Tootfinder

"Leaked letter reveals push by Coca-Cola and McDonald’s to delay EU packaging law"
#EU #EuropeanUnion #Packaging

Leaked letter reveals push by Coca-Cola and McDonald’s to delay EU packaging law
A leaked letter from more than 100 food and beverage companies has revealed a last-minute attempt by Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and others to reopen the EU packaging law just months before key rules are due to take effect in August 2026.

"Sometimes #love looks like knowing when to stay quiet."
Dr Srividya Sivakumar - Marsala and Marginalia
#shortstories #books

Action Needed! Sign Open Letter Calling for a Crackdown on Animal Experiments for Chemicals #AnimalRights

Sign Our Open Letter to Prevent Cruel Chemical Animal Experiments
The EU could allow more animals to suffer in chemical experiments. Take action now.

Europe’s Digital Future
The EU Tech Sovereignty Package is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reclaim control over our digital foundations.
For too long, public sector procurement has defaulted to proprietary lock-in, creating a weak sovereignty posture that hinders European resilience.
We are calling for a fundamental shift: the Open Source First principle.

Steve Bannon and 60 Trump allies sign a Humans First-led letter urging Trump to mandate government testing and approval of powerful AI models before release (Ashley Gold/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/18/trump-ai-steve-bannon-humans-first-letter

Scoop: 60+ MAGA allies tell Trump to vet AI before release
The letter — signed by Steve Bannon — puts a vocal faction of the MAGA base at odds with the White House's hands-off approach to AI.

"Burnham urged to drop ‘flawed’ plans that may let developers bypass environment laws for £1"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Environment

Burnham urged to drop ‘flawed’ plans that may let developers bypass environment laws for £1
Exclusive: allowing firms to dodge biodiversity protections by paying into levy will harm nature and economy, say 100 experts in letter

You, too, might actually agree with Steve Bannon on something.
Scoop: 60 MAGA allies tell Trump to vet AI before release
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/18/trump-ai-steve-bannon-humans-first-letter

Scoop: 60+ MAGA allies tell Trump to vet AI before release
The letter — signed by Steve Bannon — puts a vocal faction of the MAGA base at odds with the White House's hands-off approach to AI.

Tippet's AI takes are painfully naive
it's hard not to feel like maybe she has been taken in by the rich and powerful, especially when she ends her letter with a plug for a podcast on energy healing hosted by a Google executive.
She still seems to attribute agency to "the AIs" as if they had their own independent minds, instead of treating them as the automation of sycophantic echo chambers, feeding back whatever they are given like a good "cold read" …

On Our Lives with AI
What is it calling us to?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eff/116784448227740150
I just submitted a letter opposing the NO FAKES Act, and encourage you to do the same. @…

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eff/116784448227740150
I just submitted a letter opposing the NO FAKES Act, and encourage you to do the same. @…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Pixies:
🎵 Letter to Memphis
#Pixies
https://open.spotify.com/track/2NOLOmiGsu9vlfyJSIcglu

I'm looking for a hat I can wear (e.g. in car) here with the Arizona sun and I'm finding stories instead.
Like this one, the backslash in the prompt is missing and it's likely that it was due to whatever software was used was swallowing up the character—perhaps when sanitizing strings.
The default system prompt in DOS was just "C>" (letter of current drive plus a ">" character, though basically everyone changed it to include the current directory, so it would have been "C:\>" after boot.
(The reason why it was defaulting to just the drive letter is that early versions of MS-DOS didn't have support for directories.)

Letter: Hightouch, an ad tech startup recently valued at $2.75B, offers to buy LiveRamp's identity business from Publicis for $800M to $1.2B in cash and stock (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/16/publicis-liveramp-assets-hightouch

Scoop: Hightouch offers Publicis up to $1.2B for key LiveRamp assets
A fast-growing ad tech startup is trying to convince Publicis to sell off a significant part of LiveRamp before the ink is dry on its acquisition.

I accidentally turned a love letter to a protocol into a love letter to honest, human connections. I thought you might like it. 🌻
#blog

Re: A Love Letter To RSS - Finest Day
Alvin shared this post on Mastodon and I couldn’t agree more with Brine, the author of this little love letter. You can read it here: Discover: A Love Letter To...

