Month: March 2023

Ford Motor Company’s plan to create batteries for the rapidly expanding electric vehicle (EV) market could encounter congressional speed bumps because of the carmaker’s plan to use technology created by a Chinese company with ties to the communist government.

Ford executive chairman William Clay Ford Jr. announced in February that the company would spend $3.5 billion to build a new battery plant in Michigan and employ U.S. workers to promote U.S. “independence” in the EV market.

“Right now, many [U.S.] automakers import most of their batteries from abroad,” Ford said at that time. “This is a slow process that makes us vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.”

He added that the U.S.-produced batteries would “charge faster” and be “more affordable” and “incredibly durable.”

But the news did not sit well with some lawmakers, including Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who opposed President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included tax credits to encourage domestic EV production.

Earlier this month, Rubio introduced legislation blocking tax credits for producing EV batteries using Chinese technology and called on the Biden administration to review Ford’s partnership with the company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL).

“Nine billion to help people buy tax credits,” Rubio said. “By the way, with a Chinese battery in it. … I imagine we’ll spend a bunch more money to buy solar panels which are also made in China.”

In a Skype interview last week with VOA, China expert Jonathan Ward said “the White House has already called for a supply chain review that would cover essentially next generation batteries, critical minerals and rare earths, pharma and other biotechs.”

“We’re in the midst of this competition for supply chain security and industrial capacity where relying on our primary geopolitical adversary is really untenable in the long run,” he said.

Ward has authored two books outlining China’s economic, military and political goals. He said decades of outsourcing technology and manufacturing has left the United States with little choice but to work with Chinese companies like CATL to advance domestic EV development.

“Essentially 60% of the battery market is made up of Chinese corporations,” he said. “CATL, the battery maker in question here, is already 34% of global market share. The other companies are Japanese and South Korean, but they are smaller than the aggregate Chinese battery makers. So, we have this contest that we are going to have to deal with.”

Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an associate professor in international studies at Indiana University Bloomington, said since the U.S. currently “doesn’t have the capability” to produce EV batteries, “what is the theory of change that helps us get to that capacity?”

“Then the question becomes, are we becoming overly reliant or staying reliant on technology that ultimately the Chinese government controls rather than the U.S.?” she said.

From 2019 to 2020, Danzman was a policy adviser and case analyst with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) at the State Department’s Office of Investment Affairs. She led the unit that reviews foreign investment transactions for possible national security concerns.

Rubio wants CFIUS to review Ford and CATL’s licensing agreement.

“Rubio is really focused on this idea that we don’t want to be dependent on Chinese technology,” she explained to VOA last week via a Skype interview. “The U.S. government coming in and changing those structures is a big imposition on the private sector, so there really does need to be a strong argument for why it needs to do so.”

“I think a lot of companies are going to find themselves in situations like this where Chinese partnerships [are] coming back to haunt us here,” said Ward. “I think our companies that have been entangled in the China market all have to reassess what they are doing.”

In its response to Rubio’s proposed legislation, Ford said its own subsidiary will build and operate the new battery plant in Michigan, and that “no other entity will get U.S. tax dollars for this project.”

During February’s announcement, Ford CEO Jim Farley said the proposed BlueOval Battery Park Michigan meets goals outlined by the Biden administration.

“We’re growing production of batteries here at home, reflecting the central purpose of the Inflation Reduction Act — that’s why it was passed, for this project,” Farley said.

Ford’s plans for the new Michigan facility come as the auto manufacturer reported more than $2 billion in operating losses in EV-related business in 2022.
…

Electricity generated from renewables surpassed coal in the United States for the first time in 2022, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced Monday.

Renewables also surpassed nuclear generation in 2022, after first doing so last year.

Growth in wind and solar significantly drove the increase in renewable energy and contributed 14% of the electricity produced domestically in 2022. Hydropower contributed 6%, and biomass and geothermal sources generated less than 1%.

“I’m happy to see we’ve crossed that threshold, but that is only a step in what has to be a very rapid and much cheaper journey,” said Stephen Porder, a professor of ecology and assistant provost for sustainability at Brown University.

