WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers, meet your latest lobbyists: online influencers from TikTok. The platform is once again bringing influencers to Washington, this time to lobby members of Congress to reject a fast-moving bill that would force TikTok's Beijing-based parent company to sell or be banned in the United States. On Tuesday, some influencers began a two-day advocacy event in support of TikTok, which arranged their trip ahead of a House floor vote on the legislation on Wednesday. But unlike a similar lobbying event the company put together last March when talks of a TikTok ban reached a fever pitch, this year’s effort appeared more rushed as the company scrambles to counter the legislation, which advanced rapidly on Capitol Hill. Summer Lucille, a TikTok content creator with 1.4 million followers who is visiting Washington this week, said if TikTok is banned, she “don’t know what it will do” to her business, a plus-sized boutique in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It will be devastating,” Lucille said in an interview arranged by the platform. The legislation is drawing unusual support in Congress In an unusual showing of bipartisanship, a House panel unanimously approved the measure last week. President Joe Biden has said he will sign the legislation if lawmakers pass it. But it’s unclear what will happen in the Senate, where several bills aimed at banning TikTok have stalled. The legislation faces other roadblocks. Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump, who holds sway over both House and Senate Republicans, has voiced opposition to the bill, saying it would empower Meta-owned Facebook, which he continues to lambast over his 2020 election loss. The bill also faces pushback from some progressive lawmakers in the House as well as civil liberties groups who argue it infringes on the First Amendment. TikTok could be banned if ByteDance, the parent company, doesn’t sell its stakes in the platform and other applications it owns within six months of the bill’s enactment. The fight over the platform takes place as U.S.-China relations have shifted to that of strategic rivalry, especially in areas such as advanced technologies and data security, seen as essential to each country’s economic prowess and national security. The shift, which started during the Trump years and has continued under Biden, has placed restrictions on export of advanced technologies and outflow of U.S. monies to China, as well as access to the U.S. market by certain Chinese businesses. The Biden administration also has cited human rights concerns in blacklisting a number of Chinese companies accused of assisting the state surveillance campaign against ethnic minorities. TikTok isn’t short on lobbyists. Its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance has a strong lobbying apparatus in Washington that includes dozens of lobbyists from well-known consulting and legal firms as well as influential insiders, such as former members of Congress and ex-aides to powerful lawmakers, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will also be in Washington this week and plans to meet with lawmakers, according to a company spokesperson who said Chew’s visit was previously scheduled. Influencers descend on Washington But influencers, who have big followings on social media and can share personal stories of how the platform boosted their businesses — or simply gave them a voice — are still perhaps one of the most powerful tools the company has in its arsenal. A TikTok spokesperson said dozens of influencers will attend the two-day event, including some who came last year. The spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about how many new people would be attending this year’s lobbying blitz. The company is briefing them ahead of meetings with their representatives and media interviews. Lucille, who runs the boutique in North Carolina, says has seen a substantial surge in revenue because of her TikTok page. The 34-year-old began making TikTok content focusing on plus-sized fashion in March 2022, more than a decade after she started her business. She quickly amassed thousands of followers after posting a nine-second video about her boutique. Because of her popularity on the platform, her business has more online exposure and customers, some of whom have visited from as far as Europe. She says she also routinely hears from followers who are finding support through her content about fashion and confidence. JT Laybourne, an influencer who also came to Washington, said he joined TikTok in early 2019 after getting some negative comments on videos he posted on Instagram while singing in the car with his children. Laybourne, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, said he was attracted to the short-form video platform because it was easy to create videos that contained music. Like Lucille, he quickly gained traction on the app. He says he also received more support from TikTok users, who reacted positively to content he produced on love and positivity. Laybourne says the community he built on the platform rallied around his family when he had to undergo heart surgery in 2020. Following the surgery, he said he used the platform to help raise $1 million for the American Heart Association in less than two years. His family now run an apparel company that gets most of its traffic from TikTok. “I will fight tooth-and-nail for this app,” he said. But whether the opposition the company is mounting through lobbyists or influencers will be enough to derail the bill is yet to be seen. On Tuesday, House lawmakers received a briefing on national security concerns regarding TikTok from the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence officials. ____ AP Journalist Didi Tang contributed to this report. ___ This story was originally published on March 12, 2024. It was updated on December 23, 2024 to clarify a quote by TikTok content creator Summer Lucille. Haleluya Hadero, The Associated PressCharleston Southern grabs late lead, stuns host MiamiHis second term doesn’t start for a month, but Donald Trump is already sending shock waves around the world. His trade threats helped set off a cabinet crisis in Canada that has Prime Minister Justin Trudeau teetering. In Europe, tariff fears have weakened already-wobbling governments. Allied leaders are racing to find ways to keep up support for Ukraine as Trump drives for a quick deal to end Russia’s invasion. The prospect of talks has both sides pushing on the battlefield, with Moscow using its most sophisticated missiles and Kyiv taking the fight to the Russian capital with the brazen assassination of a general. In the Middle East, the Trump-friendly leaders of Israel and Turkey are pressing for advantage as Iran, a perennial target of the incoming president, reels from setbacks for its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas and the abrupt fall of the dictator it backed in Syria. China, which has largely avoided Trump’s post-election social media spotlight so far, is shoring up its trade defenses ahead of what’s expected to be an onslaught from the new administration. “We’re on Trump time and we want to get stuff done in a hurry,” Keith Kellogg, the retired general Trump has named as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, told Fox Business on Dec. 18 as he prepared for his first trip to the region — even before the inauguration. “He made promises on the campaign trail and we’re going to fulfill those promises.” While it’s not unusual for political leaders at home and abroad to jockey for the ear of an incoming president, the scale of Trump’s pre-inauguration influence is vast. “There’s new light all over the world, not just here,” Trump claimed in a Phoenix speech Sunday. That came after he’d warned Panama that the U.S. objects to rates to use the Panama Canal and is concerned about growing Chinese influence over the conduit — going so far as to say he might demand its return to American control. Domestically, he spent the last week steering talks on a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said policymakers are beginning to factor in some of the president-elect’s potential moves, such as tariffs. The U.S. stock market and bitcoin have rallied since the election, something Trump likes to take credit for. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has all but vanished from the stage. For the world, the turmoil is a taste of what the new Trump term is likely to bring, as the incoming president pushes his “America First” agenda without many of the guardrails that constrained his first term. Populist forces are on the rise in many countries, with Trump allies challenging establishment leaders. Fresh from a tweet storm that influenced the spending-bill talks in Washington, billionaire Trump confidant Elon Musk Friday turned his attention to Europe, endorsing the far-right AfD party as the only way to “save Germany.” That earned him a rebuke from embattled Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who faces snap elections in February with support for his party dropping amid deepening economic woes. Musk stepped up the pressure Saturday, calling on Scholz to resign after a deadly attack on a Christmas market. In the U.K., Trump’s ascent has emboldened Nigel Farage of the populist Reform U.K. party, who met with Musk at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last week. U.K. lawmakers are weighing changing donation rules to prevent Musk from barging in. The stakes are possibly highest for Ukraine, where Russia’s full-scale invasion is nearly three years old and allied support for Kyiv is showing signs of flagging. Trump isn’t promising to deliver a deal to end the fighting even before he takes office as he did on the campaign trail, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already given up his earlier demand that Russia cede all the land it’s taken as part of any ceasefire deal. Germany’s Scholz held his first direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in two years last month, drawing fierce criticism from Zelenskyy. Until now, it’s largely been Hungary’s Viktor Orban — a Putin sympathizer whom Trump is fond of — seeking to act as an intermediary. On Sunday, Trump himself left the door open to meeting the Kremlin leader, who he claimed “wants to meet me as soon as possible.” Scholz said this month he’s “confident that we can develop a joint strategy for Ukraine.” He has continued to decline to provide Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles, breaking from Biden’s policy — one Trump thinks is a mistake. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke with Trump by phone and picked Peter Mandelson, a Labor Party veteran and trade specialist, as envoy to Washington. That choice drew criticism from Trump’s former campaign co-manager, Chris LaCivita, who called Mandelson “an absolute moron.” Trump’s impending arrival has also buoyed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has aligned himself with Trump, who faces fewer political pressures than Biden over the death toll from fighting in Gaza. Netanyahu also sent troops further into Syria after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Turkey, whose leader is another Trump ally, is expanding its reach Syria through groups it supports. “All of these leaders in the Middle East, they know the former president, now the president-elect, they know his team, so it’s kind of a unique moment in history where you have two presidents, and their teams, working on the ceasefire at the same time,” Morgan Ortagus, a former State Department spokeswoman during Trump’s first term, said on Bloomberg Television’s "Balance of Power," referring to talks on a deal in Gaza. In India, Trump’s arrival has coincided with an emboldened Narendra Modi preparing to host Putin for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine. Modi is one of the world leaders Trump has cultivated through praise and shows of friendship. China has embarked on something of a charm offensive, including with U.S. allies, ahead of Trump’s return — while also preparing tools for a potential trade war in the form of limits on exports of critical minerals to the U.S. and by signaling a warming with both Japan and India. “In 2016, there was this constant sense of uncertainty, of alarm,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Now there’s a fairly robust data set of how Trump behaved and how other countries behaved in reaction to him, and what worked well and what didn’t.” But leaders are already learning that the carefully crafted strategies for dealing with the incoming