"VATICAN CITY, June 23 (Reuters) - The Vatican on Tuesday reaffirmed a long-standing rule that only an ordained priest or ​deacon can give a sermon at a Catholic mass, ‌rejecting a request from German bishops to broaden the practice and allow sermons by women or other laypeople."

A federal judge has granted a temporary restraining order against the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prevent the DOJ from pursuing the private medical records of transgender youth receiving gender-affirming healthcare in New York City. The judge also granted the request for provisional certification of a class so that the order benefits not just the case’s plaintiffs, but other trans youth as well.

“We’re thankful the court has granted our emergency request to protect the privacy interests of transgender New Yorkers and their families,” said ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project’s Co-Director Chase Strangio. “Patients and families trust their doctors with their most intimate, private information and should trust in turn that this information will be protected from impermissible and harassing demands for disclosure from the federal government or anyone else.”

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla comes in response to the DOJ’s year long campaign to obtain the medical records and personal information of trans minors who have received gender-affirming care. Last year, the DOJ sent out at least 20 administrative subpoenas to hospitals across the country requesting extensive documentation on these young patients.

The Instgram post in question

BREAKING: The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune. I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted!

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/48526310

Two ICE agents harassed a poll worker on Election Day, demanding she remove social media posts they claimed threatened federal agents, according to Syracuse.com.

Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, said she received a phone call Tuesday from two ICE agents asking to meet with her. Not wanting to meet with them alone, she invited them into her work. “I’ve seen the news, especially in Minnesota,” she said. “And I didn’t want anything to happen to me at all.”

The ICE agents arrived with copies of her social media posts and driver’s license, and handed her a warning notice alerting her that they were investigating her for allegedly threatening ICE personnel. “They tried to scare me into signing it while I was working,” she said. The agents told her to “remove and/or discontinue” the behavior, according to the notice, which Gonyea shared on Instagram.

Gonyea frequently posts about immigration on social media. She believes the investigation was prompted after she shared a news article in January identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good. “I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted,” she wrote in the caption.

Gonyea did not believe that her post or caption qualified as doxxing. “I didn’t dox his personal information, such as address, phone number,” she told Syracuse.com.

Ross, who was only placed on three days of administrative leave for shooting Good in the head, chest, and arm, faced virtually no consequences for killing an innocent woman in broad daylight. It appears that federal law enforcement now view pleas for actual justice as some kind of threat.

Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate committee Wednesday that, if a proposed rule is adopted, the U.S. Postal Service would withhold mail ballots from states that do not hand over to the federal government lists of people who have requested absentee or mail ballots.

In another boost to Donald Trump’s unprecedented hardline crackdown on immigrants, including many who have lived legally in the US for years, the court issued a 6-3 ruling. That was powered ⁠by its conservative-leaning majority, overturning decisions by ⁠federal judges in New York and Washington DC that had halted the administration’s actions terminating TPS for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.

The court’s three liberal-leaning justices disagreed with the opinion. It leaves Haitians and Syrians in the US on TPS vulnerable to deportation even if they have applications for other forms of immigration status in progress.

The state department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and ⁠kidnapping.

All countries with a designation allowing TPS in the US are now considered under threat as the ruling will embolden the US president to strip other places of their status, no matter how risky it would be for immigrants to return there.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260625160759/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/25/supreme-court-haitians-syrians-temporary-protected-status

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260625142243/https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/06/25/supreme-court-rules-asylum-border-trump-metering-us-mexico/90033040007/

The Microsoft founder Bill Gates told US members of Congress that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had sought to “blackmail” him over his extramarital affairs, according to a transcript of the testimony.

The tech pioneer testified behind closed doors before the House oversight committee on 10 June regarding his friendship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 as he awaited trial for sex crimes.

According to the transcript released by the committee on Tuesday, Gates spoke of “veiled” threats and said Epstein had considered exploiting his own knowledge of Gates’s extramarital affairs to force him to remain in Epstein’s orbit, even as Gates was distancing himself from Epstein.

“I was not blackmailed, but you know, as you look at these emails, you know, it looks like Mr Epstein’s brainstorming was going in that direction,” Gates added, referring to documents from the Epstein case released in January by the US Department of Justice.

Randy Smith’s resignation was part of plea deal after attack on podcaster Bobby Couvillion at a Madisonville restaurant

A suburban New Orleans sheriff who had held one of his community’s most prominent political offices for a decade has retired shortly after pleading guilty to battering a podcaster who often criticized him.

Randy Smith, 61, also agreed to serve more than a year of probation after admitting to a late May beating at a steakhouse where he had bought 18 alcoholic beverages on his tab on a Friday afternoon – which all but halted his four-decade policing career.

Smith had been sworn in as the elected sheriff of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, on 1 July 2016, succeeding a predecessor who eventually pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges and was separately convicted of serial child sexual molestation.

LSE analysis highlights litigation linked to energy sources, water consumption and air pollution

The proliferation of datacentres and AI is increasingly at the forefront of environmental litigation around the world, from the US and UK to Chile to Ireland, a report has found.

In an analysis of about 3,600 climate-related lawsuits filed since 2015, the latest annual review of climate litigation by the London School of Economics (LSE) found a growing number of cases challenging the energy sources, water consumption and air pollution of datacentres, all of which have related climate implications.

One of the first cases was filed in 2020 in Chile’s capital, Santiago, where Google was planning a huge datacentre in the Cerrillos area. A group of residents and the local council challenged permits given to Google, raising concerns about the impact of the development on the city’s already climate-stressed water supply.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260624201159/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/24/ice-tech-surveillance-arsenal

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/48479776

Two pet dogs were left locked inside an apartment for about a week with no food or water after ICE agents detained their owner and didn’t report the animals' presence to any authority, according to videos on social media.

The dogs reportedly watched federal agents take their owner away in Oklahoma last January, reports the Daily Beast. The agents left without notifying animal control, leaving the pets trapped for days with nothing to eat or drink.