- TikTok shut down in the United States as a federal ban on the Chinese-owned short-video app took effect.
- The 2025 Presidential Inauguration events kicked off on Saturday night with fireworks at Trump’s golf resort in Virginia.
- The U.S. Federal Reserve is exiting a global climate change coalition days before the new Trump administration is set to take power.
- Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas is stalled until the terror group submits a list of hostages, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
- Inspiring presidential leadership transformed America. See the book review after the news.
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☀️ It’s Sunday. Thank you for reading Morning Brief.
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The TikTok social media platform became unavailable in the United States on Saturday night before a federal ban on the Chinese-owned short-video app took effect. The app has also disappeared from app stores.
“A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the United States,” a message on the app states.
“Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned.”
President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that he will probably give TikTok a temporary reprieve from a looming ban over the social media platform’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
The delay would allow the platform to continue operating in the United States as the Trump administration undertakes a review of the situation.
“The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate,” he told NBC in a Jan. 18 interview. “If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday.”
TikTok said late Friday it would be “forced to go dark” on Sunday—the day before Trump’s inauguration—unless the Biden administration delivers a guarantee that it will not enforce a law requiring the company to divest or face a nationwide ban.
The Supreme Court ruled earlier on Friday to uphold the forced divestiture law requiring TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform by Sunday.
ByteDance has repeatedly insisted it will not sell. The White House weighed in on the controversy on Saturday, saying that TikTok’s threat to pull the plug on the app on Sunday was little more than a gimmick.
“It is a stunt, and we see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump administration takes office on Monday,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told media outlets.
The press secretary added that implementation of the law banning TikTok—which President Joe Biden signed in April 2024—would be up to the incoming Trump administration. (More)
More Politics
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- President Biden said on Friday that the Equal Rights Amendment, which was first proposed more than a century ago, is now the law of the land. Here’s what it is and what’s next.
- Biden’s China Legacy: After the first Trump administration hardened Washington’s actions against the array of threats posed by the communist regime, Biden continued and built upon them.
- Anti-scale fences are up, roadblocks are ready, and driving will be like navigating a maze as the nation’s capital prepares for President-elect Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
- Watch: President-elect Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, view the fireworks show at Trump’s victory party in Virginia.
- Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, a former Space Force commander, is Trump’s nominee to serve as the next United States undersecretary of the Air Force.
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Watch live coverage of the 2025 Presidential Inauguration on NTD News, our sister media. Tune at 9 a.m. on Monday.
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For the past decade, Jennifer Krazinski felt safe living in a home “tucked away, off of a dirt road,” in Hewitt, a northern New Jersey suburb.
But what she recently saw in the night sky left her disquieted. Near her house, Krazinski noticed flying objects with blinking red-and-white lights, emitting a whirring sound.
After three consecutive nights in mid-December 2024, “I stopped looking for them because it just was overwhelming,” she told The Epoch Times. “This makes me uneasy.”
Krazinski worried that someone was using drones to collect information for some nefarious purpose. But she decided against alerting authorities already inundated with similar reports of apparent drone sightings.
Weeks later, specific answers elude Krazinski and thousands of other Americans who spotted Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Reports came from at least a half-dozen U.S. states since mid-November 2024 and sparked a wave of concern.
After government officials and drone experts gave non-threatening explanations for nearly all the sightings, the hoopla over so-called “mystery drones” dissipated. However, questions lingered.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised that, soon after his Jan. 20 inauguration, he will release more details about the drone sightings; he said it was “ridiculous” that federal officials had been so tight-lipped.
Because of the attention, the public is more aware of drones—a plus for U.S. drone-makers and sellers.
Drone industry leaders also say the incidents underscore an ongoing dilemma: How to balance security needs and airspace-use restrictions against the drive to innovate drone capabilities and uses?
The need to fine-tune drone regulations and procedures is becoming more critical, considering how fast the industry is growing, experts said. (More)
More U.S. News
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- For a veteran Hotshot firefighter, California’s catastrophic fires are personal. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” says Greg Stenmo, a battalion chief with the Angeles National Forest.