California produced 26% of the national utility-scale solar electricity followed by Texas with 16% and North Carolina with 8%.

The most wind generation occurred in Texas, which accounted for 26% of the U.S. total followed by Iowa (10%) and Oklahoma (9%).

“This booming growth is driven largely by economics,” said Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy. “Over the past decade, the levelized cost of wind energy declined by 70%, while the levelized cost of solar power has declined by an even more impressive 90%.

“Renewable energy is now the most affordable source of new electricity in much of the country,” he added.

The Energy Information Administration projected that the wind share of the U.S. electricity generation mix will increase from 11% to 12% from 2022 to 2023 and that solar will grow from 4% to 5% during the period. The natural gas share is expected to remain at 39% from 2022 to 2023, and coal is projected to decline from 20% last year to 17% this year.

“Wind and solar are going to be the backbone of the growth in renewables, but whether or not they can provide 100% of the U.S. electricity without backup is something that engineers are debating,” said Porder, of Brown University.

Many decisions lie ahead, he said, as the proportion of renewables that supply the energy grid increases.

This presents challenges for engineers and policymakers, Porder said, because existing energy grids were built to deliver power from a consistent source. Renewables such as solar and wind generate power intermittently. So battery storage, long-distance transmission and other steps will be needed to help address these challenges, he said.

The EIA report found the country remains heavily reliant on the burning of climate-changing fossil fuels. Coal-fired generation was 20% of the electric sector in 2022, a decline from 23% in 2021. Natural gas was the largest source of electricity in the U.S. in 2022, generating 39% last year compared to 37% in 2021.

“When you look at the data, natural gas has been a major driver for lowering greenhouse gas emissions from electricity because it’s been largely replacing coal-fired power plants,” said Melissa Lott, director of research for the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

“Moving forward, you can’t have emissions continuing to go up, you need to bring them down quickly,” she added.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) influenced the amount of renewable energy projects that went online in 2022, Lott said, and it’s expected to have a “tremendous” impact on accelerating clean energy projects.
…

The World Health Organization says about 87% of Sudanese females between ages 15 and 49 have undergone female genital mutilation, one of the highest rates in the world. A project by the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, is targeting sports clubs to engage men and boys in the fight against the practice. Henry Wilkins reports from Khartoum, Sudan.
…

The Webb Space Telescope has found no evidence of an atmosphere at one of the seven rocky, Earth-sized planets orbiting another star.

Scientists said Monday that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the planets in this solar system, some of which are in the sweet spot for harboring water and potentially life.

“This is not necessarily a bust” for the other planets, Massachusetts Institute of Technology astrophysicist Sara Seager, who wasn’t part of the study, said in an email. “But we will have to wait and see.”

The Trappist solar system — a rarity with seven planets about the size of our own — has enticed astronomers ever since they spotted it just 40 light-years away. That’s close by cosmic standards; a light-year is about 5.8 trillion miles. Three of the seven planets are in their star’s habitable zone, making this star system even more alluring.

The NASA-led team reported little if any atmosphere exists at the innermost planet. Results were published Monday in the journal Nature.

The lack of an atmosphere would mean no water and no protection from cosmic rays, said lead researcher Thomas Greene of NASA’s Ames Research Center.

As for the other planets orbiting the small, feeble Trappist star, “I would have been more optimistic about the others” having atmospheres if this one had, Greene said in an email.

If rocky planets orbiting ultracool red dwarf stars like this one “do turn out to be a bust, we will have to wait for Earths around sun-like stars, which could be a long wait,” said MIT’s Seager.

Because the Trappist system’s innermost planet is bombarded by solar radiation — four times as much as Earth gets from our sun — it’s possible that extra energy is why there’s no atmosphere, Greene noted. His team found temperatures there hitting 450 degrees Fahrenheit (230 degrees Celsius) on the side of the planet constantly facing its star.

By using Webb — the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space — the U.S. and French scientists were able to measure the change in brightness as the innermost planet moved behind its star and estimate how much infrared light was emitted from the planet.

