X has received executive orders from the Indian government requiring X to block over 8,000 accounts in India, subject to potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment of the company’s local employees. The orders include demands to block access in India to accounts belonging to international news organizations and prominent X users.

…

X is exploring all possible legal avenues available to the company. Unlike users located in India, X is restricted by Indian law in its ability to bring legal challenges against these executive orders. However, we encourage all users who are impacted by these blocking orders to seek appropriate relief from the courts.

Looks like it's shaping up to be a very interesting contest between Hanson-Young and Faruqi over the direction of the party. When she was younger Hanson-Young was always quite widely disliked (relative to other Greens senators) because people saw her as too divisive, a reputation which has stuck, yet she now appears to be the one in the party room who wants to pursue a more collaborative relationship with Labor. Given that I haven't seen any indication from her colleagues that they believe The Greens need a course correction, it would seem she is heading for a third defeat in a leadership contest.

Sarah Hanson-Young and Mehreen Faruqi are firming as frontrunners for the Greens leadership, as the party debates whether to shift in a more moderate direction or maintain Adam Bandt’s confrontational approach for the next term of parliament.

Greens insiders said the party was bracing for its first genuinely competitive leadership ballot after the shock loss of Bandt’s seat of Melbourne left the party unprepared for a leadership transition.

None of the Greens MPs have declared their candidacy for the vacant leadership position, but allies of Faruqi and Hanson-Young are canvassing colleagues to gauge levels of support.

Queensland senator Larissa Waters is also being urged by many grassroots members to run for the leadership, but it is unclear if she is willing to contest a ballot because of family commitments.

Faruqi showed she had support in the party room when she was elected Bandt’s deputy in 2022, in contrast with Hanson-Young, who has run several times for the deputy position but never received the support of colleagues.

Hanson-Young, however, is seen as representing a clear break with the Bandt era and more likely to pursue a pragmatic approach of working with the Labor government where the parties have common ground.

“The question is: do we want to be Labor’s little brother or a party in our own right?” a Greens source said.

Faruqi would probably position herself as a progressive champion seeking to first and foremost lead for the 1.65 million Australians who gave the Greens their first preference vote at the election.

”We will sit down and talk to our colleagues, our members and our supporters, and we will think about a strategy,” Faruqi told The Project on Thursday night.

“I don’t accept that the people of Australia don’t want us in the lower house. We have many seats in state parliaments, and we still have one in federal parliament.”

She is associated with the activist wing of the party and played a prominent role in attacking the government over its response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Faruqi led her Greens colleagues in a Senate walkout in November 2023 over the government’s reluctance to call for a ceasefire, labelling her Labor opponents “gutless, heartless cowards”.

She (Faruqi) would probably have a contentious relationship with leading pro-Israel groups if elected leader.

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Faruqi said: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.”

Some within the party have defended her record as an environmentalist, pointing out she has a PhD in environmental engineering and spent much of the election campaigning in the regional NSW seat of Richmond, which the Greens almost won from Labor.

Hanson-Young, who rose to prominence as an asylum seeker advocate, controversially challenged Milne for the party’s deputy position in 2010 and again missed out on a co-deputy position in 2020.

She is now the party’s longest-serving member of parliament.

Israel will not be involved in Gaza aid distribution but will take part in providing security, U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said in a press conference on Friday.

Israel has been imposing an aid blockade on the enclave since March. Huckabee said the supply of aid was not dependent on reaching a ceasefire.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29856543

By Layli Foroudi
May 9, 202511:41 AM EDT

Summary
*France aims to shut down pro-#Palestinian protest group
*Group is contesting decision, says based on 'false' claims
*Lawyer says government move is part of wider crackdown

Preserving the British role in the F-35 jet fighter programme takes precedence over the need to comply with UK laws on arms export controls, or any UK obligation to prevent a genocide in Israel, UK government lawyers will argue in court this week.

I am not joking when I say that I thinked for hours about how do people find each other in 2025.

Currently, the world is in very weird state. People online are either using social video platforms or they are reading news or lurking in online forums in it's different shapes and forms.

Most chat platforms that I know had shut down and most alt social platforms are almost dead. Even Hackernews had started to see a lower amount of comments compared to previous years.

I want a serious answer, how should I find people online to talk to about anything really other than politics?