"The Uniform Code Council requires that there be a period after each letter in U.P.C. because the letters UPC (without periods) is the trademark of the Universal* Plumbing Code." ☝️
[Nelson, Benjamin (1997): Punched Cards to Bar Codes. A 200 Year Journey with descriptions fo over 260 codes. Helmers. Page 85.]
* Uniform, not Universal. 🧐
https://

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is demanding answers from a medical journal that recently removed a paper suggesting a link between vaccines and infant death, saying their decision was “of great interest to me”.
The journal Toxicology Reports had removed the paper this spring after editors determined it was so seriously flawed it could harm patients and pose a risk to public health.
Public health advocates immediately criticized the move, and said Kennedy appeared t…

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/reject-100-billion-submarine-purchase?source=direct_link&
I wrote a letter for the Action Network letter campaign: Reject $100 billion Submarine purchase.
Mark Carney recently announced the…

A-hu-hu
Shuffalo, 2m 21s
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🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
https://www.newyorker.com/puzzles-and-games-dept/shuffalo/2026/07/17

Play Shuffalo: Friday, July 17, 2026
Play The New Yorker’s daily anagramming game by unscrambling the letters to make a word—but every time you do, an additional letter gets added to the set.

Spotted in San Francisco
#dogs #dogsloved #sanfrancisco

Letter from a Cuban Soldier to a U.S. Soldier - World-Outlook
#Cuba

Letter from a Cuban Soldier to a U.S. Soldier
“I don't know your name, your age, or if you have children or siblings. I don't know the color of your skin or your family history. But I do know one thing: you and I are soldiers. And right now, the circles of power place us on opposite sides of a threat that I didn't seek, and that I presume you didn't either. ”With these words, a Cuban soldier began an “Open Letter from a Cuban Soldier to an American Soldier” on May 27, 2026. The letter is a very personal expression of the reality th…

Oh.
https://lemmy.world/comment/23699816

GitLab Act 2 - A letter to our customers and our investors. - Lemmy.World
Lots of layoffs (“re-evaluating our operational footprint”) and switching to “agentic” processes. Target user is AI. Anyone still hosting Gitlab?

Was looking for a word I could try to get some letter positions and accidentally stumbled on the right word. #Wordle
Wordle 1 854 4/6
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨🟩⬛
⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.

https://rs.bot/JoSHWc

Seek Peace at Home: End Nuclear Arms, Trident Expansion, and Space Weaponization
Join 59 people. I am writing to urge you to adopt a national security policy grounded in a simple but essential principle: peace must begin at home. The United… Sign and Resistbot delivers your letter in minutes.

Anthropic's new essay "When AI builds itself" says we need verifiable coordination to slow AI down if ever needed — but not who builds the mechanism, or how to fund it without the funders capturing it.
Thus, I wrote an open letter back: an IAEA (UN-associated organization) for AI, where a lab puts up the first ~$1B but contributing becomes the entry ticket to standing, not a lever of control.

Hoax alert: that legal threat supposedly sent by Flock to a discussion group telling them not to "analyze or speculate" about Flock's security vulnerabilities was made up by the group.
What Flock *actually* does is evil enough, so don't muddy the waters by making stuff up, geez. Also I was mildly suspicious of this but boosted it anyway so my bad I guess.

Nonya Bidniss (@Nonya_Bidniss@infosec.exchange)
Attached: 1 image ‪UPDATE: The letter was a fake. Per Benn Jordan, ‪Saturday Salon forged a cease and desist letter and shared it on their official profile. They put themselves and others in legal jeopardy and handed Flock a win by making critical press seem hyperbolic. I apologize for not fully vetting this, as Flock had sent frivolous letters in the past. His original post below: Benn Jordan‬ ‪@bennjordan.bsky.social‬ Flock threatens to sue a private group in Southern Cal…

🇺🇸 Car seeks energy partner to work together on exciting projects for the grid. A lasting partnership, based on equality that lifts both parties.
In Europe you could almost find the reverse contact ad:
🇪🇺 Smart energy partner seeks car for joint grid fun.
#V2G

"Consumers will be more motivated when given clear, appropriate incentives. Together, we can expand localized, time-of-use tariffs, allowing EV owners to charge cost-effectively during energy… | Jaap Burger
"Consumers will be more motivated when given clear, appropriate incentives. Together, we can expand localized, time-of-use tariffs, allowing EV owners to charge cost-effectively during energy surpluses and receive appropriate compensation when supporting the grid during peak strain or in times of need. This creates a rare economic alignment: a car becomes an asset that offsets its own operating costs while actively delivering benefits to the public system." A letter well worth reading from Wad…

Letter: Hightouch, an ad tech startup recently valued at $2.75B, offers to buy LiveRamp's identity business from Publicis for $800M to $1.2B in cash and stock (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/16/publicis-liveramp-assets-hightouch

What’s this? A cheque in the post? OMG, money beyond my wildest dreams!

