Le Journal

Lane Kiffin agreed Sunday to become LSU's next football coach, and the former Ole Miss coach was interviewed by ESPN's Marty Smith before making the trip to Baton Rouge.

Decades ago, QVC hosts would finish up their breathless pitches of Diamonique jewelry and Miracle Belt “tummy slimming” straps with a familiar phrase. “Let’s go to the phones,” they would declare, as orders seemingly began to roll in on the leading TV shopping channel. Today, QVC hosts are making the same pitch, but with a new catchphrase: “Let’s go to the comments.” That’s because they’re selling on TikTok Shop, a rapidly growing online marketplace within the popular video app. This year, sales on TikTok Shop reached more than $10 billion in the United States between January and October, compared with about $5 billion for the same period in 2024, according to Charm.io, an e-commerce analytics company that tracks daily sales numbers and item prices on TikTok Shop. This fall, QVC became the highest-earning store on TikTok Shop, where the infomercial model it honed in the ’90s is thriving in a new way. It’s a far cry from the numbers that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, achieves in China, where even by 2022 shoppers were spending over $200 billion on its version of the app, Douyin, according to data and business intelligence company Statista. It’s also well below the earnings from Amazon, which earned $638 billion in sales last year. But two years in, TikTok Shop, which hosts hundreds of thousands of businesses and takes a percentage of each sale, is already close to the size of online craft marketplace Etsy, which saw gross merchandise sales hit around $12.5 billion last year. It’s about on a par with eBay, which started two decades ago. TikTok Shop’s rapid growth reflects just how powerful the app is in the country, where it counts some 170 million users. It has ascended despite questions about the app’s future in the United States, where a federal law to ban the app unless it finds a new, non-Chinese owner still looms, even after multiple delays. And it has persisted amid pressures from President Donald Trump’s global trade war. “TikTok Shop has been really unique in how fast it’s developed into this behemoth marketplace,” said Alex Nisenzon, the CEO of Charm. It ballooned, he said, “seemingly overnight from nowhere into something massive.” Trump’s tariffs seemed to affect TikTok Shop this year. Total sales dropped about 12% in April, when Trump put a 10% across-the-board tariff on imported consumer goods, according to Charm. It has since recovered. TikTok declined to share its sales figures or comment on whether tariffs had affected growth. That wasn’t its only stumble this year. The company laid off a number of workers in July in Washington state, where the Shop has its headquarters. Around the same time, the head of operations for U.S. TikTok Shop left his post, according to an internal email shared with The New York Times. TikTok did not comment on those changes. Shopping on TikTok can be a lot like scrolling TikTok. The Shop page itself looks like Amazon’s mobile app. But people can also shop straight from TikTok’s addictive feed of swipeable videos whenever an influencer or a brand itself posts eligible content. Clicking a “Buy Now” link in the caption of those posts takes a user straight to checkout. (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.) That fusion of interactive advertisements interspersed with dance videos and memes has been key to the company’s success, analysts said. “This idea of turning content into commerce has been tried a million different ways, and it seems to be actually working on TikTok Shop in a really profound way,” said Dan Frommer, the editor-in-chief of The New Consumer, a publication that tracks companies and shoppers. (END OPTIONAL TRIM.) TikTok itself has worked hard to boost the Shop since its September 2023 debut. It has enticed sellers with free artificial intelligence tools to write scripts for videos or even generate AI avatars to pitch their products. It subsidizes coupons and free shipping options for new consumers. In November, it released digital Shop gift cards. TikTok Shop also operates nine…

KARACHI, Pakistan — As Pakistan and Afghanistan have escalated military clashes and closed their borders, Pakistani authorities have intensified mass expulsions of Afghans, saying they can no longer accommodate the decades-old refugee community. So far this year, about 1 million of the 3 million Afghans living in Pakistan have been deported or forced to return to Afghanistan, a country where many have never lived and where jobs and affordable housing are scarce amid a worsening humanitarian crisis. Many have lived their whole lives in Pakistan, which had served as a haven during Afghanistan’s successive wars since the Soviet Union’s invasion in 1979. It no longer is. On a recent evening on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, four families with children, including an infant just 7 days old, were loading a truck with their lifelong possessions — bed frames, chickens, water jerrycans and a few pieces of luggage. Saifuddin, who goes by one name, said they had decided to leave before the crackdown on Afghans got worse. They had heard calls to go back to Afghanistan both at the mosque where they prayed and from the loudspeakers on police cars patrolling their slum. “Even after 45 years here, this isn’t our land,” he said. “And we don’t have a single home in Afghanistan.” Large numbers of Afghans have moved back and forth for decades, especially in the countries’ border areas that share linguistic and cultural ties. Expulsions are not new, but the indiscriminate nature of the current drive is. Pakistan has vowed to expel all Afghans, no matter what their immigration status is or if they face danger upon their return to Afghanistan. Pakistan’s push overlaps with moves by Western nations to restrict or prohibit Afghans from entering. The Trump administration said that it had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan, and that it would review the status of Afghan asylum-seekers already in the United States, including those who worked for U.S. or NATO forces during the U.S.-led war, after the shooting Wednesday of two National Guard troops in Washington. The main suspect is Afghan. Iran, another of Afghanistan’s neighbors, has also deported or forced out more than 1.5 million Afghans this year. The large Afghan refugee communities abroad have served as a lifeline for Afghanistan, sending money back home and driving cross-border trade that has helped keep a battered Afghan economy afloat. But as Pakistan and Iran have faced their own economic crises, their governments have amped up the xenophobic rhetoric in recent months and accelerated large-scale expulsions that they initiated in 2023. Since then, the two nations have expelled or forcibly returned more than 4.5 million Afghans. More than half of those — 2.5 million — were driven out this year. Pakistani authorities have urged landlords to kick Afghan families out of apartments and encouraged citizens in at least one province to help them deport Afghans through a whistleblower system. They have arrested 12 times as many Afghans this year as in all of last year, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency. “The scale of deportations and forced repatriations has been brutal,” said Sanaa Alimia, a professor of political science at the London-based Agha Khan University who has studied the Afghan community in Pakistan. Those leaving before they get arrested, like Saifuddin’s family, have become a common sight on Pakistan’s roads, loaded aboard colorful trucks that carry entire families and their possessions to the border. They are being driven out of the slums of Karachi, where many lived by collecting metal scraps or other garbage. Others have left the city of Lahore, where they worked as day laborers and mechanics, and the onion fields and coal mines of Balochistan, where they served as a cheap, hardworking labor force. “We’re at the mercy of the Pakistani authorities,” said Mehrafzon Jalili, 24, a former Afghan dentistry student who for months lived…

With Lane Kiffin announcing that he's accepted the LSU head coaching job, Ole Miss defensive coordinator Pete Golding is reportedly in line to be the Rebels' next head coach.