- California lawmakers expressed mixed feelings about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision Jan. 13 to combine legislative special sessions addressing recent wildfires and the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
- New York City Mayor Eric Adams said that he discussed several key issues with President-elect Donald Trump during a recent meeting in Florida, but did not touch on the mayor’s corruption charges.
- A bipartisan group of Oregon lawmakers is calling on Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, heads of the to-be-established nongovernmental advisory body Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to help push for a halt in the federal government’s plan to kill roughly 450,000 barred owls.
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Li Yixue, a blogger in her early 20s, has become the face of a longstanding controversy in communist China: the misuse of psychiatric hospitals to suppress the regime’s critics.
For years, China watchers and human rights groups have raised alarms about this form of abuse, and Li’s case has drawn renewed attention to the issue.
Medical experts and Li’s family members say she shows no signs of mental illness. Others question the legality of her forced confinement.
Victims have reported beatings, forced medication, and electroconvulsive therapy, among other inhumane treatments, while locked up in these facilities, according to a 2022 report by human rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders.
China’s psychiatric facilities, often called Ankang hospitals, are regularly used to detain citizens who publicly criticize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), political dissidents, and people of faith. The Safeguard Defenders report found that more than half of those admitted to Ankang hospitals had no prior psychiatric evaluations, and nearly one-third had been hospitalized more than once.
Examples of why people end up in these hospitals vary, according to the report. One man had petitioned central authorities in 2017 because local police refused to conduct a thorough investigation into a robbery at his home. An anti-CCP activist live-streamed herself splashing ink on a portrait of CCP leader Xi Jinping in public in 2018. A veteran in 2019 sought medical compensation from central authorities for injuries sustained while serving in the People’s Liberation Army. (More)
More World News:
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🎤 Interview: Why Europe Is Putting the Brakes on Gender Interventions: Leor Sapir (Watch)
🍿 Documentary: 12 Ordinary Men looks at the twelve disciples who were hand-picked by Jesus to learn from his teachings, and spread the gospel after his crucifixion. Why these men? (Watch free on Gan Jing World)
✍️ Opinion: From China to Venezuela: Global Kidnapping on the Rise by Anders Corr
🍵 Health: A survey of Japanese people 100 years or older found 10 foods in common to them all.
💛 Inspiration: Tomorrow is a concept where things we need to do but continually push forward are not likely to come to fruition. The time to act is now.
🎵 Music: Brahms – Hungarian Dance No. 5 (Listen)
📷 Photo of the Day: A firefighter lights a controlled burn in a forest environment in Bages, France, on Jan. 18, 2025. 👇
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Idriss Bigou-Gilles/AFP via Getty Images
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“Meeting the Moment: Inspiring Presidential Leadership that Transformed America” by William Haldeman. (SUNY University of New York Press)
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America has had fewer than 50 presidents in 248 years. Of that number, history has favored some over others, and not just the quartet gracing Mount Rushmore. Modern-day presidents, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, are still revered today decades after leaving the presidency.
What distinguishes the great presidents from their lesser-known brethren is that America was made a better place under their leadership. Specifically, these presidents provided leadership at critical junctures in our nation’s history.
Author William Haldeman does a thought-provoking deep dive on this topic in his impressive new book, “Meeting the Moment: Inspiring Presidential Leadership that Transformed America.”
Haldeman’s premise is that presidents usually have distinctive leadership qualities that set them apart from other elected officials.
Historically, some presidents exercised exceptional judgment and others exuded courage and confidence when those qualities were what the country needed most.
Taken together as a whole, those different leadership qualities exhibited at crucial times in history made America stronger and better, echoing Aristotle’s idiom: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
“Meeting the Moment” profiles the leadership qualities of six former presidents and shows how specific presidential decisions at momentous times helped shape America today.
Haldeman’s literary microscope focuses on six men. He assigns one specific leadership quality to each president: George Washington—judgment; Thomas Jefferson—ingenuity; Abraham Lincoln—dedication; Theodore Roosevelt—courage; FDR—confidence; and Ronald Reagan—optimism.
Read the full article by our colleague Dean George here.
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