for firearm-related sales that could flag suspicious purchases or more easily trace how guns and ammo are sold.

Merchant Category Codes now exist for almost every kind of purchase, including those made at supermarkets, clothing stores, coffee shops and many other retailers.

“When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who blames the proliferation of guns for his city’s deadly violence.

The city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, said it made moral and financial sense as a tool to push back against gun violence.

“Unfortunately, the credit card companies have failed to support this simple, practical, potentially lifesaving tool. The time has come for them to do so,” Lander said recently, before Visa’s announcement.

Landers is a trustee of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, Teachers’ Retirement System and Board of Education Retirement System — which together own 667,200 shares in American Express valued at approximately $92.49 million; 1.1 million shares in MasterCard valued at approximately $347.59 million; and 1.85 million shares in Visa valued at approximately $363.86 million.

In letters to the companies, the New York pensions funds, joined by the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, sought support for such a move, saying the companies have a responsibility to prohibit the use of their networks for what public officials deemed illegal activity.

“Failing to do so can result in regulatory, reputational, and litigation risks that may harm long-term shareholder value,” the letters asserted.

Over the years, public pension funds have used their extensive investment portfolios to influence public policy and the market place.

The California teacher’s fund, the second largest pension fund in the country, has long taken aim on the gun industry. It has divested its holdings from gun manufacturers and has sought to persuade some retailers from selling guns.

Four years ago, the teacher’s fund made guns a key initiative. It called for background checks and called on retailers “monitor irregularities at the point of sale, to record all firearm sales, to audit firearms inventory on a regular basis, and to proactively assist law enforcement.”

The pension funds argue that creating a merchant category code for standalone firearm and ammunition stores could aid in the battle against gun violence.

In letters to the credit card companies, a pattern of purchases could flag suspicious activity.

Officials said that a week before the mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people died after a shooter opened fire in 2016, the assailant used credit cards to purchase more than $26,000 worth of guns and ammunition, including purchases at a stand-alone gun retailer.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

Source: newsy.com

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Changing Your Password Too Often Might Be Hurting Your Account Privacy

Patterns most humans use in changing their passwords could be leading to more predictable and easy-to-breach security.

Microsoft recently advised against longstanding, conventional cybersecurity logic on required password changes. It turns out forced switches made users select more predictable and easy-to-breach passwords.

“The pattern that humans use, particularly when they’re not using a password manager, is they come up with, sort of, this rubric,” said Pedro Canahuati, chief technology officer at 1Password. “If that’s really very complex, it makes it difficult for people to gain access to it. But the reality is, humans are not good at randomness.”

“The previous advice for people to rotate their passwords so frequently led to some really bad habits: people writing passwords down, only changing maybe the last digit,” said Lisa Plaggemier, executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance.

“Changing that one character at the end of your password is not enough when you’re up against a bot who’s just cycling away at different passwords and switching out letters and numbers.”

Humans are notoriously bad at passwords. NordPass’ research of commonly used passwords across 50 countries in 2021 found the most popular were strings of letters or numbers, like 123456 and qwerty or words like password. Most could be cracked in less than one second.

Still, if you search online for advice on how often you should change passwords, you’ll still find a lot of results saying you should change them routinely.

Newsy spoke to four cybersecurity experts about best rotation practices. While all noted that there are times when passwords should be changed — like when your data is implicated in a breach — there are other, more important security features that can be used to strengthen data protection.

“People just need to understand that passwords only go so far, and you need multifactor authentication,” said Ed Skoudis, president of SANS Technology Institute. “Password management organizations also have an obligation to keep their users secure and safe.”

“The simple solution at the end of the day is to use strong and unique passwords with a password manager because nobody can create them as strong as they can with the password manager,” said Craig Lurey, chief technology officer at Keeper Security. “This is hundreds of engineers, solely focused on protecting passwords in an encrypted vault that’s highly secure and protected from access, and all the years of implementation that went into that versus whatever you think you can do with your notepad.”

Source: newsy.com

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Snoop Dogg Launching New Animated Children’s Series

“Doggyland — Kids Songs & Nursery Rhymes” features a colorful cast of singing dog characters and will launch on YouTube and YouTube Kids.

His rap lyrics are decidedly adult, and that’s what makes Snoop Dogg’s latest venture a bit surprising.

The rapper and entertainment industry mogul is now transitioning into children’s cartoons.

He’s working on an animated series called “Doggyland — Kids Songs & Nursery Rhymes.”

The show features a colorful cast of dogs that will use song and dance to teach lessons on social and emotional skills.

According to a press release, the series will include lessons on topics like letters, numbers, animals and building good habits at a young age.

The show is aimed at kids and toddlers from 2 to 8 years old and will air on YouTube and YouTube Kids.

