Month: October 2023

(NewsNation) — The state of Utah has filed a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company deliberately misled young users and parents about its dangers and used “addictive features” to keep users on the app.

“My top priority is protecting our children in Utah. I’m tired of TikTok lying to Utah parents. I’m tired of our kids losing their innocence and even their lives addicted to the dark side of social media,” Attorney General Sean Reyes said in a statement Tuesday announcing the lawsuit.

Lawmakers across the country and in Washington have been aggressively pushing for restrictions on TikTok over concerns about data privacy, health effects on users and the social media company’s links to the Chinese Communist Party.

After grilling TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew earlier this year, lawmakers made a bipartisan push for legislation to ban the popular social media app. But that ban is now stalled due to legal trouble.

The Utah lawsuit, which brings claims under the Utah Consumer Sales Practices Act, claims prolonged use of the app is detrimental to children’s mental health and well-being.

“Social media companies must be held responsible for the harms they are causing,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said in a statement. “The experts — from the U.S. Surgeon General and behavioral science researchers to parents and teens — all agree that social media is affecting our children’s mental health and it’s time to intervene.”

Margaret Woolley Busse, executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, called the lawsuit the “next step in holding TikTok accountable” for it’s alleged failure to safeguard children.

“However, we will not let up the pressure on TikTok as we continue our investigation,” Busse said in a statement.

In addition, the lawsuit alleges TikTok misled its users about its connection to its Chinese parent company ByteDance.

At a March congressional hearing, Chew said TikTok provides tools to protect youth, including limits on direct messages, limiting time spent on the app for users under 18 and offering family pairing tools to help parents control what their kids are exposed to.

NewsNation digital producer Stephanie Whiteside contributed to this report.

Inmates at Paraguay’s largest prison rioted on Tuesday, taking 11 guards hostage and setting fire to facilities in the crowded Tacumbu penitentiary on the outskirts of the capital.

Two hostages were later released as government and military forces responded to the revolt, according to Interior Minister Enrique Riera. He said two police officers were injured in the clashes.

Tacumbu houses nearly 4,000 inmates in a ramshackle, tin-roof building and, according to local security experts, gangs exert near-total influence over life inside.

Images from a Reuters photographer showed a shirtless inmate standing on top of a prison wall, throwing a rock at security personnel while protecting himself with a wooden board.

Police braced behind riot shields while the entrance to the prison was in flames, though authorities said later that firefighters had brought the blaze under control.

Meanwhile, prisoners’ families gathered outside as they awaited news on their loved ones.

Interior Minister Riera said Paraguay would push for prison reform once the riot was quelled.

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President Biden reaffirms U.S. support for Israel and pledges to send aid. VOA is in Gaza and Israel, we speak with Palestinians and Israelis. There’s more military aid headed for Ukraine, and an election in Liberia. Plus, a look at China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the associated debt in Africa.

Utah sued Chinese-owned app TikTok on Tuesday, accusing it of harming children by intentionally keeping young users spending unhealthy amounts of time on the short-video sharing platform.

The Utah suit is the latest action challenging the popular app in the United States, with Indiana and Arkansas bringing similar suits.

Last month, a federal judge blocked California from enforcing a law meant to protect children when they use the Internet.

“What these children (and their parents) do not know

is that TikTok is lying to them about the safety of its app and exploiting them into checking and watching the app compulsively, no matter the terrible effects it has on their mental health, their physical development, their family, and their social life,” said Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes in a filing.

Utah’s suit filed in state court said the videos leverage “highly powerful algorithms and manipulative design features — many of which mimic features of slot machines” and the result “of these manipulative tactics is that young consumers become hooked.”

ByteDance-owned TikTok, which has more than 150 million U.S. users, said in response to the suit it “has industry-leading safeguards for young people, including an automatic 60-minute time limit for users under 18 and parental controls for teen accounts.”

Reyes said the state’s investigation is ongoing and he will ask a court next week to compel TikTok’s compliance with investigative subpoenas.

Utah is seeking civil penalties as well as an injunction prohibiting TikTok from violating state law that protects consumers from deceptive business practices.

Indiana’s lawsuit against TikTok, brought in December, is pending in state court.

Arkansas also sued both TikTok and Facebook-parent Meta (META.O) in March “for pushing addictive platforms.”

