The fight over TikTok is getting hotter in Washington, with the House passing a bipartisan bill Wednesday that intends to leave the social media giant’s China-based owner, ByteDance, with two choices: divest or face a ban in the United States.

President Biden has expressed support for the bill, although it still faces obstacles in the Senate, given that TikTok has won allies on Capitol Hill by encouraging its estimated 150 million U.S. users to lobby against the legislation. GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump has also spoken out against the legislation, arguing a TikTok ban would only give more market power to rival Facebook and its corporate parent, Meta. Lawmakers have expressed various reasons for wanting to sever TikTok from ByteDance, arguing ByteDance facilitates Chinese government theft of data, espionage and manipulation of Americans and blocks anti-China content on the social media site. Beijing denies such allegations. 

A recent Threat Status exclusive video with Foundation for Defense of Democracies China Program Director Craig Singleton examines Chinese intelligence connections to ByteDance. Mr. Singleton says Beijing is exploiting TikTok’s popularity in the U.S. to spread anti-American sentiment and sow discord ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that passed the House, meanwhile, would make it illegal for U.S. app stores and hosting services to make foreign-adversary-controlled apps accessible online.

Seven military coups have swept through West and Central Africa since 2020, but democracy continues to thrive on the continent of more than 50 nations. Washington Times Special Correspondent Geoff Hill’s dispatch from Johannesburg examines the nearly two dozen presidential and parliamentary elections slated to take place across Africa in 2024.

The unprecedented wave of votes will provide a real-world stress test for the strength of popular rule and democratic institutions across Africa, and provide a scorecard for U.S. efforts to head off economic and security inroads made by China and Russia for influence on the world’s fastest-growing continent.

For Washington, the African elections spree poses a unique challenge. Each of the continent’s 54 countries holds a seat at the United Nations, making Africa the single biggest voting bloc in the world body. It’s notable that, despite pleas from Washington, many African nations, including continental bellwether South Africa, abstained on U.N. motions over Ukraine and have taken a sharply pro-Palestinian position on the Israel-Hamas war.

Ukraine fired at least eight missiles across the border into Russia’s Belgorod region, killing one person and wounding six, just a day before Russians go to the polls in a presidential election. President Vladimir Putin is heading for near-certain reelection to another six-year term in the vote, which opens Friday and carries on through Sunday. 

Russian military officials are pushing a get-out-the-vote effort in parts of Ukraine now occupied and unilaterally annexed by Moscow. A British intelligence assessment says at least 2,600 people in Luhansk, a city in the disputed Donbas region, have been drafted to visit homes and encourage residents to vote. “With no independent election observers, … the potential for falsification of results is increased,” the assessment said.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has removed the words “Duty, Honor, Country” from its mission statement in what some critics say reflects the deepening politicization within the military services under President Biden.

Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn and National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz examine how the mission statement — until recently — included the three words made famous in retired Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s 1962 farewell address to West Point cadets. The storied World War II and Korean War commander died two years later. MacArthur’s address gave new prominence to the motto adopted by West Point in 1898, five years before he graduated from the academy.

On a separate front, The Times’ Stephen Dinan reports that conservative leaders are asking Mr. Biden for assurances that his new deportation amnesty for Palestinians won’t apply to those who simply express support for the militant Hamas group. The president announced the move last month, ordering an 18-month stay of deportation for Palestinians in the U.S. who are already here illegally or who would run out of legal status during that window. He said the protection wouldn’t apply to terrorists, but the conservatives say he needs to go further and shut out anyone who supports Hamas.

President Biden failed in his State of the Union address to convey the “hard fact that the Union is now seriously threatened by an axis of anti-American regimes,” writes regular columnist Clifford D. May, who argues the president missed a crucial opportunity to connect the dots linking “Russian imperialism with Chinese communism and Iranian Islamism.”

Mr. Biden began promisingly enough by calling attention to Russia’s war of conquest against Ukraine,” writes Mr. May. “But just a few sentences into the speech, Mr. Biden was comparing ‘Putin of Russia’ to ‘my predecessor’ and the ‘insurrectionists’ who pose ‘the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.’ At that point, it became clear he was making a campaign speech, filled with political sound and partisan fury, disconnected from serious policy.”

Mr. May laments specifically that Mr. Biden gave no indication in the speech that he is considering what it will mean “if Iran — where ‘Death to America!’ and ‘Death to Israel!’ have been chanted for 45 years — goes nuclear.”