#ForAllMankind S05E10: is there nobody in the #SONY production team old enough to remember a correct #DOS prompt? 🤔
A bit embarrassing considering the overall situation of this scene. 🤷

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Beastie Boys:
🎵 An Open Letter to NYC
#BeastieBoys
https://uncleted.bandcamp.com/track/beastie-boys-an-open-letter-to-nyc-uncle-ted-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/5vwudDPhjnuA1KrNsFjAHK

"Trump apparently shared a text that Zuckerberg sent him that included a photo of a letter written by one of his children in which the little one wrote that they “looked forward to the golden age of America.”
Trump Reportedly Showed Elon Musk Texts of Tech Execs Kissing the Ring
https://gizmodo.com/trump-reportedly-showed-elon-musk-texts-of-tech-execs-kissing-the-ring-2000774284

#LeftWordle update: I pushed a small feature to prod that allows you to downgrade the mode (or upgrade if your current board is legal under the new mode) of an in progress game.
Think of this as an escape hatch for a letter hole in hard mode: 1 unknown letter, 3 possible words after guess 4. You can take your chances, or downgrade to “regular” play an elimination word and finish the game. N…

Does Pride still matter in #Utah? Yes! Because the #utpol #GOP won't stop, so the public needs to counter them with the reality that we support our families, friends, and neighbors at every turn.

Thread worth reading!
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:73dpznbu4wqwtcyurwbiulov/post/3mltfotpw232p

Internet Archive (@archive.org)
🧵 Wayback Machine director Mark Graham is thanking the hundreds of journalists speaking out in support of the #WaybackMachine and the importance of preserving the online historical record. 🌐📰 Read Mark's letter ➡️ https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/11/a-thank-you-to-journalists-supporting-the-wayback-machine/ @mark.bsky.social #WaybackMachine

Thiago Ávila’s letter from Israeli prison to his daughter
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/5/5/thiago-avilas-letter-from-israeli-prison-to-his-daughter

Paramount sent a letter to California AG Rob Bonta last week saying "Paramount and WBD have every intention" to keep filling theaters in the state and worldwide (Rohan Goswami/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/05/12/2026

Exclusive: Paramount seeks to calm California’s creatives — and a litigious attorney general
Paramount is racing to reassure Hollywood that its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, with its HBO streaming service, isn’t aimed at killing movie theaters.

Yay! I reached dungeon 10 in #dcss
Still a noob. Today I discovered two things ALT to attack the visible enemy and letter o to go forward without afraid.
ohh and CTRL O to teleport to other Dungeon, Store, etc.
I'm keeping progressing.
Next step is understand the weapons progression level: What means ,*,-.
Lol!

Are they right? 🤔
"Euro-Office defaults to the fully proprietary OOXML document format, developed and controlled solely by Microsoft. This makes it a de facto ally of Microsoft in its content lock-in strategy, with control remaining firmly in Redmond and far from Europe."
https://blog.do…

An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement - TDF Community Blog
Dear office suite users, In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010. These are two gen…

Buy an EV like your wallet depends on it
This is a letter to all my driving friends. There is one good thing that is actively saving me money every single day, my electric car.
https://chrisalemany.ca/b/PFa

It’s ok, it’s not like we’re all going to die or anything (only billions, not everyone). @… https://slrpnk.net/post/39707961

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying that the Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models would be subject to export controls to any location outside of the U.S. and to all foreign persons within the country.
…

Scoop: Trump admin blocks foreign access to Anthropic's most powerful AI
The move marks an escalation in Washington's effort to treat cutting-edge AI systems as national security assets.

Nearly 200 economists, including 15 Nobel laureates and Anthropic's Jack Clark, sign a letter titled We Must Act Now, warning of rapid AI-led job displacement (Ben Casselman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/business/economists-ai-threat-jobs.h…

Economists Warn of A.I. Threat
Nearly 200 economists signed a letter calling for policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential A.I. disruptions.

