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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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Texas Opens Investigation Into Migrant Flights To Martha’s Vineyard

and Associated Press
September 20, 2022

Attorneys say migrants were misled before they boarded flights to the wealthy Massachusetts island.

An investigation is now underway in Texas after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent two flights of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard last week.

Attorneys say migrants were misled before they boarded flights to the wealthy Massachusetts island.

The controversy comes as Republican governors continue to transport migrants to Democratic-led states in protest of the Biden Administration’s polices at the southern border.

Migrants have told journalists and immigration attorneys they were singled out and recruited under false pretenses, and given promises of jobs, shelter and aid.

Those 48 asylum seekers, mostly from Venezuela, were looking for safety and security after fleeing a country in economic and political turmoil.

They arrived at the southwest border in Texas, were processed by federal immigration authorities and released. Some ended up at a shelter in San Antonio, where they informed their attorneys that a crew and a blonde haired woman in particular made promises to them that they could to another city, get shelter, a job and aid, all at no expense.

They were transported on a private jet, paid for by the State of Florida which has apportioned money for immigrant removals in this year’s budget.

When the news broke last week, the governor of Florida took credit, giving the news first to conservative news outlets. Governor Ron DeSantis was eager to frame this as highlighting liberal hypocrisy on immigration. But as the story trickled out about the migrants arrived and who in effect recruited them, it caught the attention of local law enforcement in San Antonio.

“We want to know what what was what was promised to them,” said Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar. “What, if anything, did they sign? Did they even understand the document that was put in front of them if they signed something? Or was this strictly a predatory measure, somebody coming and preying upon people that are here, minding their own business and are here legally, not bothering a soul, but somebody saw fit to come from another state, hunt them down, prey upon them, and then take advantage of their desperate situation just for the sake of political theater, just for the sake of making some sort of a statement and putting people’s lives in danger?”

The migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard sued Gov. DeSantis and his transportation secretary Tuesday for engaging in a “fraudulent and discriminatory scheme” to relocate them.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, alleges that the migrants were told they were going to Boston or Washington, “which was completely false,” and were induced with perks such as $10 McDonald’s gift certificates.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Railroads’ Strategy Thrilled Wall Street, but Not Customers and Workers

America’s first commercial railroads were built almost two centuries ago. Freight rail has been a symbol of the nation’s economic might and ingenuity ever since.

In recent years, some of the biggest names on Wall Street have made significant investments in railroads, reaping big stock gains as railroads reported higher profits. But the underlying strategies that strengthened railroads’ bottom lines have caused friction with customers, regulators and particularly workers — giving rise to a contract dispute that threatened a nationwide shutdown of the railway system.

After losing ground to trucking in the mid-20th century, the rail industry managed to recover through decades of consolidation and a push for efficiency. Critics say those same dynamics created a system with thin staffing and minimal competition, making it particularly vulnerable to shocks like the coronavirus pandemic.

Those complaints were at the center of the contract impasse that left tens of thousands of workers prepared to walk off the job last week. A strike could have been economically devastating, paralyzing shipments of grain, chemicals and other cargo.

It was averted with less than a day to go when the Biden administration helped to broker a tentative agreement that addresses some of those issues and will be put to a vote of the rail unions’ members in the coming weeks.

The freight rail industry says it has worked hard to adapt to rapid changes — including the pandemic and, before that, a decline in demand for coal, a critical source of business.

“The industry has had to continually evolve to grow its other services,” said Ian Jefferies, the president of the Association of American Railroads, an industry group. To make up for the decline in coal, freight shippers have tried to transport more grain, truck trailers, shipping containers and other goods, he said.

according to the Surface Transportation Board, which monitors and regulates rates.

Prices started to increase in the early 2000s, driven by rising costs for labor, fuel, materials and supplies as well as a growing focus on profitability. From 2002 to 2019, long-distance trucking rates increased by 40 percent, according to a Transportation Department report published this year, while rail rates grew by 96 percent, though they are still well below historical levels, adjusted for inflation.

won a proxy battle for Canadian Pacific in 2012 and installed Mr. Harrison to lead the company.

Mr. Harrison brought his approach to Canadian Pacific, then to CSX in 2017, before his death that year. Other freight carriers and Wall Street increasingly took notice, and the practice has spread throughout the industry.

