Tootfinder

This week, GÉANT held its first multistakeholder policy event in Brussels—opening a new chapter in how the GÉANT community and European policy makers can work together to shape the #DigitalTransformation of #Europe.
This event laid the groundwork for an ongoing dialogue between GÉANT, …

U.K. proposes new asylum policy with 20-year wait and asset seizures - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/11/17/britain-new-asylum-policy/

Doc: 15 people signed the Pentagon's press rules, including from The Federalist, The Epoch Times, OANN, and overseas media, plus freelancers and independents (Scott Nover/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/20

Hundreds of people cover the Pentagon. These are the 15 who signed its new press policy.
The Federalist, the Epoch Times, and One America News signed the Defense Department’s press rules. The rest are freelancers, independent or work for media outfits based overseas.

Trump revives policy penalizing immigrants for using safety net programs (Alice Miranda Ollstein/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/17/trump-revives-policy-penalizing-immigrants-for-using-safety-net-programs-00655378
http://www.memeorandum.com/251117/p135#a251117p135

https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-hype-is-steering-eu-policy-off-course/

Op-Fed: Opinion, Stance, and Monetary Policy Annotations on FOMC Transcripts Using Active Learning
Alisa Kanganis, Katherine A. Keith
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13539 https://…

Op-Fed: Opinion, Stance, and Monetary Policy Annotations on FOMC Transcripts Using Active Learning
The U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regularly discusses and sets monetary policy, affecting the borrowing and spending decisions of millions of people. In this work, we release Op-Fed, a dataset of 1044 human-annotated sentences and their contexts from FOMC transcripts. We faced two major technical challenges in dataset creation: imbalanced classes -- we estimate fewer than 8% of sentences express a non-neutral stance towards monetary policy -- and inter-sentence dependence -- 65% of …

An interview with Chris Gilliard on his new book Luxury Surveillance, how smart wearables could normalize pervasive surveillance, X's political shift, and more (Anika Collier Navaroli/The Tech Policy Press Podcast)
https://techpolicy.press/through-to-th

Through to Thriving: Protecting Our Privacy with Chris Gilliard | TechPolicy.Press
Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli in conversation with Critical Internet Studies Institute privacy researcher and advocate Chris Gilliard.

Youth Privacy in Australia: Insights from National Policy Dialogues
https://fpf.org/blog/youth-privacy-in-australia-insights-from-national-policy-dialogues/
@…

US may owe $1 trillion in refunds if SCOTUS cancels Trump tariffs - Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/tariff-refunds-may-get-messy-if-trump-loses-supreme-court-fight/

US may owe $1 trillion in refunds if SCOTUS cancels Trump tariffs
Tech industry primed for big refunds if SCOTUS rules against Trump tariffs.

(LinkedIn) China's bold push into brain-computer interfaces: From policy to practice https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinas-bold-push-brain-computer-interfaces-from-policy-chan-phd-ewghc/

China’s Bold Push into Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Policy to Practice
How government funding, insurance reform, and clinical breakthroughs are positioning China as a global BCI powerhouse The Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) landscape is experiencing a seismic shift, and China is emerging as a formidable force in this transformative technology. Having spent over a decad

Auf dem Weg in den Krieg https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10241

“If the market can keep the faith to persist, it buys the necessary time for the technology to mature, for the costs to come down, and for companies to figure out the business model,” Wu said. But US “companies can end up underwater if AI grows fast but less rapidly than they hope for,” he suggested.

Bursting AI bubble may be EU’s “secret weapon” in clash with Trump, expert says
Spotify and Accenture caught in crossfire as Trump attacks EU tech regulations.

„Jeffrey Epstein was a warlord. We have to talk about It. Mainstream media is ignoring the fact that the late sex trafficker was a power broker who shaped global policy“ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/jeffrey-epstein-israel-foreign-policy-elite/#<…

Report reveals 'new evidence of global pain' from Trump's signature policy - Alternet.org
https://www.alternet.org/trump-pain-signature-policy/

Media
-- including Fox News
-- overwhelmingly rejected Hegseth's Pentagon press policy

The network, which is generally supportive of the Trump administration,
has joined ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN in not signing the new Defense Department press policy.
https://w…

Media including Fox News overwhelmingly reject Pentagon press policy
Fox News, along with ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, said that the Pentagon policy violates their “core journalistic protections.”

