Tootfinder

How Kennedy's overhaul could make vaccines more expensive (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5350100-acip-replacement-vaccine-policy-impact/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p47#a250615p47

Interesting article on how #GenAI can be used effectively in a classroom setting, what methods the instructor uses to make sure students learn how and when (not) to use it, and how they ensure the students still learn what they need to learn.

Lawmakers are poised to extend Pell Grant eligibility to short-term credential programs.
With few guardrails in place, it could incentivize an explosion in unaccredited and for-profit providers.
https://www.insidehighered.com/ne…

Workforce Pell Would Extend Grants to Unaccredited Programs
Lawmakers are poised to extend Pell eligibility to short-term credential programs. With few guardrails in place, it could incentivize an explosion in unaccredited and for-profit providers.

Meta Users Feel Less Safe Since It Weakened ‘Hateful Conduct’ Policy, Survey Finds https://www.404media.co/meta-users-feel-less-safe-since-it-weakened-hateful-conduct-policy-survey-finds/

Vom Recht auf Angriffskrieg https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10016

Trump approval steady at 42%, support weakens for his immigration policy, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds (Jason Lange/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-approval-steady-42-support-weakens-his-immigration-policy-reutersipsos-2025-06-16/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p129#a250616p129

The UK CMA launches a probe into the planned $13.25B merger of ad giants Omnicom and Interpublic to assess potential competition reduction in the UK ad market (DhanushVignesh Babu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/…

Digital payment policy impact analysis on the intention to use QRIS (quick response code Indonesian standard) during COVID-19 pandemic
Wishnu Badrawani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11695

Digital payment policy impact analysis on the intention to use QRIS (quick response code Indonesian standard) during COVID-19 pandemic
This study aims to evaluate the adoption of Bank Indonesia's QRIS (Quick Response code Indonesian Standard) payment system policy. The evaluation is hindered by the contemporaneous emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which acts as a confounding factor in adopting the new payment instrument. To disentangle the impact of central bank policy from the pandemic, a novel variation of the model of Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is proposed and is estimated using purposive s…

The New MAGA World Order
“Rather than following a foreign policy that ignores values altogether,” writes @jonathanchait, “Trump has a clear preference for values that are, in the American context, historically anomalous or—to put it in less neutral terms—bad”:
(No paywall)

Trump’s Immoral World Order
This week’s Gulf tour revealed that Trump’s transactional foreign policy doesn’t lack values. It just has really bad ones.

Structural Characterizations of Marginal Policy Effects
Zhixin Wang, Yu Zhang, Zhengyu Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11694 https://

Structural Characterizations of Marginal Policy Effects
This paper investigates the structural interpretation of the marginal policy effect (MPE) within nonseparable models. We demonstrate that, for a smooth functional of the outcome distribution, the MPE equals its functional derivative evaluated at the outcome-conditioned weighted average structural derivative. This equivalence is definitional rather than identification-based. Building on this theoretical result, we propose an alternative identification strategy for the MPE that complements existi…

EU would require €241-286 billion investment to keep its nuclear power capacity roughly at today's level, draft shows. It would increase from 97 now to 109 GW by 2050; that's 12%, sharply reducing its share of growing overall electricity demand.

Trump governs today in the wake of the near-complete dismantling of checks and balances on the executive branch -- at least in the foreign policy and national security realm.
Since the 9/11 attacks, Congress has granted the presidency more and more power over foreign affairs
and declined to take any of it back,
and the Supreme Court has been reluctant to provide any meaningful restraints.
Trump inherited an ever-expanding national security apparatus that operates wi…

Imperial President at Home, Emperor Abroad
American foreign policy in an age of unrestrained executive power.

Sources said journalists’ Microsoft accounts were compromised and could have granted the intruder access to work emails they sent and received. The reporters targeted include those on the national security and economic policy teams, including some who write about China.
No paywall.
Cyberattack on Washington Post Strikes Journalists’ Email Accounts

I wish this were ironic, but it's not. The article itself has intelligent-sounding sentences, which a Web search shows up on other sites. The publisher claims to have a "strict plagiarism policy"…which I'm realizing can be read two different ways.