Last year, a group of Republican lawmakers said “many children are exposed to non-stop offerings of inappropriate content that TikTok’s algorithm force-feeds to them.”

On Thursday, a judge will hear arguments in TikTok’s lawsuit seeking to block Montana’s first-of-its kind state ban on the use of TikTok before it takes effect Jan. 1. Montana’s legislature approved legislation to ban TikTok citing spying concerns.

Congress has been considering legislation for months that would enable the Biden administration to restrict or ban TikTok over concerns of potential spying. TikTok has said it has spent more than $1.5 billion on rigorous data security efforts and rejects spying allegations.

President Joe Biden said on Monday that at least 11 American citizens were among those killed in Israel following the weekend’s attacks by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

Washington believes it is likely U.S. citizens are also among those being held hostage by Hamas, Biden said in a statement.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby later added it was not yet confirmed if Americans were taken hostage.

“I can’t say definitively that we know Americans are being held hostage. That said, we have to accept the grim possibility that some are,” Kirby told reporters late on Monday.

Biden said the United States was working with Israeli officials to obtain more information as to the whereabouts of U.S. citizens who are still unaccounted for.

“For American citizens who are currently in Israel, the State Department is providing consular assistance as well as updated security alerts,” Biden said.

“For those who desire to leave, commercial flights and ground options are still available,” he said, adding that they should take precautions and follow the guidance of local authorities.

Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Saturday killing hundreds of Israelis and seizing dozens of hostages. Israeli TV channels said the death toll from the Hamas attack had climbed to 900, with at least 2,600 injured.

Israel subsequently battered Palestinians with air strikes in Gaza. Gaza’s health ministry said at least 687 Palestinians have been killed and 3,726 wounded in Israeli air strikes on the blockaded enclave since Saturday.

Biden said he has directed his team to work with Israeli counterparts on every aspect of the hostage situation, including sharing intelligence and deploying experts from the U.S. government.

Police departments across the United States have stepped up security around centers of Jewish life, Biden said.

(Reporting by Jasper Ward and Kanishka Singh; editing by Dan Whitcomb, Rosalba O’Brien, and Jamie Freed)

The post US Citizens ‘Likely’ Among Palestinian Hostages, Biden Says appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Donald Trump’s actual net worth has always been highly suspect, given that he’s been caught lying to finance magazines about his net worth for decades. In fact he’s now on trial in New York for having falsified his net worth in order to obtain loans and such. Accordingly, Forbes has now removed Trump from its list of the wealthiest people.

Trump isn’t taking the news well, to put it mildly. Trump is erupting on social media, asserting that “Failing Forbes Magazine is controlled by Communist China. No wonder they go out of their way to write badly about me, and work with the CORRUPT AND INCOMPETENT RACIST ATTORNEY GENERAL OF NEW YORK.”

Wait, what? Now Trump has decided that the New York Attorney General is conspiring to take him down with a magazine? Trump added that he “could never figure it out until now.” Yeah, that’s because he had to become senile enough to actually believe this kind of incoherent nonsense.

But Trump just keeps going: “Despite it all, I don’t think that President Xi will be very happy with them, they’re bad news.” No one has any idea what Trump is even talking about at this point, least of all him. He’s now living entirely in an incoherent fantasy land. There’s nothing left of this guy.

The post Donald Trump has complete meltdown after Forbes removes him from list of wealthy people appeared first on Palmer Report.

President Biden is faced with the thorny reality that American citizens are among the hostages Hamas terrorists kidnapped and took into Gaza over the weekend, but the U.S. government doesn’t know exactly how many of its citizens are in that situation or where they are.

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“We now know that American citizens are among those being held by Hamas,” Biden told reporters in the White House State Dining Room on Tuesday. He said the U.S. military would be helping Israeli forces in the planning and intelligence collection for efforts to rescue hostages and that he had “no higher priority” as President than the safety of Americans held hostage around the world.

Speaking forcefully in front of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Biden called Hamas’s rampage through towns and farms in southern Israel and the slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis “pure, unadulterated evil” and confirmed that those killed include 14 Americans. “At this moment, we must be crystal clear,” Biden said. “We stand with Israel.”

Beyond confirming that some of the hostages are US citizens, White House officials had few other details about them or what options for their rescue are available to Biden.