The change in brightness was minuscule since the Trappist star is more than 1,000 times brighter than this planet, and so Webb’s detection of it “is itself a major milestone,” the European Space Agency said.

More observations are planned not only of this planet, but the others in the Trappist system. Looking at this particular planet in another wavelength could uncover an atmosphere much thinner than our own, although it seems unlikely it could survive, said Taylor Bell of the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, who was part of the study.

Further research could still uncover an atmosphere of sorts, even if it’s not exactly like what’s seen on Earth, said Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium who was part of the team that discovered the first three Trappist planets in 2016. He did not take part in the latest study.

“With rocky exoplanets, we are in uncharted territory” since scientists’ understanding is based on the four rocky planets of our solar system, Gillon said in an email.

Launched in late 2021 to an observation post 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away, Webb is considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting Earth for more than three decades.

In the past, Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope scoured the Trappist system for atmospheres, but without definitive results.

“It is just the beginning, and what we can learn with the inner planets is going to be different from what we can learn from the other ones,” MIT’s Julien de Wit, who was not involved in the study, said in an email.
…

Scientists have long known that wild seabirds ingest bits of plastic pollution as they feed, but a new study Monday shows the tiny particles don’t just clog or transit the stomach but can subvert its complex mix of good and bad bacteria, too.

Plastic-infested digestive tracts from two species of Atlantic seabirds, northern fulmars and Cory’s shearwaters, showed a decrease of mostly beneficial “indigenous” bacteria and more potentially harmful pathogens.

There was also an increase in antibiotic-resistant and plastic-degrading microbes, researchers reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The findings suggested that certain types of microplastic may be leeching chemicals that disrupt the birds’ so-called gut microbiome.

Microplastics — produced when plastic products break down in the environment — are directly and indirectly ingested across most animal food chains.

They can be found in every corner of the world, from the deepest trenches of oceans to the top of Mount Everest.

In humans, they have been detected in the blood, breast milk and placentas.

The new study supports previous findings that prolonged ingestion of microplastics causes an imbalance of healthy and unhealthy bacteria in the stomach, a condition known as gut dysbiosis.

The implications are far-reaching.

Like humans, birds have evolved with a vast network of microbes, including bacteria, that live in our bodies in communities called microbiomes.

Some microbes cause diseases, but most exist as “friendly” bacteria with a critical role in digestion, immune response and other critical functions.

“There’s a symbiosis that goes on — and that’s the case in the seabirds as well as in humans,” lead author Gloria Fackelmann of Ulm University in Germany told AFP.

Little is known about the effects of individual microbes on the body.

But overall, a growing body of research points to the harmful impacts of microplastics on animal health.

The tiny particles — less than 5 millimeters in diameter — can cause cell death and allergic reactions in humans.

Chemicals in microplastics have also been linked to increased risks of cancer, reproductive problems and DNA mutations.

The authors hope the findings in seabirds will spur related studies for humans.

“If this man-made substance could alter our microbiome, I think that should make people think,” said Fackelmann.
…

William Shatner, Monica Lewinsky and other prolific Twitter commentators — some household names, others little-known journalists — could soon be losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identity on the social media platform. 

They could get the marks back by paying up to $11 a month. But some longtime users, including 92-year-old Star Trek legend Shatner, have balked at buying the premium service championed by Twitter’s billionaire owner and chief executive Elon Musk. 

After months of delay, Musk is gleefully promising that Saturday is the deadline for celebrities, journalists and others who’d been verified for free to pony up or lose their legacy status. 

“It will be glorious,” he tweeted Monday, in response to a Twitter user who noted that Saturday is also April Fools’ Day. 

After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for a premium subscription. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become an undeserved or “corrupt” status symbol for elite personalities and news reporters. 

Along with verifying celebrities, one of Twitter’s main reasons to mark profiles with a free blue check mark starting about 14 years ago was to verify politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, as an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts that are impersonating people. 

Lewinsky tweeted a screenshot Sunday of all the people impersonating her, including at least one who appears to have paid for a blue check mark. She asked, “what universe is this fair to people who can suffer consequences for being impersonated? a lie travels half way around the world before truth even gets out the door.” 

