Category: Entertainment

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump has ordered a sweeping but vague ban on dealings with the Chinese owners of popular social media apps TikTok and WeChat on security grounds, a move China’s government criticized as “political manipulation.”

The twin executive orders Thursday — one for each app — add to growing U.S.-Chinese conflict over technology and security. They take effect in 45 days and could bar the apps from the Apple and Google app stores, effectively removing them from U.S. distribution.

China’s foreign ministry said it opposed the move but gave no indication whether Beijing might retaliate.

Earlier, Trump threatened a deadline of Sept. 15 to “close down” TikTok in the United States unless Microsoft Corp. or another company acquires it.

TikTok, owned by Beijing-headquartered ByteDance Ltd., is popular for its short, catchy videos. The company says it has 100 million users in the United States and hundreds of millions worldwide.

The Trump administration has expressed concern Chinese social media services could provide American users’ personal information to Chinese authorities, though it has given no evidence TikTok did that.

Instead, officials point to the Communist Party’s ability to compel cooperation from Chinese companies. U.S. regulators cited similar security concerns last year when the Chinese owner of Grindr was ordered to sell the dating app.

In a statement, TikTok expressed shock at the order and complained it violates U.S. law. The company said it doesn’t store American user data in China and never has given it to Beijing or censored content at the government’s request.

TikTok said it spent nearly a year trying to reach a “constructive solution” but the Trump administration “paid no attention to facts” and tried improperly to insert itself into business negotiations. TikTok said it would “pursue all remedies” available to ensure the company and its users are “are treated fairly.”

Tencent and Microsoft declined to comment.

On Friday, shares of WeChat’s owner, Tencent Holding Ltd., declined 5% in trading in Hong Kong. Tencent, Asia’s most valuable tech company with a market capitalization of $650 million, makes most of its money from online games and entertainment in China.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an expansion of the U.S. crackdown on Chinese technology to include barring Chinese apps from U.S. app stores, citing alleged security threats and calling out TikTok and WeChat by name.

The Chinese foreign ministry accused Washington of “political manipulation” and said the moves will hurt American companies and consumers.

“The United States is using national security as an excuse, frequently abuses national power and unreasonably suppresses companies of other countries,” said a ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin. “This is an outright hegemonic act. China is firmly opposed to it.”

Wang, who didn’t mention TikTok or any other company by name, called on the Trump administration to “correct its wrongdoing” but gave no indication how Beijing might respond.

Trump’s orders say the Chinese-owned apps “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” They cite the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act and call on the Commerce secretary to define the banned dealings by Sept. 15.

WeChat, known in Chinese as Weixin, is a hugely popular messaging app that links to finance and other services. It has more than 1 billion users. Around the world, many people of Chinese descent use WeChat to stay in touch with friends and family and to conduct business in mainland China.

Within China, WeChat is censored and expected to adhere to content restrictions set by authorities. The Citizen Lab internet watchdog group in Toronto says WeChat monitors files and images shared abroad to aid its censorship in China.

Tencent also owns stakes in major game companies such as Epic Games, publisher of Fortnite, a major video game hit, and Riot Games, which is behind League of Legends.

The Trump administration already was embroiled in a tariff war with Beijing over its technology ambitions. Washington has blocked acquisitions of some U.S. assets by Chinese buyers and has cut off most access to American components and other technology for Huawei Technologies Ltd., a maker of smartphones and network equipment that is China’s first global tech brand.

China-backed hackers have been blamed for breaches of U.S. federal databases and the credit agency Equifax.

In China, the Communist Party limits what foreign tech companies can do and blocks access to the Google search engine, Facebook, Twitter and other social media, along with thousands of websites operated by news organizations and human rights, pro-democracy and other activist groups.

The ruling party has used the entirely state-controlled press to encourage public anger at Trump’s actions.

“I don’t want to use American products any more,” said Sun Fanyu, an insurance salesperson in Beijing. “I will support domestic substitute products.”

Leading mobile security experts say TikTok is no more intrusive in its harvesting of user data and monitoring of user activity than U.S. apps owned by Facebook and Google.

“The U.S. thinking is that anything that is Chinese is suspect,” said Andy Mok, a senior research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization in Beijing. “They’re being targeted not because of what they’ve done, but who they are.”

The order doesn’t seem to ban Americans from using TikTok, which would be nearly impossible to enforce, said Kirsten Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame.

“This is a pretty broad and pretty quick expansion of the technology Cold War between the U.S. and China,” said Steven Weber, faculty director for the Berkeley Center for Long Term Cybersecurity.

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AP reporters Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, Calif., Mae Anderson in New York, Frank Bajak in Boston, Joe McDonald in Beijing and Zen Soo in Hong Kong contributed to this article.

NEW YORK (AP) — The filmmakers behind “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein” moved quickly when Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on federal charges that she acted as a recruiter for the financier’s sexual abuse.

The fourth episode of the new Lifetime docuseries, which was intended to be a round-table with survivors, was redone to focus on Maxwell’s alleged crimes and her grooming of potential victims.

Filmmakers also incorporated more of Maxwell’s story into the series overall and conducted additional interviews. The four-part series will be delivered at Lifetime just days before its Sunday premiere.

