New top story from Time: TikTok Gets Reprieve in U.S. as Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump’s App Store Ban

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President Donald Trump’s ban on TikTok was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, dealing a blow to the government in its showdown with the popular Chinese-owned app it says threatens national security.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols granted a preliminary injunction against the ban on the widely used video-sharing network after an unusual Sunday morning hearing. The judge refused to grant an injunction against a November deadline for a sale. TikTok’s owner, ByteDance Ltd., had requested the hold after the president ordered TikTok out of American app stores unless the company sold a stake in its U.S. operations to a domestic buyer.

The ban, scheduled to go into effect at 11:59 p.m. in New York, would have removed TikTok from the app stores run by Apple and Google’s Android, the most widely used marketplaces for downloadable apps. People who don’t yet have the app wouldn’t be able to get it, and those who already have it wouldn’t have access to updates needed to ensure its safe and smooth operation. TikTok is used regularly by 19 million Americans.

ByteDance is fighting the Trump administration in court even as it pursues its approval for the sale of a stake in the U.S. business to Oracle Corp. and Walmart Inc. Trump has called for bans on both TikTok and WeChat, owned by China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd., arguing that the apps could give China’s government access to millions of Americans’ personal data. The bans are part of an increasingly hard line he has taken on Beijing as the election approaches.

Even as the sale of TikTok is still awaiting final U.S. approvals, two of China’s most prominent state-backed media mouthpieces last week denounced the deal.

“What the United States has done to TikTok is almost the same as a gangster forcing an unreasonable and unfair business deal on a legitimate company,” the state-run China Daily wrote in a Wednesday opinion piece. Hu Xijin, the influential editor-in-chief of the Party-run Global Times, tweeted that Beijing likely wouldn’t approve the current agreement as it endangered China’s national security.

A lawyer for TikTok told the judge at Sunday’s virtual hearing that the ban was irrational given that ByteDance is in talks to strike a deal the president himself has demanded.

“How does it make sense to impose this app-store ban tonight when there are negotiations underway that might make it unnecessary?” attorney John Hall asked.

Hall said banning TikTok from U.S. app stores would undermine security by preventing existing users from receiving weekly security updates. He argued that the government has less burdensome alternatives, such as the stake sale, to achieve its national-security aims. ByteDance says Trump is exceeding his authority with the ban.

“The consequences immediately are grave,” Hall told the judge. “It would be no different than the government locking the doors to a public forum, roping off that town square.”

His language echoed the ruling of a judge in California who put a hold on Trump’s WeChat ban last week, citing its effect on free speech and the irreparable harm that the ban would cause to the business.

Daniel Schwei, a lawyer for the Justice Department, countered that “the concern here is about data security risk and leaving data vulnerable to the Chinese government. It is a threat today, it is a risk today, and therefore it deserves to be addressed today.” The U.S. government decided last week to extend its deadline to allow for more sale discussions.

In a filing on Friday, the U.S. cited FBI Director Christopher Wray’s assessment that China poses the “greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property.”

TikTok is “challenging a national security determination by the president as well as the judgment of the secretary of commerce about what’s necessary to mitigate those national security harms,” Schwei told the judge. “And I think the court owes significant deference to that.”

In a separate case, a federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday rejected a request by TikTok users to halt the ban, saying the consequences of the ban wouldn’t be severe enough for the users to justify an injunction temporarily blocking the order while the litigation continues.

The case is TikTok Inc. v. Trump, 20-cv-2658, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).

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Gene Henderson: Honoring Muni’s First Black Division Manager

Gene Henderson: Honoring Muni’s First Black Division Manager By Jeremy Menzies In recognition of Black History Month, we bring you the story of Gene Henderson, the first Black man to become the head of a Muni bus division, Muni’s Kirkland Division. Henderson’s Background Gene Henderson was born in Houston, Texas, in 1916. He married his wife Naomi in 1939 and then served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Following the war, Gene and his family moved to San Francisco where he began his career at the San Francisco Municipal Railway. Early Career On February 1, 1946, Henderson was hired as a streetcar motorman out of Sutro Division, which was located on the corner of 32nd Ave. and Clement St. He was hired just five years after Muni’s first Black transit operator, Audley Cole, had successfully fought to integrate the carmen’s union in 1941. In his early days at Muni, Gene worked one of the three lines running out of Sutro Division from the Ferry Building to the Richmond District o...

