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Tag: New York Times

  • At 25, Wikipedia Navigates a Quarter-Life Crisis in the Age of A.I.

    Turning 25 amid an A.I. boom, Wikipedia is racing to protect traffic, volunteers and revenue without losing its mission. Photo illustration by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images

    Traffic to Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, naturally ebbs and flows with the rhythms of daily life—rising and falling with the school calendar, the news cycle or even the day of the week—making routine fluctuations unremarkable for a site that draws roughly 15 billion page views a month. But sustained declines tell a different story. Last October, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia, disclosed that human traffic to the site had fallen 8 percent in recent months as a growing number of users turned to A.I. search engines and chatbots for answers.

    “I don’t think that we’ve seen something like this happen in the last seven to eight years or so,” Marshall Miller, senior director of product at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Observer.

    Launched on Jan. 15, 2001, Wikipedia turns 25 today. This milestone comes at a pivotal point for the online encyclopedia, which is straddling a delicate line between fending off existential risks posed by A.I. and avoiding irrelevance as the technology transforms how people find and consume information.

    “It’s really this question of long-term sustainability,” Lane Becker, senior director of earned revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Observer. “We’d like to make it at least another 25 years—and ideally much longer.”

    While it’s difficult to pinpoint Wikipedia’s recent traffic declines on any single factor, it’s evident that the drop coincides with the emergence of A.I. search features, according to Miller. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Perplexity often cite and link to Wikipedia, but because the information is already embedded in the A.I.-generated response, users are less likely to click through to the source, depriving the site of page views.

    Yet the spread of A.I.-generated content also underscores Wikipedia’s central role in the online information ecosystem. Wikipedia’s vast archive—more than 65 million articles across over 300 languages—plays a prominent role within A.I. tools, with the site’s data scraped by nearly all large language models (LLMs). “Yes, there is a decline in traffic to our sites, but there may well be more people getting Wikipedia knowledge than ever because of how much it’s being distributed through those platforms that are upstream of us,” said Miller.

    Surviving in the era of A.I.

    Wikipedia must find a way to stay financially and editorially viable as the internet changes. Declining page views not only mean that fewer visitors are likely to donate to the platform, threatening its main source of revenue, but also risk shrinking the community of volunteer editors who sustain it. Fewer contributors would mean slower content growth, ultimately leaving less material for LLMs to draw from.

    Metrics that track volunteer participation have already begun to slip, according to Miller. While noting that “it’s hard to parse out all the different reasons that this happens,” he conceded that the Foundation has “reason to believe that declines in page views will lead to declines in volunteer activity.”

    To maintain a steady pipeline of contributors, users must first become aware of the platform and understand its collaborative model. That makes proper attribution by A.I. tools essential, Miller said. Beyond simply linking to Wikipedia, surfacing metadata—such as when a page was last updated or how many editors contributed—could spur curiosity and encourage users to engage more deeply with the platform.

    Tech companies are becoming aware of the value of keeping Wikipedia relevant. Over the past year, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity AI, Ecosia, Pleias and ProRata have joined Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product that allows corporations to pay for large-scale access and distribution of Wikipedia content. Google and Amazon have long been partners of the platform, which was launched in 2021.

    The basic premise is that Wikimedia Enterprise customers can access content from Wikipedia at a higher volume and speed while helping sustain the platform’s mission. “I think there’s a growing understanding on the part of these A.I. companies about the significance of the Wikipedia dataset, both as it currently exists and also its need to exist in the future,” said Becker.

    Wikipedia is hardly alone in this shift. News organizations, including CNN, the Associated Press and The New York Times, have struck licensing deals with A.I. companies to supply editorial content in exchange for payment, while infrastructure providers like Cloudflare offer tools that allow websites to charge A.I. crawlers for access. Last month, the licensing nonprofit Creative Commons announced its support of a “pay-to-crawl” approach for managing A.I. bots.

    Preparing for an uncertain future

    Wikipedia itself is also adapting to a younger generation of internet users. In an effort to make editing Wikipedia more appealing, the platform is working to enhance its mobile edit features, reflecting the fact that younger audiences are far more likely to engage on smartphones than desktop computers.

    Younger users’ preference for social video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok has also pushed Wikipedia’s Future Audiences team—a division tasked with expanding readership—to experiment with video. The effort has already paid off, producing viral clips on topics ranging from Wikipedia’s most hotly disputed edits to the courtship dance of the black-footed albatross and Sino-Roman relations. The organization is also exploring a deeper presence on gaming platforms, another major draw for younger users.

    Evolving with the times also means integrating A.I. further within the platform. Wikipedia has introduced features such as Edit Check, which offers real-time feedback on whether a proposed edit fits a page, and is developing features like Tone Check to help ensure articles adhere to a neutral point of view.

    A.I.-generated content has also begun to seep onto the platform. As of August 2024, roughly 5 percent of newly created English articles on the site were produced with the help of A.I., according to a Princeton study. Seeing this as a problem, Wikipedia introduced a “speedy deletion” policy that allows editors to quickly remove content that shows clear signs of being A.I.-generated. Still, the community remains divided over whether using A.I. for tasks such as drafting articles is inherently problematic, said Miller. “There’s this active debate.”

    From streamlining editing to distributing its content ever more widely, Wikipedia is betting that A.I. can ultimately be an ally rather than an adversary. If managed carefully, the technology could help accelerate the encyclopedia’s mission over the next 25 years—as long as it doesn’t bring down the encyclopedia first.

    “Our whole thing is knowledge dissemination to anyone that wants it, anywhere that they want it,” said Becker. “If this is how people are going to learn things—and people are learning things and gaining value from the information that our community is able to bring forward—we absolutely want to find a way to be there and support it in ways that align with our values.”

    At 25, Wikipedia Navigates a Quarter-Life Crisis in the Age of A.I.

    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Women of Vanity Fair Consider: Wait, Did We Ruin the Workplace?

    Claire Howorth

    Kenneal had something to say!

    Abigail Sylvor Greenberg

    If Andrews was using “women in the workplace” as a route to talk about wokeness, Sargeant was using it to talk about abortion and reproduction.

    I really liked Andrews’s explanation of what makes wokeness feminized: When Douthat asks her about the “essential nature” of wokeness, she says, “Let’s pick one flavor,” and then complains about how #MeToo brought about the “mandatory” belief of women.

    Nothing more feminized than believing women!

    Wisdom Iheanyichukwu

    I feel like the question itself is a sort of violence, but also it just reveals this obsession with denouncing wokeness and placing blame on women for men facing the consequences of the wrong things they do that get written off as manly vices. A desire for the workplace to be copacetic for all parties involved is now seen as woke. Woke is bad. Women are bad. Woke ruins the workplace. Women cause woke, so women ruin the workplace.

    Have women ruined the workplace? Have people ruined the Chicken Dance? A lot of inconsequential questions that don’t really need to be asked.

    It’s interesting to focus on whether women ruin the workplace when women are many a time existing within the constraints of male-dominated spaces where men are acting out, which suggests an issue lies within the men, and not the women, of that space.

    A multitude of the examples of how women ruin the workplace are just traits misattributed to femininity, while in reality they are not exclusively that, as women and men can behave in similar manners and fail at the same things. If the idea is that women are unfit to be in the workplace because it is “unnatural” for them, then I raise, it’s also unnatural for men. Women are not the only ones who find fault with the systems in place at work, but why are they the only ones being asked to divorce themselves from the workplace? Being restrained to a workplace for the majority of one’s week, being forced to prioritize work over one’s self and needs, is unnatural for humans in general. What we see is people being placed into situations and institutions where different levels of power are stripped from them, and these people then act out, or they don’t always behave in a manner conducive to everyone’s well-being. And so, rather than asking if women are ruining the workplace, we should be asking if the workplace is ruining the people. The workplace is unnatural; it is not a foundational aspect of human nature, so regardless of whoever dominated the space first or dominates it presently, we should be focusing on creating spaces that everyone can exist within in a copacetic manner.

    Vanity Fair

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  • Federal prosecutors flesh out their case against James Comey. It still looks shaky.

    On July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey publicly explained why he did not think Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent in that year’s presidential election, should be prosecuted for her “extremely careless” handling of “very sensitive, highly classified information” as secretary of state during the Obama administration. But four months later, just 11 days before the election, Comey informed Congress that the FBI had reopened its investigation of Clinton in light of recently discovered emails between her and her personal assistant. Although the new evidence did not change the FBI’s assessment of Clinton’s conduct, Comey did not report that outcome to Congress until November 6, two days before the election.

    Comey took a lot of flak from Democrats, who thought he had recklessly undermined their nominee’s prospects by revealing a renewed yet ultimately fruitless investigation so close to the election. He responded by encouraging his “good friend” Daniel Richman, a Columbia law school professor, to defend him in interviews with reporters, which helped generate stories that summarized Comey’s perspective on the controversy. Sometimes Richman was quoted by name, and sometimes he provided information “on background.” Richman’s interactions with the press, it turns out, are at the center of the perjury and obstruction charges against Comey.

    That point, which federal prosecutors first revealed to Comey’s lawyers on October 15 and fleshed out in a brief they filed on Monday, adds some much-needed clarity to the vague, skimpy indictment that Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, obtained on September 25. At the same time, it sheds light on the reasons why Halligan’s predecessor, whom Trump replaced just a few days before the indictment, did not think the case was worth pursuing—an assessment shared by career prosecutors in his office.