Monetary policy, supply shocks, and retail energy prices https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988325004220 @…

Logarithmic Smoothing for Adaptive PAC-Bayesian Off-Policy Learning
Maxime Haddouche, Otmane Sakhi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10664 https://

Logarithmic Smoothing for Adaptive PAC-Bayesian Off-Policy Learning
Off-policy learning serves as the primary framework for learning optimal policies from logged interactions collected under a static behavior policy. In this work, we investigate the more practical and flexible setting of adaptive off-policy learning, where policies are iteratively refined and re-deployed to collect higher-quality data. Building on the success of PAC-Bayesian learning with Logarithmic Smoothing (LS) in static settings, we extend this framework to the adaptive scenario using tool…

I’ve long been a fan of the Check My Ads people. Now they’re launching a really ambitious-looking “Policy Platform” aimed at cleaning up the online-advertising business. My belief is that anyone who’s had much exposure to that business or to “AdTech” probably agrees that cleanup is called for. Check it out: https://checkmyads.org/policy/

The UK CMA launches a probe into the planned $13.25B merger of ad giants Omnicom and Interpublic to assess potential competition reduction in the UK ad market (DhanushVignesh Babu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/…

Big Tech quietly sponsors Trump’s military parade party
#resist

Big Tech quietly sponsors Trump’s military parade party
Though big tech companies have downplayed their involvement in funding this weekend’s military parade, the event’s organizer, America250, has released statements confirming involvement from Amazon, Palantir and Oracle.

Policy-Based Trajectory Clustering in Offline Reinforcement Learning
Hao Hu, Xinqi Wang, Simon Shaolei Du
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09202 https://

Policy-Based Trajectory Clustering in Offline Reinforcement Learning
We introduce a novel task of clustering trajectories from offline reinforcement learning (RL) datasets, where each cluster center represents the policy that generated its trajectories. By leveraging the connection between the KL-divergence of offline trajectory distributions and a mixture of policy-induced distributions, we formulate a natural clustering objective. To solve this, we propose Policy-Guided K-means (PG-Kmeans) and Centroid-Attracted Autoencoder (CAAE). PG-Kmeans iteratively trains…

Welcome to Berlin Buzzwords 2025! 
Be sure not to miss our keynote speaker, @…, who will be giving a talk on „Unpacking Digital Sovereignty: How to avoid fueling the nationalist rise," which commences at 9:35 am at stage Kesselhaus.
 
Learn more:

Unpacking Digital Sovereignty: How to avoid fueling the nationalist rise
With the new ruling coalition of Trump, Musk and Big Tech, European digital sovereignty seems to be the widely accepted solution to break free from US companies that are used to threaten European governments. The EU is reviving industrial policy and is willing to invest a lot of money into digital sovereignty - but which problems exactly should it address, and what should be part of the solution? This talk shows that digital sovereignty is prone to open the door to a nationalist agenda which fa…

The ever wonderful Marina Hyde to remind us just how much of a policy failure the billionaires among us actually are..
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/20/lauren-sanchez-hen-do-humanitarian-mission-paris-jeff-bezos?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.theverge.com/policy/685690/big-tech-trump-military-parade-america250

Big Tech quietly sponsors Trump’s military parade party
Though big tech companies have downplayed their involvement in funding this weekend’s military parade, the event’s organizer, America250, has released statements confirming involvement from Amazon, Palantir and Oracle.

Judge orders many NIH grants restored, calling cancellation unlawful (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5353385-trump-administration-grants-ruling/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p134#a250616p134

The New MAGA World Order
“Rather than following a foreign policy that ignores values altogether,” writes @jonathanchait, “Trump has a clear preference for values that are, in the American context, historically anomalous or—to put it in less neutral terms—bad”:
(No paywall)

Trump’s Immoral World Order
This week’s Gulf tour revealed that Trump’s transactional foreign policy doesn’t lack values. It just has really bad ones.

Multi-Loco: Unifying Multi-Embodiment Legged Locomotion via Reinforcement Learning Augmented Diffusion
Shunpeng Yang, Zhen Fu, Zhefeng Cao, Guo Junde, Patrick Wensing, Wei Zhang, Hua Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11470

Multi-Loco: Unifying Multi-Embodiment Legged Locomotion via Reinforcement Learning Augmented Diffusion
Generalizing locomotion policies across diverse legged robots with varying morphologies is a key challenge due to differences in observation/action dimensions and system dynamics. In this work, we propose Multi-Loco, a novel unified framework combining a morphology-agnostic generative diffusion model with a lightweight residual policy optimized via reinforcement learning (RL). The diffusion model captures morphology-invariant locomotion patterns from diverse cross-embodiment datasets, improving…

Those who are alive today because they received vaccinations, breathed clean air, drank clean water... don't know that is why they are alive.
And all those hundreds of thousands of USA citizens that will die due to this administration killing life saving health care programs and life saving environmental and food safety policy won't know they died due to who we chose to elect. But they will still be dead.