Shatner, known for his irreverent humor, also tagged Musk with a complaint about the promised changes. 

“I’ve been here for 15 years giving my (clock emoji) & witty thoughts all for bupkis,” he wrote. “Now you’re telling me that I have to pay for something you gave me for free?” 

Musk responded that there shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities. “It’s more about treating everyone equally,” Musk tweeted. 

For now, those who still have the blue check but apparently haven’t paid the premium fee — a group that includes Beyoncé, Stephen King, Barack and Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift, Tucker Carlson, Drake and Musk himself — have messages appended to their profile saying it is a “legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.” 

But while “the attention is reasonably on celebrities because of our culture,” the bigger concern for open government advocate Alex Howard, director of the Digital Democracy Project, is that impersonators could more easily spread rumors and conspiracies that could move markets or harm democracies around the world. 

“The reason verification exists on this platform was not simply to designate people as notable or authorities, but to prevent impersonation,” Howard said. 

One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by imposter accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch. 

The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for iPhone and iPad users. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently. 
…

Florida has captured more than 17,000 Burmese pythons since 2000, but tens of thousands more are likely roaming the Florida Everglades. That’s a concern because the reptiles, which are not native to the area, are gobbling up the competition.

“[Pythons] can take out one of our apex predators, which are alligators and crocodiles, and then it’ll take down some of the other native animals that are small mammals — some of the rats, the mice, the marsh bunnies — things that are supposed to be food for other things,” says Mike Hileman, park director of Gatorland, a theme park and wildlife preserve in Orlando. “So, they compete with our native animals, and because they’re a more dominant species, they win that battle.”

The Everglades is among the world’s most unique and delicate ecosystems. The python invasion is upsetting the fragile balance of the 6 million-square-kilometer wetlands preserve, which is home to rare and endangered species like manatees, the Florida panther and the American crocodile.

“Once a species starts reproducing in the wild, and they have a system that works for them, it’s almost next to impossible to eradicate them,” Hileman says.

Florida is grappling with the most severe invasive animal crisis in the continental United States. The invasives flourish in the state’s subtropical climate, characterized by hot, humid summers and wet, mild winters. There are more than 500 non-native plant and wildlife species in the state, some of which — like pythons — are taking over the habitat and threatening the environment.

“They form almost like a monoculture of the invasives, and when your biodiversity plummets, then the environment isn’t as able to withstand perturbations like climate change,” says Kurt Foote, a ranger with the National Park Service and natural resource management specialist at Fort Matanzas National Monument in St. Augustine. “Nature relies on variety, and when you don’t have variety, it’s just more susceptible to collapse.”

There is a flourishing reptile pet trade in Florida. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed a Burmese python breeding facility, releasing the animals into the wild. The Category 5 hurricane also leveled thousands of homes, setting numerous exotic pets free.

However, the very first Burmese python was found in the Everglades in 1979, more than a decade before Hurricane Andrew, and was probably a pet that escaped or was intentionally released by its owner. Florida residents are no longer allowed to keep Burmese pythons as pets.

“Animals can be a lot of work. The parrots are loud; they live almost 80 years. Tortoises can get really big and live 100 years. So, it’s a big commitment to have a lot of these animals,” says Kylie Reynolds, deputy director of Amazing Animals Inc., a nonprofit exotic animal preserve in St. Cloud that takes in non-native animals that were once people’s pets.

“People sometimes just go, ‘You know, it’s nice in Florida. We’ll just let it loose.’… Maybe they think their animal would be happier free. But again, they could compete for our natural resources with our native wildlife,” Reynolds says.

In addition to Burmese pythons, Florida’s most problematic invasive animals include lionfish, feral hogs, Argentine black and white tegu lizards, and Cuban tree frogs, which can be found in many parts of the state, including Fort Matanzas.

“They’re a bigger tree frog than what we have here by quite a bit, and they’re also fairly omnivorous, and they will eat the native tree frogs,” Foote says. “Like a lot of invasives, when they get here, they don’t have the things that predated them or competed with them in their homelands. They get here and without that pressure, they’re able to really breed and reproduce.”

