Marco Rubio

Donald Trump said that he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies if those allies don’t contribute enough defense spending to the alliance, and Sen. Marco Rubio seems to be totally fine with that. The Republican said Sunday that he has “zero concern” about the former president’s remarks. At a South Carolina rally on Saturday, Trump told a story where he claimed that he was speaking to a fellow leader of a NATO member country who asked him what the U.S. would do if Russia attacked…

At least three US senators think TikTok’s CEO may have violated federal law. In recent letters, the lawmakers say Shou Zi Chew lied about the company’s data storage practices during a combative Congressional hearing earlier this year. The renewed focus on Chew’s wishy-washy answers follows a series of news reports which suggest Chinese TikTok and ByteDance employees, and even Chinese Community Party officials, hadgreater access to US user data than previously known.On Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of…

Photo: Samuel Corum (AP)U.S.government efforts to ban TikTok over national security grounds, once considered a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream, are looking more and more likely by the week, especially after Congress browbeat TikTok’s CEO for five hours last week. That said, we’ve been here before. Various players in the federal government have attempted to ban TikTok before, all unsuccessfully. In just three short months, at least four new bills have reached the House and Senate demanding, in various forms, a national ban of…

A powerful and bizarre coalition of Senators have teamed up on a bill that could strike down the digital ad dominance of Google and Meta, though the proposed legislation never mentions those companies by name. The AMERICA Act could radically transform advertising technology, the financial backbone of the internet.Google’s Antitrust Case Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to AITry to say the bill’s title in one breath: The Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability Act, aka the AMERICA…

Photo: Chris Jackson (Getty Images)Come Sunday, March 12, at 2:00 a.m. EST, Daylight Saving Time will begin. We’ll lose an hour because the 20th-century federal government decided we should. Then on November 5th we’ll gain an hour, and be plunged into darkness. For over half a century, we’ve accepted that this cycle is normal.But dozens of states have introduced Daylight Saving Time-related legislation to end this cycle, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. States want to adopt “Daylight Saving…

Image: Leon Neal (Getty Images)Alongside Daylight Saving Time (DST) comes the yearly discussion in Congress of whether to eliminate it altogether. We lose that extra hour of sleep as the clocks spring forward on Sunday. Ahead of the time change, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is reintroducing the Sunshine Protection Act, which he also proposed early last year. The bill, intended to remove DST nationwide, would cancel the twice-yearly clock changing. The bill passed in a unanimous vote in the Senate last year but was…

Four unidentified flying objects have made their way across North American airspace since the end of January, and were subsequently shot down. While the first object was identified as a Chinese-owned surveillance balloon, U.S. lawmakers say they are no closer to discovering the truth behind the other three.Read more... Four unidentified flying objects have made their way across North American airspace since the end of January, and were subsequently shot down. While the first object was identified as a Chinese-owned…

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin delivers his State of the Commonwealth address on January 11, 2023.Photo: John C. Clark (AP)The governor of Virginia is blocking a potential Ford battery factory that would have provided thousands of jobs in an impoverished area—based on fearmongering about China.The proposed factory is a partnership between Ford and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., also known as CATL, a Chinese battery manufacturer. As of last year, CATL was the world’s largest manufacturer of batteries for electric…

Photo: Cindy Ord (Getty Images)ByteDance, the parent company behind TikTok, admitted this week a handful of its employees, some based in China, inappropriately accessed TikTok data of U.S. users and two journalists when conducting an investigation attempting to snuff out the source of a damning leak.TikTok CEO Shou Chew reportedly admitted the overreach in a memo sent to employees viewed by Bloomberg. The revelations follow a months-long internal investigation at the company spurred by a Forbes investigation earlier this…

Image: Mario Tama (Getty Images)TikTok announced on Tuesday it is becoming more transparent by introducing a new feature that will tell users why its algorithm recommends certain videos in their feeds. The change is being rolled out in users’ For You feed and will include a question mark icon titled “Why this video” for users to review.A TikTok spokesperson confirmed the feature can be accessed starting today and the icon will list why the video was selected,including examples of previous interactions, accounts the user…