Source: newsy.com

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Why Are School Buses Yellow?

The history of why school buses are yellow.

There used to be no rules for school transportation.

Kids went to school in horse-drawn wagons and some districts had red white and blue buses, to instill patriotism.

That changed with this guy: Frank Cyr.

He was a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University.

In 1939 he put together a conference focused on the school bus.

He brought together teachers and transportation experts, engineers and, yes — paint specialists.

They came up with 42 pages worth of school bus regulations, among them: a yellow hue.

They decided on yellow because black letters were the easiest to see with a yellow background, and yellow stood out even in bad weather.

In fact, the color is now officially known as “national school bus glossy yellow.”

Federal law does not require all school buses to follow this practice, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does list it among its recommendations.

Every day, 480,0000 school buses drive kids to school across the U.S.

They go in different directions, and drop off at different schools, but you can always count on that yellow color being the same.

Source: newsy.com

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The Law Behind Presidential Records Belonging To The National Archives

Congress passed the Presidential Records Act after Watergate, preserving documents that otherwise would have been Pres. Nixon’s personal property.

Supporters of former President Trump are reacting to an unprecedented move.

“We think it’s awful what happened yesterday. We think it’s an abuse of power,” Trump supporter Justin Nevarez said.

“I gotta stand. I don’t care if they kill me today,” Trump supporter Ben Pollock said.

The FBI executed a search warrant on property belonging to Trump.

“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

Unsealed court documents reveal the FBI took 11 sets of classified records from the Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home ranging from ‘top secret’ to ‘sensitive compartmented information.’ Much of the information would harm U.S. interests if it became public.

The FBI also seized potential presidential records, like the order pardoning Trump’s political ally Roger Stone and information about the president of France.

Trump and some of his allies say the documents were “all declassified” before he left office. But some archivists, like Bob Clark, who are “specially trained in preserving original material and helping people obtain it” are raising the red flag on presidential records.

“Regardless of the content of the documents — whether they’re classified or not — federal presidential records are the people’s property,” he said. “Once a president transitions out of office — at the moment that that person is no longer president, they become the legal property of the National Archives and their responsibility.”

In fact, the National Archives and Records Administration, which is like the nation’s filing cabinet, has been working to obtain Trump’s presidential records since he left office in January of 2021.

According to a statement, NARA did receive some of Trump’s presidential records that month, including some paper records torn up by the president himself.

A year later, in January 2022, NARA arranged to transport 15 boxes of presidential records from Mar-a-Lago to Washington, with understanding that Trump’s representatives would continue looking for any other records to turn over.

Amid all the back and forth Newsy wondered: Why do presidential records belong to National Archives?

For starters, it’s the law.

According to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, “any documentary materials relating to the political activities of the president or members of the president’s staff, but only if such activities relate to or have a direct effect on… duties of the president” are the people’s property.

Not all materials make the cut, though.

“It could be, you know, massive quantities of mail from the public, requests for birthday greetings, things like that, that are just so vast in number but have so little informational value that they don’t have long term political value,” Clark continued. “But prior approval is required to do that.”

Clark says Congress’ drafting of the Presidential Records Act guaranteed that these records would be accessible to the public for transparency, accountability and historical research.

Before this law came into play, there were no rules on how to manage presidential records. They were actually considered private property.

From President Warren G. Harding’s wife claiming to have burned all his records, to President Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, burning all his father’s war letters — anything could go, until FDR took a different approach.

“It was Franklin Roosevelt who set the precedent of giving them, deeding them as a gift to the American people to be in the possession and custody of the National Archives,” Clark said. “FDR created the Presidential Library.”

So why enact the law?

“The reason why the Presidential Records Act was necessary has one very simple explanation: Richard Nixon,” Clark continued. “Congress was understandably concerned as a result of their investigations into Watergate because the papers and tapes were technically Nixon’s personal property under the way the law was contrived at the time. They were concerned that the papers and tapes would be taken with Nixon, and in fact, Nixon wanted them to go with him to Yorba Linda when he resigned from the office. Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act in 1974, that essentially declared this previously personal property of Richard Nixon’s was now federal property. It was just like taking a part of your yard to build a highway … It was the first time the Congress asserted itself over presidential papers and records like that.”

Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were the last presidents whose records were their own. Ronald Reagan’s were the first Presidential Records Act library records. And Barack Obama’s will be the first fully digital presidential library.

“Up to this point, there has always been this kind of delicate dance that happens and it has to be well-timed and well-practiced and ably-executed, like it has always been up to this point,” Clark said. “But the point that I would make is that the Presidential Records Act depends on the good will of those involved for the successful execution of it.”

That good will has seemingly soured, as what has historically been a run-of-the-mill transfer of records turns into controversy.

