Trump’s WeChat Curbs Halted by Judge on Free Speech Concerns

The Trump administration’s curbs on WeChat were put on hold by a judge, upending an effort to halt use of the Chinese-owned app in the U.S.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction at the request of a group of U.S. WeChat users, who argued the prohibitions would violate the free-speech rights of millions of Chinese-speaking Americans who rely on it. The app, which was supposed to disappear from U.S. app stores on Sunday, has 19 million regular users in the U.S. and 1 billion worldwide.

The ruling means that neither WeChat nor TikTok, another Chinese-owned mobile app targeted by President Donald Trump’s executive order, will become immediately unavailable in the U.S. Trump cited national security concerns in banning the apps, but TikTok Inc. and the WeChat users’ group have said the president is trying to bolster his re-election chances by attacking China and Chinese companies.

WeChat “serves as a virtual public square for the Chinese-speaking and Chinese-American community in the United States and is (as a practical matter) their only means of communication,” the judge wrote in the ruling, dated Saturday and released early Sunday. Effectively banning it “forecloses meaningful access to communication in their community and thereby operates as a prior restraint on their right to free speech.”

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UK: Emma Watson’s school in Oxford changes name from ‘racial slur’

A FAMOUS prep-school in Oxford, whose alumni include Hollywood stars Emma Watson and Tom Hiddleston, changed the name of one of its houses that is now being used as a racial slur.

The Dragon School on Bardwell Road decided to rename the senior boys’ boarding house from Gunga Din to Dragon House because it has become a derogatory term.

When the Oxford Mail contacted the Dragon School about this, a spokesperson refused to comment.

However, in an opinion piece for The Spectator alumnus Alexander Pelling-Bruce criticised the decision and argued it ‘sanitises the present by obliterating the past’.

The boarding house was named after a poem by Rudyard Kipling that tells the story of Gunga Din, an Indian water-carrier, almost 80 years ago by the then headmaster ‘Hum’ Lynam.

Mr Pelling-Bruce wrote that Dragon School’s governors justified the move in a letter sent to all alumni. It said: “Sadly the term ‘Gunga’ has now become derogatory, and even used as a racial slur. “Such potentially offensive language is against the Dragon’s ethos of inclusivity and diversity.

“Kipling’s poem was of its time and it is no longer appropriate to continue using the name Gunga Din.”

The former student , who said the move is ‘pure madness’, even suggested that people connected with the Dragon School should not pledge any donations to protest the renaming.

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