Many freight rail experts say P.S.R. brought necessary reforms to the industry, but they also say some practices, which can differ greatly among carriers, went too far or were poorly executed. Unions say the system has created miserable working conditions.

letter to shareholders.

“I’ll venture a rare prediction,” he wrote in February. “BNSF will be a key asset for Berkshire and our country a century from now.”

Peter S. Goodman and Clifford Krauss contributed reporting.

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More Migrants Arrive In D.C. As White House Slams Republican Governors

By Newsy Staff

and Associated Press
September 17, 2022

More than 50 migrants were bused to the home of Vice President Kamala Harris, while New York officials expected at least six more buses to arrive.

Another wave of migrants arrived at the nation’s capital and New York City on Saturday as the White House continues to criticize Republican governors in Texas, Florida and Arizona for what it calls a “political stunt.”

More than 50 migrants were bused to the home of Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday while New York officials expected at least six more buses to arrive by the end of the day.

The White House hammered the Republican governors of Texas and Florida for arranging for the transport of migrants to Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

The governors of Texas and Arizona have sent thousands of migrants on buses to New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., in recent months.

But the latest surprise moves – which included two flights to Martha’s Vineyard Wednesday paid for by Florida – reached a new level of political theater that critics derided as inhumane.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the flights to Martha’s Vineyard were part of an effort to “transport illegal immigrants to sanctuary destinations.”

President Joe Biden criticized the move, saying “Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke to reporters Friday as the migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard were being moved to housing on a military base on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

“These are the kinds of tactics we see from smugglers in places like Mexico and Guatemala,” Jean-Pierre said. “And for what? A photo-op. Because these governors care about creating political theater, then creating actual solutions to help folks who are fleeing communism, to help children, to help families.”

Massachusetts is planning to activate as many as 125 National Guard members to assist.

In New York, Mayor Eric Adams says shelters are at their breaking point due to the influx of migrants.

In total, there have been nearly two million encounters along the southern border this year, which is already over 200,000 more than last year.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Why Does Our Vision Get Worse As We Age?

An optometrist talks about declining eyesight, and how to preserve your vision as you get older.

Our aging eyes can start to see some problems. The gift of vision is one that researchers say wanes over time. Why?

Dr. Robert Layman is one of the nation’s leading optometrists, with over four decades of experience in eye care.

“The parts that make up your vision system, our lifetime cells, they’re brain tissue, and they never get a replacement part. So what you’re seeing with at 80 is what you started with at one,” said Layman.

80% of the information we take in comes through the eye. Light travels through different structures, like the cornea at the front, which helps you focus light to see clearly. Or the iris that gives you your eye color and the pupil that lets light into the retina.

Once light is allowed through that lens, it travels through the retina to the back of the eye.

Special cells turn the light into electric signals that go through the optic nerve, to the brain.

Over the years those signals pick up mileage and, like an old car, begin to slow down.

“If you ever seen car headlights that have been outside, and they’re not transparent anymore, they get kind of frosted, that’s what happens to the cells inside your eye over eight decades to nine decades.”

Dr. Layman is describing cataracts. The age-related eye condition affects over 24 million people, according to the National Eye Institute.

Another ailment is presbyopia, which comes from two Greek words that mean “old man” and “eye.”

It’s when our eye’s lens loses its natural flexibility over time and makes nearby objects tougher to see.

“We’re born with this really elastic lens inside the eye and it can adjust from 25 feet to one inch and then gradually it loses the one inch to become six inches; and then gradually 12 inches and the closest point of focus you have is going to gradually go away from you. And that’s perfectly normal,” said Layman.

These conditions are often solved with an assist from glasses, contact lenses or surgery. But are there other ways to fend off father time?

Dr. Layman says we hold the keys to slowing the eye-aging process.

“You have a role to play. People that have diets of lots of colorful fruits and vegetables every day, they’re gonna get nutrients that help transport good stuff into the eye cells and bad stuff out of the eye cells back to the kidney and liver to get recycled,” said Layman.

The eye serves as a small but mighty part of the human engine.

And with maintenance, can help you see more clearly as the miles pick up.

: newsy.com

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Florida Relocates Migrants To Martha’s Vineyard

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used state appropriated funds to send two planes of migrants to the upscale island enclave in Massachusetts.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday flew two planes of immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, escalating a tactic by Republican governors to draw attention to what they consider to be the Biden administration’s failed border policies.

