A US Army website for its bases in Bavaria, Germany published a list of food banks in the area that could help soldiers and staff as part of its “Shutdown Guidance,” the subtext being that soldiers and base employees might need to obtain free food from German government services during the government shutdown.

The webpage included information about which services are affected by the ongoing shutdown of the federal government, FAQs about how to work during a furlough, and links to apply for emergency loans. After the shutdown guidance’s publication, the Army changed it and removed the list of food banks, but the original has been archived here.

The shutdown of the American federal government is affecting all its employees, from TSA agents to the troops, and the longer people go without paychecks, the more they’re turning to nonprofits and other services to survive. American military bases are like small cities with their own communities, stores, and schools. The US Army Garrison Bavaria covers four bases spread across the German state of Bavaria and is one of the largest garrisons in the world, hosting around 40,000 troops and civilians.

Like many other American military websites, the Garrison’s has stopped updating, but did publish a page of “Shutdown Guidance” to help the people living on its bases navigate the shutdown. At the very bottom of the page there was a “Running list of German support organizations for your kit bags” that included various local food banks. It listed Tafel Deutschland, which it called an “umbrella organization [that] distributes food to people in poverty through its more than 970 local food banks,” Foodsharing e.V, and Essen für Alle (Food for everyone).

The guidance also provided a link to the German version of the Too Good to Go App, which it described as a service that sells surprise bags of food to reduce food waste. “These bags contain unsellable but perfectly good food from shops, cafés, and restaurants, which can be picked up at a reduced price. To obtain one of these bags, it must be reserved in the app and picked up at the store during a specified time window, presenting the reservation receipt in the app,” the US Army Garrison Bavaria’s shutdown guidance page said.

According to snapshots on the Wayback Machine, the list of food banks was up this morning but was removed sometime in the past few hours. The US Army Garrison Bavaria did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment about the inclusion of the food banks on its shutdown guidance page.

The White House has kept paying America’s troops during the shut down, but not without struggle. At the end of October, the Trump administration accepted a $130 million donation from the billionaire Timothy Mellon to help keep America’s military paid. Though initially anonymous, The New York Times revealed Mellon’s identity. This donation only covered some of the costs,, however, and the White House has had to move money between accounts to keep the cash flowing to its troops.

But the US military isn’t just its soldiers, sailors, Marines, Guardians, and airmen. Every military base is staffed by thousands of civilian workers, many of them veterans, who do all the jobs that keep a base running. In Bavaria, those workers are a mix of German locals and Americans. The German government has approved a $50 million support package to cover the paychecks of its citizens affected by the shutdown. Any non-troop American working on those military bases is a federal employee, however, and they aren’t getting paid at all.

The privacy changes web browsers will be required to make under a new California law could set the de facto standard for the entire country, changing how Americans control their data when using the internet, according to experts. 

Assembly Bill 566, recently signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, requires companies that make web browsers to offer users an opt-out “signal” that automatically tells websites not to share or sell their personal information as they browse. 

It will likely be easier for companies to roll out the service for the entire country, rather than for users only in California.  

“It’s such a trivial implementation,” said Emory Roane, associate director of policy at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, an organization that pushed for the legislation. “It’s really not that difficult technically.”

The legislation, a first of its kind in the country, was sponsored by the California Privacy Protection Agency, the state’s consumer privacy watchdog, as well as several consumer advocacy and privacy rights groups. 

Under the law, browsers like Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge will have until the beginning of 2027 to create a way for consumers to select the signal. Combined with recent changes from other states, the new law could be a tipping point in how web traffic is treated in the United States.

“We expect it to have a national impact,” Roane said.

A national standard

California already offers privacy protections under the California Consumer Privacy Act, including a right to opt out from having their information sold. 

But advocates for the new law point out this still puts the burden on the consumer to navigate to web pages and individually select web pages to opt out from. The new tool will effectively automate that process, giving consumers a single toggle to keep their data protected. 

“I would argue if you have to go to every individual website and click the link saying you ‘don’t want your information sold or shared,’ that’s not really a meaningful privacy right,” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, another organization that pressed for AB 566.