Teacher Appreciation Week should consist solely of letter writing campaigns to the school board and state calling for a 50% across the board pay increase for all faculty and a guaranteed inflation-adjustment raise every year.
#Education #Budget

“McConnell says
‘I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke.’
But nowhere in the letter does he address the cardiac arrest,” Journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote.
“Swapping out ‘cardiac arrest’ for ‘heart attack’ is a clever move because most people use the two terms interchangeably.
They are not.”
Klippenstein went on to argue that McConnell's statement was a
"masterclass in political manipulation"
– technically accurate in denying he'd…

Major detail flagged in McConnell’s ‘proof-of-life’ update: ‘Masterclass in manipulation’
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) finally broke his roughly month-long silence this week regarding his state of health, though one journalist flagged what they said was a revealing detail in the Kentucky Republican’s statement.McConnell was hospitalized on June 14, though his office initially disclosed fe...

hehe
Shuffalo, 0m 35s
🟡🟡🟡🟡
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🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
https://www.newyorker.com/puzzles-and-games-dept/shuffalo/2026/07/16

Play Shuffalo: Thursday, July 16, 2026
Play The New Yorker’s daily anagramming game by unscrambling the letters to make a word—but every time you do, an additional letter gets added to the set.

Designed-Source Reductions and a Dual-Purpose Feasibility Band for Semantic Rate-Distortion
Joss Armstrong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11280 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.11280 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.11280
arXiv:2606.11280v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The joint rate-distortion framework of Stavrou and Kountouris (IEEE Transactions on Communications 2023) characterises dual-fidelity tradeoffs for semantic communication on stochastic semantic sources. Many task-oriented communication systems instead use designed sources, where the semantic object is a deterministic oracle allocation $\phi^(t)$ rather than a stochastic quantity given by nature. We isolate the subclass of designed sources under smooth concave utility with assumptions A1, A2 and Euclidean allocation codomain, and restrict the encoder class to deterministic common-category mappings. Within this subclass the SK exponential-tilting decoder and generalised Blahut--Arimoto iteration specialise to conditional-mean decoding and Lloyd--Max stationarity on $\phi^(t)$. When the second fidelity is a monotone single-letter distortion, the joint problem stays inside the SK admissible class; the common-category SK rate is lower-bounded by the max of the corresponding Shannon rate-distortion functions, with equality only when the common-category reconstruction is compatible and RDF-optimal. When the second fidelity is aggregate verification, the joint problem leaves the SK single-letter class and admits a constrained-design feasibility band $R_{\min}(\varepsilon^) \leq R \leq R_{\max}(\beta^)$ of width $\log_2(K_{\max}/K_{\min})$ bits in partition cardinality. The reduction and the band are scope statements on the SK apparatus, not modifications to it. A smart-grid economic-dispatch example with a non-technical-loss-detection contrast illustrates the band.
toXiv_bot_toot

Do you use AI to develop open-source software or believe it's the future? Then I want to let you know that you should be using GitHub or GitLab, and if you already are using them, stay there. Do NOT come to Forgejo or Codeberg. Why?
GitLab just made it very clear that they are fully committing (they say betting on the agentic era) to the opportunity that the agentic era provides. I noticed they rebranded their homepage slogan a while ago to "Finally, AI for the entire software…

'A Green party spokesperson said: “Antisemitism needs a cross-party effort and politicians of all parties have a responsibility to reduce tensions and division, not escalate them. It does feel like the world is upside down when Reform are invited to be part of an initiative to tackle antisemitism but the Green party – and its Jewish leader – aren’t.”'
Downing Street rally asks ‘silent majority’ to fight antisemitism | UK news | The Guardian

https://rs.bot/iNbsg6

Pass AB 2461 To Make Oil Companies Pay For Well Cleanup
Join 44 people. I want my representative to vote yes on AB2461. This bill fixes bonding requirements for oil and gas wells so that operators have to put up enough… Sign and Resistbot delivers your letter in minutes.

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Thievery Corporation feat. Racquel Jones:
🎵 Letter To The Editor
#NowPlaying #ThieveryCorporation #RacquelJones
https://open.spotify.com/track/3D2v0rx9B0q3CaQuANAFFR

Microsoft, your climate plan ran into a problem and needs to restart. Read the coalition's open letter and add your name.
https://microsoftlies.com/?utm_source=ensocial

Microsoft, Your Climate Plan Ran Into a Problem
An open letter to Microsoft demanding accountability on climate commitments. Microsoft promised to be carbon negative by 2030 — but emissions keep rising. Sign the letter and demand action.