Breaking the Cycle of Incarceration With Targeted Mental Health Outreach: A Case Study in Machine Learning for Public Policy
Kit T. Rodolfa, Erika Salomon, Jin Yao, Steve Yoder, Robert Sullivan, Kevin McGuire, Allie Dickinson, Rob MacDougall, Brian Seidler, Christina Sung, Claire Herdeman, Rayid Ghani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14129

Breaking the Cycle of Incarceration With Targeted Mental Health Outreach: A Case Study in Machine Learning for Public Policy
Many incarcerated individuals face significant and complex challenges, including mental illness, substance dependence, and homelessness, yet jails and prisons are often poorly equipped to address these needs. With little support from the existing criminal justice system, these needs can remain untreated and worsen, often leading to further offenses and a cycle of incarceration with adverse outcomes both for the individual and for public safety, with particularly large impacts on communities of …

Bursting AI bubble may be EU’s “secret weapon” in clash with Trump, expert says:
Spotify and Accenture caught in crossfire as Trump attacks EU tech regulations.
The US threatened to restrict some of the largest service providers in the European Union as retaliation for EU tech regulations and investigations are increasingly drawing Donald Trump’s ire. […]
🤖

Bursting AI bubble may be EU’s “secret weapon” in clash with Trump, expert says
Spotify and Accenture caught in crossfire as Trump attacks EU tech regulations.

Towards an Evidence-Based Approach to Climate Policy
Niklas G\"artner (UGA)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13682 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13682

Towards an Evidence-Based Approach to Climate Policy
Evidence-Based Climate Policy (EBCP) is an approach to policymaking that relies on evidence to make decisions about managing climate impacts, mitigation, and adaptation. A core problem for EBCP is the lack of a clear definition of evidence, a fundamental concept to the theory. The literature often draws on evidence-based medicine (EBM), where evidence is typically empirical data from scientific research or systematic investigations and quality is arranged within an evidence hierarchy with rando…

Deliveroo CEO Will Shu will step down once its takeover by DoorDash takes effect; the deal is expected to close by October 2 (Yadarisa Shabong/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-re…

The Economics of Information Pollution in the Age of AI: A General Equilibrium Approach to Welfare, Measurement, and Policy
Yukun Zhang, Tianyang Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13729

The Economics of Information Pollution in the Age of AI: A General Equilibrium Approach to Welfare, Measurement, and Policy
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a fundamental shock to the economics of information production. By asymmetrically collapsing the marginal cost of generating low-quality, synthetic content while leaving high-quality production costly, AI systematically incentivizes information pollution. This paper develops a general equilibrium framework to analyze this challenge. We model the strategic interactions among a monopolistic platform, profit-maximizing producers, and utility-ma…

During the #COP30 climate conference in Brazil, Australia's opposition party withdrew from the country's net-zero by 2050 target. It now sees net-zero as a potential 'welcome outcome' of using Australia's resources (coal, gas) plus new energy technologies. Reckless.

Liberal Party formally abandons net zero by 2050 climate target
The decision brings the party closer to the Nationals, which ditched its support for the target earlier this month amid internal turmoil over the Coalition's policy.

StableTracker: Learning to Stably Track Target via Differentiable Simulation
Fanxing Li, Shengyang Wang, Fangyu Sun, Shuyu Wu, Dexin Zuo, Wenxian Yu, Danping Zou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14147

StableTracker: Learning to Stably Track Target via Differentiable Simulation
FPV object tracking methods heavily rely on handcraft modular designs, resulting in hardware overload and cumulative error, which seriously degrades the tracking performance, especially for rapidly accelerating or decelerating targets. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{StableTracker}, a learning-based control policy that enables quadrotors to robustly follow the moving target from arbitrary perspectives. The policy is trained using backpropagation-through-time via differentiable s…

Malignancy at work.
#OpenAI #LLM
https://arstechnica.com/tech-poli…

Adaptive Off-Policy Inference for M-Estimators Under Model Misspecification
James Leiner, Robin Dunn, Aaditya Ramdas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14218 https://

Adaptive Off-Policy Inference for M-Estimators Under Model Misspecification
When data are collected adaptively, such as in bandit algorithms, classical statistical approaches such as ordinary least squares and $M$-estimation will often fail to achieve asymptotic normality. Although recent lines of work have modified the classical approaches to ensure valid inference on adaptively collected data, most of these works assume that the model is correctly specified. We propose a method that provides valid inference for M-estimators that use adaptively collected bandit data w…

