Apple is facing additional scrutiny over its alleged crackdown against pro-union retail workers. House Representatives Emanuel Cleaver and Sylvia Garcia have sent a letter to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) asking for an investigation into alleged labor abuses at Houston and Kansas City, Missouri stores. The politicians are concerned about claims Apple fired five Kansas City staff in retaliation for unionization efforts, and disciplined multiple Houston employees for attempting to organize.

In March, the Communications Works of America union (CWA) filed charges with the NLRB over the purported retaliation. The CWA believes Apple used thin pretexts to fire and intimidate employees, such as slightly late arrivals and even typos in timesheets. Some of the workers were reportedly forced to sign a release of claims against the company if they wanted a severance package. These practices are illegal, Cleaver and Garcia say.

The House members also pointed to the NLRB's January finding that Apple was violating labor rights with rules barring leaks and discussions of employment conditions. The representatives are worried about a "recurring pattern," according to the letter. In December, the board said Apple also broke the law by holding anti-union meetings in Atlanta.

We've asked Apple for comment. The company has previously argued that it can better care for retail staff without unions. At the same time, it has addressed concerns by raising pay, improving benefits and easing its scheduling rules.

The letter doesn't obligate the NLRB to respond, and there's no certainty that an investigation will lead to official action. Even so, it's notable that Apple's stance on retail labor has drawn Congress' attention. It won't be surprising if there's more interest from the federal government, whether or not the NLRB responds to the letter.

Nearly eight years after the start of Dieselgate, one of the highest-ranking executives implicated in the scandal is set to plead guilty. The New York Times reports former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler has agreed to accept a plea deal that will see him confess that he allowed Audi to continue selling diesel cars even after Volkswagen, the automaker’s parent company, admitted its vehicles had illegal software designed to cheat government emissions tests. Per The Times, a Munich state court said on Wednesday that Stadler would also pay a €1.1 million fine and serve a sentence of up to two years. The former executive is expected to make his confession in about two weeks.

Since the start of his trial in 2020, Stadler had maintained he was innocent of any wrongdoing. In court, Volkswagen has insisted that Dieselgate was the work of employees who hid the software they created from the company’s leadership. While at Audi, Stadler also served as a member of Volkswagen’s management board. Alongside Stadler, German prosecutors are set to convict two other former executives: Wolfgang Hatz and Zaccheo Giovanni Pamio. The former previously led engine development at Audi and Porsche, while the latter was involved in designing the software that allowed Volkswagen vehicles to cheat emissions tests.

In 2017, Volkswagen agreed to pay $4.3 billion to settle fraud and other criminal and civil charges brought by the Department of Justice after the company admitted that nearly 600,000 diesel cars sold in the US were compromised by its “defeat device.” Those vehicles were programmed to detect when they were being tested on a set of rollers and would, as a result, produce fewer emissions than out on the road. According to court documents filed by German prosecutors, Audi engineers originally designed the software that Volkswagen would later deploy in its vehicles. Since Dieselgate came to light, the German automaker has agreed to pay more than $20 billion in fines and legal settlements.

A former Apple employee who pled guilty to defrauding the company out of over $17 million has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to repay his ill-gotten gains. Dhirendra Prasad, who primarily worked as a buyer in Apple's Global Service Supply Chain department during his time at the company, admitted to charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States in November. As iMore notes, two charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering were dismissed during sentencing.

Prasad joined Apple in 2008 and carried out his schemes between 2011 and 2018. According to the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, he conspired with two vendors to conduct fraud against Apple by "taking kickbacks, stealing parts, inflating invoices and causing Apple to pay for items and services it never received." Prasad is said to have used his insider knowledge of Apple's fraud detection practices to avoid being caught for several years.

The government has already seized $5.5 million worth of assets from Prasad, who a judge ordered to pay an additional forfeiture money judgment of $8.1 million. On top of that sum and the $17.4 million Prasad has been told to give back to Apple, he was ordered to pay $1.9 million to the Internal Revenue Service — he conceded that he did not pay tax on the proceeds of his schemes. Following Prasad's time in prison, he will have to serve three years of supervised release.