Microsoft, your climate plan ran into a problem and needs to restart. Read the coalition's open letter and add your name.
https://microsoftlies.com/?utm_source=ensocial

Microsoft, Your Climate Plan Ran Into a Problem
An open letter to Microsoft demanding accountability on climate commitments. Microsoft promised to be carbon negative by 2030 — but emissions keep rising. Sign the letter and demand action.

The letter is fake. @bennjordan.bsky.social has apologized for posting it. @… https://infosec.exchange/@Nonya_Bidniss/116897523388822104…

Nonya Bidniss (@Nonya_Bidniss@infosec.exchange)
Attached: 1 image ‪Benn Jordan‬ ‪@bennjordan.bsky.social‬ Flock threatens to sue a private group in Southern California that meets regularly to hold discussions and Q&As about diplomacy, law, and philosophy. It demands that they do not "analyze" or "speculate" on the security vulnerabilities we've confirmed when talking about government surveillance.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #ChrisHawkins
Beastie Boys:
🎵 An Open Letter To NYC
#BeastieBoys
https://uncleted.bandcamp.com/track/beastie-boys-an-open-letter-to-nyc-uncle-ted-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/5vwudDPhjnuA1KrNsFjAHK

The US has always been a nation of immigrants. The early US had debates on how long you had to have been here a citizen you could serve in the US Houses. This letter by Ben Franklin summarizes the debate (whose vote ended up very much pro-).
https://bjpryor.substack.com/p/immigra

Immigrants in Congress
Letter 101

GM: “This letter is an active operational invitation for collaboration. Utilities have a historic opportunity to utilize a ready asset to support their infrastructure. We believe GM is ready to deploy that asset to American driveways at a scale no other manufacturer can match.”
https://

Attention John Ternus #apple
https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ternus_apple_slippery_slope

John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope
What gave Tim Cook’s privacy letter heft in 2014 wasn’t just the clarity of its plain language, but the fact that you didn’t have to take his word for it that the ads Apple showed you respected your privacy, because Apple didn’t show you ads in 2014.

Over 100 former ABC News journalists sign an open letter supporting the network and Disney as ABC pushes back against the FCC's investigation of The View (Ted Johnson/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/05/abc-news-journalists-letter-fcc-trump-1236901977/…

Former ABC News Journalists Sign Letter Supporting Network As It Pushes Back On FCC: “This Is Political Retaliation, Not Regulatory Enforcement”
Sam Donaldson and Chris Bury are among those who signed on to the letter.

Ten Democratic lawmakers told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a letter Sunday
that his gutting of a program focused on protecting civilians
is a leadership failure that imperils service members and erodes the military’s moral standing.
Led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the joint letter echoed concerns raised by a recent Defense Department inspector general report
that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.”
Lawmakers also cited repor…

Amid Mounting War Casualties, Pete Hegseth “Defunded and Impeded” Efforts to Protect Civilians, Lawmakers Say
Ten members of Congress have warned the secretary of defense that the Trump administration’s gutting of a program focused on shielding noncombatants puts service members in peril, erodes the military’s moral standing and may violate federal law.

Uff.
Shuffalo, 6m 17s
🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🔘🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
https://www.newyorker.com/puzzles-and-games-dept/shuffalo/2026/07/15

Play Shuffalo: Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Play The New Yorker’s daily anagramming game by unscrambling the letters to make a word—but every time you do, an additional letter gets added to the set.

https://rs.bot/VHLUsL

Investigate Trump's Conduct and Its Damage to American Credibility
Join 100 people. Congress must open a serious investigation into Donald Trump's conduct — his diplomatic failures, his conflicts of interest, and the broader… Sign and Resistbot delivers your letter in minutes.