Major US Media Outlets, Including Fox News, Newsmax, Refuse to Sign Pentagon’s New Press Policy https://ground.news/article/major-us-media-outlets-including-fox-news-newsmax-refuse-to-sign-pentagons-new-press-policy

Privacy advocates see risk in new Meta policy that uses AI chats to serve targeted ads https://therecord.media/privacy-advocates-see-risks-meta-ai-ad-targeting

Auf dem Weg zur Wehrpflicht https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10158

Public Health Professor Craig Spencer Warns Donald Trump’s ‘Eugenics’ Shutdown Health Policy Echoes Nazism
https://www.thedailybeast.com/public-health-professor-craig-spencer-warns-donald-trumps-eugenics-shutdown-health-policy-echoes-nazism/

Watch live: Trump announces move to expand IVF access (The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5558779-trump-ivf-coverage-watch-live/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251016/p99#a251016p99

«More than 1,500 livestock farmers registered for the buyout schemes» in the #Netherlands.
«Europe has more than 24,000 "mega-farms" (facilities with 40,000 or more poultry, 2,000 or more fattening pigs, or 750 or more breeding sows)»

Analyzing and Internalizing Complex Policy Documents for LLM Agents
Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingjie Li, Xing Fan, Xiang Li, Chenlei Guo, Ruhi Sarikaya, Heng Ji
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11588

Analyzing and Internalizing Complex Policy Documents for LLM Agents
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agentic systems rely on in-context policy documents encoding diverse business rules. As requirements grow, these documents expand rapidly, causing high computational overhead. This motivates developing internalization methods that embed policy documents into model priors while preserving performance. Prior prompt compression work targets generic prompts, but agentic policy documents span multiple complexity levels and require deeper reasoning, making internaliza…

I’m in a work training for a agentic AI we will soon have access to. One use case that was suggested is researching and summarizing HR policy on a topic or for a question.
Oof. I expect it won’t be long before I read a news article where someone brings a wrongful termination suit based on either end of such a AI query.
#OfficeWorkerGripes

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr says he won't end the FCC's news distortion policy despite a petition from a bipartisan group of former FCC chairs and commissioners (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

“How about no”: FCC boss Brendan Carr says he won’t end news distortion probes
Carr rejects criticism from four former FCC chairs, including three Republicans.

Compute as Teacher: Turning Inference Compute Into Reference-Free Supervision
Dulhan Jayalath, Shashwat Goel, Thomas Foster, Parag Jain, Suchin Gururangan, Cheng Zhang, Anirudh Goyal, Alan Schelten
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14234

Compute as Teacher: Turning Inference Compute Into Reference-Free Supervision
Where do learning signals come from when there is no ground truth in post-training? We propose turning exploration into supervision through Compute as Teacher (CaT), which converts the model's own exploration at inference-time into reference-free supervision by synthesizing a single reference from a group of parallel rollouts and then optimizing toward it. Concretely, the current policy produces a group of rollouts; a frozen anchor (the initial policy) reconciles omissions and contradictions to…

Where Do Tokens Go? Understanding Pruning Behaviors in STEP at High Resolutions
Michal Szczepanski, Martyna Poreba, Karim Haroun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14165 https://…

Where Do Tokens Go? Understanding Pruning Behaviors in STEP at High Resolutions
Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in semantic segmentation but are hindered by high computational and memory costs. To address this, we propose STEP (SuperToken and Early-Pruning), a hybrid token-reduction framework that combines dynamic patch merging and token pruning to enhance efficiency without significantly compromising accuracy. At the core of STEP is dCTS, a lightweight CNN-based policy network that enables flexible merging into superpatches. Encoder blocks …

Zwischen den USA, Russland und China https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10239

Makary denies plans for COVID-19 black box warning (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5651857-fda-denies-black-box-warning-covid19/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251216/p134#a251216p134

Amid concerns that he has failed to address a worsening affordability crisis,
with health insurance premiums about to spike dramatically for over 20 million Americans,
Donald Trump revealed on Sunday that his domestic policy chief’s main priority is -- building a triumphal arch for Washington DC.
Speaking at a White House holiday party, the president praised Vince Haley, his former speechwriter and a longtime aide to Newt Gingrich who now leads the White House Domestic Poli…

Perhaps the silver lining to the UK no longer being in the European Union is that it offers the opportunity to look at developments that are progressing at a different pace in the EU.
Here:
how clean consumer flexibility - EVs, heat pumps - can support the local grid, if allow it to.