New top story from Time: U.S. Executes Brandon Bernard Despite High-Profile Appeals for Clemency

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शुरू हुई टीवी इंडस्ट्री में शूटिंग, सेट पर आने से मना कर रहे एक्टर्स, लटका कसौटी और ये रिश्ता

टीवी इंडस्ट्री कोरोना वायरस के डर से जीना सीख चुकी है और अब सेट पर वापस लौटने को तैयार है। टीवी एक्टर्स को उनके नए शेड्यूल दिए जा चुके हैं और सबसे पहले शूटिंग शुरू करने वाला शो होगा कसौटी ज़िंदगी from टेलीविजन की खबरें | Television News in Hindi | TV Serials Update in Hindi – FilmiBeat Hindi http:/hindi.filmibeat.com/television/tv-industry-to-resume-shooting-actors-still-don-t-want-to-return-to-sets-090318.html?utm_source=/rss/filmibeat-hindi-television-fb.xml&utm_medium=23.11.231.156&utm_campaign=client-rss

New top story from Time: The Security Perimeter Around the Capitol Starts to Recede — and Washington Feels a Little More Normal

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New top story from Time: No, the Vikings Did Not Discover America. Here’s Why That Myth is Problematic

https://ift.tt/3h1mI9B Who discovered America? The common-sense answer is that the continent was discovered by the remote ancestors of today’s Native Americans. Americans of European descent have traditionally phrased the question in terms of identifying the first Europeans to have crossed the Atlantic and visited what is now the United States. But who those Europeans were is not such a simple question—and, since the earliest days of American nationhood, its answer has been repeatedly used and misused for political purposes . Everybody, it seems, wants a piece of the discovery. The Irish claim centers on St Brendan, who in the sixth century is said to have sailed to America in his coracle. The Welsh claimant is Madog ab Owain Gwynedd, who is said to have landed in Mobile, Ala., in 1170. The Scottish claimant is Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, who is said to have reached Westford, Mass., in 1398. The English have never claimed first contact, but in the English colonies John Ca...

New top story from Time: What Counts as a Mass Shooting? Why so Much of America’s Gun Violence Gets Overlooked

https://ift.tt/3dg1qSG In the past two weeks, two horrific mass shootings have made national news across the United States. On March 22, a gunman killed 10 people at a Boulder, Colo. grocery store, including a police officer responding to the scene. A 21-year-old man has since been charged with ten counts of murder, after surrendering to police at the scene. Just six days earlier, on March 16, a mass shooting occurred at three spas and massage parlors in the Atlanta metropolitan area. A 21-year-old man has since been charged with eight counts of murder, having been arrested after a police chase. Of the eight people killed, six have been identified as Asian and Asian-American women; the incident has been widely viewed targeted attack against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, at a time when violence and racism against the AAPI community in the country has been on a marked rise. Read more: The Atlanta Shootings Fit Into a Long Legacy of Anti-Asian ...

New top story from Time: A Woman Has Never Run New York City. Can Kathryn Garcia Change That?

https://ift.tt/2SyRJIi Kathryn Garcia knows her shit. On a blustery spring morning, she’s standing at the waterfront in Long Island City and squinting at a boat on the East River, roughly a hundred yards away. “That’s a sludge boat,” she says. “Riding high.” One of her volunteers muses aloud that the vessel must be carrying trash. “No,” she says with a smirk, “it’s transporting solids.” Then she pauses for the tiniest moment before clarifying. “From the sewage system.” Garcia knows this because for six years she served as New York City’s Sanitation Commissioner, overseeing a department of roughly 10,000 workers—mostly men—who kept the city running through snowstorms and prevented the garbage from piling up. (“Do you know,” she told me as if she was delivering a piece of juicy gossip, “that a rat parent couple can have 19,000 offspring in a year?”) Garcia is a consummate problem-solver. She helped lead the response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, getting clean water to New Yorker...

New top story from Time: David Card Shares Nobel Prize in Economics for Natural Experiments

https://ift.tt/3asqS6w Three U.S.-based academics won the 2021 Nobel Prize for economics for work using experiments that draw on real-life situations to revolutionize empirical research. David Card at the University of California Berkeley, Joshua D. Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido W. Imbens at Stanford University will share the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Monday. “This year’s economic sciences laureates have demonstrated that many of society’s big questions can be answered,” the academy said on Twitter. “Their solution is to use natural experiments—situations arising in real life that resemble randomized experiments.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] BREAKING NEWS: The 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded with one half to David Card and the other half jointly to Jos...

New top story from Time: Finding New Optimism In Those Pandemic Babies

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Meet the People of the Next Generation CIS: Leon Yu

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