    Halligan says Comey lied during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3, 2017, less than a week before Trump fired him out of anger at the FBI’s investigation of alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government. Although the statute of limitations precludes charging Comey in connection with that hearing, Halligan alleges that he reiterated his lie when he reaffirmed his 2017 testimony during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 30, 2020. Halligan managed, just barely, to obtain an indictment within five years of the latter hearing.

    As relevant to the indictment, Comey answered “no” in 2017 when Sen. Charles Grassley (R–Iowa) asked whether he had “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” about “the Clinton investigation.” At the 2020 hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) noted the exchange with Grassley, and Comey said “I stand by” that answer, adding that his testimony “is the same today.”

    In sticking by his 2017 testimony, Halligan alleges, Comey “willfully and knowingly” made “a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement” to Congress, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison under 18 USC 1001(a)(2). Comey’s statement was false, the indictment says, because he “then and there knew” that he “in fact had authorized PERSON 3 [Richman] to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation of PERSON 1 [Clinton].” Halligan says Richman qualified as “someone else at the FBI” because, in addition to his full-time, paying gig at Columbia, he served the agency as an unpaid “special government employee” during Comey’s tenure there.

    There are several problems with Halligan’s interpretation of Comey’s exchange with Cruz, beginning with the fact that the senator’s questioning focused on a dispute between Comey and Andrew McCabe, his former deputy, regarding the release of information about a different FBI investigation. Comey’s lawyers argue that “when Senator Cruz referenced Senator Grassley’s question about whether Mr. Comey authorized ‘someone else at the FBI’ to serve as anonymous source, there was no reason to assume that he was referring to anyone but full-time employees like Mr. McCabe—who were stationed at the FBI—as opposed to someone like Mr. Richman, who was a Special Government Employee living fulltime in New York.”

    In light of Comey’s close, longstanding friendship with Richman, it is especially plausible that he did not think of him as “someone else at the FBI.” Richman repeatedly defended Comey’s handling of the Clinton investigation, both on and off the record, in conversations with journalists—to the point that a sympathetic 2017 article in The New Yorker described Richman as “a close friend of Comey who has served as his unofficial media surrogate.” Given that background, it seems unlikely that Comey, in his responses to Grassley and Cruz, was trying to cover up Richman’s role in getting him good press.

    That is nevertheless what federal prosecutors suggest in their November 3 brief. Officially, it is a response to Comey’s argument that the indictment should be dismissed because his prosecution is vindictive and selective, driven by Trump’s personal grudge against him. But in rebutting that claim, the brief offers a narrative that was conspicuously missing from the indictment, which Halligan rushed to obtain before a statutory deadline that would have missed by the end of September.

    Notably, the indictment was signed by Halligan alone, which seemed to reflect internal skepticism about the charges. But the response to Comey’s claim of vindictive and selective prosecution is signed by two assistant U.S. attorneys: N. Tyler Lemons and Gabriel J. Diaz, both of whom were reassigned to Halligan’s office from the Eastern District of North Carolina in October.

    Lemons and Diaz cite emails between Comey and Richman that illustrate their collaboration in generating stories that reflected Comey’s defense of the way he handled the Clinton investigation. On November 1, 2016, for example, Comey expressed his dissatisfaction with coverage of the controversy in The New York Times.

    “When I read the [Times] coverage involving [reporter Michael Schmidt], I am left with the sense that they don’t understand the significance of my having spoke[n] about the case in July,” Comey wrote. “It changes the entire analysis. Perhaps you can make [Schmidt] smarter.”

    Comey was alluding to his argument that he had an obligation to update Congress about the Clinton investigation in light of his earlier announcement. “Why is this so hard for them to grasp?” he wondered. “All the stuff about how we were allegedly careful not to take actions on cases involving other allegations about which we have never spoken is irrelevant. I love our practice of being inactive near elections. But inactivity was not an option here. The choices were act to reveal or act to conceal.”

    Richman replied the next day, assuring Comey that he was working hard to promote his perspective: “This is precisely the case I made to them and thought they understood. I was quite wrong. Indeed I went further and said mindless allegiance to the policy (and recognition that more evidence could come in) would have counseled silence in [J]uly to let [Clinton] twist in the wind.”

    Later that day, Richman told Comey he had tried again, this time with more success: “Just got the point home to [Schmidt]. Probably was rougher than u would have been.”

    That same day, the Times ran a flow-chart-style article by Matt Apuzzo and Sergio Pecanha under the headline “These Are the Bad (and Worse) Options James Comey Faced.” Comey deemed that article “pretty good,” adding, “Someone showed some logic. I would paint the cons more darkly but not bad.” Richman replied, “See I *can* teach.” Comey expressed his gratitude: “Well done my friend.”

    On February 11, 2017, Richman emailed Chuck Rosenberg, who was then acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Rosenberg had previously held various FBI and Justice Department positions, including chief of staff for Comey when he was deputy attorney general during George W. Bush’s administration.

    “My pal at the NYT, Mike Schmidt, is (along with [Matt] Apuzzo, [Adam] Goldman, and (gag me) [Eric] Lichtblau)…doing a huge piece on the [Clinton] emails,” Richman wrote. “He’s had a ton of background conversations with players and non-players (like me). Mike would very much like to talk to you exclusively on background as he tries to [understand] Jim’s decisionmaking to the extent possible. Mike asked me to reach out to you. Hence this email. Would you be willing to chat with him?” Rosenberg said he would “reach out” to Schmidt.

    The “huge piece” to which Richman referred evidently was a story by Apuzzo, Schmidt, Goldman, and Lichtblau that the Times ran on April 22, 2017, under the headline “Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election.” The story quoted Richman by name, describing him as “a longtime confidant and friend of Mr. Comey’s.” Comey was again pleased. “I read the piece,” he wrote to Richman the next day. “Thanks so much for your words and tell [Schmidt] he did a good job. Would be different if I wrote it but it is by and large fair.”

    Richman replied: “You’re ever so welcome. And will do re Mike. Any badly or under-developed points for me to work on with the New Yorker? Or just the usual.”

    Richman apparently was referring to a flattering article by Peter Elkind that would appear in the May 11, 2017, issue of The New Yorker, titled “James Comey’s Conspicuous Independence.” Like the April 22 Times story, it quoted Richman by name, describing him as “a Columbia law professor and close friend of Comey who has served as his unofficial media surrogate.”

    The evidence cited by the government, in short, does not do much more than confirm Richman’s well-known role as Comey’s champion. It establishes that Richman, with Comey’s encouragement, sometimes openly defended his friend and sometimes worked behind the scenes to influence press coverage.

    Given the latter approach, it is accurate to say that Comey “authorized” Richman to “serve as an anonymous source in news reports” about the Clinton investigation. But the assertion that Comey lied about that hinges on two questionable assumptions.

    Halligan assumes that Comey, when he was questioned by Grassley and Cruz, would have thought of Richman as “someone else at the FBI” rather than his “longtime confidant and friend.” She also assumes that Comey was deliberately trying to mislead the senators about his well-established relationship with Richman, at least to the extent that it included “background” discussions with reporters.

    To convict Comey, prosecutors would have to persuade a jury that there is no reasonable doubt about either of those propositions. It is therefore not surprising that Erik Siebert, Halligan’s predecessor, was not keen to pursue this case, or that Trump managed to get what he wanted only by intervening at the last minute. He replaced Siebert with Halligan, a neophyte prosecutor whose main qualification was her willingness to overlook the weaknesses that had deterred her predecessor, and he publicly ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Comey before it was too late.

    “We can’t delay any longer,” Trump told Bondi. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Five days later, Siebert delivered the indictment that Trump had demanded, although it was such a hasty job that the details of the allegations against Comey are only now coming into focus. Those details reinforce the impression that Trump was determined to get Comey one way or another, regardless of the law or the evidence.

    Jacob Sullum

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  • Holidaymaker reveals she was downgraded to economy – and the airline refused a refund

    By ALESIA FIDDLER – TRAVEL REPORTER

    Published: | Updated:

    Imagine packing for your trip and looking forward to a comfortable premium economy seat you paid extra for, only to find you had been downgraded.

    It’s the exact situation one holidaymaker, Marion McGilvary, found herself in – and she wasn’t even offered a refund from the airline. 

    She told The Times about her journey from New York back in August this year.

    The passenger had booked her trip through British Airways and had a BA flight number, however her actual flight was operated by American Airlines.

    Marion claimed she was ‘involuntarily downgraded’ and was struggling to get a refund.

    She told the publication: ‘I was given, not offered, a $300 (£225) credit voucher for use on AA or a partner airline, which I was told could be renewed if not used within a year, but this apparently isn’t the case.

    ‘AA also told me I’d get the difference in fare automatically refunded and that I should already have the email. No email came.’

    Due to the flight being operated by American Airlines, the holidaymaker said BA refused to take responsibility for the issue. 

    Marion McGilvary was looking forward to a comfortable premium economy seat she’d paid extra for on her flight, only to find out she had been downgraded – and wasn’t offered a refund  (stock)

    Marion found herself sat next to another passenger in the same position as her.

    However, she was given a $500 (£375) credit voucher and when Marion raised this huge difference, was told it was ‘individually decided’.

    ‘I was then told I’d get no refund for a voluntary downgrade and that I’d agreed to take the compensation,’ Marion recalled. 

    The passenger insisted she had not agreed with the circumstances. 

    The Times contacted the airlines and in the end, BA agreed to give Marion a £234 refund for the downgrade. 

    The Daily Mail approached British Airways and American Airlines for comment. 

    Another passenger, Edina, 48, previously told the Daily Mail about her compensation ordeal.

