Tootfinder

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

(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

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/

„Policymakers need to understand that AGI is a contested term.“
https://www.techpolicy.press/most-researchers-do-not-believe-agi-is-imminent-why-do-policymakers-act-otherwise/

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.

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.

„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/#<…

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.”

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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-…

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…

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.

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

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

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/

"Hope is a Thing With Calloused Hands." Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove of the Center for Public Theology/Public Policy at YDS interviews religion author and sociologist Robert P. Jones on the "Advent in a Time of Authoritarianism" series. https://ourmoralmoment.substack.com/p/

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…

“Sometimes the decision making criteria that the leadership uses to make a decision is different than the decision making criteria that might be reflected in scoring, but that really gets to the heart of it,” he said. 
That sounds a lot like #RFKJr's reasoning - Don't trust experts, I'm the one that knows what the right answer.

Lurie doubles down on S.F. permitting contract despite questions of deputy’s impropriety 
Lurie’s policy chief Ned Segal awarded contract to preferred firm despite report finding it "shouldn’t be considered."

“Sometimes the decision making criteria that the leadership uses to make a decision is different than the decision making criteria that might be reflected in scoring, but that really gets to the heart of it,” he said. 
That sounds a lot like #RFKJr's reasoning - Don't trust experts, I'm the one that knows what the right answer.

Lurie doubles down on S.F. permitting contract despite questions of deputy’s impropriety 
Lurie’s policy chief Ned Segal awarded contract to preferred firm despite report finding it "shouldn’t be considered."

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

Didn't realize Katie Wilson identified as a socialist! Cool. https://komonews.c…

Mayor-elect Katie Wilson urges unity, community, collective responsibility in Seattle
Seattle's new Mayor-elect Katie Wilson is set to address the public regarding her election and upcoming role as mayor on Thursday afternoon.

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.

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

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

"Despite widespread belief in climate policy, disinformation still seeds doubt ahead of COP30"
#COP30 #ClimateSummit

Climate disinformation surges ahead of COP30
A new report looks at the climate disinformation online ecosystem

Friday Links 25-26
Short, but with lots of good stuff. The fad of engineering management, drug policy in Spain, and Mr. TIFF are my favourites.
Have a lovely weekend!
https://christof.damian.net/2025/11/friday-links-25-26.html

Friday Links 25-26
Short, but with lots of good stuff. The fad of engineering management, drug policy in Spain, and Mr. TIFF are my favourites. Have a lovely w...

Token-Level Policy Optimization: Linking Group-Level Rewards to Token-Level Aggregation via Markov Likelihood
Xingyu Lin, Yilin Wen, En Wang, Du Su, Wenbin Liu, Chenfu Bao, Zhonghou Lv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09369

Token-Level Policy Optimization: Linking Group-Level Rewards to Token-Level Aggregation via Markov Likelihood
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), particularly by boosting their mathematical performance. However, GRPO and related entropy-regularization methods still face challenges rooted in the sparse token rewards inherent to chain-of-thought (CoT). Current approaches often rely on undifferentiated token-level entropy adjustments, which frequently lead to entropy collapse or model collapse. In this work, we propose…

Boundary-Guided Policy Optimization for Memory-efficient RL of Diffusion Large Language Models
Nianyi Lin, Jiajie Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11683 http…

Boundary-Guided Policy Optimization for Memory-efficient RL of Diffusion Large Language Models
A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) lies in the intractability of their likelihood functions, which are essential for the RL objective, necessitating corresponding approximation in each training step. While existing methods approximate the log-likelihoods by their evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) via customized Monte Carlo (MC) sampling, the forward computational graphs of all MC samples need to be retained for the gradient computation…

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

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.

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

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

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

SCOOP'D: Learning Mixed-Liquid-Solid Scooping via Sim2Real Generative Policy
Kuanning Wang, Yongchong Gu, Yuqian Fu, Zeyu Shangguan, Sicheng He, Xiangyang Xue, Yanwei Fu, Daniel Seita
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11566

SCOOP'D: Learning Mixed-Liquid-Solid Scooping via Sim2Real Generative Policy
Scooping items with tools such as spoons and ladles is common in daily life, ranging from assistive feeding to retrieving items from environmental disaster sites. However, developing a general and autonomous robotic scooping policy is challenging since it requires reasoning about complex tool-object interactions. Furthermore, scooping often involves manipulating deformable objects, such as granular media or liquids, which is challenging due to their infinite-dimensional configuration spaces and…

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.

Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader for Decoupled Bandits: Best-of-Both-Worlds and Practicality
Chaiwon Kim, Jongyeong Lee, Min-hwan Oh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12152 https://

Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader for Decoupled Bandits: Best-of-Both-Worlds and Practicality
We study the decoupled multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, where the learner selects one arm for exploration and one arm for exploitation in each round. The loss of the explored arm is observed but not counted, while the loss of the exploited arm is incurred without being observed. We propose a policy within the Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) framework using Pareto perturbations. Our policy achieves (near-)optimal regret regardless of the environment, i.e., Best-of-Both-Worlds (BOBW): constan…

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

SPG: Sandwiched Policy Gradient for Masked Diffusion Language Models
Chengyu Wang, Paria Rashidinejad, DiJia Su, Song Jiang, Sid Wang, Siyan Zhao, Cai Zhou, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Feiyu Chen, Tommi Jaakkola, Yuandong Tian, Bo Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09541

SPG: Sandwiched Policy Gradient for Masked Diffusion Language Models
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as an efficient alternative to autoregressive models due to their ability to decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, aligning dLLMs with human preferences or task-specific rewards via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging because their intractable log-likelihood precludes the direct application of standard policy gradient methods. While prior work uses surrogates like the evidence lower bound (ELBO), these one-sided approximations c…

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/

Ha!
"Synology Reverses Policy Banning Third-Party HDDs After NAS sales plummet"
https://www.guru3d.com/story/synology-reverses-policy-banning-thirdparty-hdds-after-nas-sales-plummet/

Synology Reverses Policy Banning Third-Party HDDs After NAS sales plummet
Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives.

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

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

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/

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 …

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

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.

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

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

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

Geometry-aware Policy Imitation
Yiming Li, Nael Darwiche, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sichao Liu, Yilun Du, Auke Ijspeert, Sylvain Calinon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08787 https://…

Geometry-aware Policy Imitation
We propose a Geometry-aware Policy Imitation (GPI) approach that rethinks imitation learning by treating demonstrations as geometric curves rather than collections of state-action samples. From these curves, GPI derives distance fields that give rise to two complementary control primitives: a progression flow that advances along expert trajectories and an attraction flow that corrects deviations. Their combination defines a controllable, non-parametric vector field that directly guides robot be…

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

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

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.

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.

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

Ukrainians sue US chip firms for powering Russian drones, missiles - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/ukrainians-sue-us-chip-firms-for-powering-russian-drones-missiles/

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.

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.

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)

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

School district bans trans athletes in defiance of state policy - LGBTQ Nation
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/10/school-district-bans-trans-athletes-in-defiance-of-state-policy/

Longtime Pentagon reporter Tom Bowman explains why NPR won't be signing on to the Pentagon's press policy: "signing that document would make us stenographers" (Tom Bowman/NPR)
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/g-s1-93297/pentagon-reporter-opini…

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.

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

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.

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.

Senate advances annual defense policy bill (Al Weaver/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5650254-senate-ndaa-national-defense-authorization-act/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p128#a251215p128

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

Newsmax, The Washington Times, and the Washington Examiner say they will not sign the Pentagon's new press restrictions; OANN says it has signed the policy (Scott Nover/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/20

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.

An interview with Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on copyright lawsuits that threatened to bankrupt the nonprofit, fair use, IA's future, AI, and more (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost
“We survived, but it wiped out the library,” Internet Archive’s founder says.

Der Spannungsfall https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10198

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

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

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

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

Trump says he was moved by 'good round of applause' to call for Netanyahu pardon (Ashleigh Fields/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5554349-trump-advocates-netanyahu-pardon-applause/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251014/p68#a251014p68

Media including Fox News overwhelmingly reject Pentagon press policy (Scott Nover/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/10/14/fox-news-among-broadcasters-refusing-sign-pentagon-press-pledge/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251014/p165#a251014p165