Flights to the upscale island enclave in Massachusetts were part of an effort to “transport illegal immigrants to sanctuary destinations,” said Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’ communications director.

While DeSantis’ office didn’t elaborate on their legal status, many migrants who cross the border illegally from Mexico are temporarily shielded from deportation after being freed by U.S. authorities to pursue asylum in immigration court — as allowed under U.S law and international treaty — or released on humanitarian parole.

Massachusetts’ Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, said he was in touch with local officials and that short-term shelter was being provided.

Martha’s Vineyard has styled itself as a “sanctuary destination” that welcomes migrants — a position it took early in former President Donald Trump’s administration.

State Rep. Dylan Fernandes, who represents Martha’s Vineyard, tweeted: “Our island jumped into action putting together 50 beds, giving everyone a good meal, providing a play area for the children, making sure people have the healthcare and support they need. We are a community that comes together to support immigrants.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing thousands of migrants to Washington in April and recently added New York and Chicago as destinations. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has been busing migrants to Washington since May. Passengers must sign waivers that the free trips are voluntary.

DeSantis, who is mentioned as potential presidential candidate, appears to be taking the strategy to a new level by using planes and choosing Martha’s Vineyard, whose harbor towns that are home to about 15,000 people are far less prepared than New York or Washington for large influxes of migrants.

The move is likely to delight DeSantis’ supporters who deride Democrat-led, immigrant-friendly “sanctuary” cities and anger critics who say he is weaponizing migrants as pawns for political gain.

The Florida Legislature appropriated $12 million to transport “illegal immigrants” from the state consistent with federal law, Fenske said.

“States like Massachusetts, New York, and California will better facilitate the care of these individuals who they have invited into our country by incentivizing illegal immigration through their designation as ‘sanctuary states’ and support for the Biden Administration’s open border policies,” Fenske said.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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How a Spreader of Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theories Became a Star

In 2011, Catherine Engelbrecht appeared at a Tea Party Patriots convention in Phoenix to deliver a dire warning.

While volunteering at her local polls in the Houston area two years earlier, she claimed, she witnessed voter fraud so rampant that it made her heart stop. People cast ballots without proof of registration or eligibility, she said. Corrupt election judges marked votes for their preferred candidates on the ballots of unwitting citizens, she added.

Local authorities found no evidence of the election tampering she described, but Ms. Engelbrecht was undeterred. “Once you see something like that, you can’t forget it,” the suburban Texas mom turned election-fraud warrior told the audience of 2,000. “You certainly can’t abide by it.”

planting seeds of doubt over the electoral process, becoming one of the earliest and most enthusiastic spreaders of ballot conspiracy theories.

fueled by Mr. Trump, has seized the moment. She has become a sought-after speaker at Republican organizations, regularly appears on right-wing media and was the star of the recent film “2,000 Mules,” which claimed mass voter fraud in the 2020 election and has been debunked.

She has also been active in the far-right’s battle for November’s midterm elections, rallying election officials, law enforcement and lawmakers to tighten voter restrictions and investigate the 2020 results.

said in an interview last month with a conservative show, GraceTimeTV, which was posted on the video-sharing site Rumble. “There have been no substantive improvements to change anything that happened in 2020 to prevent it from happening in 2022.”

set up stakeouts to prevent illegal stuffing of ballot boxes. Officials overseeing elections are ramping up security at polling places.

Voting rights groups said they were increasingly concerned by Ms. Engelbrecht.

She has “taken the power of rhetoric to a new place,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “It’s having a real impact on the way lawmakers and states are governing elections and on the concerns we have on what may happen in the upcoming elections.”

Some of Ms. Engelbrecht’s former allies have cut ties with her. Rick Wilson, a Republican operative and Trump critic, ran public relations for Ms. Engelbrecht in 2014 but quit after a few months. He said she had declined to turn over data to back her voting fraud claims.

“She never had the juice in terms of evidence,” Mr. Wilson said. “But now that doesn’t matter. She’s having her uplift moment.”

a video of the donor meeting obtained by The New York Times. They did not elaborate on why.

announce a partnership to scrutinize voting during the midterms.

“The most important right the American people have is to choose our own public officials,” said Mr. Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Ariz. “Anybody trying to steal that right needs to be prosecuted and arrested.”