Telegram might soon disappear from Brazilian app stores after a federal court in the country has issued a temporary ban against the messaging service. Judge Wellington Lopes da Silva has ordered Google and Apple to remove the app from their stores and for mobile carriers to block access to it for failing to hand over complete user data from two neo-Nazi group chats. Telegram will also have to pay a fine worth almost $200,000 a day until it's able to give authorities data from the groups believed to have been used to incite attacks on schools in Brazil. 

According to The New York Times, the group chats were found on the phone of a teenager accused of committing two school shootings in November, which left three dead and 13 people injured. Authorities said they saw murder tutorials, bomb-manufacturing instructions and violent videos in those group chats, in addition to Nazi content. Brazilian justice minister Flavio Dino said: "The so-called antisemitic movement is acting in these networks. And we know that this is at the base of violence against our children, our teens."

Judge da Silva explained that Telegram only handed over information on the administrator of a channel named the "Brazilian Anti-Semitic Movement." It failed to give authorities information on members of that group and any data from another channel called "Anti-Semitic Front." The service reportedly said that the groups had been deleted and that it couldn't recover any information, but that wasn't enough to justify not complying with the court's subpoena to the judge

The Brazilian Supreme Court previously banned Telegram for failing to freeze accounts spreading disinformation ahead of last year's presidential elections. However, the ban was reversed in just a couple of days, and Telegram blamed its noncompliance to lost emails. 

On Wednesday, a group of contractors at YouTube Music voted to unionize with the Alphabet Workers Union-Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA). Out of the 49 workers who were eligible to vote, 41 voted in favor of the action, with the remaining eight abstaining. As of last year, the workers were already paying AWU-CWA dues but were seeking bargaining rights. In March, the group won a landmark legal victory when the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Google must bargain with them to ratify their union contract.

While Google vowed to challenge the ruling, the results of today’s vote could have significant implications for the company. Provided the NLRB’s decision stands, Google will need to collectively bargain with a group of its US employees for the first time in the company's nearly 25-year history. That’s something that could prompt other groups within the tech giant to pursue unionization.

“After months of union-busting by Google and Cognizant, our YouTube Music members have just won their NLRB union election in a blowout victory and are ready to bring both of their employers to the table to win their fair share,” the Alphabet Workers Union tweeted.

Although Wednesday's vote was months in the making, it comes after Google laid off 12,000 employees – or about six percent of its global workforce – in late January. This week, the company shared its Q1 earnings results, reporting a net income of $15 billion. It also announced a $70 billion stock buyback. In 2022, the year workers at YouTube Music Content Operations filed for union recognition with the NLRB, Google compensated CEO Sundar Pichai to the tune of $226 million.

South Korean authorities announced today that they indicted the co-founder of Terraform Labs, the company that develops and manages the blockchain payment platform Terra. According toBloomberg, Daniel Shin and nine others linked to Terra now face multiple charges, including violations of capital markets law, which regulates the nation’s securities and financial markets.

The authorities indicted eight people, including Shin, for illegal trading; two others face breach of trust charges. Prosecutors say all the defendants were directly involved with Terra, having handled marketing, systems development and management. In addition, prosecutors have frozen 246.8 billion won ($184.7 million) in assets from the defendants. Korean officials said they’re working with the US on the case, although they didn’t go into specifics.

Billed as a stablecoin, TerraUSD isn’t backed by real-world assets or fiat currency. Instead, it’s supported by Luna, the native cryptocurrency of the Terra blockchain, that supposedly had a mechanism to restore its value to $1 if its value ever failed. In addition, investors saw it as an alluring money-making opportunity because of its Anchor lending program, which promised annual yields of 20 percent for coin deposits.

However, prosecutors allege the Terra blockchain was a “fabrication” from the get-go, with the entire system essentially built on a house of cards. They claim the blockchain’s algorithm that kept TerraUSD at a stable price was “impossible to get right.” Its value collapsed in May 2022, when depositors lost confidence in the platform and simultaneously tried to sell off their investments. At the time of publication, Terra has a value of less than two cents.

