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Roger Ailes, the longtime Republican media guru, founder of Fox News and its current chairman, had some advice last year for then-Gen. David H. Petraeus. Ailes asked a Fox News analyst headed to Afghanistan to pass on his thoughts to Petraeus, who was then the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. Petraeus, Ailes advised, should turn down an expected offer from President Obama to become CIA director and accept nothing less than the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military post. If President Obama did not offer the Joint Chiefs post, Petraeus should resign from the military and run for president, Ailes suggested.

The Fox News chairman’s message was delivered to Petraeus by Kathleen T. McFarland, a Fox News national security analyst and former national security and Pentagon aide in three Republican administrations. McFarland said that Ailes — who had a decades-long career as a Republican political consultant, advising Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — might resign as head of Fox to run a Petraeus presidential campaign. At one point, McFarland and Petraeus spoke about the possibility that Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., which owns Fox News, would “bankroll” the campaign.

Twenty-four hours after Facebook opened the polls, more than 100,000 users have cast their votes 10 to 1 against Facebook's proposed changes to its policies. That includes a proposal that would do away with Facebook users' right to vote on future changes.

Hoping to get out the vote, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy have joined forces with Facebook critic Julius Harper. They say they are campaigning to raise awareness about the vote. "We are making good progress," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Most Facebook users don’t seem to know that a vote is taking place.

An American and Canadian proposal to protect the Internet from new international regulation has failed to win prompt backing from other countries, setting up potentially tough negotiations to rewrite a telecom treaty.

The idea, also supported by Europe, would limit the International Telecommunication Union's rules to only telecom operators and not Internet-based companies such as Google and Facebook. That could reduce the prospective impact of efforts by other countries including Russia and some in the Middle East and Africa to obtain more powers to govern the Internet through the ITU, an arm of the United Nations. Those efforts, slated for discussion next week, could make Internet anonymity - or the ability to remain anonymous online - more difficult to maintain and could bolster censorship, critics say.

A coalition of health groups is pressuring Viacom to implement stronger nutritional standards for the foods marketed on Nickelodeon.

The Food Marketing Workgroup -- led by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest and Berkeley Media Studies Group, and comprising the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, Jamie Oliver Food Foundation, Environmental Working Group and others – sent a letter to Viacom Inc. president/CEO Philippe Dauman and Nickelodeon president Cyma Zarghami. The letter urges the executives to “implement strong nutrition standards for all of the company’s food marketing to children,” including all television advertising on Nickelodeon channels, company sites and mobile platforms. It also urges the company to apply stricter nutrition standards for products that want to use licensed characters like Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants. The letter -- part of a larger campaign being launched by the Workgroup that includes social media, a letter-writing campaign to Nickelodeon’s CEO and other efforts -- is the latest volley in the ongoing controversy over food marketing to children.