    She was flying from Granada, Spain, to Gatwick on September 1, 2019, when she found herself stuck. The Hungarian, who moved to the UK 13 years ago, was travelling with her partner, a breast-feeding infant and two young children via Iberia. 

    The passenger had booked her trip through British Airways and had a BA flight number, however her actual flight was operated by American Airlines

    The passenger had booked her trip through British Airways and had a BA flight number, however her actual flight was operated by American Airlines 

    The family had booked a connecting flight with the same airline from Madrid to Gatwick and was supposed to arrive at the Spanish airport at 8.05am.

    Originally, the connecting flight was due to depart Madrid at 8.50am, but it changed to 8.20am, making it impossible for them to make it on time. 

    She described the situation in Madrid as ‘complete chaos’ and the family landed in Gatwick eight hours later than they were supposed to. 

    After the ordeal, Edina tried to claim compensation and was hit with further hurdles which she described as ‘horrible’ to deal with.

    The holidaymaker didn’t receive anything for six months and first approached Iberia who she says ‘didn’t reply at all’.

    She then approached the Spanish aviation authority who advised her to submit again to Iberia and wait one month.  Eventually, Iberia agreed to pay compensation and Edina received around €2,000 (£1,738).

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  • Inside Pete Hegseth’s “Soviet-Style” War on the Press

    “None of Hegseth’s predecessors, nor any of his fellow Cabinet secretaries, are doing anything like this, and it’s embarrassing. President Trump deserves better,” said Ullyot, a Marine Corps veteran who also served as a deputy assistant to Trump. “Hegseth should drop the Soviet-style restrictions, reopen the briefing room, and follow the lead of President Trump and every other Cabinet secretary by engaging regularly, confidently, and conversationally with reporters of all stripes.”

    Critics include pro-Trump media personalities. “I’m MAGA, and I’m conservative, and I want this administration to succeed,” Gabrielle Cuccia told me. In May, she said, she was fired from her job as chief Pentagon correspondent at One America News after she criticized policies that restricted reporting on the department. She later explained that she had argued that the restrictions were “not based on any credible threat from the Pentagon media present every single day, but rather a growing desire to control how, and when, the public receives information.” She told me: “What does that say when we start to accept agreements in which a government is telling us what is approved to be spoken of and what’s not?”

    Critics include Fox News, one of the president’s favorite networks and Hegseth’s former employer, which joined every major news network, both cable and broadcast, in refusing to agree to the new rules. In a joint statement, Fox and other news organizations said the policy “threatens core journalistic protections.”

    “The policy was just unacceptable to folks,” said one Fox News editorial staffer. On the air, Bret Baier, Fox’s most prominent newsman, criticized the new rules in an interview with retired US Army general Jack Keane. Keane, a Fox analyst who worked in the Pentagon when Baier covered it as a correspondent, disputed the accuracy of Hegseth’s claims. “It doesn’t seem like the whole story is being told to our viewers here,” Keane told Baier. “What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalists, and that will be their story. That’s not journalism.”

    Aidan McLaughlin

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  • OpenAI Will Stop Saving Users’ Deleted Posts

    A controversial court order has forced OpenAI to save deleted users posts “indefinitely” as part of its ongoing legal battle with the New York Times. However, it appears that’s mostly over—for now.

    OpenAI was sued by the Times in December 2023 for allegedly using the Times’s copyrighted material to train its algorithm. Other news organizations also joined the litigation. As part of that case, the AI company was previously ordered to retain its chat logs “indefinitely”—including deleted ones—so that they could be examined for potential evidence related to the case. Ars Technica previously noted that this court order was quite sweeping, and impacted the privacy of “hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users globally.”

    Indeed, OpenAI notably made a big stink about the order when it was instituted, characterizing it as an attack on users’ privacy. “The New York Times and other plaintiffs have made a sweeping and unnecessary demand in their baseless lawsuit against us: retain consumer ChatGPT and API customer data indefinitely,” said Brad Lightcap, COO, OpenAI, in June.

    Well, it appears the Great Chat Log Retention Saga has come to a close. Ars now reports that, on Thursday, U.S. Judge Ona Wang approved a joint measure that had been submitted by both OpenAI and the Times, which nixed the preservation order that had previously been in place, allowing the company to actually delete the deleted chat logs. That said, Ars notes that “deleted and temporary chats will still be monitored” for some users, although it’s a little unclear who might be impacted.

    The chat logs that have already been retained will continue to be made accessible to the news organizations involved in the legal case, as part of the effort to uncover examples of chatbot “outputs infringing their articles or attributing misinformation to their publications,” Ars notes.

    While the chat log retention drama may be over, what isn’t over is the battle over copyright law currently embroiling the AI industry. At this point, OpenAI has been sued many, many times on similar grounds. So have other AI firms. The copyright issues surrounding generative AI are still largely unsettled—or, rather, are in the process of being settled via the ongoing legal battles that are currently unfolding.

    Lucas Ropek

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  • U.S. attorney said she was fired after telling Border Patrol to follow a court order

    The acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento has said she was fired after telling the Border Patrol chief in charge of immigration raids in California that his agents were not allowed to arrest people without probable cause in the Central Valley.

    Michele Beckwith, a career prosecutor who was made the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California earlier this year, told the New York Times that she was let go after she warned Gregory Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, that a court injunction blocked him from carrying out indiscriminate immigration raids in Sacramento.

    Beckwith did not respond to a request for comment from the L.A. Times, but told the New York Times that “we have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.”

    The U.S. attorney’s office in Sacramento declined to comment. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

    Bovino presided over a series of raids in Los Angeles starting in June in which agents spent weeks pursuing Latino-looking workers outside of Home Depots, car washes, bus stops and other areas. The agents often wore masks and used unmarked vehicles.

    But such indiscriminate tactics were not allowed in California’s Eastern District after the American Civil Liberties Union and United Farm Workers filed suit against the Border Patrol earlier in the year and won an injunction.

    The suit followed a January operation in Kern County called “Operation Return to Sender,” in which agents swarmed a Home Depot and Latino market, among other areas frequented by laborers. In April, a federal district court judge ruled that the Border Patrol likely violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

    As Beckwith described it to New York Times reporters, she received a phone call from Bovino on July 14 in which he said he was bringing agents to Sacramento.

    She said she told him that the injunction filed after the Kern County raid meant he could not stop people indiscriminately in the Eastern District. The next day, she wrote him an email in which, as quoted in the New York Times, she stressed the need for “compliance with court orders and the Constitution.”

    Shortly thereafter her work cell phone and her work computer stopped working. A bit before 5 p.m. she received an email informing her that her employment was being terminated effective immediately.

    It was the end of a 15-year career in in the Department of Justice in which she had served as the office’s Criminal Division Chief and First Assistant and prosecuted members of the Aryan Brotherhood, suspected terrorists, and fentanyl traffickers.

    Two days later on July 17, Bovino and his agents moved into Sacramento, conducting a raid at a Home Depot south of downtown.

    In an interview with Fox News that day, Bovino said the raids were targeted and based on intelligence. “Everything we do is targeted,” he said. “We did have prior intelligence that there were targets that we were interested in and around that Home Depot, as well as other targeted enforcement packages in and around the Sacramento area.”

    He also said that his operations would not slow down. “There is no sanctuary anywhere,” he said. “We’re here to stay. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to affect this mission and secure the homeland.”

    Beckwith is one of a number of top prosecutors who have quit or been fired as the Trump administration pushes the Department of Justice to aggressively carry out his policies, including investigating people who have been the president’s political targets.

    In March, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles was fired after lawyers for a fast-food executive he was prosecuting pushed officials in Washington to drop all charges against him, according to multiple sources.

    In July, Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, was fired by the Trump administration, according to the New York Times.

    And just last week, a U. S. attorney in Virginia was pushed out after he had determined there was insufficient evidence to prosecute James B. Comey. A new prosecutor this week won a grand jury indictment against Comey on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.

    Jessica Garrison

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  • Ezra Klein Argues for Big-Tent Politics

    But it’s not in the spirit of giving counsel. I’m not saying you do it—

    No, I take that point. I don’t see myself in those conversations as a counsellor.

    Because, you know, there is a tradition of this—Walter Lippmann giving counsel to this one or that one.

    And doing secret diplomatic missions. The lines were blurry back then.

    So you keep it pretty on the up and up.

    I try to.

    Would you ever go into politics?

    No.

    Absolutely not? You’re making a Sherman statement.

    I’m making a Sherman statement. I think you have to know what you’re good at doing. I think I’m good at doing this.

    What is your sense of your mission as a podcaster, as a writer?

    My sense of mission is simple: I have values and beliefs about how the world should work and what would make the world better, and I try to persuade people of them, but I also try to explore them in an honest way. I do this because I care about where things are going. I’m not dispassionately observing from the sidelines. I am emotionally, intellectually, spiritually involved.

    But what I’m doing, and the way I’m doing it, has changed a lot over the years. In ways that I can follow more through intuition than through some framework. The version of me that was writing “Wonkblog,” and telling everybody about health care and aging in one chart, is not what I’m doing on my podcast now. My podcast is a forum in which I’m not primarily trying to be persuasive. Over time I think it has persuasive elements, but it’s mostly other people talking. I have a lot of people on the show whom I disagree with. And I think it acts as a space in which certain kinds of conversations can be had and then can be put into conversation with each other. And that matters.