Yes, consumer clean energy technologies can support the local grid — if we allow them to. Last week, I shared information about EU policy developments regarding device-level metering for charging… | Jaap Burger
Yes, consumer clean energy technologies can support the local grid — if we allow them to. Last week, I shared information about EU policy developments regarding device-level metering for charging points. This allows EV charging sessions to be measured accurately and enables the flexibility involved to be marketed. I cited the example of the UK, where this has recently become a practical reality, an opportunity to learn for other jurisdictions. Here is another example. The latest amendment to…

Geopolitics, Geoeconomics and Risk:A Machine Learning Approach
Alvaro Ortiz, Tomasa Rodrigo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12416 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.124…

Geopolitics, Geoeconomics and Risk:A Machine Learning Approach
We introduce a novel high-frequency daily panel dataset of both markets and news-based indicators -- including Geopolitical Risk, Economic Policy Uncertainty, Trade Policy Uncertainty, and Political Sentiment -- for 42 countries across both emerging and developed markets. Using this dataset, we study how sentiment dynamics shape sovereign risk, measured by Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads, and evaluate their forecasting value relative to traditional drivers such as global monetary policy and m…

NPR's veteran Pentagon reporter warns new media policy stifles journalism : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/g-s1-93297/pentagon-reporter-opinion-press-policy

Quantum Reinforcement Learning-Guided Diffusion Model for Image Synthesis via Hybrid Quantum-Classical Generative Model Architectures
Chi-Sheng Chen, En-Jui Kuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14163

Quantum Reinforcement Learning-Guided Diffusion Model for Image Synthesis via Hybrid Quantum-Classical Generative Model Architectures
Diffusion models typically employ static or heuristic classifier-free guidance (CFG) schedules, which often fail to adapt across timesteps and noise conditions. In this work, we introduce a quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) controller that dynamically adjusts CFG at each denoising step. The controller adopts a hybrid quantum--classical actor--critic architecture: a shallow variational quantum circuit (VQC) with ring entanglement generates policy features, which are mapped by a compact multil…

Fast Visuomotor Policy for Robotic Manipulation
Jingkai Jia, Tong Yang, Xueyao Chen, Chenhuan Liu, Wenqiang Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12483 https://…

Fast Visuomotor Policy for Robotic Manipulation
We present a fast and effective policy framework for robotic manipulation, named Energy Policy, designed for high-frequency robotic tasks and resource-constrained systems. Unlike existing robotic policies, Energy Policy natively predicts multimodal actions in a single forward pass, enabling high-precision manipulation at high speed. The framework is built upon two core components. First, we adopt the energy score as the learning objective to facilitate multimodal action modeling. Second, we int…

a16z releases a nine-pillar AI policy framework for Congress, including restricting AI use for under-13s without parental consent and keeping a role for states (Punchbowl News)
https://punchbowl.news/article/tech/a16z-ai/

Here are a16z’s ideas for Congress on AI
Andreessen Horowitz is laying out a framework on Wednesday that it wants Congress to take up for artificial intelligence.

Yes, Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension was government censorship | The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/policy/781148/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-monologue-brendan-carr-censorship-first-amendment

FDA warns major retailers over recalled baby formula sales (Max Rego/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5651675-infant-formula-recall-fda-compliance/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251216/p135#a251216p135

Trump shows support for Pete Hegseth's Pentagon press restrictions, saying "the press is very dishonest", after expressing skepticism about the rules last month (Isaac Schorr/Mediaite)
https://www.mediaite.com/me…

Trump Flip-Flops, Throws Support Behind Pentagon Press Policy — And Threatens to Kick Media Out of White House
President Donald Trump threw his support behind Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's controversial new Pentagon press policy on Tuesday.

The capture of prisoners presents a major new set of legal and policy problems for the Trump administration in its escalating terror campaign.
https://universeodon.com/@jaykuo/115391110182959524

Jay Kuo (@jaykuo@universeodon.com)
Attached: 1 image I want to know EVERYTHING about these survivors they have detained. Now.