Already, some browser makers have voluntarily offered similar settings under a framework called the Global Privacy Control. Mozilla’s Firefox, for example, includes a setting called “tell websites not to sell or share your data.” With that setting on, the browser communicates to sites that the visitor wants the site to respect the user’s preference.

Several states, including Texas and New Jersey, have moved to force companies to respect such preferences, and California’s attorney general has even taken legal action against businesses that fail to do so. 

But until now, browsers haven’t been required to offer a setting that uses the Global Privacy Control or another standard to communicate users’ preferences. “There are browser extensions but those aren’t very widely used,” said Nick Doty, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. 

Since it would likely be burdensome for companies to carve out a way to only allow the signal to be used by Californians, according to experts, the tool will likely be available across the country. How, exactly, that will look still remains to be seen. The legislation doesn’t require browser makers to use a specific standard. (Spokespeople for Google and Microsoft declined to comment on the companies’ plans.)

There’s still a risk that some websites may try to detect which state a visitor is from, and only respect the signal if they find the visitor is from a state that mandates it.

This is legally risky, though, according to Roane, who points out that AB 566 applies to residents of California, regardless of whether they’re using the web from California.

“If I’m safe saying I’m a resident and you’re assuming I’m not and you’re flagrantly not respecting my privacy wishes, that is a violation of the law,” Roane said. 

Pushback from Google and the industry

The law didn’t get across the finish line without friction. As CalMatters reported in September, despite not being publicly against the legislation, Google organized opposition to the bill through a group it backs financially. 

AB 566 also wasn’t the first attempt at such legislation. Newsom vetoed a similar, but slightly more expansive, version of the bill in 2024. 

But now that the door is open, some advocates say they are going to continue to push to further expand privacy preferences.

Roane notes that legislation could be drafted that requires connected smart devices to offer an opt-out preference, or for vehicles that gather data on drivers to respect opt-out preference requests. 

“We are  finally, finally starting to have real privacy rights,” Roane said, “but we’re far away from them being really easy to exercise across the country and across the border and even in states like California where we have these rights.”

With Zohran Mamdani's election as New York City mayor, can we expect a change in the city's policies related to sex work? There are some reasons to suspect that the answer to this question is yes.

Losing NYC mayoral candidate and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo certainly wanted people to think so. Back in August, Cuomo's team put out a press release calling out "Mamdani's dangerous support for decriminalizing prostitution."

It's true that during his time in the New York State Assembly, Mamdani cosponsored legislation to decriminalize prostitution. Running for reelection in 2022, he pledged that he would reject legislation to implement the Nordic model of sex work regulation, in which some selling of sex is decriminalized but paying for it is not. And back in 2021, he supported the repeal of a statute—referred to by opponents as the "walking while trans" law—that criminalized loitering for purposes of prostitution, saying it is his "fundamental belief that sex work is work."

But Mamdani did not make prostitution an issue in his mayoral campaign, and even dodged some direct questions about decriminalization, including whether he still opposed criminalizing the purchase of sex.

What we can make of that is anyone's guess. I suspect Mamdani does support decriminalization, but was smart enough to realize that making a big deal of it wouldn't do him any favors in his bid to become New York City's next mayor.

The key question is, now that he has won, will Mamdani move to make a difference in the way the city handles prostitution?

And, as New York City mayor, what can he realistically do? After all, prostitution is a state-level criminal offense.

While New York City leaders can't change the state laws, they can affect the way they're enforced within city limits. And the city's mayor can play a big role in setting the agenda on this.

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who served from 2014 through 2021, became an advocate for decriminalization, pushed for state lawmakers to pass a decriminalization bill, and heralded a social services approach to helping sex workers, rather than a criminal justice approach. It's not clear exactly how de Blasio put these beliefs into practice, but during de Blasio's tenure, the city did cut down on prostitution arrests. Manhattan, for instance, went from around 600 prostitution arrests in 2014 to just a handful in 2021, per data from the Urban Justice Center. The city overall went from 1,790 arrests in 2014 to 376 arrests in 2019, according to a 2021 report from the city. And, in 2021, Manhattan and Brooklyn district attorneys dismissed hundreds of prostitution cases and announced that they would stop prosecuting people for selling sex. (Under Mayor Eric Adams, prostitution-related arrests have ticked back up again, according to The New York Times.)