Archived

The Polish EU Council Presidency has suffered another rebuff in its attempt to end the years-long dispute over the EU Commission's draft regulation on mass online surveillance under the banner of the fight against child sexual abuse. After her plan to convert the current transitional regulation on voluntary scanning for abuse images into a permanent permit did not get very far in the working group of the ministerial committee on criminal prosecution, the Presidency raised the initiative one step higher to the level of the Justice and Home Affairs spokespersons at the end of April. However, they did not want to hear anything about the compromise approach.

The representatives of the EU embassies "clearly" resented the initiative to even bring up the alternative draft regulation from Poland in their circles. This can be seen in the minutes of a meeting of the diplomatic representation of the Federal Republic of Germany, which are actually classified [...] According to the minutes, the speakers are actually responsible for "clearing up any final problems with texts that have essentially been agreed". In the case of the dossier on mandatory or voluntary chat control, however, there is not even a consensus "on the basic direction".

Not a single article of the Polish draft law has been "conclusively discussed", the embassy representatives complain. An agreement between the EU states on the whole issue is "further away than ever before in recent years". The speakers therefore did not even discuss the complete proposal from the Council leadership. In terms of content, it was only a matter of merging two articles, according to the minutes. There were "only a few requests to speak".

[...]

With its preferred form of chat control, the Commission also wants to be able to force providers of end-to-end encrypted messaging and other communication services such as WhatsApp, Apple with iMessage, Signal and Threema to track down abusive photos and videos in their users' messages. Poland, on the other hand, wants permanent permission to voluntarily scan content, as Facebook, Google and Microsoft currently do on the basis of the interim provision. This – also not uncontroversial – option was approved by the EU legislator in 2021 through an exemption from the ePrivacy Directive. This special provision only applies until the end of 2025.

The panel of speakers is urging the presidency to shift the procedure and the tenor of the text back in the direction of the Commission paper, which has also been controversial for years. Otherwise, all those involved would only be wasting "time, money and energy". This means that it is virtually impossible for the EU countries to make any decisive progress on the dossier during the current Presidency, which runs until the end of June.

[...]

According to the minutes of the meeting, Ireland, for example, argued that a strong text was needed for further negotiations with the EU Parliament. The MEPs want to allow the particularly controversial disclosure orders as a last resort at best. According to their line, services with end-to-end encrypted communication should be completely excluded. At the same time, however, Dublin expressed its willingness to discuss an extension of the interim regulation. According to their own statements, representatives of the German government, together with other speakers from Italy and Hungary, for example, expressed a reservation of scrutiny and emphasized that a regulatory loophole must be avoided.

The former Bundestag president is poised to become co-leader of the SPD as it attempts a reboot after historic election losses.

Ukraine is starting to consider a shift away from the U.S. dollar, possibly linking its currency more closely to the euro amid the splintering of global trade and its growing ties to Europe, Central Bank Governor Andriy Pyshnyi told Reuters.

Potential accession to the European Union, a "strengthening of the EU's role in ensuring our defense capabilities, greater volatility in global markets, and the probability of global-trade fragmentation," are forcing the central bank to review whether the euro should be the reference currency for Ukraine's hryvnia instead of the dollar, Pyshnyi said in emailed remarks.

Ukrainian authorities claim to have busted a Hungarian spy ring operating on its territory, alleging that Budapest was collecting sensitive military data with one eye on a possible future incursion into the west of the country.

Hungary’s foreign minister dismissed the accusations as “propaganda” and announced the expulsion of two Ukrainians described as “spies working under diplomatic cover” at the Ukrainian embassy in Budapest.

The allegations will further test already fraught relations between the two neighbouring countries. While Hungary is a member of Nato and the EU, its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has been an outlier among European leaders, strongly critical of Kyiv and neutral towards Russia.

The United States’ version of capitalism has systematically failed its population through corporate greed and manipulation of the legislature. But don’t lose hope.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29823642

Brett Wilkins
May 08, 2025

"Israeli occupation forces enforced a ban on the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees on Thursday by storming three schools in East Jerusalem, terrorizing children and staff as they shuttered the facilities and drawing condemnation from human rights defenders.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, heavily armed Israeli security forces raided the schools in the Shu'fat refugee camp in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, detaining one UNRWA employee and forcing around 550 children out of their classrooms as the invaders closed the facilities."

• Lagging Results: Oregon and Washington trailed most states in adding renewable energy during the past decade, despite pledges to eliminate fossil fuels from power generation.
• Unique Barrier: The Bonneville Power Administration, whose approval is needed for most wind and solar work in the Northwest, has barely approved any big applications made since 2015.
• Missing Investment: Lawmakers were told of the need for better transmission, which Bonneville would have to finance, when they passed new mandates for green energy. They forged ahead anyway.