Future of Privacy Forum Appoints Matthew Reisman as Vice President of U.S. Policy
https://fpf.org/press-releases/future-of-privacy-forum-appoints-matthew-reisman-as-vice-president-of-u-s-policy/

Big Tech sues Texas, says age-verification law is “broad censorship regime” - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/big-tech-sues-texas-says-age-verification-law-is-broad-censorship-regime/

Sanders pushes for moratorium on AI data center construction (Julia Shapero/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5652830-concerns-ai-data-centers/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p69#a251217p69

House Homeland Security chairman keeps attention on cyber issues https://therecord.media/andrew-garbarino-legislation-cyber-policy-outlook

Niamh Sweeney, Facebook's former head of public policy in Ireland, is appointed as Ireland's new Data Protection Commissioner, starting October 13 (Peter Flanagan/The Irish Times)
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/09/17/ex-t…

Ex-tech lobbyist named as Ireland’s new Data Protection Commissioner
Niamh Sweeney to take up role in October

Gen AI in Proof-based Math Courses: A Pilot Study
Hannah Klawa, Shraddha Rajpal, Cigole Thomas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13570 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

Gen AI in Proof-based Math Courses: A Pilot Study
With the rapid rise of generative AI in higher education and the unreliability of current AI detection tools, developing policies that encourage student learning and critical thinking has become increasingly important. This study examines student use and perceptions of generative AI across three proof-based undergraduate mathematics courses: a first-semester abstract algebra course, a topology course and a second-semester abstract algebra course. In each case, course policy permitted some use o…

Hegseth overhauling chaplain corps, targeting 'new age' concepts (Tara Suter/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5653054-defense-secretary-overhauls-chaplain-corps/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p86#a251217p86

A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows.
Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue particip…

"Not Guilty"
A not-at-all-subtle reminder to Trump that he's just the president — and that means his power is limited. And: The Seventh Circuit keeps troop deployment blocked in Illinois.

An interview with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on the company's new Content Signals Policy, which lets sites fine tune how their data can be used by crawlers (Samuel Axon/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/inside-the-web-i…

Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is making sweeping changes to force Google’s hand.

Donald Trump: America First globalist (Marc Caputo/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/17/trump-foreign-policy-focus-marjorie-taylor-greene
http://www.memeorandum.com/251017/p15#a251017p15

An interview with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on the company's new Content Signals Policy, which lets sites fine tune how their data can be used by crawlers (Samuel Axon/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/inside-the-web-i…

Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is making sweeping changes to force Google’s hand.

Five Big Questions (and Zero Predictions) for the U.S. Privacy and AI Landscape in 2026
https://fpf.org/blog/five-big-questions-and-zero-predictions-for-the-u-s-privacy-and-ai-landscape-in-2026/

Der Kampf um Nexperia https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10157

Chamber of Commerce Sues Over Trump's New $100,000 H-1B Visa Fee (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-h1b-visa-fee-lawsuit-chamber-of-commerce-2c55f183
http://www.memeorandum.com/251016/p110#a251016p110

Two Wikipedia contributors disarmed a gunman who threatened to kill himself at WikiConference to protest a policy banning editors who identify as pedophiles (Andy Newman/New York Times)
https://www.

Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference
After the man walked onto the stage at the “Wiki World’s Fair” event and threatened to kill himself, witnesses said, two members of the audience jumped in to stop him.

The debate regarding the “Goldwater rule” has intensified
following President Trump’s recent rambling presentation in Pennsylvania
(Trump rails on affordability ‘hoax’ and flings racist attacks in rally-style speech, 10 December).
As a physician with decades of experience in health policy, I believe the current discourse misses a vital distinction:
the difference between prohibited diagnosis and legitimate observation.
The Goldwater rule was designed to prevent …

A group of former FCC members petition the FCC to repeal its News Distortion policy, invoked by Brendan Carr in the 60 Minutes case, arguing it violates the 1A (Kevin Collier/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/fcc

Former FCC chairs urge agency to repeal policy invoked by Trump administration
A group of former FCC leaders has petitioned the agency to repeal the policy the Trump administration invoked in discussions surrounding Jimmy Kimmel.