Feral hogs, originally brought to Florida by Spanish explorers in the 1500s, cause millions of dollars’ worth of damage to crops each year. The animals, which are found statewide, disrupt the soil in areas such as Lake Apopka in Mount Dora that biologists are trying to restore.

“We’re planting native vegetation. … A lot of times, they’re rare or endemic species,” says Ben Gugliotti, land manager of Lake Apopka North Shore, a nature preserve. “The hogs will come in and root up those areas, basically destroying the planting areas that we’re trying to restore. And then also actually create a secondary opening for invasive plant species that move into those disturbed soil areas.”

Argentine black and white tegu lizards are on the mind of Cheryl Millett, manager of The Nature Conservancy’s Tiger Creek preserve in Babson Park, which sits on Florida’s oldest and highest land mass.

“It’s a biodiversity hotspot. And yeah, we have a lot of things that … don’t exist anywhere else,” Millett says. “And if we lost them here, we wouldn’t have them anymore on Earth.”

She’s most concerned about tegu lizards, which haven’t reached Tiger Creek yet but have been spotted nearby. They can grow up to 1.5 meters long.

“They found baby gopher tortoises in the guts of tegu lizards that have been found in South Florida,” Millett says. “They can eat baby gopher tortoises. I’m really worried about their potential impact here.”

Gopher tortoises are listed as federally endangered. They are a keystone species, which means they are critical to the surrounding ecosystem because they provide shelter for hundreds of other animals.

“[Tegu lizards] love gopher tortoise burrows, and they’ve been found using gopher tortoise burrows in South Florida,” Millett says. “Gopher tortoises create these burrows. They’re like 10 feet deep, and can be 30 feet long, and they harbor over 300 different species in them.”

Florida spends more than $500 million a year trying to contain invasive species and the damage they cause. Officials organize hunts, exotic pet amnesty programs, and utilize other methods to combat invasive species. But it might come down to educating the future.

“Our generation, we already have preconceived ideas. We’re lost. We’re not going to change anything,” says Hileman of Gatorland, who speaks to school groups about wildlife conservation. “We’ve got to get with the little guys, and we got to get them on the same team so they can spread that message to their kids as they get older.”
…

Some parts of Twitter’s source code — the fundamental computer code on which the social network runs — were leaked online, the social media company said in a legal filing on Sunday that was first reported by The New York Times. 

According to the legal document, filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Twitter had asked GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted. The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, according to the filing. Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization. 

Twitter, based in San Francisco, noted in the filing that the postings infringe copyrights held by Twitter. 

The leak creates more challenges for billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last October for $44 billion and took the company private. Since then, it has been engulfed in chaos, with massive layoffs and advertisers fleeing. 

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is probing Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and trying to obtain his internal communications as part of ongoing oversight into the social media company’s privacy and cybersecurity practices, according to documents described in a congressional report. 
…

Keep an eye to the sky this week for a chance to see a planetary hangout.

Five planets — Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus and Mars — will line up near the moon.

Where and when can you see them?

The best day to catch the whole group is Tuesday. You’ll want to look to the western horizon right after sunset, said NASA astronomer Bill Cooke.

The planets will stretch from the horizon line to around halfway up the night sky. But don’t be late: Mercury and Jupiter will quickly dip below the horizon around half an hour after sunset.

The five-planet spread can be seen from anywhere on Earth, as long as you have clear skies and a view of the west.

“That’s the beauty of these planetary alignments. It doesn’t take much,” Cooke said.

Do I need binoculars?

Maybe. Jupiter, Venus and Mars will all be pretty easy to see since they shine brightly, Cooke said. Venus will be one of the brightest things in the sky, and Mars will be hanging out near the moon with a reddish glow. Mercury and Uranus could be trickier to spot, since they will be dimmer. You’ll probably need to grab a pair of binoculars.

If you’re a “planet collector,” it’s a rare chance to spot Uranus, which usually isn’t visible, Cooke said. Look out for its green glow just above Venus.

Does this happen often?