president don’t always play out as planned. After Trump threatened to slap a 25% tariff on imports from Canada, Trudeau hopped on a plane to Trump’s Florida estate to talk the issue over at dinner. Then he offered a border-security plan to assuage Trump’s concern (even though Canadian officials say migrant flows across the frontier are tiny). Trump’s camp touted that as an early victory. “President Trump is already acting as the president,” Karoline Leavitt, his incoming press secretary, told Fox Business on Sunday. For his part, Trump offered no concessions and has spent the weeks since the dinner trolling Trudeau, suggesting Canada should become the 51st U.S. state and complaining about the trade imbalance between the countries. Now, Trudeau’s government is at risk after his top lieutenant quit, citing in her resignation letter a disagreement over spending and how to prepare for a potential Trump trade war. ©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
A Republican lawmaker facing domestic violence allegations kept his seat by a single vote after a Thursday recount broke a tie with his challenger. State Rep. Lucas Lanigan, R-Sanford, got 2,478 votes to 2,477 for Democrat Patricia Kidder in the Nov. 5 election that came just eight days after Lanigan turned himself in to police on an aggravated assault charge that came after he allegedly strangled his romantic partner after she confronted him over an affair. That woman later said that the case should be dropped . Lanigan had been heavily favored to win a second term until his arrest. Early voting had been under way for more than three weeks by that time. Unofficial results initially showed Lanigan and Kidder tied after the city of Sanford corrected a flawed absentee ballot count. Neither Lanigan nor Kidder immediately responded to phone calls seeking comment on Thursday afternoon, but House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, R-Winter Harbor, said he expected Lanigan to serve in the chamber while his case works through the legal system. “He’s a duly elected representative from Sanford who does have serious, heavy charges against him,” he said. Top Democrats called on Lanigan to leave the race after the allegations became public. The result of the election leaves them with a slim 76-73 majority over Republicans in the Maine House of Representatives alongside two liberal-leaning independents. This seat is the last one in the Legislature to be decided after the 2024 election, although three more recounts are scheduled in races whose outcomes are unlikely to be reversed.In Special Gesture, Kuwait's Prime Minister Sees-Off PM Modi At Airport After Conclusion Of Historic Visit
Dimopoulos shines in double OT and Northern Illinois beats Fresno State 28-20 in Idaho Potato BowlThis story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The angry Alaskans gathered in Fairbanks to burn the president’s effigy. It was early December 1978 and President Jimmy Carter was that unpopular in Alaska. A few days earlier Carter had issued an unusual executive order, designating 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness as a national monument. He did so unilaterally, using a little known 1906 Antiquities Act that ostensibly gave the president the executive power to designate buildings or small plots of historical sites on federal land as national monuments. No previous president had ever used the obscure act to create a vast wilderness area. But Congress was refusing to pass the necessary legislation, so Carter, who passed away Sunday at the age of 100, decided to act alone. The Alaskan political establishment was flabbergasted. Despite the unpopularity of the unusual sequestration order, Carter announced that it would stand until Congress agreed to pass its own legislation. For the next two years Carter stubbornly held his ground, explaining that he wasn’t opposed to oil and gas development, but that he would not accept any bill that jeopardized the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the calving grounds and migratory route for one of the world’s last great caribou herds. Finally, Alaska’s senior politician, Republican Senator Ted Stevens agreed in late 1980 to break the impasse. At one point in their wrangling over what became known as the Alaska Lands Act, Senator Stevens argued that one small region should be excluded from the proposed wilderness refuge. “Well, let’s check that,” Carter said. The president then rolled out an oversized map on the floor of the Oval Office. Stevens was astonished to see the president on his hands and knees, inspecting the area in question. “No, I don’t think you are right,” Carter observed. “You see, this little watershed here doesn’t actually go into that one. It comes over here.” The senator had to concede the point, and on the car ride back to Capitol Hill he turned to his aide and remarked, “He knows more about Alaska than I do.” Sen. Ted Stevens and President Carter discuss the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Anchorage Daily News/Tribune News Service/Getty That was vintage Carter, the president who always paid attention to details. But it also illustrates Carter’s legacy as a president devoted to protecting the environment. Carter was still negotiating with Senator Stevens weeks after his defeat in the November 1980 election. But on December 2, 1980, this now lame-duck president signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, creating more than 157 million acres of wilderness area, national wildlife refuges, and national parks—tripling the size of the nation’s Wilderness Preservation System and doubling the size of the National Park System. It was, and still is, the largest single expansion of protected lands in American history. More than four decades later, before he entered hospice care in his simple Plains, Georgia home in February, Carter signed an amicus brief, appealing to the courts and President Joe Biden, not to permit the building of a gravel road through one small portion of the designated wilderness area. It was his last act in the public arena. And it succeeded: On March 14, 2023, the Interior Department canceled a plan that would have allowed the road’s construction. Carter was always annoyed when pundits proclaimed him a “model” ex-president, but a failed president. And he was