Criminal Law
Stop buying flat-faced dogs! RSPCA reports a 3800% increase in French Bulldogs coming into its care over the last 10 years - as owners struggle to cope with the repercussions of their 'cute' features
Dr Anthony Fauci's embarrassing obsession with fame and celebrities is revealed in secret unearthed diary entries... as he bragged about meeting A-listers while Americans died from Covid Influencer's haunting final screams and cries heard on 911 call moments before husband shot her after outing him as pedophile online Arielle Charnas left carnage in her wake when her fashion brand imploded. RSPCA reports a 3800% increase in French Bulldogs coming into its care over the last 10 years - as owners struggle to cope with the repercussions of their'cute' features Flat-faced Frenchies and Pugs might look cute, but the RSPCA is warning pet lovers to avoid these breeds amidst a'tragic' rise in abandonments. The number of French Bulldogs coming into care of the RSPCA has increased by a staggering 3,800 per cent in the last 10 years. In 2016, the animal welfare charity took in just six French Bulldogs, or Frenchie crosses, from owners who could no longer safely keep their pets. Last year that figure rose to 234 Frenchies - almost double the number abandoned in four years from 2016 to 2019 combined.
The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets
A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use--and conceal--to build criminal cases, from facial recognition to AI-written police reports. The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it's releasing an online toolkit this week for criminal defense attorneys designed to uncover whether police used surveillance technologies --facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and more--to build the cases against their clients in secret. The toolkit, which the group describes as the first of its kind, is built around handcrafted legal motions that, when granted by a judge, will force prosecutors to reveal whether surveillance technology was used against a defendant. It covers an array of technologies, from "stingray" phone trackers and location data sold by commercial brokers to AI-drafted police reports and forensic tools that crack phones and siphon data from car infotainment systems. It also includes preservation motions--demands that surveillance data be saved before it is deleted automatically--aimed at government agencies and private vendors alike.
Olympic cyclist admits to driving despite ban after crash that killed wife
Australian Olympic cyclist Rohan Dennis has pleaded guilty to driving despite a five-year ban placed on him after a 2023 incident where he struck his wife with a car. Dennis, 36, appeared in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Friday to face a charge of driving while disqualified after police pulled him over last month when he was behind the wheel with two children as passengers. Last year, Dennis received a suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty to one aggravated count of creating the likelihood of harm under a plea deal where prosecutors dropped two more serious charges. The court found he was not criminally responsible for Melissa Hoskins' death but had been reckless in his actions. During last year's case, the court heard that the couple - who got married in 2018 - had been arguing about kitchen renovations before Dennis got into his car to leave.
Israeli drones strike Lebanon despite US-brokered framework deal
What is Lebanon's Beaufort Castle? Why is Israel attacking Nabatieh? Two people have been injured in an Israeli drone strike on a pick-up truck in southern Lebanon, according to state-run media, the latest attack despite a United States-brokered framework agreement intended to pave the way for a phased Israeli withdrawal. The drone struck the vehicle as it was unloading garbage on the outskirts of the towns of Choukine and Kfar Dajjal in the Nabatieh district early on Friday, Lebanon's National News Agency (NNA) said. Later, NNA reported drones also targeted the towns of Kfar Reman and Nabatieh al-Fawqa.
Ghanaian influencer extradited to US over 8m scam targeting elderly Americans
A Ghanaian social media influencer known as Abu Trica, whose real name is Frederick Kumi, has been extradited to the US to face trial for allegedly running a romance scam that defrauded elderly Americans of over $8m (£5.9m). He denies all the charges against him. Prosecutors said he used AI tools to create fake online identities, targeting victims through social media and dating sites, earning their trust then extorting their money. Kumi was flown to the US on Thursday and faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. Kumi's lawyer, Oliver Barker-Vormawor, told the BBC he went to court on Thursday to stop the extradition before learning a short while later that Kumi had in fact already been extradited on board a Delta Airlines flight.
Carvalho was threatened with possible dismissal before he resigned as LAUSD superintendent
Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Alberto Carvalho addresses a press conference at Elysian Heights Elementary Arts Magnet in 2022. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.
Security News This Week: LastPass Users Had Their Data Stolen--Again
Plus: Former national security advisor John Bolton pleads guilty in classified-materials case, Microsoft helps take down major infostealer infrastructure, and more. A WIRED investigation this week offers insight into a predictive policing program in Bristol, England that has involved 23 separate models over more than a decade, intended to score the likelihood of specific individuals will perpetrate or be victims of different crimes. The investigation draws on data from public records requests and other reporting to reveal a messy law enforcement apparatus that has real implications for the community--but that most people in the area know nothing about. After the identities of members of Peter Thiel's private "Dialog" group were exposed last week, the organization claimed that a "criminal" hacker was behind the breach. But evidence shows that members' personal information--including that of a White House intelligence official and an active-duty special operations officer --was publicly accessible and likely exposed as the result of a Dialog website misconfiguration .
4d18c7389f436e1e22b219d7e8d43f94-Paper-Conference.pdf
Alignment faking in large language models presented a demonstration of Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet selectively complying with a helpfulonly training objective to prevent modification of their behavior outside of training. We expand this analysis to 25 models and find that only 5 (Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3 405B, Grok 3, Gemini 2.0 Flash) comply with harmful queries more when they infer they are in training than when they infer they are in deployment. First, we study the motivations of these 5 models. Results from perturbing details of the scenario suggest that only Claude 3 Opus's compliance gap is primarily and consistently motivated by trying to keep its goals. Second, we investigate why many chat models don't fake alignment. Our results suggest this is not entirely due to a lack of capabilities: many base models fake alignment some of the time, and post-training eliminates alignment-faking for some models and amplifies it for others.We investigate 5 hypotheses for how post-training may suppress alignment faking and find that variations in refusal behavior may account for a significant portion of differences in alignment faking.
Guiding LLMDecision-Making with Fairness Reward Models
Large language models are increasingly used to support high-stakes decisions, potentially influencing who is granted bail or receives a loan. Naive chain-ofthought sampling can improve average decision accuracy, but has also been shown to amplify unfair bias. To address this challenge and enable the trustworthy use of reasoning models in high-stakes decision-making, we propose a framework for training a generalizable Fairness Reward Model (FRM). Our model assigns a fairness score to LLM reasoning, enabling the system to down-weight biased trajectories and favor equitable ones when aggregating decisions across reasoning chains. We show that a single Fairness Reward Model, trained on weakly supervised, LLM-annotated examples of biased versus unbiased reasoning, transfers across tasks, domains, and model families without additional fine-tuning. When applied to real-world decision-making tasks including recidivism prediction and social media moderation, our approach consistently improves fairness while matching, or even surpassing, baseline accuracy.
HR consultant wins English court case using AI lawyer in apparent legal first
A freelance HR consultant paid Garfield AI about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000. A freelance HR consultant paid Garfield AI about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000. Barrister who was given material produced by Garfield AI says advocacy at trial'remained fundamentally human' An artificial intelligence law firm has won a case in an English court, in what is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer. A freelance HR consultant, Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid the firm, Garfield AI, about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000. The co-founder of Garfield, Philip Young, called it a "landmark moment" for access to justice and said many small businesses have had to write off debts because the cost of litigation outweighed the money they could hope to win.