Different numbers and groups of planets line up in the sky from time to time. There was a five-planet lineup last summer and there’s another one in June, with a slightly different makeup.

This kind of alignment happens when the planets’ orbits line them up on one side of the sun from Earth’s perspective, Cooke said.
…

Hundreds of volunteers descended on the beaches of the North Sea coast this weekend to collect sea shells as a measure of the sea’s biological diversity.

While there is a serious scientific purpose to the exercise, it is also a fun day out on the coast for Belgian, French and Dutch families with kids.

On Saturday, Natascha Perales and her children marked a wide spiral pattern on the sand in Middelkerke, in Flanders, and filled their plastic buckets with shells.

The harvests were taken to a sorting center run by volunteers, to be counted and divided up by species.

“We found mussels, oysters, cockles, at least six different species,” 40-year-old Perales told AFP. “It’s a great activity, despite the weather.”

Braving stiff gusts of wind, the dozen participants kept the Middelkerke collection point busy.

Laurence Virolee, 41, came with her three children.

“We learned a lot of things,” she said. “Last year we took part in a clean-up day on the beach. It’s important for the kids to see the evolution in biodiversity and make them aware of the climate.”

The collections took place along 400 kilometers of coastline and around 800 people took part in three countries, with France joining the sixth annual event for the first time.

In total, around 38,000 shells were brought in, roughly as many as in last year’s event.

Invasive species

“Shells are a good indicator of the state of biodiversity in the North Sea, ” explained Jan Seys, who organizes the survey for the Flanders Marine Institute.

“Last year, 15% of the shells found belonged to exotic species,” he said, amid fears that foreign shellfish species might become an invasive danger to native organisms. “We have seen, for example the Atlantic Jackknife Clam appearing on our coasts.”

The volunteers were also on the lookout for shells with holes in them, trying to measure the spread of predatory sea snails preying on shellfish.

Near the beach, retired biologist Joris Hooze, 75, taught volunteers how to examine mollusks under his microscope and distinguish their differences.

“We’ve seen organisms that normally live in warm waters turning up more and more,” he said. “It’s a sign of climate change.”

The European Union wants to clean up the seas around its coasts and restore the natural ecosystem by 2030. To do that, it has assigned 800 million euros ($861,600,000) in funding to the task.

“If we’re going to hit that target, we’ll need the general public,” said Seys. As well as its scientific value, the shell hunt served to raise awareness, he added.
…

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Sunday lawmakers will move forward with legislation to address national security worries about TikTok, alleging China’s government had access to the short video app’s user data.

In the United States, there are growing calls to ban TikTok, owned by China-based company ByteDance, or to pass bipartisan legislation to give President Joe Biden’s administration legal authority to seek a ban. Devices owned by the U.S. government were recently banned from having the app installed.

“The House will be moving forward with legislation to protect Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party,” McCarthy said on Twitter.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before a U.S. House Committee for about five hour on Thursday and lawmakers from both parties grilled him about national security and other concerns involving the app, which has 150 million American users.

In Thursday’s hearing, the TikTok CEO was asked if of the app, has spied on Americans at Beijing’s request. Chew answered, “No.”

Republican Representative Neal Dunn then referenced the company’s disclosure in December that some China-based employees at ByteDance improperly accessed TikTok user data of two journalists and were no longer employed by the company. He repeated his question about whether ByteDance was spying.

“I don’t think that spying is the right way to describe it,” Chew said. He went on to describe the reports as involving an “internal investigation” before being cut off.

McCarthy, a Republican, said in a tweet on Sunday, “It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data.”

The company says it has spent more than $1.5 billion on data security efforts under the name “Project Texas” which currently has nearly 1,500 full-time employees and is contracted with Oracle Corp ORCL.N to store TikTok’s U.S. user data.

Rather than appease lawmakers’ concerns, Chew’s appearance before Congress on Thursday “actually increased the likelihood that Congress will take some action,” Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told ABC News on Sunday.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump lost a series of court rulings in 2020 when he sought to ban TikTok and another Chinese-owned app, WeChat, a unit of Tencent 0700.HK.
…