right to be annoyed because his was actually a quite consequential presidency, and no more so than on questions of conservation and the environment. Carter signs the Energy Bill on November 9, 1978. HUM Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Early in his presidency, in the spring of 1977, he famously vetoed a slew of water projects, mostly small dams and river diversion facilities, in dozens of congressional districts around the country. Federal funding of such projects was often a waste of taxpayer funds. And these boondoggles, always encouraged by the US Army Corps of Engineers, often harmed the rivers’ natural habitat. Carter knew he was doing the right thing—even though it eroded his support in a Democratic-controlled Congress. Carter’s instincts for conservation had been evident earlier when, as governor of Georgia, he had opposed unbridled commercial development, favored tough regulations to protect the state’s coastal wetlands, and endorsed the creation of two major seashores and river parks. But when Carter got to the White House, he shocked many observers by appointing James Gustave Speth, age 35, to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. Speth was regarded by the Washington establishment as a radical on environmental issues. A Yale-trained lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, he had co-founded in 1970 the Natural Resources Defense Council, a tough advocacy group on environmental issues. Speth, who later served as dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, used his position in the administration to educate Carter about the dangers of acid rain, carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, and the likely extinction of 100,000 species during the next quarter century. Just before leaving office, Carter released a prophetic report, largely written by Speth, that predicted “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if humanity continued to rely on fossil fuels. The Global 2000 Report to the President became an early clarion call for scientists studying climate change. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Danielle Brigida/US Fish and Wildlife Service History will judge Carter as a president ahead of his time. He set a goal of producing 20 percent of the nation’s energy from renewable sources by 2000. In an age of soaring energy prices and stagflation, he famously wore a cardigan on national television during a fireside chat in which he urged Americans to lower their thermostats and conserve energy. He put solar water heating panels on the roof of the White House, telling reporters, “A generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” Ironically, while Carter put federal money into solar energy research, a few years later his successor Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof—and a few are still displayed in museums. Carter spent much of his time in office trying to deal with energy issues. He proposed a 283-page National Energy Act (NEA) that included a tax on oversized, gas-guzzling cars, tax credits for home insulation, and investments in solar and wind technologies. Carter insisted that his energy bill was the “moral equivalent of war.” In response, The Wall Street Journal labeled it with the sarcastic acronym MEOW. Republican Party chairman Bill Brock charged that the president was “driving people out of their family cars.” Michigan Democratic Congressman John Dingell told Carter aides that it was an “asinine bill.” The legislation nevertheless passed the House, but then encountered much more opposition in the Senate. Carter complained in a private White House diary, “The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable, and it’s impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves.” Carter announces his solar energy policy in front of PV panels installed on the West Wing roof. Warren Leffler/Library of Congress The final bill, passed in October 1978, was a complicated compromise—but it did impose penalties on gas-guzzling cars, required higher efficiency standards for home appliances, and provided tax incentives to develop wind and solar technologies. But environmentalists would criticize it for also providing incentives to mine domestic coal and produce corn-based gasohol. Carter’s goal here was to lessen the country’s dependence on imported Arab oil—and in this he was marginally successful, leading to a decline in oil imports during his term in office. But in an unintended consequence, environmentalists would complain that a part of the bill required that any new power plants be fired with fuels other than oil or natural gas. In practice, that meant coal received a major boost. In retrospect, the most consequential part of the energy bill was the phased decontrol of natural gas prices. This deregulation eventually stimulated exploration for natural gas in the United States and created the market conditions decades later for the innovative fracking technology that would make the country a major supplier of liquefied natural gas. Politically speaking, Carter’s energy policies were criticized by both sides. He was faulted by liberals for enacting too much deregulation, while conservatives perceived him as an enemy of the oil and gas industry. Former President Carter with grandson Jason Carter during a ribbon cutting for a solar project on family farmland in Plains, Georgia. David Goldman/AP If environmentalists should remember one thing about the Carter presidency it should be his so-called “malaise speech” in July 1979. It was an extraordinary sermon about America’s limits—a most un-American idea for a people constantly fed on the manna of manifest destiny. “We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” he said. “Our people are losing that faith...In a nation that was once proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” Taking a page straight from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (which Carter had recently read), Carter observed, “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” This was the born-again Southern Baptist in Jimmy Carter speaking, the Southern populist, warning his people about the need to be aware of our environment’s fragility and limitations. It was not a message most Americans wanted to hear. But it remains a key part of his presidential legacy.