    In my column, I’m more prescriptive. What goes into, eventually, the book “Abundance,” comes more from the column, and that’s me trying to understand the world and trying to find ways to confront things in it that I find puzzling or unnerving. I try to take seriously questions that I don’t love. I don’t try to insist the world works the way I want it to work. I try to be honest with myself about the way it is working.

    You are an important figure at what I think is still, today, the most important news-gathering organization on earth, the New York Times, but it’s also one that everybody has opinions about. And recently Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a book about the summer of 2020, which was dramatic in a lot of quarters, including the Times. James Bennett fired. Bari Weiss left and created The Free Press. What’s your opinion about Bari Weiss’s increasing influence? It looks like she’s about to be a very important figure at CBS News.

    Yeah, it seems like she’s about to take over CBS.

    What do you think?

    My thing about Bari—and I’ve been on her show—I have a lot of admiration for how good she is at what she does. My disagreements with Bari are that I think she’s asymmetric in sympathy and generosity.

    Tell me what that means.

    I’ve thought The Free Press’ work on, say, starvation in Gaza has been really bad.

    Spell it out.

    It’s done this whole thing, like, Well, a lot of the kids who have died and have been reported on, well, they had secondary conditions. And, yes, when you starve a population the people who die first will be the most vulnerable. But that’s not exculpatory. There was overwhelming evidence of how bad things were in Gaza. I felt that they were trying to whitewash it.

    I think Bari, though, is an insane talent spotter. If you look at what she’s built at The Free Press, she’s very, very good at finding people, at pulling them in, at networking with them. She’s sort of an impresario. Bringing in Tyler Cowen to be a columnist was a very good idea for them.

    The economist.

    I’m somebody who’s edited a site, Vox, right? I know how hard this is to do. And Bari has an incredibly sensitive feel for the political moment. It is not my feel for the moment, and her politics are not mine.

    What are her politics? How would you describe them?

    What I see her trying to do is something that used to be somewhat more common, which is to self-consciously be what she would define as the center. And I see The Free Press tacking back and forth around that. It was much more sort of pro-Trump, I would say, when he was running and the Democrats were in power. But now that he’s in it’s, like, Oh, no, they’re the vandals. The publication is a little bit, to me, like the old New Republic, doing things they used to do. . . . Actually, it’s funny. When I was a blogger, this was something we all used to complain about all the time. All of these organizations that we felt were using this concept, this amorphous concept of the center as a positioning device—

    That it was a dodge.

    No, it wasn’t a dodge—it was navigational. They weren’t dodging. They were just kind of . . . there were a lot of politicians and a lot of players who had felt like their politics were hewing to some idea of the center, as opposed to a very consistent set of views and principles. And, as media has become polarized, many fewer places are doing that. I think Bari saw a market opportunity in that. Is her center what I think is the center? No. But I recognize a lot of editorial skill there.

    David Remnick

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  • Je Suis Jimmy

    Illustration: Brian Stauffer

    Like watching Rome burn,” one news anchor said as Donald Trump’s attack on the media industry entered a new phase. The president has never done well with criticism, constantly going after news organizations and private companies and individuals perceived to be insufficiently supportive or ingratiating. “This is the environment that we’re all operating in, and we’ve known this for a while, where, whether it’s legitimate or not, you have the government as an actor trying to control and shape coverage through a combination of means, one of which is threats,” the news anchor said. But lately those threats feel less empty: The assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has given the administration further opportunity to use its power to influence the media industry and its output — “consequence culture,” as they are calling it. So far, companies have largely shown an unwillingness to fight back. Coincidentally or not, this timidity comes at a moment of intense consolidation in the business, as David Ellison, right after taking over Paramount, sets his sights on Warner Bros. Discovery, with help from father Larry, a recent Trump ally who is expected to be a major investor in the American-owned version of TikTok.

    On Wednesday, September 17, FCC chairman Brendan Carr dangled the possibility of punishing ABC over remarks Jimmy Kimmel had made days before about Kirk’s assassination; the late-night host had suggested “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” It happened quickly from there: Nexstar, which owns numerous ABC affiliates throughout the country, said it would pull Kimmel’s show from the airwaves; within minutes, Sinclair, another owner of ABC affiliates, followed suit; then an ABC spokesperson told the press that new episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be “preempted indefinitely.” Trump and Carr took a victory lap, and the president seemed to suggest a similar fate for NBC late-night stars Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. On Thursday, Trump, who earlier in the week had sued the New York Times for $15 billion over articles questioning his success, issued another threat, musing that networks giving him negative coverage deserve to have their licenses revoked.

    Inside the media and entertainment companies, the mood among those creating the content under attack is somber. “I haven’t seen a lot of comedy writers or hosts choosing to censor themselves after watching our colleagues get literally canceled. It’s more that we’re horrified and embarrassed by the cowardice of the networks and the choices they’re making,” said a writer for a late-night show. “The people who have the most money and power are the first to give up, and frankly that should be mortifying for them.” Said another late-night writer: “The broadcast networks are beholden to Trump’s FCC in a way cable channels aren’t, but that’s hardly reassuring.” (Cable channels, unlike broadcast, do not use public airwaves and therefore don’t require FCC licenses.)

    The decision to pull Kimmel off the air came two months after CBS, following its settlement of a lawsuit with Trump, canceled Stephen Colbert’s show. The latter move at least appeared couched in financial reasons, some insiders I spoke to noted; The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was expensive to produce — more than $100 million a year — and reportedly ran tens of millions of dollars in the red. “We had no idea how much of it was business motivated,” a late-night staffer said of the Colbert decision. “But this is just cut and dry.” As one prominent talent executive put it: “The FCC commissioner threatened ABC and its station partners, and the station partners and ABC took an action based on that threat. It’s never been that clear before.”

    Pulling Kimmel was a decision that came from the very top of Disney with CEO Bob Iger and head of television Dana Walden reportedly fielding concerns from advertisers and affiliates. Kimmel had planned to address Carr’s comments on air Wednesday night, but Walden and other senior executives feared that would further inflame the situation, especially as staff on Kimmel’s show had been doxed and received threatening emails, according to The Wall Street Journal. Nexstar, for its part, denied that its decision was influenced by Carr’s remarks or FCC pressure, but, notably, the conglomerate is in the midst of trying to get a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna approved by the agency. “No one is confused — this is all about Tegna and Sinclair’s regulatory approval,” said another talent executive. “It’s super-specific. But it has real impact if it’s not limited in scope.” Multiple executives across television and print publishing said the focus is on ensuring their staffers can continue doing the work. “This is just the latest, right? We are just keeping our heads down and doing reporting,” said one.

    At all levels of the industry, the question hung in the air of whether this moment marks a turning point. On Thursday, Carr told CNBC, “We’re not done yet,” and suggested The View, another ABC program, could be subject to review. “Clients are scared for what it suggests is to come. If Kimmel can get fired for that, what might they get fired for?” said another prominent talent executive. Late-night writers are also in a precarious position. “Our show is not in a position to pretend nothing happened in the way that others might be able to,” said one. “If our format didn’t demand it, I think some people who work here would feel safer not putting a target on their backs by commenting on it — which is the point of political censorship.” This writer described feeling newly paranoid: “I haven’t liked or shared any political commentary on social media since Kirk’s killing last week. It all feels like evidence that could be used in bad faith for some future persecution.”

    Many feel something fundamental is changing in the industry. “The consolidation happening in the media world is incredibly unhelpful to this. Everyone feels like there’s no safe space, no corporate parent that’s going to stand up for you or protect you,” said the news anchor. “I don’t know that anybody knows how it’s going to end, but I think everybody recognizes the danger that we’re all in.” The Ellisons loom large with reported plans to acquire the Free Press and possibly put founder Bari Weiss in a leadership role atop CBS News. A Warner Bros. Discovery deal would give the family control over CNN too. Some see media companies’ capitulation as yet another indication of their waning power — that in an effort to slow down their decline, they’ve accelerated it. “They’re continuing to remind the audience and the population of their growing irrelevance,” said one network executive. “Personally, I would be a lot more concerned if Jimmy Kimmel got canceled from YouTube.”

    For now, there haven’t been explicit directives for journalists or late-night writers to pull punches. But the menacing environment is impossible to ignore. “It’s front of mind, and front of coverage, and you’re living it while also reporting on it,” said a veteran news editor at the New York Times. Still, the Times, in the face of Trump’s suit, finds itself in a better position than other organizations Trump has picked on. “We do not have millions of dollars of research grants from the federal government. We do not need to do business in front of the courts. We are one of the few institutions in America that he has no leverage over,” a Times reporter noted.

    Times executives have come out forcefully in response to the lawsuit. Publisher A. G. Sulzberger called it “frivolous,” and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien described it as an authoritarian-like attempt to intimidate independent journalists. (A federal judge essentially agreed, calling the suit “improper and impermissible” as filed.) “The New York Times will not be cowed by this,” she said. “A.G. is the person who I feel like was kind of made for this moment and is increasingly alone in this industry,” said the veteran news editor. “In the past, we could, you know, join with the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, put out a statement about this. It does feel increasingly singular and not in a good way.”


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    Charlotte Klein

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  • Trump’s Frivolous Times Lawsuit Wasn’t Supposed to Succeed

    President Trump speaks to reporters on Air Force One on September 18, 2025.
    Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

    Nobody who has come within shouting distance of law school was surprised when Florida-based U.S. District Court judge Steven Merryday dismissed
    Donald Trump’s $15 billion defamation suit against the New York Times. It was widely panned as meritless the moment he filed it. But the contempt of the judge for Trump’s waste of everyone’s time was remarkable, notes CBS News:

    In the ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Steven Merryday said the original 85-page complaint was “decidedly improper and impermissible” and went well beyond Rule 8 of federal rules of civil procedure, which requires that each allegation be “simple, concise and direct.” …

    “Even under the most generous and lenient applications of Rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible,” Merryday wrote. “… The reader must endure an allegation of ‘the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass’ and an allegation that ‘the false narrative about The Apprentice was just the tip of defendants’ melting iceberg of falsehoods.’”