Mamdani's campaign has said that he supports de Blasio's approach to handling sex work. "Zohran will return to the decriminalization approach taken by the de Blasio administration, which means he'll end raids on sex workers and work with District Attorneys to reduce unnecessary prosecutions," Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a September statement.

Mamdani himself has implied as much, too. "What I want to do is look at the ways in which the previous administration addressed this issue," Mamdani told reporters in August. "What we've seen from the previous administration is an understanding that the responses that have to be taken into account have much more to do with things beyond the question of an individual sex worker and through the larger system around that," he said in September. Mamdani also stressed then that he has never supported the legalization of prostitution.

Some—including Cuomo—have tried to portray Mamdani as flip-flopping on the issue of sex work, pointing to his statements supporting decriminalization and rejecting legalization. But there is nothing contradictory in these statements, because decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing.

Legalization refers to a highly regulated system in which prostitution is sanctioned by the state under certain circumstances (and still criminalized outside of those circumstances). It may be permitted, but only in certain districts, or in a brothel, or with a permit. Decriminalization, on the other hand, simply means removing all criminal penalties surrounding the (consensual, adult) selling and purchase of sexual services. There is no enforcement of sanctions against sex workers or their clients, but neither is there a state-regulated brothel system or anything else like that. (Sex worker activists and their allies tend to support decriminalization over legalization.)

"I don't get the impression that Mamdani's stance on sex work has shifted one bit," writes Lux Alptraum in Dame magazine. "I think he is deftly navigating an obviously bad faith attempt to misrepresent his past and present stances, all while avoiding getting sucked into a conversation that's far too complex to be appropriately addressed in brief sound bites or during a debate."

As mayor, Mamdani couldn't technically decriminalize prostitution in New York City, but he could encourage local police to halt prostitution stings and deprioritize prostitution arrests and raids, and support prosecutors declining to bring prostitution cases.

A system where sex workers and their customers face uncertainty about whether they'll be arrested or charged isn't ideal, even if they ultimately escape these fates. It still keeps prostitution operating in the black market, where it's easier for violence and exploitation to thrive and harder for sex workers to take steps to operate safely. That said, cutting down on sex workers' encounters with police (which can be harmful in their own ways) and helping them avoid criminal records, fines, jail time, and other life-disrupting consequences is still a net positive for sex worker well-being and safety.

Hopefully, Mamdani won't shy away from supporting decriminalization now that he has won, and will do whatever is within his power as mayor to lessen the negative effects of sex-work criminalization within New York City.

More Sex & Tech News

All noise, no signal: AI-written cover letters are making cover letters useless.

Do you know who has purchased your travel data? "Most people probably have no idea that when you book a flight through major travel websites, a data broker owned by U.S. airlines then sells details about your flight, including your name, credit card used, and where you're flying to the government," writes Joseph Cox at 404 Media. Here's how he opted out.

Meta moves to dismiss porn copyright lawsuit: Meta is being sued for copyright infringement by Strike 3 Holdings, which "discovered illegal downloads of some of its adult films on Meta corporate IP addresses" and alleges that they're being used to train AI, notes Ars Technica. But in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, "Meta argued that there was no evidence that the tech giant directed any of the downloads of about 2,400 adult movies owned by Strike 3—or was even aware of the illegal activity" and claimed the videos had been downloaded by employees for "private personal use."

U.K. leaders can't ever seem to get enough censorship: They now want to criminalize porn that features choking.

Appeals court judges seem skeptical of Idaho book law: "An Idaho law restricting what materials students can access in schools and libraries drew scrutiny at the Ninth Circuit on Monday as a group of schools urged the court to block the law," reports Courthouse News Service. The law has a "pretty serious impact on the First Amendment rights of [librarians]," said U.S. Circuit Judge Milan Smith, while Judge Jacqueline Nguyen noted that "a lot of young adult novels that may actually have sexual themes or may have nudity and fall strictly within the definition of harmful to minors would then be swept up, despite the fact that it has serious value."

