The Trump administration asked the US Supreme Court to let Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have access to sensitive Social Security information, escalating a privacy fight that could affect millions of people.

The administration is challenging a federal trial judge’s order blocking DOGE from having full access to personally identifiable information in the Social Security Administration database. US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander’s order also requires people affiliated with DOGE to “destroy and delete” data they’ve already acquired.

wAnnouncing the open beta of Waterfox Private Search, our new meta-search engine designed with privacy at its core.

Hello, today I set up my own Lemmy instance through YunoHost, but when comparing posts here and on (for example) lemm.ee, on my instance the same posts have less votes. Is there a setting or something I'm missing?

Edit: also, some comments and posts are missing, how do I federate with more instances? Do I just subscribe to random instances' communities?

https://files.catbox.moe/7vh90g.mp4

Detailed Army plans for a potential military parade on Donald Trump’s birthday in June call for more than 6,600 soldiers, at least 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, seven bands and possibly a couple thousand civilians, The Associated Press has learned.

The planning documents, obtained by the AP, are dated April 29 and 30 and have not been publicly released. They represent the Army’s most recent blueprint for its long-planned 250th birthday festival on the National Mall and the newly added element — a large military parade that Trump has long wanted but is still being discussed.

While the slides do not include any price estimates, it would likely cost tens of millions of dollars to put on a parade of that size. Costs would include the movement of military vehicles, equipment, aircraft and troops from across the country to Washington and the need to feed and house thousands of service members.

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/33809108

Police in Hong Kong have arrested the father and brother of US-based pro-democracy activist Anna Kwok for allegedly helping with her finances, according to media reports.

It is the first time the relatives of an "absconder" have been charged under the territory's security law, Reuters news agency said.

The authorities accused Ms Kwok, 26, of breaching Hong Kong's national security laws after participating in pro-democracy protests in 2019.

She fled the territory in 2020 and now serves as the Executive Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC), an organisation based in Washington DC.

Police said they had arrested two men aged 35 and 68 on suspicion of handling "funds or other financial assets" belonging to Kwok, Reuters said.

Local media later identified the two men as relatives of Ms Kwok, citing police sources.

[...]

In 2023, Hong Kong placed a bounty on the heads of several pro-democracy activists - including Ms Kwok - who had fled the territory.

[...]

At the time, Ms Kwok said the bounty was aimed at intimidating her and her fellow activists.

"That's exactly the kind of thing the Hong Kong government and the Chinese Communist party would do - which is to intimidate people into not doing anything, silencing them," she told BBC's Newshour at the time.

The former British colony became a special administrative region of China in 1997, when Britain's 99-year lease of the New Territories, north of Hong Kong island, expired.

[...]

A Popemobile Used by Pope Francis Will Become a Mobile Clinic in Gaza (NYT, 2025-05-04)

＊Gift article link＊
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/world/middleeast/a-popemobile-will-ride-again-this-time-into-gaza.html?unlocked%5C_article%5C_code=1.E08.CZ0H.sKQV7KC%5C_ubOn
———

>> In his last months, Pope Francis blessed an effort to transform the vehicle he used when he visited the West Bank in 2014 into a mobile health clinic to treat Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip.

>> The popemobile, a converted Mitsubishi, was donated by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority for Francis’ visit. It was given to the Franciscan order afterward, and then to Caritas ...

>> Preparing the vehicle …including the installation of blastproof windows, will take roughly three weeks, ... Caritas Jerusalem … will soon request approval from Israeli authorities to deliver it to Gaza.

>> COGAT, the Israeli government agency responsible for coordinating the entry of aid into the enclave, did not respond to a request for comment about whether Israel intended to allow the passage of the popemobile.

@palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

Anonymous smear campaign, which blames Christine Jorgensen for the existence of transgender people.

We are all apparently liars who cannot be trusted when we say that our medical transitions make us happy. The fact that many of us struggle with employment and mental illness is laid at the feet of our transness, not the fact that we experience discrimination or mistreatment.

They want conversion therapy for kids - but don’t think they’ll stop with kids.

I use Funkwhale for my music collection and had my podcasts in there for a while. However, I ended up not listening to my podcasts very much since they were hidden among my much larger music collection.

So I moved my podcasts feeds to FreshRSS, which I was already using for RSS feeds. I like the simplicity of using something that I already had, but it doesn't have any podcast-specific features like being able to resume where you left off.

Do you have any podcast listening apps that you like?

*edit: I should add that I originally meant "self-hostable applications for storing your podcast subscriptions," but these phone app recommendations are great to have, too. I might just ditch the server-side of this entirely and just use a separate app on my devices for listening. It would be nice if I only had to subscribe in one place and be able to pick up where I left off across multiple devices, though.

Summary:

Close allies of President Trump are asking a judge to give the White House control over much of the federal court system.

In a little-noticed lawsuit filed last week, the America First Legal Foundation sued Chief Justice John Roberts and the head of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts.

The case ostensibly proceeds as a FOIA lawsuit, with the Trump-aligned group seeking access to judiciary records. But, in doing so, it asks the courts to cede massive power to the White House: the bodies that make court policy and manage the judiciary’s day-to-day operations should be considered independent agencies of the executive branch, the suit argues, giving the President, under the conservative legal movement’s theories, the power to appoint and dismiss people in key roles.

Multiple legal scholars and attorneys TPM spoke with reacted to the suit with a mixture of dismay, disdain and laughter. Though the core legal claim is invalid, they said, the suit seems to be a part of the fight that the administration launched and has continued to escalate against the courts over the past several months: ignoring a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of a wrongly removed Salvadoran man, providing minimal notice to people subject to the Alien Enemies Act, flaunting an aggressive criminal case against a state court judge.

The executive branch has tried to encroach on the power of the judiciary in other ways too, prompting a degree of consternation and alarm unusual for the normally-staid Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. As TPM has documented, DOGE has already caused disorder at the courts and sent out mass emails to judges and other judiciary employees demanding a list of their recent accomplishments. Per one recent report in the New York Times, federal judges have expressed concern that Trump could direct the U.S. Marshals Service — an executive branch agency tasked with protecting judges and carrying out court orders — to withdraw protection.

These are all facets of an escalating campaign to erode the independence of the judiciary, experts told TPM. The lawsuit demonstrates another prong of it: close allies of the president are effectively asking the courts to rule that they should be managed by the White House.

“It’s like using an invalid legal claim to taunt the judiciary,” Anne Joseph O’Connell, a professor at Stanford University Law School, told TPM.

“To the extent this lawsuit has any value other than clickbait, maybe the underlying message is, we will let our imaginations run wild,” Peter M. Shane, a constitutional law scholar at NYU Law School, told TPM. “The Trump administration and the MAGA community will let our imaginations run wild in our attempts to figure out ways to make the life of the judiciary miserable, to the extent you push back against Trump.”

Especially for technical documentation matters. 100% of links are old or just hallucinations.

Oh noez! Anyway…