    NBC News has another hostile comment from the ruling:

    “As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary,” wrote Merryday.

    Merryday is decidedly not one of those “radical left judges” the White House loves to bash. He was appointed to the federal bench by George H.W. Bush and is best known for striking down the CDC’s ban on cruise-ship operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. But he knows a frivolous lawsuit when he sees one. And he basically ordered Trump’s lawyers to cut the crap if they wanted any hearing on a defamation suit against the Times.

    The timing of this angry rejection of the president’s assault on the Times’ First Amendment rights to cover his administration is interesting, to put it mildly. Trump, his vice-president, his attorney general, and many of his supporters are engaged in a systemic effort to restrict or inhibit free speech if the content of that speech displeases them or offers opportunities to smear or demonize their opponents. But the suit itself, idiotic as it was, also illustrates an important point about how Trump goes about intimidating his foes and getting his way. He understands that getting his way indirectly through public pressure and private threats is legally safer and more effective than the direct use of government power to silence pesky critics and persistent reporters. The operation to shut down Jimmy Kimmel for his comments about politicization of the Charlie Kirk assassination was textbook Trump. His FCC chairman didn’t try to directly sanction Kimmel or ABC; he complained about Kimmel on a right-wing podcast and then after an intense MAGA social-media campaign network affiliates vowed to take his show off the air, leading ABC to suspend it indefinitely. It’s a two-cushion shot providing the administration with plausible deniability.

    Similarly Trump’s lawsuit against the Times was never intended to succeed in court; it didn’t even make a token effort to demonstrate the newspaper told conscious untruths with “actual malice,” the First Amendment standard for defamation suits by public figures. But by putting the broad accusation and a vast claim of damages out there, Team Trump hoped to rouse supporters to take their own actions against the Times, to put the Times on notice that worse things are to come, and perhaps to pave the way for the sort of shakedowns the president has deftly executed against CBS and ABC.

    Beyond that, the Times lawsuit was a reminder that the president has for many years earned a reputation as the king of frivolous lawsuits. Back in 2016 when he was first running for president, USA Today did an inventory of lawsuits filed by Trump and his businesses and identified 4,095 of them. In a 2020 book on Trump’s incredibly long and active history of litigation, former prosecutor James D. Zirin captures his M.O. succinctly:

    Trump learned how to use the law from his mentor, notorious lawyer Roy Cohn. Trump took Cohn’s scorched-earth strategy to heart.

    “Trump saw litigation as being only about winning,” Zirin writes. “He sued at the drop of a hat. He sued for sport; he sued to achieve control; and he sued to make a point. He sued as a means of destroying or silencing those who crossed him. He became a plaintiff in chief.”

    It was a source of bitter amusement in the legal community when Trump framed his aggressive 2025 shakedown of white-shoe law firms for free legal work as an attack on “frivolous lawsuits.” It was an incredible example of a pot calling the kettle black.

    So the president won’t be the least bit deterred or dismayed by the dismissal of his giant suit against the Times or by the mockery it invited. This is who he is and what he does.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump Sues New York Times for $15B Defamation

    The president is seeking $15 billion from the publication for libel and defamation

    Former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a campaign event on April 02

    President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to announce that he has filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times. 

    Trump wrote, “Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual “mouthpiece” for the Radical Left Democrat Party.” 

    This announcement comes shortly after The New York Times reported on a note with an explicit drawing for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, with a signature that looks a lot like President Trump’s. The publication published articles on how the signature resembles the President’s, while Trump has been steadfastly denying. The note came out in a batch of Epstein-related materials by the House Oversight Committee. 

    Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, responded in a statement published Wednesday: “Our journalists reported the facts, provided the visual evidence and printed the president’s denial. It’s all there for the American people to see and to make up their own minds about. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.” 

    In the past, Trump has gone to court with a number of other news outlets and publications. Like the multi-billion dollar settlements he has done in the past against Disney’s ABC, and Paramount’s CBS networks. 

    “I am PROUD to hold this once respected “rag” responsible,” Trump said in the same Truth Social post, referring to the Times. 

    This would not be the first time the President and The New York Times have had a run in. In the past Trump would criticize the publications’ coverage, for their ‘biased’ reporting on his administration and family business relations. 

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    Tara Nguyen

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  • Long Island law firm sues Project Veritas over legal fees | Long Island Business News

    Lake Success-based Abrams Fensterman has filed a lawsuit against the right-wing nonprofit Project Veritas for stiffing the law firm for payment of legal fees. 

    The lawsuit filed in Nassau County State Supreme Court on Wednesday claims that Mamaroneck-based Project Veritas has not paid for legal services rendered by the firm and that the client has yet to make any payments on a balance due of $103,672.03. 

    The complaint asserts that between Jan. 5, 2021 and Sept. 19, 2023, Abrams Fensterman worked on a number of cases on behalf of Project Veritas, including a defamation lawsuit the nonprofit lodged against The New York Times in 2020, after the newspaper described some videos from Project Veritas as part of a “coordinated disinformation effort.” The suit was withdrawn in July 2025. 

    In the lawsuit filed by Abrams Fensterman, the firm stated that the amount owed by Project Veritas is “above the threshold amount” for arbitration, so it had to sue for the money instead. 

    Attorney MarieRose Apice, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of her firm, has yet to respond to a request for comment. 

    Project Veritas could not be reached for comment. 

    Founded by James O’Keefe in 2010, Project Veritas is described in published reports as a far-right activist group, which targeted main-stream media outlets and progressive organizations. In the exposé published by the Times in 2020, for which Project Veritas sued for defamation, the newspaper chronicled the group’s use of undercover operatives to infiltrate “Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda.” 

    Project Veritas suspended its operations “amidst severe financial woes,” in Sept. 2023, according to Mediaite.com. 

    Headquartered in Lake Success, Abrams Fensterman also has offices in Brooklyn, White Plains, Albany and Rochester, according to its website. 


    David Winzelberg

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  • Universal Epic Orlando theme park will open in May | Honolulu Star-Advertiser

    Universal Epic Orlando theme park will open in May | Honolulu Star-Advertiser

    UNIVERSAL ORLANDO RESORT VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES

    In an artist conceptual rendering provided by Universal Orlando Resort, the planned addition to Universal Orlando Resort, titled Universal Epic Universe, in Orlando, Fla. Initial ticket packages for the new area of Universal Orlando Resort, the first new Florida theme park in a generation, will cost as much as $521.

    When the Universal Orlando Resort opened its first Harry Potter rides in June 2010, people waited six hours in 90-degree heat just to get in the gate. Demand overran expectations for months, leaving some visitors with a gridlocked vacation they vowed never to repeat.

    Universal, hoping to avoid similar headaches when it opens a much splashier theme park in the resort on May 22, has decided to do things differently.

    Initially, tickets for the general public will be sold only for the new area, Universal Epic Universe, which is the first major park to open in Orlando, Florida, in 26 years, as part of multiday packages, the resort said Thursday. The least expensive option, priced at $352 to $521, with the cost fluctuating based on the days chosen, will provide one-day admission to Epic Universe and two days of access to the resort’s older parks. The packages go on sale Tuesday.

    Universal said that additional ticket options, including single-day admission for the grand opening period, would become available “in the months ahead.” (Current annual passholders can buy single-day tickets to Epic Universe starting Oct. 24.)

    Epic Universe is expected to attract roughly 10 million visitors in its first full year of operation, according to MoffettNathanson, a research firm.

    The company wants to avoid congestion — to leave visitors, some of whom may be experiencing Universal for the first time, wanting to return. But the multiday focus also underscores Universal’s primary mission in adding Epic Universe: It wants more families to view the resort as a weeklong destination and not just a one- or two-day add-on to a Disney pilgrimage.

    Comcast, which owns the Universal theme park chain, has poured billions of dollars into Epic Universe, which will feature 70 acres worth of attractions, dining and shopping. (To compare, the Harry Potter area that opened in 2010 covered 20 acres.) Epic Universe will have major rides based on Nintendo video games; films like “How to Train Your Dragon”; classic movie monsters; and, yes, Harry Potter. The expansion also includes three new hotels.

    “Epic Universe signals a new phase in the theme park wars,” Craig Moffett, a founder of MoffettNathanson, wrote in a report this year. He estimated that Universal would siphon about 1 million visitors from the much-larger Disney World from mid-2025 to the end of 2026.

    This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

    © 2024 The New York Times Company


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  • Court Revives Sarah Palin’s Libel Lawsuit Against The New York Times – KXL

    Court Revives Sarah Palin’s Libel Lawsuit Against The New York Times – KXL

    FILE – Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin speaks briefly to reporters as she leaves a courthouse in New York, Feb. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

    NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court has revived Sarah Palin’s libel case against The New York Times.

    The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday.

    The appeals court wrote that Judge Jed S. Rakoff’s dismissal of the lawsuit while a jury was deliberating improperly intruded on the jury’s work in February 2022.

    It also found that the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction and an erroneous response to a question from the jury tainted the jury’s ruling against Palin.

    A lawyer for Palin says he is reviewing the ruling.

