To the surprise of no one at this point, Kier Starmer's Labour prepares to squeeze more money out of poor people. Anything to not tax billionaires.

The (Forced) Labour party seem to earnestly believe that disabled people are just too lazy to work, and cutting their benefits will incentivise them to do so. In reality, what will happen is that most will sink into deeper poverty and many will become homeless. Homeless people are a lot more expensive to the state than people on benefits, and their health will only deteriorate, causing them to be even less likely to work and costing more to the NHS.

EDIT: Changed the article from Guardian to Independent as it was a more complete, less odd article without a cookiewall.

The numbers are still unconfirmed, but having been there I can tell you it was massive and fantastic.

The police estimates of 50 000 are comically false. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Most likely in the multiple hundreds of thousands.

Either way, it dwarfs any of the half a dozen protests I've seen in London over the last year, and some of those were really big.

To be completely precise, some she reverse engineers herself, others she finds an implementation someone has already done and just creates a UI for them. Still very cool.

In the video, she then describes how she did it, tools and all.

It's a shame people in the US (and possibly UK?) would be putting themselves at legal risk if they did the same. See Louis Rossman's videos on the DMCA if you are curious.

The news first came in 2024, but it's been very quiet since.

I've been waiting this whole time to jettison WhatsApp from my phone.

Is it available only in some parts of the world? If so can I spoof it?

We know that adversarial interoperability works, so why have we not been able to make this work?

All else failing, are there any unofficial WhatsApp clients I can use to preserve my privacy?

Sorry for the YouTube link, I realise Lemmy doesn't like that format much.

This is a video trying to explain the bathshit crazy views of Pete Hegseth, the GOP and the rest of its Christian Nationalist followers.

Not to excuse them, but to help understand what they will do next and what their goals are. As to many of us, myself included, it sometimes seems like random chaos.

This is a follow-up to banning puberty blockers for children under 16 in 2023, pausing or cancelling all trials recently, and the banning of trans people from gendered bathrooms this year.

It's a progressive attack on trans rights, where evidence of the safety and benefits of trans healthcare is ignored and decisions is taken out of the hands of trans people, trans children and their parents. They're treated as people unable to make decisions for themselves. A tactic often used against women, disabled people and black people historically.

In this particular case, it's still breaking news but I've heard the way they fit the data to their desired result was to make the filters on what was to be accepted as evidence extremely narrow. Things like "all subjects in the study must have never taken puberty blockers, but must be on hormones and born male". When they find that no study exactly matches their criteria, they throw up their hands and say "we just don't know if it's safe" and ban all healthcare.

It doesn't matter how many experts criticise these choices and peer-review the reports. We've been shown by the Cass Review (still referenced in these decisions, despite its provably terrible quality) that all evidence outside the transphobic agenda will be ignored and every possible side-effect of treatment will be used as justification to eradicate trans people.

More pointlessly cruel policy changes from the UK's Labour government.

This won't even be taken to a parliamentary vote because the party knows it wouldn't pass.

Imran Hussain, from the Refugee Council charity, told the BBC that reviewing the status of refugees - who were successful, not failed, asylum seekers - would be costly and distract the Home Office from speeding up the system.

He also warned that if refugees felt they "had one foot in the departure lounge" even though their asylum claim had been accepted, then this would make it more difficult for them to hold down employment and to integrate.

So this genuinely helps no one. All it does is pander to the far right, who will never vote Labour.

Let's make sure the Streisand Effect goes into full-swing here.

Personal Note: Landlords, especially those owning more than two houses, are a cancer on society and their existence should be banned.

D_____ T____ 🤔

Rather than directly banning Medicaid reimbursement for transgender care, the rule would bar any hospital that accepts Medicaid funding from providing gender-affirming care for trans youth at all, regardless of whether that care is paid for by Medicaid.

The new rule contains no exceptions for patients already receiving care... For many, this would amount to forced medical detransition.

This rule appears to violate multiple U.S. statutes and constitutional limits on federal authority.

The government attempts to get around this by stating that gender affirming care is not part of “the practice of medicine.”

A story of the kind of disdain Palestine Action hunger strikers experience in UK prisons.

“Can you ring an ambulance? I’m scared”. They hung up on her.

[hours later] the nurse returned and informed her that “you don’t decide if you go to hospital, I do”.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40180143

What happened

Going against policy, the UK's EHRC chose to not record (or perhaps even destroy) the meeting minutes for a 2023 consultation with trans groups after one of its worst acts towards their rights.

This meeting was the day after the EHRC sent its now infamous letter to Kemi Badenoch, suggesting the Government to rewrite the Equality Act by redefining the words sex, man, and woman to mean “biological sex"

Context for Americans etc.

For context, the EHRC is the UK's primary human rights organisation. However, since Kishwer Falkner's takeover in 2020, the organisation has taken a clear trans-exclusive direction that has only gotten worse over time.

They offer guidance to businesses and the government on how to interpret human rights laws. That guidance authority has been used to twist the meaning of legislation intended to protect minority groups, against all legal precedent, to instead use as a basis for removing the rights of trans people specifically.

The EHRC has since rarely met with trans organisations when deciding how to advise on their rights. Instead, they frequently meet with trans hate groups like Sex Matters. This is to the point that their views closely mirror these hate groups.

Back to the article

Looking at the meeting notes, it's clear why they chose to hide them, as it's clear that they were entirely unable to justify their change in definition of sex and gender, and they knew that it went against the stances of most other human rights organisations.

Have a read for yourself. The long pauses are wild.