TikTok plea live: Supreme Court hears arguments with TikTok ban looming | BBC News

January 10, 2025 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Just as the former solicitor general Noel Francisco, appearing for TikTok and ByteDance, sought to drive home their argument that the sale-or-ban law would burden the platform’s speech – current Solicitor General Elizabeth B Prelogar repeatedly returned to the government’s view that the Chinese state could, at some point, try to access sensitive US user data via the companies.

She stressed that TikTok collects more data than other platforms on an “unprecedented” scale – a claim the company has denied – and warned it represented risks of espionage and blackmail.

Starbucks scraps vaccine requirement following Supreme Court decision | CNN

January 20, 2022January 20, 2022 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Starbucks is no longer requiring employees to get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing, following the US Supreme Court’s rejection last week of President Joe Biden’s vaccine and testing requirement for large businesses.

In a letter published on January 4, the coffee company recommended that its workers get vaccinated by February 9, in accordance with guidance from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Those who remained unvaccinated past that deadline would have had to submit to weekly testing, according to that early January note.

Census 2020: Trump drops plan for controversial citizenship question | BBC News

July 4, 2019July 2, 2019 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The Trump administration has dropped a controversial plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, marking a major victory for civil rights groups.

It comes just days after the Supreme Court blocked efforts to include the question, ruling that the government’s justification seemed “contrived”.

The White House argued it would bolster protections for minority voters.

Why Are There 9 Supreme Court Justices? | Live Science

February 15, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Ever since Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in February 2016, the Supreme Court has had just eight justices. While the number of justices has fluctuated over the years, there may soon be nine now that President Donald Trump has nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to the court.

The original U.S. Constitution did not set the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Therefore, it was up to Congress to decide, and in 1801, it set the number at five. But things didn’t stay that way for long.

Supreme Court affirms Google Books scans of copyrighted works are fair use | TechCrunch

April 19, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

A Supreme Court order issued today closes the book on (or perhaps merely ends this chapter of) more than a decade of legal warfare between Google and the Authors Guild over the legality of the former’s scanning without permission of millions of copyrighted books. And the final word is: it’s fair use. Related Articles As “Paying The Writer” Gets Easier, Whither Bookstores? Pronoun, A Self-Publishing Platform For Authors, Is Ready To Serve Humanity With Publishing Tools Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

The order is just an item in a long list of other orders that appeared today, and adds nothing to the argument except the tacit approval of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals 2015 decision — itself approving an even earlier decision, that of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2013. So in a way, it’s old news.