Datini Letters. Geospatial Explorer
Francesco di Marco Datini's merchant correspondence network
#history

Beehiiv launches Community, which lets subscribers chat with each other, adds programmatic ads and an AI tool that helps creators manage their audiences (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/16/newsletter-platf…

Newsletter platform Beehiiv now lets subscribers chat with each other, adds AI | TechCrunch
Beehiiv is launching an AI Copilot to help publishers with user growth and analytics

WSJ asks a judge to toss out Trump's revised defamation lawsuit over its Jeffrey Epstein letter story, saying it is a "re-package" of claims already dismissed (Ted Johnson/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/06/trump-wall-street-journal…

The Wall Street Journal Asks Judge To Toss Donald Trump’s Revised Lawsuit Over Story On Jeffrey Epstein Letter
Trump claimed he was defamed by a Journal story about a bawdy "birthday letter" to Jeffrey Epstein.

Gotta love it, when there's enough time for voters to react.
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/letters/2026/07/06/letter-thank-you-kai-schwemmer/
"This revealed one of two things to the public: either Davidson was incompetent, failing…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #SundaySoul
Janet Jackson:
🎵 Come Back to Me
#JanetJackson
https://vloelove.bandcamp.com/track/the-letter-janet-jackson-come-back-to-me-bootleg
https://open.spotify.com/track/5EBWCGlCn65HM8Hglrc5V1

Letter: Tennessee Deputy Governor Stuart McWhorter urged David Ellison to move Paramount's corporate headquarters from California to Tennessee (Winston Cho/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/tennessee-…

Tennessee Is Courting Paramount — And the Studio Is Considering It (Exclusive)
Paramount CEO David Ellison and his family have deep ties to the Volunteer State and the mogul is now in a legal battle with California.

Letter: US cybersecurity leaders urge the White House to lift the ban on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable 5, arguing the move hurts defenders more than attackers (Sam Sabin/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/15/anthropic-fable-security-leaders-trump-admin

Cyber leaders defend Anthropic's banned model
Former Facebook cyber head defend Anthropic in an open letter.

Shuffalo, 2m 43s
🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
https://www.newyorker.com/puzzles-and-games-dept/shuffalo/2026/07/14

Play Shuffalo: Tuesday, July 14, 2026
Play The New Yorker’s daily anagramming game by unscrambling the letters to make a word—but every time you do, an additional letter gets added to the set.

Two press freedom groups are warning that Larry Ellison may “implement the CBS playbook” at CNN by getting rid of all the anchors President Donald Trump doesn’t like.
In a letter sent Thursday to Paramount Skydance, Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders demanded to see internal documents, alleging that there was “credible concern that Paramount leadership has offered, solicited, or effectuated a corrupt exchange: more favorable coverage of the Trump administrati…

Larry Ellison Promised to Fire CNN Anchors If Trump Approved Takeover
Two press freedom groups allege Ellison agreed to a “corrupt exchange” with Donald Trump.

https://rs.bot/mc4aWQ

Get the Flock Out of Cali!
Join 274 people. Get Flock cameras out of California towns! They violate CA privacy laws and expose towns to massive fines! Sign and Resistbot delivers your letter in minutes.

Letter: Texas Governor Greg Abbott released regulatory recommendations for state lawmakers to ensure that data centers shoulder the costs of their growth (The Texas Tribune)
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/10/texas-greg-abbott-data-centers-re…

Abbott recommends sweeping data center regulation, including eliminating sales tax exemption
The recommendations for legislative action amount to a striking call for industry regulation by the Republican governor in a state that has long prided itself on being a favorable environment for business.

I’ve signed a letter calling for Andy Burnham to clarify his views on control or ownership of public services. Can you sign and share it as well?
https://weownit.org.uk/act-now/sign-our-open-letter-to-andy-burnham

Add your name to our open letter to Andy Burnham
Public control is not public ownership. Andy Burnham must clarify that he backs public ownership of life's essentials.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
Beastie Boys:
🎵 An Open Letter To NYC
#BeastieBoys
https://uncleted.bandcamp.com/track/beastie-boys-an-open-letter-to-nyc-uncle-ted-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/5vwudDPhjnuA1KrNsFjAHK

Puh
Shuffalo, 9m 45s
🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟡🔘🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡
https://www.newyorker.com/puzzles-and-games-dept/shuffalo/2026/07/13

Play Shuffalo: Monday, July 13, 2026
Play The New Yorker’s daily anagramming game by unscrambling the letters to make a word—but every time you do, an additional letter gets added to the set.

https://rs.bot/3MR2Kh

Stop the Mass Deportation Program
Join 66 people. I am alarmed by President Trump’s Mass Deportation Program, which targets people making meaningful contributions to our country (like veterans,… Sign and Resistbot delivers your letter in minutes.