Senators Press FBI Over Failure to Investigate Epstein's Lawyer and Accountant (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/senators-press-fbi-over-failure-to-investigate-epsteins-lawyer-and-accountant-9e6b0261
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p93#a251217p93

„Eine neue Ära der Führung“ https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10238

FlightDiffusion: Revolutionising Autonomous Drone Training with Diffusion Models Generating FPV Video
Valerii Serpiva, Artem Lykov, Faryal Batool, Vladislav Kozlovskiy, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14082

FlightDiffusion: Revolutionising Autonomous Drone Training with Diffusion Models Generating FPV Video
We present FlightDiffusion, a diffusion-model-based framework for training autonomous drones from first-person view (FPV) video. Our model generates realistic video sequences from a single frame, enriched with corresponding action spaces to enable reasoning-driven navigation in dynamic environments. Beyond direct policy learning, FlightDiffusion leverages its generative capabilities to synthesize diverse FPV trajectories and state-action pairs, facilitating the creation of large-scale training …

Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2025 report: for the 15th straight year, global internet freedom is in decline; of the 72 countries surveyed, Kenya fell most (Tech Policy Press)
https://www.techpolicy.press/global-internet-freedom-declines-for-…

Global Internet Freedom Declines for 15th Consecutive Year | TechPolicy.Press
Despite funding cuts, Freedom House delivered its annual report on how countries are performing on measures of digital rights and internet freedom.

Judge lifts Trump administration limits on lawmaker visits to ICE jails (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/17/ice-lawmaker-visits-policy-ruling-00695801
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p115#a251217p115

NPR lost access to the Pentagon because they will not sign an unprecedented Defense Department document,
which warns that journalists may lose their press credentials for "soliciting" even unclassified information from federal employees that has not been officially approved for release.
That policy prevents press from doing our job.
Signing that document would make us stenographers parroting press releases, not watchdogs holding government officials accountable.…

The White House says representatives from Microsoft, Meta, Google, and other corporate donors to the $250M ballroom attended a dinner with President Trump (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-…

WaPo joins the NYT, the Atlantic, and the Guardian US in rejecting the Pentagon's new press restrictions ahead of a Monday deadline; OANN will sign the policy (Corbin Bolies/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/washington-post-nyt-reject-pentagon-pr…

Washington Post, NYT and More Reject Trump's Revised Pentagon Press Policy, Citing First Amendment Rights
The Washington Post joined the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Guardian U.S. in spurring the Pentagon’s new press restrictions ahead of its Monday deadline.

Trump's Racially Discriminatory Refugee Policy (Ilya Somin/Reason)
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/11/15/trumps-racially-discriminatory-refugee-policy/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251116/p11#a251116p11

Media across the ideological spectrum said they will not sign the Defense Department’s restrictive new press policy by Tuesday’s afternoon deadline.
The Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN said they wouldn’t sign, as did Newsmax and the Washington Times.

Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said the policy runs counter to the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

News outlets broadly reject Pentagon rules before signing deadline
The Washington Post and other major news outlets have refused to sign the Defense Department’s restrictive new media policy, citing First Amendment concerns.

New York Gov. Hochul: Indian Point won't reopen despite ruling on Hudson River
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5555190-new-york-hochul-indian-point-hudson-river/

Kabul im Fokus https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10156

Journalists from The New York Times will not sign the Pentagon’s revised press pass policy,
which threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment.
Since the policy was first announced, we have expressed concerns that it constrains how journalists can report on the U.S. military,
which is funded by nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars annually.
The public has a right to know how the government and military are operating.
T…

A Statement from The New York Times on the Pentagon’s Press Pass Policy | The New York Times Company
Journalists from The New York Times will not sign the Pentagon’s revised press pass policy, which threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment.

Der Notstandsparagraph der EU https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10236

The NYT says its journalists won't sign the Pentagon's revised press pass policy, saying it threatens to punish them for First-Amendment protected newsgathering (The New York Times Company)
https://www.nytco.com/press/a-statement-fr…

A Statement from The New York Times on the Pentagon’s Press Pass Policy | The New York Times Company
Journalists from The New York Times will not sign the Pentagon’s revised press pass policy, which threatens to punish them for ordinary news gathering protected by the First Amendment.

The Liberty Justice Center
is the litigation arm of the
right-wing Illinois Policy Institute.
It has aggressively backed legal attacks on labor unions
(including the landmark Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court case),
attacked gun safety measures,
and promoted policies that undermine public schools, such as taxpayer-funded vouchers.