Steve Bannon, then chief executive of the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News, and Andrew Breitbart, the publication’s founder, spoke at her conferences.

True the Vote’s volunteers scrutinized registration rolls, watched polling stations and wrote highly speculative reports. In 2010, a volunteer in San Diego reported seeing a bus offloading people at a polling station “who did not appear to be from this country.”

Civil rights groups described the activities as voter suppression. In 2010, Ms. Engelbrecht told supporters that Houston Votes, a nonprofit that registered voters in diverse communities of Harris County, Texas, was connected to the “New Black Panthers.” She showed a video of an unrelated New Black Panther member in Philadelphia who called for the extermination of white people. Houston Votes was subsequently investigated by state officials, and law enforcement raided its office.

“It was a lie and racist to the core,” said Fred Lewis, head of Houston Votes, who sued True the Vote for defamation. He said he had dropped the suit after reaching “an understanding” that True the Vote would stop making accusations. Ms. Engelbrecht said she didn’t recall such an agreement.

in April 2021, did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. Engelbrecht has denied his claims.

In mid-2021, “2,000 Mules” was hatched after Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips met with Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative provocateur and filmmaker. They told him that they could detect cases of ballot box stuffing based on two terabytes of cellphone geolocation data that they had bought and matched with video surveillance footage of ballot drop boxes.

Salem Media Group, the conservative media conglomerate, and Mr. D’Souza agreed to create and fund a film. The “2,000 Mules” title was meant to evoke the image of cartels that pay people to carry illegal drugs into the United States.

said after seeing the film that it raised “significant questions” about the 2020 election results; 17 state legislators in Michigan also called for an investigation into election results there based on the film’s accusations.

In Arizona, the attorney general’s office asked True the Vote between April and June for data about some of the claims in “2,000 Mules.” The contentions related to Maricopa and Yuma Counties, where Ms. Engelbrecht said people had illegally submitted ballots and had used “stash houses” to store fraudulent ballots.

According to emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, a True the Vote official said Mr. Phillips had turned over a hard drive with the data. The attorney general’s office said early this month that it hadn’t received it.

Last month, Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips hosted an invitation-only gathering of about 150 supporters in Queen Creek, Ariz., which was streamed online. For weeks beforehand, they promised to reveal the addresses of ballot “stash houses” and footage of voter fraud.

Ms. Engelbrecht did not divulge the data at the event. Instead, she implored the audience to look to the midterm elections, which she warned were the next great threat to voter integrity.

“The past is prologue,” she said.

Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.

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Possible Railroad Worker Strike Could Upend U.S. Supply Chain

There are 60,000 workers in two unions still demanding pay and time off concessions from rail lines, with no deal on the table yet.

As trains barrel across rail lines coast to coast, a labor dispute is barreling toward an end-of-week deadline that could derail the country’s shipping industry and upend commerce in a multi-billion-dollar strike.

Rail lines and the country’s two largest rail unions still can’t agree on pay and time off, leaving some 60,000 workers ready to leave the job Friday unless they get a deal.

“The companies have very demanding schedules,” said Andy Borchers, business professor at Lipscomb University. “There will be a variety of products that’ll be affected, and we may not even know for sure exactly which ones those are until the breakdown happens.”

At the White House Tuesday, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration is working on contingency plans to keep moving whatever goods they can, but still pushing aggressively to avoid a strike altogether.

“A shutdown is not acceptable,” Jean-Pierre said. “That is not something that we want. It risks harming families, farming, harming businesses and whole communities. We have made that clear, empathetically and repeatedly to both parties.”

The Association of American Railroads, a trade group that represents the major freight lines, says a strike could cost the country more than $2 billion a day.

The unions say BNSF and Union Pacific’s attendance policies make it difficult for workers to take time off, especially for medical appointments. The rail lines reject that argument.

The threat of strike comes as the U.S. supply chain grapples for ways to address the effects of the pandemic.

“The problem is there’s only one way in, and there’s only one way out, and it’s not efficient,” said Pete Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary.

Just last week, Buttigieg hailed plans for a new bridge in Los Angeles that would allow more freight to leave the city’s log-jammed port.

“These improvements are expected to reduce trucking delays by almost 2,500 truck hours every single day,” Buttigieg said. “It’s going to allow freight trains to move goods more rapidly, and yes, that’s part of the fight against inflation because it can help reduce shipping costs and the cost of goods.”