Same. I plan to continue my subscription as additional donation.
When propaganda and hate is free, it's important to make good journalism accessible to everyone.
#Utah #Utahns #NoPaywall…

Most of California's Democratic congressional delegation sent a letter to state AG Rob Bonta urging him to "closely scrutinize" the Paramount-WBD deal (Gene Maddaus/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/rob-bonta-paramount-warner…

California Attorney General Urged to Scrutinize Paramount-W.B. Merger
A group of 34 Congressional Democrats urged Attorney General Rob Bonta on Thursday to carefully scrutinize the Paramount-W.B. merger.

Observers are once again raising concerns about insider trading on Wednesday after a trader took a colossal crude oil short position just over an hour before a US-Iran peace deal was reported to be on the horizon, causing prices to fall.
The Kobeissi Letter, a financial newsletter, 
reported on X that at 3:40 am on Wednesday,
“nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news.”
This was equivalent to $920 million in notional value,

‘Epic insider trading’: nearly $1 billion in crude oil shorts taken just before report of US-Iran peace deal
“Only a select few in the top tax bracket are benefiting from this, and the majority of you ain’t in it,” said former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are among signatories on an open letter urging improved tracking of synthetic DNA potentially used in AI-developed bioweapons (Emily Mullin/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-anthropic-letter-ai-biological-weapons/

OpenAI and Anthropic Sign Letter to Prevent AI-Developed Biological Weapons
Leading AI labs, executives, and scientists are sending a letter to lawmakers urging them to improve tracking of synthetic DNA sequences that could be used for bioweapons.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.)
said Monday that he’s confident
Democrats will still win back the House of Representatives,
despite Republicans now being poised to come out ahead in Donald Trump’s redistricting war.
“The failed GOP majority will not be able to gerrymander themselves back into power,”
Jeffries wrote in a new letter to House Democrats
Jeffries said the House Democratic caucus would meet Thursday as they plot next steps.
…

‘We remain undeterred’: Hakeem Jeffries says gerrymandering won’t save House Republicans
“The failed GOP majority will not be able to gerrymander themselves back into power."

Letter to Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro: the FCC's Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez says ABC has been a victim of a "coordinated campaign of censorship and control" (Joe Flint/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/fcc-com

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #Early
Beastie Boys:
🎵 An Open Letter To NYC
#BeastieBoys
https://uncleted.bandcamp.com/track/beastie-boys-an-open-letter-to-nyc-uncle-ted-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/5vwudDPhjnuA1KrNsFjAHK

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon warns that the Trump administration is getting ready to
round up 500 immigrant children in a hasty effort to remove them from the country,
bypassing legal protections.
It would be their second attempt after a federal court intervened last year in an overnight plan to fly out hundreds of children on Labor Day weekend.

Senator warns Trump plans to deport over 500 immigrant children
A U.S. senator is warning of a Trump administration plan to remove over 500 children from the country, bypassing legal protections, in a letter sent to U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday. Sen. Ron Wyden details that in the coming days, the administration will fast-track the removal of the immigrant children who arrived in the U.S. without their parents to their countries of origin. The targeted children have been in long-term foster care under federal custody for more than…

More than 600 Google employees, including many from DeepMind, sign a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding he bar the DOD from using Google's AI for classified work (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/2…

Google workers petition CEO to refuse classified AI work with Pentagon
Hundreads of Google employees wrote in a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai that they did not want to see its AI technology used in “inhumane or extremely harmful ways.”

In Trump’s America, the First Amendment is a dead letter.
If you’re seen as anti-Trump,
you apparently no longer have any rights at all.
We’ll get to the man who moved a box of zines and got thirty years
— he wasn’t even at the protest,
but the judge claimed he was aiding a “terrorist on the run” (he was not).
To understand how that’s even possible, though,
you first have to look at how some people who actually tried to overturn democracy were tre…

He Moved A Box Of Leftist Zines. MAGA’s Favorite Judge Just Gave Him 30 Years.
In Trump’s America, the First Amendment is a dead letter. If you’re seen as anti-Trump, you apparently no longer have any rights at all. We’ll get to the man who moved a box of zi…

Letter: UK-based Google DeepMind workers voted to unionize with the Communication Workers Union and Unite in April, representing 1K staff, amid the US DOD deal (Alice Speri/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/04/google-deepmind-uk-work…