    A Times spokesperson says that the decision is disappointing but that the newspaper is confident it will prevail in a retrial.

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    Grant McHill

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  • Ezra Klein, Wonk in Full, Is Almost a Celebrity at the DNC

    Ezra Klein, Wonk in Full, Is Almost a Celebrity at the DNC

    Ezra Klein at the DNC on August 20th, 2024.
    Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine

    It was Tuesday afternoon at the United Center in Chicago, a few hours before back-to-back Obamas issued their impassioned calls-to-arms, and the famously sensible explanatory journalist Ezra Klein, who characteristically keeps his passions in check, didn’t have the right credentials to get into the arena. The Secret Service didn’t recognize the New York Times’ star Opinion writer and podcaster, who has had a bit of a glow-up lately with a salt-and-pepper beard and David Beckham–esque haircut, but eventually after we met up was able to figure out how to get in to where he belonged. This is, after all, as much his convention as any journalist this time around, since its high-energy optimism turned on the fact that President Joe Biden no longer was leading the ticket. And, starting early this year, Klein platformed that Establishment desire, leading the coup-drumbeat.

    It worked so well that Klein, 40, who has been an influential journalist for over half his life, is ready to come out from behind his computer, step out of his podcast studio, and into the spotlight. He tells me this is actually the first convention he’s attended since the Obama years. After spending his 20s writing lengthy blog posts on economics, he’s now become a tattooed middle-aged Brooklyn dad in Bonobos and sand-colored Air Force Ones who goes to Burning Man, where he’s headed next week.

    “The thing I got right this year wasn’t that Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection. Everyone knew that,” he told me in the back of a bar near his hotel in Downtown Chicago the night before. “The thing I got right this year was that the Democratic Party was an institution that still had decision-making capacity.” In February, Klein launched a series of podcasts and columns arguing that Biden should step aside. He also advocated for alternatives, like an open convention, and made the case for why Kamala Harris was underrated. Following his “prediction about the campaign” in February, as he later referred to it, Klein continued to take the pulse of the party. And while he didn’t get the open convention he was looking for, he did get what he called a “disorganized” mini primary in the veepstakes — and played a role in the unofficial auditioning process, too, having Gretchen Whitmer and then Tim Walz on his show in the days leading up to Harris’s eventual pick. (He also invited Josh Shapiro on, but the Pennsylvania governor turned him down. “And look what happened,” Klein says, seemingly joking.) He says he’s “very uncomfortable” with the amount of attention he’s received, though seems to be enjoying it just fine, even if Semafor was picking on him a bit for being too cozy with top-echelon Dems with a piece posted August 19 they titled “The New York Times’ Ezra Klein Problem.”

    There is a historical tension between the newsroom and Opinion side at the Times, one that Klein doesn’t think is all that useful. “I think of my work as primarily reported,” he says. “My line for a very long time back when I was at the Washington Post,” he said, “was that the division between the news and opinion sides made it too hard for the news side to tell the truth and too easy for the opinion side to bullshit.” He adds: “I don’t really think my show’s lineage, so to speak, is actually inside that opinion-news divide.”

    Still, the Times works hard to maintain its journalistic propriety. Following the debate, but prior to Biden dropping out, Klein wanted to have Times politics reporter and The Run-Up host Astead Herndon on his show to talk about Harris. But executive editor Joe Kahn shut it down. This was around the time the paper’s own editorial board had joined the chorus of calls for Biden to step aside, a moment when newsroom leaders felt the need to reinforce the division between the newsroom and Opinion side. “Newsroom people get resentful as he veers more into newsmaking,” one Times staffer noted. Said another: “I think he only becomes more powerful over time, since I’d argue the influence of the Times editorial board (and all ed boards, really) has waned over the course of the rise of the internet and social.”

    But in general, Klein’s star status doesn’t seem to be a problem at all for the Gray Lady, which runs full-page advertisements for The Ezra Klein Show in the paper and is building out a video dimension to the podcast. He recently interviewed Nancy Pelosi in a room in the middle of Times HQ, footage of which prompted speculation — among media folk, Brooklyn mom group chats, etc. — about that glow-up. He dismisses speculation that he now has a stylist — he’s a man who respects the experts, after all — though notes that he’s been determined to spend “some time this year upgrading my wardrobe and my style, but it’s a thing that has not happened in my mind yet.”

    Klein was not the first pundit to urge the president against running for reelection. Maureen Dowd said as much in the summer of 2022 (as did Mark Leibovich); Paul Krugman, too, in September 2023. But what made Klein more influential is “he is seen by many party elites as much more of a partisan figure, instead of just a columnist,” Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson told me. “It was someone pretty deeply steeped in the Democratic Party basically being the first one to break the taboo.” That The Ezra Klein Show is dominating the charts or has a cult following is not new; but the sense that he is plugged into the inner workings of the Democratic Party has imbued the podcast with greater importance.

    “I mean, some things happened in public. It wasn’t all just behind-the-scenes reporting,” Klein says, between sips of a mezcal-soda at the hotel bar. “but I try to pay attention to who people pay attention to, and who’s earned that respect and credibility inside the caucus — or inside or among other donors, or among strategists. And you can feel those things.”

    Every election cycle at the Times has a face, and Klein, despite being an Opinion writer, is this year’s. “I don’t think anyone notable’s behavior would change because of his podcast,” a Democratic strategist told me. But where he deserves credit, they said, is “helping to initiate that conversation a while ago” and keeping it in the media long after.

    “This was not a fun process,” Klein says. “This was a really wrenching thing the party had to go through.” As for his role in it, heavy is the head. “Look, I recognize that in the rare moments when you want to say you’re right about something, you should agree and accept it, but it also feels like it always pins a target on your back,” he said. Klein seems broken up, though unsurprised, about the bridges he’s burnt. “When I did the February piece, I recognized it was going to fuck up a lot of my relationships in the Biden White House.” Still, he was “aghast” when I told him I’d heard that there was conspiratorial chatter among Biden officials after Klein’s piece, wondering who — someone in Obama’s camp? — had planted the idea with Klein. “I’m actually shocked to hear anybody would think that. That’s so dumb,” he said. “The only thing happening here was saying what everybody was seeing.”

    It was through reporting, he said, that he came to that conclusion. “I talked to people and I understood that they could imagine that Joe Biden shouldn’t run, but they couldn’t imagine what would lead him to step aside and what to do if he did,” he says, noting he was frustrated by the “sense that this was going to be a stable situation — that people were not going to need alternatives.” He also felt he owed it to his listeners. “I don’t think people pay a lot of attention to the mechanics of nominating processes,” he says. “I was just trying to make people aware that this wasn’t done.”

    Klein tells me he’s interested to see if this moment of collective action changes the Democratic Party going forward. “Institutions have muscles and the muscles atrophy when they’re not used and they strengthen when they are used, and the Democratic party did something collectively. It’s really unusual, functionally unknown about American politics.” The party proved itself “beyond the ambitions of any one person,” he says. “It’s not that I think the Democratic party is going to start knocking its candidates off or something, but it just learned it can act, in a way that I could tell you for a fact its members did not think they could.”

    Talking to Klein can feel, at times, like listening to his show. He’ll casually go on a tangent about child-care policy or recall a cross-national study, and then he’ll become a normal person again, talking about the challenge of juggling his professional and personal life, married to Atlantic journalist Annie Lowrey, with two kids, living in Brooklyn.

    “I think I’m an interesting person on my podcast. I often wonder why I’m not more interesting at home,” he said. “Sometimes I think, Does my family get the best version of me? And the answer is often no.” I asked him what he does for fun. “A mix of very quiet and very loud,” he said. “I spend a lot of time quietly reading. I have very deep friendships. I go to a lot of shows.” This will not be his first time going to Burning Man.

    He has been covering politics since he was 18, cutting his teeth as a policy blogger. He moved the blog from Typepad to the American Prospect in 2007, when he was 23. Then he went to the Washington Post, where he ran the popular Wonkblog. After five years he left to co-found Vox, the website that became the namesake of the multi-brand digital-media company that today owns New York Magazine, until departing for the Times in 2020. His popular interview podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, followed him there.

    He considered going another route: selling his podcast to Spotify, starting a Substack. “I sometimes feel like a dumbass who’s left a ton of money on the table,” he admits. But he likes being part of institutions and seems, in a vaguely messianic way, to see it as his duty to support them. “It’s true that I could make more money doing this independently, but if all the people who do what I do decide to go and capture all of their revenue themselves, then what happens to all the parts of the industry that are frankly more important than what I do, but are not self-sustaining in that way?” he says, citing investigative and foreign reporting among the beats that haven’t quite figured out the newsletter format. It seems to be a mutually beneficial relationship: “The Times is a unique power,” he says. “If I had done the same pieces from Substack, would it have mattered?”

    Going to the Times meant he didn’t have to manage anymore — “it feels almost decadent to only really have to worry about my own work,” he says — and could focus on what he wanted to do, as opposed to the biggest stories that Vox needed its biggest voices to cover. “That allows me to follow my own interests with a lot more authenticity than I would be able to bring otherwise,” he says. What some people love about Klein and what some people hate about him is that he makes himself a mini expert on everything, dipping in and out of topics, from AI to wellness to the Russia-Ukraine war. He has a Zadie Smith interview coming up, and will soon welcome back Richard Powers to the show. “Those are things that bring me a huge amount of joy, and it is really hard to imagine what else I could do that would allow me to explore my own interests broadly.”

