Winnie the Pooh is a fictional persona non grata on some Chinese social media sites, where censors are scrubbing images and mentions of the bear, NBC News reported. On the popular chat app WeChat, stickers of Pooh and friends were no longer accessible, while Weibo no longer showed memes comparing President Xi Jinping to the bear. That longtime meme is being blamed for the censoring in the absence of an official explanation. WeChat’s developer declined to comment to NBC News. “To ban Winnie because someone has compared him to Xi?” one student said. “What the heck, give Pooh and President Xi a break!”
The quadrennial chaos has quieted down over at the New Hampshire secretary of state's office with the closing of the filing period for the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
Between Oct. 30 and Nov. 15, a total of 50 candidates—33 Democrats and 17 Republicans—signed paperwork and paid $1,000 each to get their names on the 2020 ballot.
That's compared to the 42 names voters saw 100 years ago, the first time New Hampshire held the nation's earliest primary. Back then, voters selected delegates to the nominating conventions, rather than voting for the candidates themselves.
For the 2016 election, 58 candidates got on New Hampshire's ballot. The all-time high for candidates was 1992, when 61 signed up.
