Headline
Trump Gives TikTok Extra 75 Days To Find Buyer TikTok

US President Donald Trump on Friday extended the deadline for TikTok to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban in the United States, allowing 75 more days to find a solution.
“My administration has been working very hard on a deal to save TikTok, and we have made tremendous progress,” Trump said on Truth Social, just hours before the deadline was to expire.
“A transaction requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is why I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.”
The hugely popular video-sharing app, which has more than 170 million American users, is under threat from a US law that passed overwhelmingly last year and orders TikTok to split from its Chinese owner ByteDance or get shut down in the United States.
Trump has insisted his administration is near a deal to find a buyer for TikTok and keep it from shutting down that would involve multiple investors, but has given few details.
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Motivated by national security fears and belief in Washington that TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government, the ban took effect on January 19, one day before Trump’s inauguration.
In the hours before that deadline, TikTok temporarily shut down in the United States and disappeared from app stores, to the dismay of millions of users.
But the Republican president quickly announced an initial 75-day delay and TikTok subsequently restored service to users, returning to the Apple and Google app stores in February.
The new 75-day delay pushes the deadline to June 19.
Trump has repeatedly downplayed risks that TikTok is in danger, saying he remains confident of finding a buyer for the app’s US business.
The president added on Friday that he would “continue working in good faith with China,” whose government will need to sign off on the transaction.
The president suggested TikTok could even be part of a broader deal with China to ease the stinging tariffs he imposed on Beijing as part of a worldwide blitz of levies.
READ ALSO: US Tariffs To Hit All Countries, Says Trump
“We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’ We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the deal,” he added.
According to reports, the solution in the works would see existing US investors in ByteDance roll over their stakes into a new independent global TikTok company.
Additional US investors, including Oracle and Blackstone, the private equity firm, would be brought on to reduce ByteDance’s share.
Much of TikTok’s US activity is already housed on Oracle servers, and the company’s chairman, Larry Ellison, is a longtime Trump ally.
ABC News reported on Friday that Walmart was also in the mix.
The retail behemoth as well as Oracle were previously rumored to be taking shares in TikTok when Trump tried to wrest the company from its Chinese owners during his first administration.
Trump supported a ban or divestment in his first term, but lately became a TikTok defender, seeing it as a reason more young voters supported him in November’s election.
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– What about the algorithm? –
Uncertainty remains, particularly over what would happen to TikTok’s valuable algorithm.
“TikTok without its algorithm is like Harry Potter without his wand — it’s simply not as powerful,” said Forrester Principal Analyst Kelsey Chickering.
The New York Times suggested the new company could license the algorithm from ByteDance.
But such an arrangement would go against the spirit of the law, which is in part based on the premise that TikTok’s algorithm can be weaponized by the Chinese against US interests.
Amazon has also reportedly made a last-minute bid to buy TikTok.
Other proposals include an initiative called “The People’s Bid for TikTok,” launched by real estate and sports tycoon Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative.
Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity recently expressed interest in buying TikTok, as did a joint venture involving YouTube mega-celebrity MrBeast and another bid from adult content platform OnlyFans.
Headline
UK Is A Home, Not Hotel, Kemi Badenoch Tells Immigrants, Starmer’s Govt

UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government over its immigration policy, declaring that Britain is “a home, not a hotel.”
Badenoch accused Labour of weakening the country’s borders and enabling mass automatic citizenship.
In a 1:11-minute video posted on her official X account on Friday, Badenoch claimed Labour’s proposed reforms could allow up to two million immigrants to automatically qualify for British citizenship starting next year.
READ ALSO:Badenoch Unveils Strict UK Immigration Plan, Targets 150,000 Yearly Deportations
“From next year, two million immigrants can automatically claim British citizenship. Two million people! That’s nearly twice the population of Birmingham. That’s massive,” Badenoch said in the video.
Badenoch noted that the Conservative Party has introduced a deportation bill to bring immigration down.
NDLEA intercepts drugs hidden in snails, others meant for UK, US, DRC
Among the measures she endorsed in the video were deporting all foreign criminals, mandatory age checks, no more pretending to be kids, tougher visa rules and salary thresholds, disapplying the Human Rights Act to immigration cases, and no more abusing human rights laws to judge deportations. Make asylum support repayable, and no permanent right to stay in the UK if you’ve relied on benefits.
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“Until that’s law, we won’t fix this. Labour should adopt it now. It’s time to get tough. That’s what the Conservatives’ Deportation Bill delivers, and we’re going to go further. Our country is a home, not a hotel. And if we don’t defend it, no one else will.”
In the caption that came with the video, she tweeted, “Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.
“Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak; it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation Bill.”
Headline
King Charles To Pray With Pope Leo In Historic Vatican Visit

