National Roundup

New York
TikTok asks judge to block Trump’s ban as Sunday deadline looms
NEW YORK (AP) — Chinese-owned TikTok asked a judge to block the Trump Administration’s attempt to ban its app, suggesting the video-sharing app’s forced deal with Oracle and Walmart remains unsettled.

An app-store ban of TikTok, delayed once by the government, is set to go into effect Sunday. A more comprehensive ban is scheduled for November, about a week after the presidential election. President Donald Trump set this process in motion with executive orders in August that declared TikTok and another Chinese app threats to U.S. national security. The administration has offered no specifics to substantiate that charge.

Trump has pushed for a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to an American company. The president said this week that he would bless a proposed deal in which Oracle and Walmart take a 20% stake in a new U.S. entity to be called TikTok Global. But he also said he could retract his approval if Oracle doesn’t “have total control.”

The two sides in the TikTok deal appear at odds over the corporate structure of TikTok Global. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent, said Monday that it will still own 80% of the U.S. entity after a financing round. Oracle, meanwhile, put out a statement saying that Americans “will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global.”

Chinese media have criticized the deal, suggesting that the Chinese government is not happy with the arrangement. The Chinese government complicated deal arrangements in August when it restricted exports of artificial-intelligence tech like that used by TikTok.

One editorial in the state-owned China Daily on Wednesday called the deal a “dirty and underhanded trick.”

In its filing in federal court in the District of Columbia, TikTok said Trump’s Aug. 6 executive order is unlawful. So are resulting Commerce Department prohibitions that aim to kick TikTok out of U.S. app stores and, in November, essentially shut it down in the U.S., it claimed.

The Chinese firm said the president doesn’t have the authority to take these actions under the national-security law he cited; that the ban violates TikTok’s First Amendment speech rights and Fifth Amendment due-process rights; and that there’s no authority for the restrictions because they are not based on a national emergency.

Representatives for the Commerce Department and Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration in August also began a process to ban Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat. Restrictions that would effectively have made the app impossible to use were set to go into effect Sunday. Over the weekend, a federal judge in California  approved a request from a group of U.S. WeChat users to delay those restrictions. She said the government’s actions would affect users’ First Amendment rights.

Massachusetts
eBay workers who sent spiders to couple to plead guilty
BOSTON (AP) — Four former eBay Inc. employees have agreed to plead guilty to their roles in a campaign of intimidation that included sending live spiders and cockroaches to the home of a Massachusetts couple who ran an online newsletter critical of the auction site, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

“Four former employees of #eBay are scheduled to plead guilty on Oct. 8 at 2pm via zoom in federal court in #Boston,” according to a tweet from the official account of the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts. “The defendants are charged w/ participating in a cyberstalking campaign that targeted a Massachusetts couple.”

The four expected to plead guilty are Brian Gilbert, 51; Stephanie Popp, 32; Stephanie Stockwell, 26; and Veronica Zea, 26, according to The Boston Globe.

All live in San Jose, California, except for Stockwell, who lives in Redwood City, California.

They are among seven former eBay employees charged in the case, in which the Massachusetts couple had other disturbing items sent to their home, including a funeral wreath and a bloody pig Halloween mask.

They are all charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with a witness. Their lawyers either declined to comment or didn’t immediately return emails seeking comment Wednesday.

The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on them to their neighbor’s house, planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car, and posted the couple’s names and address online, advertising things like yard sales and encouraging strangers to knock on the door if the pair wasn’t outside, officials said.

The suspects engaged in a “systematic campaign fueled by the resources of a Fortune 500 company to emotionally and psychologically terrorize this middle-aged couple in Natick,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said at a news conference when charges were announced in June.

An internal investigation was launched after San Jose, California-based eBay was notified by law enforcement of “suspicious actions by its security personnel,” company officials wrote in a prepared statement. The employees were ultimately fired, the company said.

Popp was a senior manager of global intelligence at eBay; Gilbert was senior manager of special operations for eBay’s Global Security Team; Stockwell was manager of eBay’s Global Intelligence Center; and Zea was an eBay contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst in the Global Intelligence Center. Authorities say they were working at eBay at the time of the alleged harassment.

Court documents say the couple was targeted after their newsletter published an article in August 2019 about a lawsuit filed by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers.

South Carolina
AG: County supervisor trafficked meth on the job
CHESTER, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina grand jury has indicted a county supervisor for allegedly using government cars to run a methamphetamine trafficking operation while on the clock.

Documents unsealed Thursday charged Chester County Supervisor Kenneth Shane Stuart with meth trafficking, criminal conspiracy, misconduct in office and two counts of meth distribution. Two other individuals were also charged with meth trafficking through the investigation.

The state attorney general’s office said Stuart also conspired to steal catalytic converters from county-owned vehicles.

Stuart, 47, has served as supervisor since 2015 and was re-elected in 2018. County supervisors in South Carolina typically perform administrative duties, working with an elected county council.

Jail records show Stuart was booked this week into the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Columbia. A bond hearing is scheduled for Friday.

Stuart could face prison time if convicted of the trafficking and public corruption charges.