Sui-Lee Wee

China this month awarded Ivanka Trump seven new trademarks across a broad collection of businesses, including books, housewares and cushions. At around the same time, President Trump vowed to find a way to prevent a major Chinese telecommunications company from going bust, even though the company has a history of violating American limits on doing business with countries like Iran and North Korea.

Coincidence? Well, probably.

Apple, complying with what it said was a request from Chinese authorities, removed news apps created by The New York Times from its app store in China late in Dec. The move limits access to one of the few remaining channels for readers in mainland China to read The Times without resorting to special software.

The government began blocking The Times’s websites in 2012, after a series of articles on the wealth amassed by the family of Wen Jiabao, who was then prime minister, but it had struggled in recent months to prevent readers from using the Chinese-language app. Apple removed both the English-language and Chinese-language apps from the app store in China on Dec 23. Apps from other international publications, including The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, were still available in the app store.