The Liberty Justice Center received $1 million in 2021 from the Marcus Foundation,
a charitable giving nonprofit run b…

Liberty Justice Center | Supreme Transparency
The Liberty Justice Center is the litigation arm of the right-wing Illinois Policy Institute. It has aggressively backed legal attacks on labor unions (including the landmark Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court case), attacked gun safety measures, and promoted policies that undermine public schools, such as taxpayer-funded vouchers.

Senators freeze Coast Guard admiral's promotion over swastika, noose policy (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/12/17/coast-guard-swastika-kevin-lunday/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p91#a251217p91

A US judge sentences Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon to 15 years in prison; Kwon pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud charges in August (Cheyenne Ligon/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/12/10/terraform-s-do-kwon-s…

Terra Creator Do Kwon Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison
The Terraform Labs co-founder pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud in August.

Newsom hires former CDC leaders as public health advisers (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5649676-newsom-hires-ex-cdc-officials/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p88#a251215p88

Trump says he is 'considering' marijuana reclassification (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5650130-marijuana-rescheduling-trump/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p110#a251215p110

David Sacks says Anthropic is running a "regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering", responding to Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark's post on AI policy (Dave Lee/Bloomberg)

Duffy pulls $40M from California over English-only trucker rule (Max Rego/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/5557644-duffy-pulls-40m-california-english-only-trucker-rule/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251015/p161#a251015p161

Canada loses its measles elimination status, and the US is close behind (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5606830-vaccination-rates-decline-americas/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251116/p7#a251116p7

Trump Team Plans IRS Overhaul to Enable Pursuit of Left-Leaning Groups (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-irs-investigations-left-leaning-groups-democratic-donors-612a095e
http://www.memeorandum.com/251015/p157#a251015p157

Democracy Now! speaks to William Hartung about his new book
“The Trillion Dollar War Machine”
and who profits from the United States’ runaway military spending that fuels foreign wars.
Hartung says that U.S. policy is “based on profit”
and calls for a rethinking of our foreign entanglements.
“We haven’t won a war in this century.
We’ve caused immense harm.
We’ve spent $8 trillion,” he says

“The Trillion Dollar War Machine”: William Hartung on How U.S. Military Spending Fuels Wars
Democracy Now! speaks to William Hartung about his new book “The Trillion Dollar War Machine” and who profits from the United States’ runaway military spending that fuels foreign wars. Hartung says that U.S. policy is “based on profit” and calls for a rethinking of our foreign entanglements. “We haven’t won a war in this century. We’ve caused immense harm. We’ve spent $8 trillion,” he says.

Nathan Calvin, general counsel of AI safety nonprofit Encode, says OpenAI used intimidation tactics to undermine California's SB 53 while it was being debated (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/10/1…

A 3-person policy nonprofit that worked on California’s AI safety law is publicly accusing OpenAI of intimidation tactics
In a widely read post on social media, the general counsel of Encode said OpenAI used subpoenas and political muscle to intimidate the firm and to undermine California’s new AI safety bill, all while falsely claiming the firm was funded by Elon Musk.

A Statement from NPR on the Pentagon's Press Policy (NPR)
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/13/g-s1-93291/a-statement-from-npr-on-the-pentagons-press-policy
http://www.memeorandum.com/251013/p110#a251013p110

OU Faculty Senate raises concerns with policy suspending faculty members who receive student complaints (Natalie Armour/Oklahoma Daily)
https://www.oudaily.com/news/ou-policy-suspend-professor-complaint-bible-essay-samantha-fulnecky/article_fadf58c7-3632-492e-ac47-386ada314227.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251213/p50#a251213p50

Quarter of CDC staff targeted by layoff notices: Union (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5556514-federal-layoffs-cdc-union/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251015/p88#a251015p88

CDC union blasts lack of transparency from HHS in layoffs (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5555773-trump-cdc-layoffs-impact/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251014/p166#a251014p166

Why Florida is ground zero for coming ObamaCare storm (Lee Ann Anderson/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5640956-rising-healthcare-costs-florida-obamacare-subsidies/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p18#a251215p18

Cassidy says 'I don't care who gets the credit' on ACA subsidies extension (Max Rego/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5648831-cassidy-calls-aca-subsidies/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p4#a251215p4

Army shares identities of two soldiers killed in ISIS ambush in Syria (Mike Brest/Washington Examiner)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense/3917875/army-shares-identities-two-soldiers-killed-isis-ambush-syria/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p67#a251215p67