Today's Image

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The results are in, and Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City, after winning a raw majority of the vote and easily besting former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.

Over at Cuomo's election night party, independent journalist Michael Tracey captured one of the former governor's supporters engaging in some blunt analysis of the results.

"Hey Curtis [Sliwa], you're a fucking scumbag like I said all along," he says in the video. "You split the fucking vote."

A message to ⁦@CurtisSliwa⁩ from the Cuomo party pic.twitter.com/4FIWf1MYV7

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 5, 2025

This unnamed "Cuomosexual" wasn't alone in expressing these sentiments.

Hear, for instance, former Republican Congressman and pardoned fraudster George Santos saying something similar:

Fuck you @CurtisSliwa I HATE YOU, your dumb wife, that stupid Beret of yours and all your fucking cats!

— George Santos (@MrSantosNY) November 5, 2025

To be sure, neither are official campaign spokesmen. But both the level of their rage and their target for it says a lot about the purely negative pitch of the Cuomo's mayoral campaign and why that proved so completely unconvincing for voters.

In both the primary and the general election, Cuomo never seemed to be able to get beyond the idea that all he had to do to win was point at the other candidates and say, "you're really going to vote for them?"

On election night, that proved woefully insufficient.

To start with some pure arithmetic, contrary to our video subject, it couldn't matter less that Sliwa "split the vote." Mamdani is walking away from this election with a raw majority, meaning that if even every single Sliwa voter lined up behind Cuomo, he'd still have lost.

More substantively, Cuomo was never able to articulate why people should line up behind him besides the fact that he wasn't Mamdani.

The obvious strategy for an experienced politician running against a young, inexperienced ideologue is to emphasize one's own record of achievement and administrative acumen.

But Cuomo couldn't convincingly do this, given that he spent the last year or so of his governorship stumbling from one incompetence scandal after another, before eventually resigning in response to sexual harassment allegations.

It was Cuomo's administration that forced nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, and then tried to cover up the deaths that resulted from this deeply mistaken policy.

It was under his governorship that New York had the worst-administered emergency rental assistance program in the country.

It's hard to argue that you are a steady, capable alternative to the starry-eyed socialist when your administration can't do something as simple as not recklessly endanger senior citizens or cut checks to people.

Even less helpful was that Cuomo had seemingly no positive agenda for New York City to counter Mamdani's simple, catchy (and to be sure, ill-conceived) plans to make New York affordable with free buses and free childcare.

Mamdani was, famously, the candidate of "freeze the rent." Cuomo rightly argued this was an irresponsible policy that would push more landlords into insolvency. And yet the governor had no plan to improve the sorry state of New York's rent-stabilized housing stock either.

His campaign's housing policy platform was a bunch of AI-generated pablum. In an effort to score a cheap hit on Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized unit, Cuomo proposed "Zohran's law" that would, if anything, make life harder for the owners of rent-stabilized housing.

It bears repeating that Cuomo also signed the 2019 rent law that has done so much to damage the financial position of New York City housing.

With no decent record to run on and no positive visions to pitch, Cuomo fell back on aristocratic entitlement. If you didn't like Mamdani, you had to vote for him as the only realistic alternative. Sliwa voters weren't worth convincing; they simply owed loyalty to Cuomo.

This was hardly a winning attitude. Now that's failed, his supporters are directing their rage at Sliwa for not simply giving up, instead of Mamdani for actually winning.

Cuomo's faults obviously don't mitigate any of Mamdani's own flaws, to be sure. The mayor-elect's remarks during his victory speech about how there's no problem too large or small for the government to solve are alarming, to say the least.

"No problem too large for government to solve, and [none] too small for government to care about."

Oh my sweet summer child.

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) November 5, 2025

While fiscal realities will do a lot of work to check Mamdani's ideas, one shouldn't expect city policy to improve during his tenure.

It's not good to see Mamdani win. But, as a consolation prize, it is good to see Cuomo lose.

Whatever else one wants to say about them and their choices, New York voters were right to decide that they don't want a disgraced politician with a bad record, a worse attitude, and no vision running their city government.

The post Good Riddance, Andrew Cuomo appeared first on Reason.com.