“We do not know about their condition and we cannot confirm a precise number of American hostages,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House. More than 20 American citizens who were in Israel are missing, Sullivan said, but it is unclear how many among those are being held captive by Hamas. 

The lack of clarity was especially upsetting for some of the family members of American citizens caught up in the crisis. Nahar Neta doesn’t know whether his 66-year-old mother, Adrienne Neta, is still alive after she was kidnapped on Saturday by Hamas from her home on Kibbutz Be’eri. “It is a little bit ridiculous at this stage to say that the optimistic scenario is that she is held hostage in Gaza and not dead on the street of the kibbutz where we grew up,” he said during an event in Jerusalem where family members of kidnapped Americans called on Biden to take action to bring their loved ones home.

Nahar described how Adrienne was on the phone with him and her daughter during the assault when they heard her scream. Neta said that his mom, who had worked as a nurse and midwife, spoke in Arabic to try to calm down the attackers. 

If the U.S. is able to locate any of the Americans being held by Hamas, a U.S. rescue mission would be incredibly complex and dangerous for U.S. military personnel and any civilians on the ground in the densely populated Gaza Strip, which is currently under regular barrage by Israeli missiles.  Also, the kidnappers may be holding U.S. citizens alongside Israeli captives, leaving open the question of which country would lead such an operation.

Hamas is believed to have more than 100 hostages in Gaza, including children and the elderly, making the Israeli offensive into Gaza that much more challenging and complex, says Uzi Arad, who served as national security advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2009 to 2011. “This is a complicating factor to an incredible degree, because the hostages may be now used as a card in the management of the war,” says Arad, who was part of the 1976 Israeli commando raid to rescue hostages at the Entebbe International Airport in Uganda. Arad praised Biden’s statement of support for Israel on Tuesday. “The effect this has on Israeli morale and attitude is galvanizing,” he says.

Biden ordered U.S. military aircraft to Israel loaded with additional weapons, equipment and supplies, and a U.S. carrier strike group armed with guided missiles is loitering in the Eastern Mediterranean to deter other Iran-backed militants based in Syria and Lebanon from taking advantage of the moment to step up their own attacks.

The U.S. Navy strike group, led by the USS Gerald R. Ford—the newest, most sophisticated carrier in the U.S. fleet—is manned by more than 5,000 sailors and Marines and places additional US special operations forces, intelligence collection equipment, and attack planes closer to Gaza. Those could be used in potential hostage rescue operations, if the U.S. can learn more about their fate.

The families of the missing Americans who spoke to reporters in Jerusalem on Tuesday were frustrated that they hadn’t been told anything by the US State Department or Israeli government about what may have happened to their loved ones. Neta wanted to hear what US and Israelis officials know about his mother at this point. “I think that after three days—more than three days now—it is more than a reasonable request to have somebody from the Israeli government or the U.S. administration approach us with any type of information they may have on our family members,” Neta said.

—WITH REPORTING BY ERIC CORTELLESSA

Hurricane Lidia reached Category 4 strength on Tuesday afternoon as it barreled towards Mexico’s Pacific coast, where major beach and tourist resorts were bracing for significant downpours, likely flooding as well as imminent hurricane-force winds.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned that Hurricane Lidia was of “extremely dangerous” strength and could strengthen further before making landfall on Tuesday night.

The hurricane was about 110 miles (177 km) southwest of major beach destination Puerto Vallarta, the Miami-based NHC reported in its latest bulletin at 5:30 p.m. ET (2130 GMT).

The center estimated that Lidia was moving east-northeast at 16 miles-per-hour (26 kph) with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (225 kph).

The Puerto Vallarta airport announced on social media it was closing from 4 p.m. (2200 GMT) until 8 a.m. on Wednesday.

The hurricane’s rainfall was estimated at between 4-8 inches (10-20 cm), though some areas could see up to 12 inches through Wednesday, according to an earlier bulletin.

A large swath of western and central Mexico will likely see the brunt of the expected downpour, including Nayarit state, southern portions of Sinaloa state, plus coastal areas in Jalisco state.

“These rains will likely produce flash and urban flooding, along with possible mudslides in areas of higher terrain near the coast,” the NHC predicted.

The strength of Lidia’s winds, however, are expected to weaken rapidly after it moves inland.

Further south, Tropical Storm Max left two dead and at least two injured in the state of Guerrero following heavy rains, according to local media reports.

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