This is about racist Fat Nixon "Making America White Again", not 'immigration' policy.
Asians Americans: If you think this is about illegal immigration... wait 'til they come for us.
☑️ Fact-checking Over 12,000 of Trump’s Quotes About Immigrants
https://www.

Fact-checking Trump's Quotes About Immigrants
Trump repeats false and misleading claims on immigration, an analysis of 12,000 statements shows.

Minnesota Shootings Shake Capitol Hill, Spark Security Fears (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/minnesota-lawmakers-shooting-response-political-violence-958959d4
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p11#a250615p11

Trump admin must rehire immigrant advocates fired by DOGE
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/cannot-just-simply-disregard-it-judge-orders-trump-admin-to-uphold-biden-era-agreement-over-family-border-separation-policy/

Cross-Border Data Flows in Africa: Examining Policy Approaches and Pathways to Regulatory Interoperability
https://fpf.org/blog/cross-border-data-flows-in-africa-examining-policy-approaches-and-pathways…

Altman's iris-scanning orbs may have us in a privacy tizzy, but let's not forget that Zuck is hoping to recoup the $60B he lost on VR by gathering data in Meta's Ray-Bans—for AI, yes, but probably also to personalize ads you won't be able to look away from https://www.

“Legitimate interests is now our legal basis for using your information to improve Meta Products.”
Alright, Zuck. 😂
Here’s what's included:
https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy/?section_id=18.4-LegitimateInterestsWeRely

US-Hospitals are no longer required to perform emergency abortions in order to save a pregnant person’s life. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/pro-life-admin-nixes-policy-requiring-lifesaving-abortions

White House denies reporting by Guardian on VA benefits: 'Totally FALSE story' (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5353202-va-hospitals-report-white-house-denial/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p133#a250616p133

A heady throng of tech billionaires, ministers, corporate titans and the king of the Netherlands have convened in Sweden for the 71st Bilderberg meeting
– the publicity-shy annual policy conference that has long sustained conspiracy theorists
– hosted this year by the fabulously wealthy Wallenberg family.
The four days of transatlantic talks are taking place at the swanky Grand hotel,
which is owned, like so much else in Sweden, by the Wallenbergs.
The Swedis…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11862 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

Q-Policy: Quantum-Enhanced Policy Evaluation for Scalable Reinforcement Learning
We propose Q-Policy, a hybrid quantum-classical reinforcement learning (RL) framework that mathematically accelerates policy evaluation and optimization by exploiting quantum computing primitives. Q-Policy encodes value functions in quantum superposition, enabling simultaneous evaluation of multiple state-action pairs via amplitude encoding and quantum parallelism. We introduce a quantum-enhanced policy iteration algorithm with provable polynomial reductions in sample complexity for the evaluat…

Continuous Policy and Value Iteration for Stochastic Control Problems and Its Convergence
Qi Feng, Gu Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08121 https://…

Continuous Policy and Value Iteration for Stochastic Control Problems and Its Convergence
We introduce a continuous policy-value iteration algorithm where the approximations of the value function of a stochastic control problem and the optimal control are simultaneously updated through Langevin-type dynamics. This framework applies to both the entropy-regularized relaxed control problems and the classical control problems, with infinite horizon. We establish policy improvement and demonstrate convergence to the optimal control under the monotonicity condition of the Hamiltonian. By …

Mathematical Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Utilizing Machine Learning Tools for Assessing the Impact of Climate Lobbying
Andrew Jacoby, Samiran Ghosh, Malay Banerjee, Aditi Ghosh, Padmanabhan Seshaiyer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09617

Mathematical Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Utilizing Machine Learning Tools for Assessing the Impact of Climate Lobbying
Climate policy and legislation has a significant influence on both domestic and global responses to the pressing environmental challenges of our time. The effectiveness of such climate legislation is closely tied to the complex dynamics among elected officials, a dynamic significantly shaped by the relentless efforts of lobbying. This project aims to develop a novel compartmental model to forecast the trajectory of climate legislation within the United States. By understanding the dynamics surr…

