Senate passes bill forcing TikTok’s parent company to sell or face ban, sends to Biden for signature

By HALELUYA HADERO
Updated 9:47 PM CDT, April 23, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate passed legislation Tuesday that would force TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell the social media platform under the threat of a ban, a contentious move by U.S. lawmakers that’s expected to face legal challenges and disrupt the lives of content creators who rely on the short-form video app for income.

The TikTok legislation was included as part of a larger $95 billion package that provides foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel and was passed 79-18. It now goes to President Joe Biden, who said in a statement immediately after passage that he will sign it Wednesday.

A decision made by House Republicans last week to attach the TikTok bill to the high-priority package helped expedite its passage in Congress and came after negotiations with the Senate, where an earlier version of the bill had stalled. That version had given TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, six months to divest its stakes in the platform. But it drew skepticism from some key lawmakers concerned it was too short of a window for a complex deal that could be worth tens of billions of dollars.

The revised legislation extends the deadline, giving ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok, and a possible three-month extension if a sale is in progress. The bill would also bar the company from controlling TikTok’s secret sauce: the algorithm that feeds users videos based on their interests and has made the platform a trendsetting phenomenon.

TikTok did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday night.

more
https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-congress-bill-1c48466df82f3684bd6eb21e61ebcb8d?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=share

As you can see its not just that the Brits in this video are horribly out of synch while marching, they also put little to no effort in swinging their arms. It's no wonder since many of them look their would prefer to swing their arms to grab a ham sandwich. Oh, and could the Brits exhibit just a slight bit of enthusiasm in their marching? I remember as a kid seeing the British Tattoo when it came to America and was quite impressed with their precision marching. Obviously such precision marching standards has declined drastically in Britain since then.

https://rumble.com/embed/v4opxr8/?pub=7wvc3

 Alvin Bragg has his Trump trial, all he needs now is a crime
By Social Links for Jonathan Turley
Published April 24, 2024, 3:38 a.m. ET

For many of us in the legal community, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Donald Trump borders on the legally obscene: an openly political prosecution based on a theory even legal pundits dismiss. Yet Monday the prosecution seemed to actually make a case for obscenity.

It wasn’t the gratuitous introduction of an uncharged alleged tryst with a former Playboy Bunny or expected details on the relationship with an ex-porn star. It was the criminal theory itself that seemed crafted around the obscenity stan- dard Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously described in 1984’s Jacobellis v. Ohio: “I shall not today attempt further to define [it]. . . . But I know it when I see it.

The prosecution must show Trump falsified business records in “furtherance of another crime.” After months of confusion on just what crime underpinned the indictment, the prosecution offered a new theory so ambiguous and undefined, it would have made Justice Stewart blush.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told the jury that in listing Stormy Daniels payments as a “legal expense,” Trump violated this New York law: “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”

So Trump committed a crime by conspiring to unlawfully promote his own candidacy, by paying to quash a potentially embarrassing story and then reimbursing his lawyer Michael Cohen with other legal expenses.

Confused? You are not alone.

It’s not a crime to pay for the nondisclosure of an alleged affair. It’s also not a federal election offense (the other underlying crime Bragg alleges) to pay such money as a personal or legal expense. Federal law doesn’t treat it as a political contribution to yourself.

Yet somehow the characterization of this payment as a legal expense is an illegal conspiracy to promote one’s own candidacy in New York.

more
https://nypost.com/2024/04/24/opinion/alvin-bragg-has-his-trump-trial-all-he-needs-now-is-a-crime/

Hurried hump-day thank-you's, Pookie!

And remember:

Assuming the guy's post on X is actually real, assuming the one station's price is typical of all SF Bay Area stations is an example of the Fallacy of Composition. ~20 miles south of Menlo Park, my neighborhood, we've been paying about $2 per gallon less. Gas prices in our area are up about a dollar per gallon in the past couple of months, but there's something more to that Chevron station's price than just the high price.

This gives a list of low and of high prices in San Jose, https://www.sanjosegasprices.com/ . That most of the high prices are either Chevron or Shell stations does not surprise me, and note that the station mentioned in the OP is a Chevron station.