“I think that amidst all of the noise over what is where, it’s important for the American people to know that this is their property,” Clark continued. “Regardless of the content of the documents, whether they’re classified or not, presidential records are the people’s property. And a former president, who is now a private citizen, has absolutely no right to claim those records as his or her personal property. They’re the people’s property.”

Source: newsy.com

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Exclusive: Wall Street revives Russian bond trading after U.S. go-ahead

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NEW YORK, Aug 15 (Reuters) – Several major Wall Street banks have begun offering to facilitate trades in Russian debt in recent days, according to bank documents seen by Reuters, giving investors another chance to dispose of assets widely seen in the West as toxic.

Most U.S. and European banks had pulled back from the market in June after the Treasury Department banned U.S. investors from purchasing any Russian security as part of economic sanctions to punish Moscow for invading Ukraine, according to an investor who holds Russian securities and two banking sources.

Following subsequent guidelines from the Treasury in July that allowed U.S. holders to wind down their positions, the largest Wall Street firms have cautiously returned to the market for Russian government and corporate bonds, according to emails, client notes and other communications from six banks as well as interviews with the sources.

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The banks that are in the market now include JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N), Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE), Barclays Plc (BARC.L) and Jefferies Financial Group Inc (JEF.N), the documents show.

The return of the largest Wall Street firms, the details of the trades they are offering to facilitate and the precautions they are taking to avoid breaching sanctions are reported here for the first time.

Bank of America, Barclays, Citi and JPMorgan declined to comment.

A Jefferies spokesperson said it was “working within global sanctions guidelines to facilitate our clients’ needs to navigate this complicated situation.”

A source close to Deutsche Bank said the bank trades bonds for clients on a request-only and case-by-case basis to further manage down its Russia risk exposure or that of its non-U.S. clients, but won’t do any new business outside of these two categories.

STRANDED ASSETS

Some $40 billion of Russian sovereign bonds were outstanding before Russia began what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine in February. Roughly half was held by foreign funds. Many investors got stranded with Russian assets, as their value plummeted, buyers disappeared and sanctions made trading hard.

In May, two U.S. lawmakers asked JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) for information about trades in Russian debt, saying they may undermine sanctions. read more The following month the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control banned U.S. money managers from buying any Russian debt or stocks in secondary markets, prompting banks to pull back.

Regulators have since taken steps to help ease the pain for investors.

The Treasury provided further guidance on July 22 to help settle default insurance payments on Russian bonds. It also clarified that banks could facilitate, clear and settle transactions of Russian securities if this helped U.S. holders wind down their positions. read more

Separately, European regulators have also eased rules to allow investors to deal with Russian assets by allowing them to put them into so-called side pockets on a case-by-case basis. read more

The price of some Russian bonds has jumped alongside the renewed trading activity since late July. That could make the trades more attractive to investors and also help companies that sold protection against Russian default.

For example, U.S. bond manager PIMCO – which was on the hook for a payout of around $1 billion after Russia defaulted on its dollar debt in June – could now save around $300 million, one investor estimated. PIMCO declined to comment.

“There’s some bid emerging for both local and external bonds for the first time in a while,” said Gabriele Foa, portfolio manager of the Global Credit Opportunities Fund at Algebris, who follows the market for Russian securities. “Some banks and brokers are using this bid to facilitate divestment of Russian positions for investors that want to get out.”

Reuters could not establish who was buying the bonds.

Reuters Graphics Reuters Graphics

LOTS OF RULES

Some banks are offering to trade Russian sovereign and corporate bonds, and some are offering to facilitate trades in bonds denominated in both roubles and U.S. dollars, according to the documents and the investor who holds Russian securities. But they are also demanding additional paperwork from clients and remain averse to taking on risk.

In a research update to clients on Wednesday, for example, Bank of America declared in capital letters in red: “Bank of America is now facilitating divestment of Russian sovereign and select corporate bonds.”

But it added that it would be acting as “riskless principal on client facilitation trades,” meaning a situation where a dealer buys a bond and immediately resells it. It also warned there were “a lot of rules around the process” which remained subject to “protocol and attestation.”

The approaches also differ among banks. In some cases, for example, banks are offering clients to help divest their holdings as well as other types of trades that would reduce exposure to Russian assets, while others are limiting trades to asset disposals only.

At times they are asking investors to sign documents prior to trade execution that would allow the banks to cancel trades if settlement does not go through and risks leaving the banks with Russian paper on their books, according to one of the documents and the investor.

One bank warned clients that settlements would take longer than usual.

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Reporting by Davide Barbuscia in New York; Additional reporting by Rodrigo Campos.
Editing by Megan Davies, Paritosh Bansal and Edward Tobin

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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STRANDED ASSETS

LOTS OF RULES

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