"The British people want peace. The government’s continued support for Israel must be made untenable. The Gaza Inquiry Bill, and the “red line” Palestine solidarity campaigners drew around Parliament yesterday, help us to do that."
Corbyn’s Gaza Inquiry Bill reflects public opinion – Starmer’s pro-war policy does not | Morning Star

🌍🛰️ How do NRENs & RRENs support Earth Observation research?
At our April infoshare with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), RedCLARA & ASREN, we explored how R&E networks enable Earth Observation research, supporting data access, policy, training, and cross-border collaboration.
Daniela Brauner also shared these insights at GEO Global Forum 2025 last week.
📅 Don’t miss Part 2 of the infoshare series on 27 May!
🔗 Register today:

Infoshare Series on Earth Observations Support Through NRENs - Part 2

Abortion providers devastated by political killings, hit list (Alejandra O'Connell-Domenech/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5353386-abortion-providers-targeted-missouri-shooting/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p135#a250616p135

Practical Improvements of A/B Testing with Off-Policy Estimation
Sakhi Otmane, Gilotte Alexandre, Rohde David
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10677 https://

Practical Improvements of A/B Testing with Off-Policy Estimation
We address the problem of A/B testing, a widely used protocol for evaluating the potential improvement achieved by a new decision system compared to a baseline. This protocol segments the population into two subgroups, each exposed to a version of the system and estimates the improvement as the difference between the measured effects. In this work, we demonstrate that the commonly used difference-in-means estimator, while unbiased, can be improved. We introduce a family of unbiased off-policy e…

Influential scientists shape knowledge flows between science and IGO policy
Kimitaka Asatani, Yurie Iwata, Yuta Tomokiyo, Basil Mahfouz, Masaru Yarime, Ichiro Sakata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06753

Influential scientists shape knowledge flows between science and IGO policy
Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) increasingly rely on scientific evidence, yet the pathways through which scientific research enters policy remain opaque. By linking 230,737 scientific papers cited in IGO policy documents (2015-2023) to their authors and collaboration networks, we identify a small group of policy-influential scientists (PI-Sci) who dominate this knowledge flow. These scientists form tightly interconnected, internationally spanning co-authorship networks and achieve policy…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13809 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

Characterization of Efficient Influence Function for Off-Policy Evaluation Under Optimal Policies
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) provides a powerful framework for estimating the value of a counterfactual policy using observational data, without the need for additional experimentation. Despite recent progress in robust and efficient OPE across various settings, rigorous efficiency analysis of OPE under an estimated optimal policy remains limited. In this paper, we establish a concise characterization of the efficient influence function (EIF) for the value function under optimal policy within ca…

The benefits don't stop at bringing a five year old to the Oval Office …
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/trump-is-forcing-states-to-funnel-grant-money-to-starlink-senate-democrats-say/

Trump and his allies wasted little time in branding the people protesting against immigration enforcement raids in Los Angeles as “insurrectionists”.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy
– particularly the vindictive kind
– spoke darkly of a “violent insurrection”.
JD Vance, the vice-president, inveighed against “insurrectionists carrying foreign flags” on the streets of the nation’s second-biggest city.
It didn’t escape notice that …

I really feel for JLCPCB. With all the visible strike-throughs on their tariff FAQ, you can see they're *trying* to keep track of the febrile toddler's changes, but seem to have just given up back mid-May https://jlcpcb.com/help/article/us-tariff-policy-faq

OH:
In other words, this is a bad policy that would only be pursued by people who hadn't thought through the consequences that probably harms everyone for no reason.
#uspol

By corporate policy you're not allowed to cuss at the Google AI

„Vom Trump-Tornado lernen“ https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/news/detail/10013

I wrote about why Zohran Mamdani's free bus fare policy is a good idea actually, and the difference between thinking about transit as a consultant versus as a voter and activist.
(public replies to this toot will appear as comments)
https://scott.mn/2025/06/11/consultant

Consultant's mindset, or why Jarrett Walker is wrong about free buses

The UK's FCA plans to lift its ban on offering crypto exchange traded notes to retail investors "to support UK growth and competitiveness" (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/06/06/uk…

UK cyber agency pushes for 'strategic policy agenda' as government efforts stall https://therecord.media/ncsc-pushes-uk-government-create-strategic-cyber-policy-agenda

