TikTok may soon be banned in the United States due to its China ties, but some users are now migrating to a platform even more strongly linked to China’s communist regime. The case with TikTok is now in the hands of the Supreme Court, which is weighing the constitutionality of banning the video app unless its China-based owner, ByteDance, sells it off. It appears the ban is likely to be upheld, and some TikTok users have been jumping to another platform that’s even more Chinese—RedNote. Technically, the name is Xiaohongshu, which is Mandarin for “Little Red Book”—as in the teachings of former CCP leader Mao Zedong.

In other news, TikTok may be just the first of many such companies that could be forced to either sell or get banned in the United States. The U.S. Department of Defense recently listed Tencent as a Chinese military company, and this could also have broad implications for tech and entertainment. Tencent owns the messaging app WeChat and has also been buying up large swaths of companies in the video game market—including many of the most popular games currently available. With the new designation, and with the passage of some recent U.S. laws, Tencent could soon go the way of TikTok.

President-elect Donald Trump has announced his plan to create a new agency called the External Revenue Service. This is an inversion of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and, as the new agency’s name suggests, its focus will be on collecting money from outside the United States—including through the use of tariffs.

In other news, special counsel Jack Smith has officially left his position. The federal investigation and charges against Trump have now come to an end. But before leaving, part of Smith’s report on one case has been released to the public. In it, Smith alleges that had Trump not won the 2024 election, there would have been enough evidence for a criminal conviction. Trump, meanwhile, has strongly criticized the report and Smith, arguing it was part of a politicized campaign to target him.

With the presidential inauguration now less than a week away, the Senate is holding hearings on the appointments of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees. The hearings could display the level of support, or lack of enthusiasm, that Republicans will show for the incoming administration. And there are also questions about how this will go for Cabinet selections who’ve been the focus of media attacks. Among these is Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, and already veterans are rallying on the streets of Washington D.C. in his support.

Censorship programs were forced onto Facebook and Instagram through outside pressure, said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who provided the details during an interview with Joe Rogan. Zuckerberg explained how programs for content moderation transformed into large-scale censorship systems after the COVID-19 outbreak. This ties in with his recent announcement that Meta will be ending these censorship practices, and working with the incoming Trump administration to push for freedom of expression globally.

A persecution of between 70 million and 100 million people has largely been hidden from the world, and western news outlets have played a role in concealing it from the public. The Chinese Communist Party launched a campaign of torture, killing, and live organ harvesting against the Falun Gong religious group in 1999. And while many news outlets even won awards in the early years for exposing the truth of the Chinese regime’s brutal actions, many mysteriously stopped covering it around 2003, and some have even flipped to parroting the communist party’s propaganda.

To learn more about this, and what has actually been taking place, we speak with Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, a human rights organization that has been researching and exposing the persecution.

The fires in Los Angeles are not just a natural disaster. They’re also turning into a political disaster, as blame falls on California’s policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental regulation. Many are now raising concerns over regulations that allegedly led to water shortages, policies on forestry management, and money for the Fire Department being diverted to programs for DEI.

Individuals who risk prosecution under the incoming Trump administration could receive preemptive pardons. President Joe Biden said he was considering issuing pardons like this in order to shield key figures from prosecution.

Biden demonstrated a novel use of pardons like this when he granted his son, Hunter Biden, a pardon for any potential crimes committed between January 2014 and December 2024. The president has been pressed to give similar pardons to others, although he has not fully committed to doing so.

Meta is ending its third-party fact-checking system on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and looking to adopt a community notes system following in the footsteps of X.

This push for more freedom of expression was announced in a video from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, where he noted the problems that were caused by an increase in censorship in recent years, and he also explained how he plans to work with the incoming Trump administration to push back against censorship pressure coming to the United States from Europe.

President-elect Donald Trump is hoping to jumpstart his administration with one massive bill, covering everything from border policies to taxes to energy. With less than two weeks before the inauguration, he has held closed-door meetings to win support among key figures in Congress. The goal is to fast-track the agenda through Congress and get the package of legislation on Trump’s desk by the end of April.

Read 'China’s Massive Hacking Campaign Targeting the US': https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/ch­inas-massive-hacking-campaign-targeting-­the-us-5785939

It’s Jan. 6 yet again, and this time, it will be the electoral college votes for President-elect Donald Trump getting certified at the U.S. Capitol building.

Over the course of the last four years, and even after the election results were declared for 2024, Trump has faced legal actions that raised questions over whether he could be rendered ineligible for reelection. Despite the pressure, and some recent doubts that were cast over the election certification, Republicans and Democrats in Congress appear to remain in support of a peaceful transition of power.

A suspected terrorist attack killed at least 14 people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day. The suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police after driving a truck through a crowd of people celebrating the new year, and an ISIS flag was discovered inside the vehicle.

The FBI is now investigating whether the attack has any ties to another incident the same day, where a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with gas tanks and fireworks exploded outside the Las Vegas Trump International Hotel. Yet these incidents are also raising an additional concern. Just prior to this, a former CIA agent warned in an interview on the Shawn Ryan Show that the terrorist groups ISIS and al-Qaeda were planning a resurgence of attacks within the United States for 2025.