    “He’s an influential voice, but also generationally unique,” said Obama senior adviser Eric Schultz, citing traditional media’s fight for attention and relevance in an ecosystem filled with tweets and clips and trolling. Klein, has “found a sweet spot that I don’t think anyone else has been able to replicate. It’s like what the Sunday shows used to be,” said Schultz. “Now they’re consumed by the blow-by-blow, and Ezra is having the thoughtful conversations.”

    Klein, who grew up in Orange County, California, moved from San Francisco to Park Slope, then Gowanus, a year ago to be closer to his wife’s family. The redwoods are still close to his heart, literally, as he has a tattoo of them on his shoulder. He recently added a second tattoo, a typewriter-font “Is that so?” printed on his inner bicep. “A reminder to not believe what you think,” he says, when I ask him what it means to him. “Sometimes people see it and they think of it as outwardly focused, but it’s inwardly focused,” says Klein. “The easiest person to convince of anything is yourself. And it connects to small Zen stories that I like.” It took him a while, he says, to get over the belief that you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have tattoos, which he claims is “a complete myth” and tells me that I can read all about it in a Times article.

    This post-glow up Klein might seem like he’s ready to mingle at the joy-filled late-night celeb-packed party-ready DNC. But he says he’s not really planning on hitting the town (and I didn’t see him out either.) His first night in town was spent at dinner with his editor and a member of congress and then in his hotel room, where he watched the speeches. On Tuesday he watched the speeches from the floor — where, according to his boss, Katie Kingsbury, with whom he was standing, an usher recognized him but not her — but didn’t hit any afters after. “I doubt I’ll go to anything,” he texted me, when I asked him his party plans for the rest of the convention. “Going to watch from the floor each night then I record fairly early in the morning. So no real social calendar really,” he said. “Work, work, work.”

    Charlotte Klein

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  • Biden, Trump, and RFK Jr. are all anti-freedom

    Biden, Trump, and RFK Jr. are all anti-freedom

    Last week, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked me to moderate what he called “The Real Debate.”

    Kennedy was angry with CNN because it wouldn’t let him join its Trump-Biden debate.

    His people persuaded Elon Musk to carry his Real Debate on X, formerly Twitter. They asked me to give RFK Jr. the same questions, with the same time limits.

    I agreed, hoping to hear some good new ideas.

    I didn’t.

    As you know, President Joe Biden slept, and former President Donald Trump lied. Well, OK, Biden lied at least nine times, too, even by CNN’s count.

    Kennedy was better.

    But not much.

    He did acknowledge that our government’s deficit spending binge is horrible. He said he’d cut military spending. He criticized unscientific COVID-19 lockdowns and said nice words about school choice.

    But he, too, dodged questions, blathered on past time limits, and pushed big government nonsense like, “Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs.”

    Give me a break.

    Independence Day is this week.

    As presidential candidates promise to subsidize flying cars (Trump), free community college tuition (Biden), and “affordable” housing via 3 percent government-backed bonds (Kennedy), I think about how bewildered and horrified the Founding Fathers would be by such promises.

    On the Fourth of July almost 250 years ago, they signed the Declaration of Independence, marking the birth of our nation.

    They did not want life dominated by politicians. They wanted a society made up of free individuals. They believed every human being has “unalienable rights” to life, liberty, and (justly acquired) property.

    The blueprints created by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution gradually created the freest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world.

    Before 1776, people thought there was a “divine right” of kings and nobles to rule over them.

    America succeeded because the Founders rejected that belief.

    In the Virginia Declaration of Rights, George Mason wrote, “All power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people.”

    By contrast, Kennedy and Biden make promises that resemble the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” U.N. bureaucrats say every person deserves “holidays with pay…clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”

    The Founders made it clear that governments should be limited. They didn’t think we had a claim on our neighbor’s money. We shouldn’t try to force them to pay for our food, clothing, housing, prescription drugs, college tuition.

    They believe you have the right to be left alone to pursue happiness as you see fit.

    For a while, the U.S. government stayed modest. Politicians mostly let citizens decide our own paths, choose where to live, what jobs to take, and what to say.

    There were a small number of “public servants.” But they weren’t our bosses.

    Patrick Henry declared: “The governing persons are the servants of the people.”

    Yet now there are 23 million government employees. Some think they are in charge of everything.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), pushing her Green New Deal, declared herself “the boss.”

    The Biden administration wants to decide what kind of car you should drive.

    During the pandemic, politicians ordered people to stay home, schools to shut down and businesses to close.

    Then, as often happens in “Big Government World,” people harmed by government edicts ask politicians to compensate them.

    After governments banned Fourth of July fireworks, the American Pyrotechnics Association requested “relief in the next Senate Covid package to address the unique and specific costs to this industry,” reported The New York Times. “The industry hopes Congress will earmark $175 million for it in another stimulus bill.”

    Today the politically connected routinely lobby passionately to get bigger chunks of your money.

    For some of you, the last straw was when the administration demanded you inject a chemical into your body.

    When some resisted vaccinations, Biden warned, “Our patience is wearing thin.”

    His patience? Who does he think he is? My father? My king?

    At least Kennedy doesn’t say things like that. But he does say absurd things. In a few weeks I’ll release my sit-down interview with him, and you can decide for yourself whether he’s a good candidate.

    This Fourth of July, remember Milton Friedman’s question: “How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?”

    COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

    The post Biden, Trump, and RFK Jr. Are All Anti-Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

    John Stossel

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  • Washington Post CEO Will Lewis’ status ‘increasingly untenable’ as newsgathering controversies mount – WTOP News

    Washington Post CEO Will Lewis’ status ‘increasingly untenable’ as newsgathering controversies mount – WTOP News

    A report from the New York Times on Saturday alleges Will Lewis, the Washington Post’s embattled new publisher and chief executive, used fraudulent and unethical methods to obtain information for articles while working at the London-based Sunday Times in the early 2000s.

    Will Lewis, founder of The News Movement, is seen here in September 2023 at the publisher’s headquarters in London, UK. A report from the New York Times alleges Lewis used fraudulent and unethical methods to obtain information for articles.

    New York (CNN) — A report from the New York Times on Saturday alleges Will Lewis, the Washington Post’s embattled new publisher and chief executive, used fraudulent and unethical methods to obtain information for articles while working at the London-based Sunday Times in the early 2000s.

    Citing a former co-worker of Lewis’, a private investigator and its own investigation of newspaper archives, the New York Times said Lewis used phone and company records that were “fraudulently obtained” through hacking and paying sources for information.

    Through the haze of accusations, it remains unclear whether these claims will prompt Lewis to step down from the helm of one of the most distinguished outlets in the country. Even so, experts see Lewis’ grasp on the newsroom as one that is increasingly weakening. Margaret Sullivan, executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, told CNN on Sunday that Lewis’ position is “increasingly untenable.”

    These latest allegations of questionable journalistic ethics could also leave an enduring impression on a newsroom already reeling from the blindsiding ouster of its executive editor, Sally Buzbee. The allegations may also end up reflecting on the paper’s own reputation as a standard-bearer for American journalism.

    Late on Sunday, the Washington Post itself published a story about Robert Winnett, whom Lewis appointed to take the top job at the Post’s core newsroom after the US presidential election in November. TThe Post article alleged that Winnett, a Lewis protege, was linked to a man who used dishonest means to obtain information that Winnett then used in his journalism.

    In a statement, the Washington Post said: “We cover The Washington Post independently, rigorously and fairly. Given perceived and potential conflicts, we have asked former senior managing editor Cameron Barr, who stepped down from that position in 2023 and now has a contractual relationship as a senior associate editor, to oversee this coverage. The publisher has no involvement in or influence on our reporting.”

    Winnett did not immediately respond to a CNN query via LinkedIn.

    The Society of Professional Journalists, which represents about 7,000 members across the country and whose journalism standards are recognized in many newsrooms, warns journalists in its Code of Ethics: “Do not pay for access to news.”

    While SPJ does not explicitly address hacking as a means of newsgathering, it does tell journalists to “avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public” but cautions that “pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance of undue intrusiveness.”

    The new accusations come as Lewis tries to fend off resurfacing allegations of his involvement in a UK phone hacking scandal coverup, in which he has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Lewis has previously said his role in the scandal consisted of rooting out problematic behavior.

    A spokesperson for the Washington Post told CNN Lewis declined to comment.

    A Washington Post source with knowledge of internal meetings at the paper last week told CNN that Lewis has told employees “his role as publisher is to create the environment for great journalism and to encourage and support it, that he will never interfere in the journalism and that he is very clear about the lines that should not be crossed.”

    The decade-old scandal engulfed right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid and was revived in recent years in a new lawsuit filed by Prince Harry and Hollywood figures including Guy Ritchie and Hugh Grant. At the time of the News of the World controversy, Lewis was a senior executive at Murdoch’s News Corporation.

    But a cascade of claims has followed Lewis in recent weeks, mostly involving alleged attempts to suppress stories about his connection with the coverup. Earlier this month, the New York Times first reported that Lewis, who took the reins at the Washington Post on January 2, clashed with Buzbee over publishing an article in May that named him in connection to the scandal, although a spokesperson for Lewis has denied he pressured Buzbee to quash the article, according to NPR.

    Buzbee abruptly left the company earlier this month. Days later, an NPR reporter said Lewis offered him an interview in exchange for quashing a forthcoming article about the scandal.

    The Washington Post did not respond to CNN with regard to these allegations.