Time-Unified Diffusion Policy with Action Discrimination for Robotic Manipulation
Ye Niu, Sanping Zhou, Yizhe Li, Ye Den, Le Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09422

Time-Unified Diffusion Policy with Action Discrimination for Robotic Manipulation
In many complex scenarios, robotic manipulation relies on generative models to estimate the distribution of multiple successful actions. As the diffusion model has better training robustness than other generative models, it performs well in imitation learning through successful robot demonstrations. However, the diffusion-based policy methods typically require significant time to iteratively denoise robot actions, which hinders real-time responses in robotic manipulation. Moreover, existing dif…

Identification and Inference of Partial Effects in Sharp Regression Kink Designs
Zhixin Wang, Zhengyu Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11663 https://

Identification and Inference of Partial Effects in Sharp Regression Kink Designs
The partial effect refers to the impact of a change in a target variable D on the distribution of an outcome variable Y . This study examines the identification and inference of a wide range of partial effects at the threshold in the sharp regression kink (RK) design under general policy interventions. We establish a unifying framework for conducting inference on the effect of an infinitesimal change in D on smooth functionals of the distribution of Y, particularly when D is endogenous and inst…

Reusing Trajectories in Policy Gradients Enables Fast Convergence
Alessandro Montenegro, Federico Mansutti, Marco Mussi, Matteo Papini, Alberto Maria Metelli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06178

Reusing Trajectories in Policy Gradients Enables Fast Convergence
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a class of effective reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly when dealing with continuous control problems. These methods learn the parameters of parametric policies via stochastic gradient ascent, typically using on-policy trajectory data to estimate the policy gradient. However, such reliance on fresh data makes them sample-inefficient. Indeed, vanilla PG methods require $O(ε^{-2})$ trajectories to reach an $ε$-approximate stationary point. A common …

Cassidy in a bind as RFK Jr. blows up vaccine policy (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5345378-kennedy-cassidy-vaccine-policy/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250612/p14#a250612p14

Justin Sun-linked BiT Global dismisses with prejudice its lawsuit against Coinbase for delisting wBTC; the delisting followed Coinbase launching rival cbBTC (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/06/07…

Coinbase, BiT Global End Legal Fight Over WBTC Delisting
BiT Global agreed to dismiss its lawsuit against Coinbase, with each party covering its own legal expenses.

FPF Launches Major Initiative to Study Economic and Policy Implications of AgeTech
https://fpf.org/press-releases/fpf-launches-major-initiative-to-study-economic-and-policy-implications-of-agetech/

Rezension: Der Tech-Krieg https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10011

Trump’s war against DEI isn’t going so well in Virginia
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/5337479-trump-dei-policy-fairfax-schools/

Trump Disclosure Shows $57 Million in Earnings From Early Crypto Push (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-disclosure-shows-57-million-in-earnings-from-early-crypto-push-2c7dd19a?st=K5aK4n
http://www.memeorandum.com/250614/p88#a250614p88

Trump Planning to Extend TikTok Deadline—Again
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-tiktok-ban-extension-f242c36a?st=KTCYtf&reflink=article_copyURL_share

I nearly gave my credit card to a legit-looking Maine business, until I noticed their “privacy policy” linked to Wikipedia. That’s not laziness but AI-generated HTML vibecoded into place without review. And a lot more can go wrong than a missing legal page.
https://www.

ISP Frontier Communications settles a lawsuit from record labels that demanded broadband users accused of piracy be dropped; SCOTUS may hear Cox's similar case (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

ISP settles with record labels that demanded mass termination of Internet users
One piracy case is over, but the biggest one could be decided by Supreme Court.

Indian Creek Village,
the “Billionaire Bunker” near Miami,
couldn’t get approval to discharge its waste into a neighboring town’s sewer lines.
So the village quietly persuaded state lawmakers to force the issue.
In a world where billionaires are increasingly exercising political clout,
the fight over sewage in Indian Creek suggests the degree to which their influence is extending not just to policy in the White House and Congress but to some of the most foundat…

A Billionaire Island Where Bezos and Kushner Live Is Fighting Over Sewage
Indian Creek Village, the “Billionaire Bunker” near Miami, couldn’t get approval to discharge its waste into a neighboring town’s sewer lines. So the village quietly persuaded state lawmakers to come to the rescue.