Before the collapse, the defendants took 463 billion won (nearly $346 million) in profit. In addition, prosecutors claim they illegally exposed clients’ payment details and embezzled funds. Authorities say those charged caused “astronomical damage” to global investors as the crash also played a role in the collapse of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and the broader $2 trillion decline in the cryptocurrency market.

“Shin has nothing to do with the Terra, Luna collapse as he left the [company] two years before the fallout,” said Shin’s lawyer, Kim Ki-dong, in a statement. “He voluntarily returned to South Korea immediately after the collapse, and has been faithfully cooperating with the probe for over 10 months, hoping to contribute to fact finding.”

In September, Korean authorities issued an arrest warrant for Shin’s co-founder, Do Kwon, who was also placed on an Interpol "red notice" list at South Korea’s request. He was finally arrested last month in Montenegro on capital markets law and fraud charges. The US Securities and Exchange Commission also charged Do Kwon and Terraform Labs in February.

When a highly anticipated set of Magic: The Gathering cards leaked on YouTube last week, it’s hard to imagine anyone would have guessed the incident would end with the involvement of one of the most infamous private security firms in the world. But that’s exactly what happened after YouTuber Oldschoolmtg uploaded an unboxing video featuring a collection of March of the Machine: The Aftermath booster packs.

If you’re not familiar, Aftermath is an upcoming 50-card Magic: The Gathering set Wizards of the Coast will release on May 12th. It’s billed as a supplement to the game’s current March of the Machine expansion, which has been available since April 21st. Predictably, Oldschoolmtg’s unboxing video was all anyone in the Magic: The Gathering community could talk about in recent days. Based on Wizards of the Coast’s reaction, it’s safe to say the video also irked the Hasbro-owned publisher.

Over the weekend, Oldchoolmtg uploaded another video, this time titled “The Aftermath of The Aftermath… Everything is Gone!” In the clip, the YouTuber says Pinkerton agents showed up at his home on Saturday morning and began demanding he hand over the “stolen” product. “I got up and recorded some videos,” Oldschoolmtg states. “Right after I got done with the video, dogs started barking because somebody is at the door. I come out and the wife’s answering the door and it was the Pinkertons.”

If you live in the US, the Pinkertons need no introduction. The company is one of the country’s oldest private security firms, with its original incarnation, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, dating back to 1850. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pinkertons made a name for themselves with their anti-union operations, a job they continue to do in the 21st century.

Oldschoolmtg speculates the person he bought the unreleased cards from likely didn’t know they sent him an unreleased set. “Somebody screwed up and sent out the wrong cases to the gentlemen that I bought the boxes off of, because when he sold me the stuff he said he was selling me March of the Machine collector’s boxes — not Aftermath.”

After recovering the leaked Magic: The Gathering set, including the empty boxes and wrappers, the Pinkertons put Oldschoolmtg in touch with a Wizards of the Coast representative, who was “very apologetic about making my wife cry first thing in the morning by sending these heavy-duty lawmen.”

A Wizards of the Coast spokesperson confirmed to Polygon and Kotaku that the company sent the private security firm to Oldschoolmtg as “part of their investigation” into the leak. The YouTuber says the contact they spoke to at Wizards of the Coast offered to send them free products as compensation for what had happened. For what it’s worth, his YouTube viewership has also doubled since the original video went up.

In an 89-page complaint unsealed on Monday, the Justice Department alleges 34 current and former members of China’s 912 Special Project Working Group carried out a multi-year campaign to harass critics of Xi Jinping’s regime and discredit American policies. The task force, part of China’s domestic security agency, created thousands of fake social media profiles, including on Twitter and Facebook, to target Chinese dissidents in the US.

In its attempt to disseminate official government propaganda, the group created thousands of fake online personas. Judging from screenshots shared by the Justice Department, many of the profiles did not have more than a dozen accounts following them, but a common thread among them is that they tried to pass as authentic American voices. As The Wall Street Journal points out, one account claimed to be “Susan Miller,” a woman from New York. Another said they were “Julie Torres,” a native of Wisconsin. According to the Justice Department, China’s Ministry of Public Security tracked the performance of the agents involved in the operation and rewarded those who successfully ran multiple online personas without being detected by Twitter and Facebook.

