News

Like many athletes, Simon Wheatcroft loves chasing that runner's high, training on a path near his home in the English village of Doncaster. And he never let the fact that he has a rare condition that left him completely blind by age 27 slow him down. Wheatcroft has run marathons in New York and Boston while testing new technologies that, he hopes, will one day help the quarter-billion visually-impaired people around the world to walk, hike and, yes, run without the help of a guide. Lee Cowan reports.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in Edinburgh, Scotland, a printer, an engraver, and an editor teamed up to produce the first Encyclopedia Britannica, which contained scholarly essays and short definitional entries about practically everything. It was a revolution in information. But now that we have instant access to all knowledge from throughout human history via our smartphones, what would kids today think of the encyclopedia, which now encompasses 44 million words, in books? Luke Burbank reports.

On Christmas Eve 1968, the first humans to circle the moon aboard Apollo 8 sent back the first image of the Earth above the lunar surface. The picture, dubbed "Earthrise," showed humanity the beauty and fragility of our home planet, and helped invigorate the environmental movement. Lee Cowan talks with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders; with Jeffrey Kluger, author of a book on Apollo 8; and with former Vice President Al Gore, who talks about the impact of that mission on man's environmental awareness.

President Donald Trump plans to extend the pause on enforcing the TikTok ban once again, The Wall Street Journal reports. Trump previously extended the pause on April 4 to give TikTok, its potential US buyers and the Chinese government more time to reach an agreement, but the deal has made little progress since then.

The current pause on enforcement is supposed to end on June 19. Given the state of the negotiations between the US and China, the odds of a deal being reached before then seem highly unlikely. The issue hasn't been helped by the fluctuating tariffs the Trump administration has attempted to levy on goods manufactured outside of the US, which started on April 2 and at one point included a 125 percent tariff on everything shipped from China.

The two countries are expected to restart trade negotiations at some point in the near-future, according to The New York Times, but there's been no public mention of a TikTok sale being a key part of the discussion. A number of investors are still looking to own a piece of the US version of the app, including the software company Oracle, which has a pre-existing relationship with TikTok as a cloud provider.

The TikTok ban went into effect on January 19. TikTok tried to appeal the ban beforehand, but the Supreme Court ultimately decided to uphold it, prompting Trump's first executive order pausing the ban on January 20, 2025.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/trump-reportedly-plans-to-extend-the-pause-on-the-tiktok-ban-yet-again-200408397.html?src=rss