Grenzabschottung im Alleingang https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/9969

Filing: OpenAI seeks to block a May 13 court order requiring it to preserve all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats, arguing it poses a risk to users' privacy (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats
OpenAI defends privacy of hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users.

FreqPolicy: Efficient Flow-based Visuomotor Policy via Frequency Consistency
Yifei Su, Ning Liu, Dong Chen, Zhen Zhao, Kun Wu, Meng Li, Zhiyuan Xu, Zhengping Che, Jian Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08822

FreqPolicy: Efficient Flow-based Visuomotor Policy via Frequency Consistency
Generative modeling-based visuomotor policies have been widely adopted in robotic manipulation attributed to their ability to model multimodal action distributions. However, the high inference cost of multi-step sampling limits their applicability in real-time robotic systems. To address this issue, existing approaches accelerate the sampling process in generative modeling-based visuomotor policies by adapting acceleration techniques originally developed for image generation. Despite this progr…

Vietnam ends two-child policy as birth rate hits record low | The Straits Times
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/vietnam-ends-two-child-policy-to-stem-falling-birth-rates

Redaktionspause https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/9944

The US taxpayer is going to be on the hook for all the soldiers, tanks, and planes that appear in Donald Trump’s military parade.
But several major tech companies are paying for the festivities along the parade route.
According to recent statements from America250, #Oracle, #Amazon,

Big Tech quietly sponsors Trump’s military parade party
Though big tech companies have downplayed their involvement in funding this weekend’s military parade, the event’s organizer, America250, has released statements confirming involvement from Amazon, Palantir and Oracle.

Top Lawyers Leaving Willkie Farr After Law Firm's Deal With Trump (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/top-lawyers-leaving-willkie-farr-after-law-firms-deal-with-trump-97f89ef9?st=Ksyrid&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
http://www.memeorandum.com/250613/p145#a250613p145

Extremist's Advice for 'No Kings' Protests: 'Shoot a Couple, the Rest Will Go Home ' (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/no-kings-protest-proud-boys-df066df0?st=93NAgP&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
http://www.memeorandum.com/250613/p144#a250613p144

Microsoft hires ex-Biden administration lawyer Lisa Monaco as president of global affairs and promotes ex-Trump official C.J. Mahoney to general counsel (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/30/microsoft-policy-promotes-trump-official…

Exclusive: Microsoft promotes former Trump official, hires ex-Biden lawyer
C.J. Mahoney and Lisa Monaco join the company's policy and legal leadership.

How to craft a deep reinforcement learning policy for wind farm flow control
Elie Kadoche, Pascal Bianchi, Florence Carton, Philippe Ciblat, Damien Ernst
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06204

How to craft a deep reinforcement learning policy for wind farm flow control
Within wind farms, wake effects between turbines can significantly reduce overall energy production. Wind farm flow control encompasses methods designed to mitigate these effects through coordinated turbine control. Wake steering, for example, consists in intentionally misaligning certain turbines with the wind to optimize airflow and increase power output. However, designing a robust wake steering controller remains challenging, and existing machine learning approaches are limited to quasi-sta…

Three of the new advisers appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to guide the government on immunization policy
took part in lawsuits casting doubt on the safety or efficacy of vaccines,
public records show.
In dismissing all 17 members of an influential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel on Monday,
Mr. Kennedy cited what he said was a history of conflicts of interest that he claimed made those experts a “rubber stamp” on approving …

Kennedy’s New Vaccine Advisers Helped Lawyers Raise Doubts About Their Safety
Three of the health secretary’s picks to replace fired members of an influential panel that sets U.S. vaccine policies have filed statements in court flagging concerns about vaccines.

TGRPO :Fine-tuning Vision-Language-Action Model via Trajectory-wise Group Relative Policy Optimization
Zengjue Chen, Runliang Niu, He Kong, Qi Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08440

TGRPO :Fine-tuning Vision-Language-Action Model via Trajectory-wise Group Relative Policy Optimization
Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across diverse scenes, tasks, and robotic platforms when pretrained at large-scale datasets. However, these models still require task-specific fine-tuning in novel environments, a process that relies almost exclusively on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using static trajectory datasets. Such approaches neither allow robot to interact with environment nor do they leverage feedback from live ex…

„Der automatisierte Seeluftkrieg“ https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10009

ISP Frontier Communications settles a lawsuit from record labels that demanded broadband users accused of piracy be dropped; SCOTUS may hear Cox's similar case (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

ISP settles with record labels that demanded mass termination of Internet users
One piracy case is over, but the biggest one could be decided by Supreme Court.

