Connect with us

Business

Supreme Court to hear TikTok case before ban deadline

Published

on

Supreme Court to hear TikTok case before ban deadline

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear TikTok’s challenge to a law that would ban the popular social media app next month unless its Chinese owner sells it.

The case is set for Jan. 10, nine days before TikTok is scheduled to be shut down in the U.S.

In announcing its decision, the court instructed lawyers for TikTok and the government to prepare arguments around the question of whether the impending ban, which lawmakers feel is needed to block potential meddling by Chinese authorities, would violate the 1st Amendment.

With time running out before the ban takes effect Jan. 19, the justices agreed to decide the TikTok case on a fast-track basis, scheduling two hours of oral argument.

“We’re pleased with today’s Supreme Court order,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. “We believe the Court will find the TikTok ban unconstitutional so the over 170 million Americans on our platform can continue to exercise their free speech rights.”

Advertisement

The legal battle over TikTok poses a conflict between the American tradition of wide-open free speech versus the potential national security threat of a Chinese-owned company that collects the personal data of its users.

TikTok’s future in the U.S. has been uncertain since 2020, when then-President Trump moved to shut down the short-form video app, which people use to share dance routines, news stories, recipes and funny videos.

Trump and others raised the prospect that ByteDance, which owns TikTok, could assist the Chinese government by sharing data it collects from its American users; embedding malicious software in the app; or helping to spread disinformation.

That set off years of back-and-forth between TikTok and the U.S. government. In April, President Biden signed a law that required ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations to a non-Chinese entity or be shut down.

The companies responded by suing the U.S. government in May, saying a ban would violate 1st Amendment rights. They also said that the new law “offers no support for the idea” that TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses national security risks.

Advertisement

“Speculative risk of harm is simply not enough when First Amendment values are at stake,” TikTok and ByteDance said in their filing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the law two weeks ago, paving the way for a Supreme Court showdown.

In a 3-0 decision, the D.C. Circuit Court rejected TikTok’s free-speech claim, saying the government is not opposed to the content on the social media platform, but to the owner of it.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg cited testimony from the government’s security experts who concluded that they “did not trust” TikTok’s owners to protect the privacy of Americans. That is not a problem of social media in general, he said.

“TikTok is the only global platform of its kind that has been designated by the political branches as a foreign adversary controlled application,” Ginsburg wrote in the Dec. 6 decision.

Advertisement

Like the appellate court, the Supreme Court justices could be wary of overturning the judgment of Congress and two presidents on a matter of national security.

In the spring, a few notable names announced their interest in buying the U.S. portion of TikTok, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who said he was assembling an investor group. Since the law passed, however, there has been little public indication of a possible sale.

On Wednesday, another interested buyer, former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, said he expected the Supreme Court to uphold the law and reiterated his plans to make an offer along with other investors.

The group’s proposal, McCourt said in a statement, would “migrate this vibrant community to an American-made tech stack that gives people control of their data and embraces a transparent approach to content recommendation and moderation.”

Free speech organizations have warned that enforcing the ban would set a bad precedent.

Advertisement

“We should be concerned about this law as Americans who engage with one another on social media, but we should also be concerned about the global system of free expression,” said George Wang, staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute.

If the law is upheld, he said, it’s “hard to see where the stopping point is.”

“Future bans of social media platforms are possible, but maybe also other forms of media,” Wang said. “It really blesses the government’s ability and authority to shut down entire platforms for speech on pretty vague national security justifications.”

TikTok on Monday said that its estimates showed that small businesses on the platform would lose “more than $1 billion in revenue and creators would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings in just one month” unless the ban was halted.

TikTok’s lawyer before the high court, Noel Francisco, is a familiar figure for the justices, having served as U.S. solicitor general during Trump’s first term.

Advertisement

Chang reported from Los Angeles and Savage from Washington.

Business

Polymarket Bets on Paris Temperature Prompt Investigation After Unusual Spikes

Published

on

Polymarket Bets on Paris Temperature Prompt Investigation After Unusual Spikes

Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.

Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.

“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.

He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.

The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.

Advertisement

One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.

As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.

Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.

“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”

On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.

Advertisement

On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.

In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.

Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.

Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.

The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.

Advertisement

It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.

On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.

Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.

Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.

As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.

Advertisement

“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”

Continue Reading

Business

California’s jet fuel stockpile hits two-year low as war strangles oil supplies

Published

on

California’s jet fuel stockpile hits two-year low as war strangles oil supplies

As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.

The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.

The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”

Advertisement

As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.

Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.

“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.

Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.

Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.

Advertisement

“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”

California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.

The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.

“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”

Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.

Advertisement

The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.

The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.

California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.

“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”

In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.

Advertisement

The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.

“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”

The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.

Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.

The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.

Advertisement

“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.

Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.

Continue Reading

Business

Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

Published

on

Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.

In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”

“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”

Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.

In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.

Advertisement

The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.

“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.

Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.

The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.

Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.

Advertisement

Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending