|
 Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images and TikTokTo the chagrin of middle-schoolers everywhere, the most extreme restrictions on TikTok are on a glide path to passage in Congress.
The bill—which is now set to get a vote on Saturday and is expected to pass with strong bipartisan support—has animated distraught TikTok creators of all ages to call congressional offices and demand they oppose a ban on the popular video app.
While the legislation is largely understood and referred to as a bill to ban TikTok, the truth is far more complex. The measure would not immediately ban TikTok. Rather, it would force its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app to a U.S.-based entity within nine months of becoming law, giving the president the option of stalling the elimination of TikTok for another 90 days.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
|
|
 CNNShortly after it was announced that the entire jury had been empaneled in Donald Trump's hush-money trial on Friday, CNN anchor Laura Coates was interviewing a legal expert about what the jurors could expect in the weekslong case.
Little did she know that moments later she would have to dramatically cut that conversation short in order to pivot to a man setting himself on fire outside the lower Manhattan courthouse where the ex-president's trial is taking place.
Coates' quick journalistic impulses and composure while live-reporting a self-immolation and the attempts of first responders to extinguish the flames has drawn widespread praise from journalists and media observers, including conservatives who typically have nothing but disdain for CNN.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
|
|
Columbia University President Nemat "Minouche" Shafik on Thursday called on New York police to forcibly clear a student occupation on the lawn of the school, which had been dubbed the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, resulting in over 100 arrests. The protesters were demanding the Ivy League school divest from firms and institutions that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but Shafik ordered the raid a day after being questioned on Capitol Hill about ongoing pro-Palestinian protests on campus. The move caused outrage among students and many faculty, who decried it as censorship and a violation of academic freedom. The renowned professor and presidential candidate Cornel West, chair of the Columbia-affiliated Union Theological Seminary, joined students Thursday in solidarity with their protest and told Democracy Now! they "represent the best … of the human spirit," and lauded them for "fighting in the face of domination and occupation and subjugation, and doing it with tremendous determination."
|
|