Trump's former surgeon general rips RFK Jr.'s purge of vaccine board (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5346914-trump-former-surgeon-general-vaccines/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250612/p117#a250612p117

China's Hainan province tests letting some corporate users bypass the Great Firewall and access the global internet, as it seeks to become a free-trade port (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy…

China will drop the Great Firewall for some users, but only in southern Hainan
Employees of companies operating in the island province can apply for the ‘Global Connect’ scheme, but some content will remain restricted.

Piraterie in der Ostsee (II) https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10008

The dollar sank to its lowest level in more than three years on Thursday
and the FTSE 100 closed at a record high as Donald Trump’s latest trade threats and the weakening economy appeared to bring forward interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.
Foreign exchange traders sold the dollar in favour of the yen and the euro,
which both climbed by about 1% against the US currency to leave it almost 10% down on its value against a basket of currencies since the beginning of the …

Sources: Trump plans to extend TikTok's June 19 sale deadline; ByteDance told the White House China wouldn't approve a deal until there are trade negotiations (Alex Leary/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trum…

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has said Floridians have a right to hit protesters with their car if they need to "flee for your safety."
DeSantis was speaking on The Rubin Report on Wednesday when he said:
"We also have a policy that if you're driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle,
and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety.
"And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people,
tha…

Ron DeSantis Says Floridians Have Right to Hit Protesters With Cars
"That's their fault for impinging on you," Florida's governor said.

„Krieg geht alle an“ https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/9942

Russian attacks show with clarity that Putin is mocking Trump, Poland's Sikorski says
Arriving for talks in Rome, Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski said the continued Russian attacks show that
“Vladimir Putin of Russia is mocking the peace efforts of president Donald Trump.”
He also stressed that Europe is stepping up its plans for defence, with increased spending.
Talking about the meeting ahead, he said leaders needed to
“strategise about what to do…

Befreiung ohne Befreier (II) https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/9965

Watch live: NIH director testifies in Senate amid deep cuts to research (The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5341647-nih-director-testifies-senate-cuts/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250610/p68#a250610p68

Thailand files charges against, and orders the blocking of crypto exchanges Bybit, CoinEx, OKX, 1000X, and XT.com from June 28 for operating without a license (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/05/30

Thailand Will Block Access to OKX, Bybit, 1000X and XT.com From June 28, Citing Lack of License
OKX, Bybit, 1000x, and XT are among the exchanges that will be blocked in Thailand by the end of June.

Hegseth cites 2020 Minnesota riots as reason for sending National Guard into LA (Mike Brest/Washington Examiner)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense/3436556/hegseth-cites-2020-minnesota-riots-reason-national-guard-los-angeles/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250610/p94#a250610p94

The big, beautiful bill is bad news for student loans (Abdallah Fayyad/Vox)
https://www.vox.com/policy/415793/big-beautiful-bill-student-loans-pell-grants
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p52#a250609p52

What's a Medicaid cut? Senate GOP tiptoes around $800B question (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5335867-senate-gop-medicaid-cuts/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p23#a250609p23

Social Security Chief Says Musk's DOGE Figures Heavily in Agency's Plans (Anne Tergesen/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/social-security-chief-says-musks-doge-figures-heavily-in-agencys-plans-45cc0f35
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p72#a250609p72

Minnesota state lawmaker claims on House floor she is in the US illegally (Asher Notheis/Washington Examiner)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/immigration/3435894/minnesota-kaohly-vang-her-claims-illegal-immigrant/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p140#a250609p140

Republican lawmakers back Trump administration in the heat of Los Angeles riots (Ally Goelz/Washington Examiner)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/immigration/3435335/republican-lawmakers-support-trump-administration-los-angeles-riots/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p113#a250609p113

Republican Policy Bill Would Add $2.4 Trillion to Debt, Budget Office Says (Andrew Duehren/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/us/politics/trump-policy-bill-deficit-estimate.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250604/p121#a250604p121

Republicans urge Trump to extinguish Los Angeles protests ASAP: 'Put down the mob' (Brady Knox/Washington Examiner)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/immigration/3434939/republicans-urge-trump-crush-los-angeles-protests-asap/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250608/p53#a250608p53