On Capitol Hill,
Sen. Bernie Sanders
and Reps. Pramila Jayapal
and Debbie Dingell
have repeatedly introduced the
👉Medicare for All Act.
While support for the bill among elected Democrats and the US public has grown,
the legislation hasn’t progressed in either chamber,
which are both narrowly controlled by the GOP.
However, “we may face a once-in-a-generation opportunity to legislate on healthcare in 2029,” notes the letter.
While the…

'Now Is the Time to Organize,' Says Medicare for All Coalition | Common Dreams
As Americans struggle with high prices and corporate greed under Trump and Republicans in Congress, a major coalition is arguing that now is the time to organize for Medicare for All.

Digital Content Next, which represents major US publishers, sends Common Crawl a cease-and-desist demanding it stop scraping and remove copyrighted content (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/common-craw…

US publishers tell Common Crawl to stop scraping and delete archive
Digital news publishers in the US have raised “significant legal concerns” over the continued scraping of their content by Common Crawl.

Investor letter: TCI, one of the world's biggest hedge funds, cut almost all of its $8B stake in Microsoft, citing AI-related risks to Office and Azure (Costas Mourselas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/ac5d90a9-b010-4529-9616-706420920681

Letter: Freedom of the Press Foundation and RSF seek Paramount's records over reports the Ellisons allegedly agreed to compromise CNN to secure the WBD deal (Oliver Darcy/Status)
https://www.status.news/p/paramount-cnn-warner-bros-merger-ellison-trump

Paramount’s Paper Trail
Two press freedom groups that hold Paramount shares are demanding internal records over concerns the Ellisons have agreed to compromise the editorial integrity of CNN to secure approval for the Warners deal, Status has learned.

Fourteen employees with the US Federal Emergency Management Agency
returned to work this week,
after spending eight months on administrative leave
for signing a public letter criticising the Trump administration.
The so-called “Katrina declaration”, sent last August to members of Congress and a federal council formed to help determine Fema’s future,
was written as a rebuke from the workers about the dangerous erosion in US capacity to prepare for and respond to …

As many expected,
the Trump administration has persisted in waging its war on Iran without congressional authorization.
In doing so, the White House  continues to act in violation of not only the U.S. Constitution and the UN Charter,
but also the 60-day deadline on unauthorized hostilities imposed by the War Powers Resolution (WPR).
What’s new is the White House argument in a May 1st letter to Congress that the WPR’s 60-day clock stopped because the “hostilities that…

Ongoing Iran War Reveals Necessary War Powers Reforms
It is Congress’s responsibility to assert its constitutional prerogatives with respect to the use of force and to rein in a lawless executive.

Letter: the US lifts its block on Mythos 5, allowing Anthropic to release it to more than 100 US institutions; sources: talks about Fable 5 are ongoing (Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/06/27/2026/us-releases-powerful-anthro…

Exclusive: US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies
The move comes the same day as a new OpenAI model sees a limited release.

Dozens of CBS News veterans, including Lowell Bergman and Dan Rather, sign a letter to David Ellison urging him to "uphold editorial independence" at 60 Minutes (Jeremy Barr/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jun

In a letter to Utah Senate President, Kevin O'Leary says he will cut a 40,000-acre AI data center project in Utah by roughly half, after backlash from lawmakers (John Ainger/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

The Trump administration has canceled federal funding for test strips used to find out if a substance contains fentanyl. 
CBS News, citing a letter from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, reports that
government funds can’t be used to purchase the strips anymore,
increasing the risk of drug overdoses.
The strips also test for other dangerous substances such as xylazine and medetomidine,
which are normally used to sedate animals and hav…

Trump Makes It Harder to See if Drugs Are Laced With Fentanyl
The move has shocked public health experts who are worried about a spike in drug overdoses.

For nearly a decade, the Pentagon was warned
—by its own contractors, analysts, and intelligence agencies
—that anyone with a credit card could buy a map of where American troops sleep, work, and store nuclear weapons.
Now the bill has come due in a war zone.
A newly disclosed letter shows the warnings went unheeded:
US Central Command now confirms it has received “multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or su…

The Pentagon Knew Enemies Could Track Troops’ Phones for Years. Now They Are
The US military has long known that cheap fixes could stop location data from exposing its troops. It adopted almost none—and now says adversaries are using the data to target soldiers during a war.