King Charles III will on Thursday meet Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican and make history as the first head of the Church of England to pray publicly with the pontiff for five centuries.
The 76-year-old monarch, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England, arrived in Rome on Wednesday evening with his wife, Queen Camilla, for what Buckingham Palace described as a “historic” state visit.
It will be Charles’s first meeting with Leo since the US-born pope took over as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in May, following the death of Pope Francis.
The royals will arrive at the Apostolic Palace at 10.45am (0845 GMT) for private talks with the pope.
READ ALSO:King Charles III To Visit Vatican Next Week
The king and queen will then join an ecumenical service at midday (1000 GMT) in the Sistine Chapel led by Pope Leo and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, currently the senior cleric of the Church of England.
Broadcast live by Vatican media, it will be the first time a reigning English or British monarch has prayed publicly with a pope since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.
Triggered by the pope’s refusal to annul the king’s marriage so he could marry another woman, the schism made the monarch head of the separate Church of England.
Thursday’s service, held beneath Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling frescoes, will be centred on conservation and protecting the environment, a cause championed by Charles.
READ ALSO:King Charles To Knight David Beckham For Football, Charity Work
It will bring together Catholic and Anglican traditions, with the choir from the Sistine Chapel joined by that from Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences.
– Schism –
The religious break between London and Rome remains, even if there has been a significant rapprochement in recent decades.
In 1961, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, became the first British monarch to visit the Holy See since the split.
The law was changed in 2013 so that marrying a Catholic would no longer disqualify someone from becoming monarch — although they still have to be a Protestant themselves.
The rapprochement is important because “Anglicanism was born in reaction to the Catholic Church, and therefore in opposition,” said Hyacinthe Destivelle, a French priest and member of the Vatican’s dicastery (department) for promoting Christian unity.
READ ALSO:King Charles III To Visit Vatican Next Week
This is no longer the case, despite “theological differences in recent decades”, he told AFP.
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England — the mother church of the world’s 85-million-strong Anglican community — ordains women and allows priests to marry.
Sarah Mullally was recently named the first female archbishop of Canterbury, the Church’s top cleric, although she has yet to officially take up her post.
– Royal Confrater –
Charles and Queen Camilla are also set to take part in a service at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, one of four major papal basilicas, which has historic links with the English crown.
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The king will be made a “Royal Confrater” of the basilica and presented with a specially designed seat for use by him and future British monarchs.
Charles has visited the Vatican several times and met privately with Pope Francis on April 9, just days before the pontiff’s death.
The king sent his son and heir, William, to the funeral and his brother, Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inauguration mass.
The visit comes as the Catholic Church celebrates the Jubilee, a year-long event held every 25 years, which has drawn millions of pilgrims to the Vatican.
It also comes at a delicate time for Charles, following new revelations about his brother Prince Andrew, who is mired in a scandal surrounding late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Andrew announced on Friday that he would relinquish his title as Duke of York, reportedly under pressure from Charles. He had already stepped back from royal duties in 2019.
AFP
Headline
One Dies As Woman Trying To Kill Cockroach Sets House On Fire

South Korean police have stated that a woman in her 20s set her apartment building on fire while trying to kill a cockroach with an improvised flamethrower.
Local media reports that the woman attempted to burn the insect using a lighter and a flammable spray, saying she had used the same method before. However, items in her home caught fire on Monday, spreading to other parts of the building.
Police in the northern city of Osan said they will seek an arrest warrant for the woman, who could be charged with accidentally starting a fire and causing death by negligence.
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According to the BBC, one of the woman’s neighbours, a Chinese national in her 30s, died while trying to escape the blaze. The victim lived on the fifth floor of the building with her husband and their two-month-old baby.
When the fire broke out, the couple opened their window and called for help. They handed their baby to a neighbour on the adjacent block before attempting to escape. The husband managed to climb over, but the woman fell from the window. She was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead hours later.
Police said they believed the couple tried escaping through the window because thick smoke from the fire had blocked the stairway.
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The building houses commercial shops on the first floor and 32 residential units from the second to fifth floors. Eight other residents also suffered from smoke inhalation.
Using blowtorches or homemade flamethrowers to kill cockroaches has become a trend on social media. In 2018, an Australian man set fire to his kitchen while attempting to exterminate cockroaches with a similar device.
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