    A spokesperson for Lewis told the New York Times earlier this month when the story broke that “when he was a private citizen ahead of joining The Washington Post, he had off the record conversations with an employee of NPR about a story the employee then published.” The spokesperson added that any request for an interview after he joined the Washington Post was “processed through the normal corporate communication channels.”

    Buzbee’s departure has seemingly frayed Lewis’ command of his newsroom even further. A number of Post staffers who spoke to CNN have described plummeting morale. “It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it, truly,” one staffer said earlier this month, noting that the Washington Post has hit “rough patches” before but that the stormy atmosphere hanging over the outlet is unprecedented.

    In an opinion piece for the Guardian on Wednesday, Sullivan wrote that firing Lewis and finding a new CEO is “the cleanest, best move” Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos could make. Lewis’ insistence on tamping down reporting about him “has motivated several news organizations to look more deeply into his past; it’s possible that some new revelation will make his Post leadership position even more untenable and will force Bezos’ hand,” she added.

    Sullivan also wrote in her op-ed that Lewis could try to repair the trust both within and outside the newsroom by acknowledging that he will not cross any ethical lines and reiterating his commitment to giving staffers “true editorial independence.” He could also work toward reinstating an independent public editor or ombudsman — a position the Washington Post nixed more than a decade ago — who would oversee the paper’s implementation of journalistic ethics.

    The-CNN-Wire
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    WTOP Staff

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  • Washington Post Publisher Will Lewis and Incoming Executive Editor Robert Winnett Used Stolen Records While Reporting in Britain: NYT

    Washington Post Publisher Will Lewis and Incoming Executive Editor Robert Winnett Used Stolen Records While Reporting in Britain: NYT

    The freshly appointed publisher of The Washington Post, Will Lewis, and its incoming executive editor, Robert Winnett, both used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles while they were journalists in London some two decades ago, according to reporting from The New York Times.

    The articles, published in the British broadsheet newspaper The Sunday Times, were produced during a period the organization “has acknowledged paying the private detective explicitly to obtain material surreptitiously. That would violate the ethics codes of The Post and most American news organizations,” the NYT‘s Justin Scheck and Jo Becker wrote on Saturday. Their reporting is based on interviews with a former colleague, a published account of a private investigator, and an analysis of newspaper archives.

    The British newspaper has repeatedly denied paying anyone to act illegally.

    “I have asked my friends and family to stop sending me links to stories about Will Lewis,” a Post employee told Politico. “Every scoop is worse than the last. I can’t focus on my work when each headline heightens what’s beginning to feel like an existential crisis.”

    Lewis, who was the publisher of The Wall Street Journal from 2014 to 2020, assigned an article in 2004 while he was working as business editor at The Sunday Times. The author of that article, Peter Koenig, said this week that Lewis “had personally assigned him to write an article in 2004 using phone records that the reporter understood to have been obtained through hacking,” according to the NYT.

    After that article was published, the subject, a prominent British businessman, publicly said that his records had been stolen. While it remains unclear who initially obtained the records—they’ve never been caught—it was reported at the time that someone had called into the phone company and impersonated the businessman. In the U.K., this kind of deception is referred to as “blagging,” which holds special allowances under British law, should the obtained information be in the public interest.

    The Times’ review of Mr. Lewis’s career questioned a decision the new publisher made back in 2009 when working for The Daily Telegraph in Britain to “pay more than 100,000 (GB) pounds for information from a source. Paying for information is prohibited in most American newsrooms,” the journalists write.

    In a November meeting with Post staff, Lewis reportedly defended the payments and said the money in question had been put into an escrow account to protect a source. “But,” the Times’ team writes, “the consultant who brokered the deal said in a recent interview that there had been no escrow account and that he had doled out the money to sources himself.”

    A spokeswoman for the Washington Post told the Times that Lewis declined to answer a list of questions.

    In a November meeting before officially stepping into the role, Lewis told a room of Post staffers that his “plan is to arrive and for us to together craft an extremely exciting way forward. I can smell it. I can feel it. I know it.”

    In light of questions raised in yesterday’s reporting, it’s unclear what Lewis’ future looks like at the organization.

    Sally Quinn, a long-time Post columnist who has shown support for Lewis’ proposed changes to the newsroom, said about the Times article that “total transparency is key” and “it’s only fair to give Will a chance to speak for himself,” according to Politico.

    As Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein has reported, these findings come after a particularly tumultuous transition period for the Post. For the team at the legacy newsroom, this past year has been filled with the introduction of new executive staff, like Lewis, over 200 buyouts across the organization, persistent financial concerns, editorial restructuring, and general confusion about their future. The Post was particularly rattled by the abrupt exit of Sally Buzbee, who had led the paper since May 2021 and was the first woman to do so.

    Katie Herchenroeder

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  • ‘I had fun’: Alleged scammer takes credit for Graceland foreclosure upheaval

    ‘I had fun’: Alleged scammer takes credit for Graceland foreclosure upheaval

    A self-proclaimed identity thief based in Nigeria claimed responsibility over the puzzling, and now court-blocked, auction of Elvis Presley’s historic Graceland mansion.

    The thief sent an email to the New York Times claiming to be part of a criminal network that targets the dead and elderly, particularly those from Florida and California, the outlet reported Tuesday.

    The statement, which was sent in reply to questions about the case, came from an email address listed in court documents related to Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC. Riley Keough, Presley’s granddaughter and owner of Graceland, sued the company earlier this month to stop a foreclosure sale of the Memphis property.

    “We figure out how to steal,” the thief wrote to the New York Times on Friday. “That’s what we do.”

    Naussany Investments presented a deed of trust to the estate in September via the Los Angeles County Superior Court, claiming that the late Lisa Marie Presley, Keough’s mother, borrowed $3.8 million from the company and offered Graceland as collateral. Keough fiercely disputed the claims, calling the documents “fraudulent” and “forgeries” in her lawsuit.

    The alleged thief accepted defeat.

    “I had fun figuring this one out and it didn’t succeed very well,” the statement continued.

    Referencing Keough’s legal victories in the case, the message, as reportedly written, continued: “Yo client dont have nothing to worries, win fir her. She beat me at my own game.”

    The New York Times reported that the thief wrote their message in Luganda, a Bantu language of Uganda. The email, the outlet said, was faxed from a North American toll-free number that also appeared in court documents.

    A Tennessee judge issued a temporary injunction blocking the sale at a hearing last Wednesday, in which no representatives from Naussany Investments appeared. Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins said he would proceed with Keough’s fraud lawsuit, which asked the court to declare the deed of trust illegitimate.

    Tennessee’s Shelby County Register of Deeds said last Tuesday that it did not have any filings relating to a Graceland deed, according to broadcast outlet WREG Memphis. The deed also included the signature of Florida notary Kimberly L. Philbrick, who submitted an affidavit stating she had never met Lisa Marie Presley or notarized a document signed by the singer.

    Hours after the Wednesday ruling, a person purporting to be a Naussany Investments representative submitted a statement that said the company intended to drop its claims on Graceland, according to the Associated Press. However, the legal filings have yet to appear.

    Elvis Presley Enterprises, which manages the Presley estate, told The Times in a statement at the time that it agreed with the court’s ruling to block the sale.

    “As the court has now made clear, there was no validity to the claims,” the statement read. “There will be no foreclosure. Graceland will continue to operate as it has for the past 42 years, ensuring that Elvis fans from around the world can continue to have a best in class experience when visiting his iconic home.”

    Angie Orellana Hernandez

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  • Is The Administration Racing To Reschedule By 4/20

    Is The Administration Racing To Reschedule By 4/20

    After dragging their feet  for 3 years, the Biden administration seems to be putting some juice to get the DEA to move

    Is it opening the door to a new era? It seems the Biden administration has suddenly decided to follow up on their 2020 campaign promises. But does the sense of urgency reflect not only their need to engage younger voters but something else? Is the administration racing to reschedule by 4/20. President Biden brought up federal rescheduling as part of his proclamation declaring April to be “Second Chance Month.”  Followed by his mentioning it in the State of the Union, this should be a signal to the Federal Drug Agency (FDA) to move on the recommendation by other agency and act.

    RELATED: California or New York, Which Has The Biggest Marijuana Mess

    Having made the promise, for almost the first 3 years of his tenure, Biden barely acknowledged the cannabis industry. This despite sales in the industry continues to grow and now, over 50% of the country has legal access to products.  Those under 40 have an entirely different take on marijuana with Gen Z drifting away from alcohol and moving to weed.  Beer sales have mirrored the societal shift. They have been out of step with the public.

    Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    Biden is struggling with younger voters. Media like the New York Times has been piling on by highlighting why he is losing and gently making it a much bigger issue.  The campaign is concerned and sees to reengage this demographic. Biden is viewed favorably by only 31% of people ages 18 through 29, much worse than he fares with other age groups, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll.

    The White House begrudgingly started the process of rescheduling last year.  Currently, cannabis classified as having zero medical benefit is lumped into the same category as heroin and LSD.  Neither alcohol or tobacco are boxed into this category despite having zero health benefits and litany of problems the does cause.

    Rescheduling would be an immediate benefit to an industry struggling with a host of issues including tough business rules around the classification, chaos in the New York and California market, and a dropping of flower prices.  Some older Senators including James Risch (R-ID) and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) are making a last ditch effort to stop the process.

    RELATED: Americans Want It, Some Politicians Prefer a Nanny State

    While 4/20 has long been a wink wink nod to marijuana use for those in the know, thanks to the legal sales it is another big media day.  Like the 4th of July or Drinksgiving/Green Wednesday, it is a time where they could get the most engagement with the public.

    Terry Hacienda

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