But port leaders have said for months a shortage of rail workers has made getting containers off their terminals difficult.

The fight is part of a larger, global trend as rail workers in the U.K. forced a strike late last month, likely to resume after Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral.

“Before we even get onto pay, we have to sort out job security, which we haven’t done,” said Mick Lynch, secretary-general of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union.

Airlines, trucking lines and major corporations from retail to commerce are now used to a new era of workers demanding higher pay and better working conditions, plus the workers are ready to unionize and strike if they don’t get what they want.

: newsy.com

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2 People Plead Guilty In Scheme To Sell Biden’s Daughter’s Diary

Florida residents Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander face up to five years in prison for trying to sell Ashley Biden’s stolen diary to Project Veritas.

Two Florida residents have pleaded guilty in a scheme to peddle a diary and other items stolen from President Joe Biden’s daughter to the conservative group Project Veritas for $40,000, prosecutors said Thursday.

Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander “sought to profit from their theft of another person’s personal property,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

Harris, a 40-year-old from Palm Beach, and Kurlander, 58, of nearby Jupiter, face the possibility of up to five years in prison. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines.

Harris’ lawyer, Sam Talkin, said she “has accepted responsibility for her conduct and looks forward to moving on with her life.” Kurlander’s lawyer, Florian Miedel, declined to comment.

While authorities didn’t identify anyone in the case except the defendants, the details of the investigation have been public for months.

Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, was moving out of a friend’s Delray Beach, Florida, home in spring 2020 when she stored the diary and other belongings there, prosecutors said in a court filing.

They said Harris then moved into the same room, found the items and got in touch with Kurlander, who enthused in a text message that he would help her make a “ton of money” from selling it, adding an expletive before “ton.”

The two initially aimed to sell some of the purloined property to then-President Donald Trump’s campaign, but a representative turned them down and told them to take the material to the FBI, according to the court papers.

The campaign “can’t use this,” Kurlander explained to Harris in a September 2020 text message, adding: “It has to be done a different way.”

Their next stop was Project Veritas, which paid for the two to bring some of the material — including the diary and a digital device with family photos — to a New York luxury hotel, prosecutors said.

Project Veritas staffers met with Kurlander and Harris in New York and agreed to pay an initial $10,000, saying more money could come if they retrieved more of Ashley Biden’s items from the home, partly in order to authenticate the diary, according to the court filing.

Back in Florida, Kurlander texted Harris a blunt assessment of what would come of the exchange, prosecutors said.

“They are in a sketchy business and here they are taking what’s literally a stolen diary and info … and trying to make a story that will ruin” Ashley Biden’s life and possibly affect the impending presidential election, he wrote, according to the court papers. He added that the two needed “to tread even more carefully” and get “anything worthwhile” out of the Delray Beach house, according to the court papers.

Prosecutors said Kurlander and Harris took Ashley Biden’s stored tax documents, clothes and luggage as Kurlander pressed Project Veritas in a message to commit to a bigger payout: “We are taking huge risks. This isn’t fair.”

A Project Veritas staffer soon flew to Florida, the employee shipped the items to New York and the group paid Harris and Kurlander $20,000 apiece, prosecutors said.

Project Veritas identifies itself as a news organization. It is best known for conducting hidden camera stings that have embarrassed news outlets, labor organizations and Democratic politicians.

“Project Veritas’s news gathering was ethical and legal” in the diary affair, the group said in a statement Thursday. The organization said earlier that it turned the journal over to law enforcement after receiving it from “tipsters” who maintained that it had been abandoned in a room.

“A journalist’s lawful receipt of material later alleged to be stolen is routine, commonplace and protected by the First Amendment,” Project Veritas added Thursday.

Neither Project Veritas nor any staffers have been charged with a crime.

The FBI searched the group’s New York offices and the homes of some of its employees as part of the investigation. A court in New York appointed a former federal judge to review material that was seized in those searches, so as to ensure that investigators couldn’t look at material protected by journalistic or attorney-client privileges.

Generally, media organizations aren’t culpable for receiving material that might have been stolen, if they weren’t involved in the theft. But there can be criminal liability for orchestrating theft and then knowingly paying for stolen material.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: 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.”

: newsy.com

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