“If your timing can be great, our timing was great,” said executive producer Robert Friedman.

This wasn’t the first time the filmmakers had to regroup. Production was underway when the 66-year-old Epstein killed himself in his New York City prison cell last August after his arrest on sex trafficking charges. He had pleaded not guilty to sexually abusing girls as young as 14 and young women in New York and Florida in the early 2000s. In lawsuits, women say the abuse spanned decades.

Ricki Stern, a co-producer and co-director, said Epstein’s death “opened up the opportunity to say to their interview subjects, ‘You don’t have to hold anything back. The guy is dead.’ We can now speak in some ways more openly and honestly and with details that I think had he not been found dead, there may have been more legal maneuvering and careful consideration around.”

However, adds co-producer and co-director Anne Sundberg, for the victims, “there was a feeling of real helplessness in the wake of Epstein’s death and with all the battles over the settlement of his estate, there was a sense there will never be any clarity or justice. To finally have a shot at it (after Maxwell’s arrest) is remarkable.”

Maxwell’s arrest just a month before the series’ premiere triggered “a race, but definitely worth it” said Sundberg. ”We’re about to pass out,” joked Friedman. “The team has been great. We’re working to tell a story basically in real time.”

Maxwell, 58, incarcerated since her July 2 arrest at her New Hampshire estate, has pleaded not guilty to charges alleging she sometimes joined in the abuse of the girls, which included one who was 14.

As Maxwell’s case plays out in court, Friedman says the intention is “to tell this as a continuing story.”

Lifetime is also responsible for the Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated “Surviving R. Kelly.” It wasn’t until after the airing of that series in 2019 that the investigation into the singer intensified under a global spotlight. Kelly is now in jail, facing charges on a variety of crimes in three states.

Lifetime has partnered with Rise, a national nonprofit trying to eliminate racial discrimination, to run a public service announcement featuring Epstein survivors during the airings of the documentary to call for a sexual assault survivors’ bills of rights. It will also air a PSA from the anti-sexual assault organization, RAINN, to provide hotline information and resources for those in need.

SAN RAMON, Calif. (AP) — A former Google engineer has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing trade secrets before joining Uber’s effort to build robotic vehicles for its ride-hailing service.

The sentence handed down Tuesday by U.S. District Judge William Alsup came more than four months after former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski reached a plea agreement with the federal prosecutors who brought a criminal case against him last August.

Levandowski, who helped steer Google’s self-driving car project before landing at Uber, was also ordered to pay more than $850,000.

Alsup had taken the unusual step of recommending the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Levandowski while presiding over a high-profile civil trial between Uber and Waymo, a spinoff from a self-driving car project that Google began in 2007 after hiring Levandowski to be part of its team.

Levandowski eventually became disillusioned with Google and left the company in early 2016 to start his own self-driving truck company, called Otto, which Uber eventually bought for $680 million.

Before leaving Google, though, Levandowski downloaded a trove of Google’s self-driving car technology, resulting in him facing 33 counts of intellectual property theft. He wound up pleading guilty to one count, culminating in Tuesday’s sentencing.

The accusations turned Levandowski, once highly regarded for his early inroads into self-driving cars, into a notorious figure “almost synonymous with greed run amok in Silicon Valley,” his own lawyers acknowledged in court documents filed last week.

The lawyers argued Levandowski deserved some leniency because there was never any evidence that he used Google’s trade secrets while overseeing Uber’s self-driving car division. He lost that job in 2017 while asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when Uber was still defending itself against Waymo’s lawsuit.

Uber settled its case with Waymo for $245 million a few days into a trial that featured its former CEO, Travis Kalanick, speaking about some of his discussions with Levandowski about the ride-hailing service’s desire to win the race to build self-driving cars.

Levandowski, 40, faced a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a $250,000 fine. Besides sentencing Levandowski to 18 months in prison, Alsup fined him $95,000 and ordered him to pay Waymo $756,499 to reimburse the company for the costs it incurred in helping the government with its investigation.

It appears uncertain whether Levandowski will be able to make the payments. He filed for bankruptcy earlier this year after another court upheld an arbitration ruling requiring him to pay Google $179 million, most of which consisted of a bonus he received for his work on self-driving cars.

In its victim statement, Waymo told Alsup that Levandowski’s “misconduct was enormously disruptive and harmful to Waymo, constituted a betrayal, and the financial effects would likely have been even more severe had it gone undetected.”

In documents arguing why Levandowski deserved prison time, U.S. Attorney David Anderson called his theft a “brazen and shocking” act that seemed driven by ego as much as greed.

“Levandowski’s actions suggest he wanted to be seen as the singular inventor of the self-driving car, the way Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone,” Anderson wrote.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Police officers captured an unlikely suspect bouncing through a Fort Lauderdale neighborhood on Thursday morning.

After receiving a call about a kangaroo running loose in the area, officers managed to capture it and place it in a squad car. The agency posted a picture of the kangaroo on Twitter.

So far, police have few clues as to the origins of this misplaced marsupial. No one was injured in its capture.

The kangaroo was turned over to the South Florida Wildlife Center.