In addition to targeting Chinese dissidents, the group, taking a page from Russia’s disinformation playbook, sought to discredit the US government by exploiting divisions among the American public. For instance, it spread disinformation about George Floyd, the Black Man whose murder by Minneapolis police in 2020 sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the country. The group also amplified Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.

“As alleged, the PRC government deploys its national police and the 912 Special Project Working Group not as an instrument to uphold the law and protect public safety, but rather as a troll farm that attacks persons in our country for exercising free speech in a manner that the PRC government finds disagreeable, and also spreads propaganda whose sole purpose is to sow divisions within the United States,” said US attorney Breon Peace, referring to the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

According to the Justice Department, all 34 of the agents remain at large. This isn’t the first time the US has detailed an effort by China to target overseas dissidents. At the end of last year, US Attorney General Merrick Garland detailed a case involving a multi-year campaign by Chinese operatives to force a US resident to return to China.

Accused classified document leaker Jack Teixeira may be learning first-hand about the ease of tracking people's digital lives. The federal government has charged Teixeira with illegally taking national defense info and classified items after a quick investigation focused on his digital trail. As The New York Times' Christiaan Triebert explains, his investigative journalism team identified Teixeira by finding an Instagram account mentioned in his Steam profile. That, in turn, showed photos of the granite kitchen countertop and floor tiles visible in the leaks.

The suspect hasn't yet entered a plea and will face a hearing on April 19th. The two charges against him carry a maximum combined sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

Teixeira, an Air National Guardsman in Massachusetts, allegedly began sharing the documents on a Minecraft-oriented Discord server in late 2022. He initially transcribed them himself but later posted photos of the raw material. He supposedly didn't intend to act as a whistleblower (he was trying to impress his gaming friends), but the content eventually reached other Discord servers as well as 4chan and Telegram.

The documents include large volumes of information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including Ukraine's strategy as well as Russia's bids to secure weapons from Egypt and Turkey. The files also show how the US spies on allies and otherwise monitors their activity, such as interest in UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The FBI arrested Teixeira the afternoon of April 13th. The case has raised questions about the ease of access to classified material in the US military. Teixeira is an Airman First Class who serves as a Cyber Transport Systems Journeyman — effectively, technical support. The Washington Post notes Teixeira could nonetheless use the Pentagon's Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, granting him access to top secret intelligence like that from the leak.

The FBI has made an arrest in connection to a recent leak of classified documents that revealed sensitive details about the war in Ukraine and other US intelligence matters, apprehending a young Massachusetts Air National Guard member on Thursday, April 13th. 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, who holds the rank of airman first class, allegedly shared the files to a Discord server primarily dedicated to Minecraft. According to The Washington Post, he first transcribed the documents manually when he started sharing them late last year before posting photos of the classified materials themselves.  

The Justice Department has arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into “alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information,“ Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement issued by the Justice Department. As NBC News notes, public military records show that Texeira was assigned as a cyber transport systems journeyman at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod. 

Based on the The Post’s investigation, Teixeira, who used the pseudonym “OG” on the Discord server, claimed he partly worked at a secure facility where phones and cameras are prohibited. That’s reportedly the reason why he originally copied the documents by hand before the lack of interaction on the server prompted him to post photographs of the original documents. Some of the photos contained random items and furniture that may have given investigators a clue on his identity. 

Despite the sensitive information contained in the documents, the suspect apparently did not intend to be a whistleblower — according to The New York Times, members of "Thug Shaker Central," the original Discord server, say the documents were never intended to be shared outside of their small group. Eventually, though, they were shared to other Discord servers before finding their way to Telegram channels, 4chan and other social media platforms.   

The documents Teixeira had leaked included large amounts of information regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including detailed battlefield conditions and missile strike maps for the latter. They also reportedly showed how Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and how Russia approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons. In addition, the documents apparently contained information showing how the US spies on its foreign allies.  

Discord previously said that it was cooperating with authorities regarding their investigation on the leak. As for Teixeira, he will make his initial appearance in the US District Court for Massachusetts.