- Fixed #118052: nodeAffinity on pods can change prior to scheduling gates being removed even when podSpec.affinity is nil in the initial spec, this matches the 1.28 behavior to allow consistent integrators to be written. ([#118199](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118199), [@aleskandro](https://github.com/aleskandro)) [SIG Apps, Scheduling and Testing]

	The v1beta1 API used an annotation on Namespaces to activate the DefaultDeny policy for an entire Namespace. To activate default deny in the v1 API, you can create a NetworkPolicy that matches all Pods but does not allow any traffic:

    ```yaml
    kind: NetworkPolicy
    apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
    metadata:
      name: default-deny
    spec:
      podSelector:
    ```

- Kube-apiserver: ensures the namespace of objects sent to admission webhooks matches the request namespace. Previously, objects without a namespace set would have the request namespace populated after mutating admission, and objects with a namespace that did not match the request namespace would be rejected after admission. ([#94...

  The scheduling hints allow the scheduler to only retry scheduling a `Pod`
  that was previously rejected by the `NodeAffinity` plugin if a new `Node` or a `Node` update matches the `Pod`'s node affinity. ([#119155](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/119155), [@carlory](https://github.com/carlory))
- `kubeadm`: promoted feature gate `EtcdLearnerMode` to `beta`. Learner mode for

HSPLkotlin/text/MatcherMatchResult;-><init>(Ljava/util/regex/Matcher;Ljava/lang/CharSequence;)V
HSPLkotlin/text/MatcherMatchResult;->getRange()Lkotlin/ranges/IntRange;
HSPLkotlin/text/Regex;-><init>(Ljava/lang/String;)V
HSPLkotlin/text/Regex;->matches(Ljava/lang/CharSequence;)Z
HSPLkotlin/text/StringsKt__StringNumberConversionsKt;->toIntOrNull(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/Integer;
HSPLkotlin/text/StringsKt__StringsJVMKt;->endsWith$default(Ljava/lang/String;Ljava/lang/String;ZI)Z

	response, err = s.client.Do(request)
	c.Assert(err, nil)
	c.Assert(response.StatusCode, http.StatusOK)

	bucketPolicyReadBuf, err := io.ReadAll(response.Body)
	c.Assert(err, nil)
	// Verify if downloaded policy matches with previously uploaded.
	expectedPolicy, err := policy.ParseBucketPolicyConfig(strings.NewReader(bucketPolicyStr), bucketName)
	c.Assert(err, nil)

  * Mediates issue [#36859](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/36859). StatefulSet only acts on Pods whose identity matches the StatefulSet, providing a partial mediation for overlapping controllers.

### Taints and Tolerations

- Azurefile: Normalize share name to not include capital letters ([#100731](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/100731), [@kassarl](https://github.com/kassarl)) [SIG Cloud Provider and Storage]
- EndpointSlice IP validation now matches Endpoints IP validation. ([#101084](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/101084), [@robscott](https://github.com/robscott)) [SIG Apps and Network]

- Added `objectSelector` to admission webhook configurations. `objectSelector` is evaluated the oldObject and newObject that would be sent to the webhook, and is considered to match if either object matches the selector. A null object (oldObject in the case of create, or newObject in the case of delete) or an object that cannot have labels (like a DeploymentRollback or a PodProxyOptions object) is not considered to match. Use the object selector only...

- The alpha `Initializers` admission plugin is no longer enabled by default. This matches the off-by-default behavior of the alpha API which drives initializer behavior. ([#66039](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66039), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))