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A Library Dedicated Solely to the Epstein Files Is Opening in New York

WIRED

The Institute for Primary Facts has compiled more than 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files for public display at the newly opened Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. It's an early 2016 email thread between Jeffrey Epstein and a woman whose name is redacted by the Department of Justice . In the thread, Epstein asks the unidentified woman for a "naughty selfie" and later sends her a camera. In late February, he replies with a different ask: "Do you have any friends that might want to work for me?...I will give you money if you find someone willing to travel, 22-25, educated. The exchange carries extra resonance when you consider that Epstein is accused of sex trafficking minors, with the Department of Justice estimating that he had more than 1,200 potential victims.



Immigration Agents Are Killing and Abusing People. So Civilians Are Turning to a Controversial Tool to Find Justice.

Slate

Users Civilians Are Using A.I. to Unmask ICE Agents. Websites like ICEList are attempting to hold federal agents accountable--but it's unclear whether they make the system safer or more dangerous. After federal immigration officers shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, social media users called for the unmasking of the agents responsible. On X, users shared photos of the agents involved. It didn't take long before A.I.-generated pictures made their appearance: One user posted a seemingly deepfaked picture of a masked ICE agent, writing, "This is one of the soulless lowlife ghouls who executed Alex Pretti in cold blood!


Fujitsu 'not a parasite' over Horizon scandal

BBC News

Fujitsu is not a parasite for continuing to profit from government contracts in the wake of the Post Office Horizon scandal, its boss told MPs. European chief executive Paul Patterson said Fujitsu had been given £500m of contract extensions despite its faulty software being at the centre of the huge miscarriage of justice. We are not a parasite, the government has got an option as to whether they wish to extend those contracts or not, he said, adding it would not bid for new business. Patterson also repeatedly refused to say how much Fujitsu would contribute to the £1.8bn redress scheme for victims of the scandal, currently funded by taxpayers. More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted after the faulty Horizon computer system made it look like money was missing from their branch accounts.


Mind the Gap! Pathways Towards Unifying AI Safety and Ethics Research

Roytburg, Dani, Miller, Beck

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While much research in artificial intelligence (AI) has focused on scaling capabilities, the accelerating pace of development makes countervailing work on producing harmless, "aligned" systems increasingly urgent. Yet research on alignment has diverged along two largely parallel tracks: safety--centered on scaled intelligence, deceptive or scheming behaviors, and existential risk--and ethics--focused on present harms, the reproduction of social bias, and flaws in production pipelines. Although both communities warn of insufficient investment in alignment, they disagree on what alignment means or ought to mean. As a result, their efforts have evolved in relative isolation, shaped by distinct methodologies, institutional homes, and disciplinary genealogies. We present a large-scale, quantitative study showing the structural split between AI safety and AI ethics. Using a bibliometric and co-authorship network analysis of 6,442 papers from twelve major ML and NLP conferences (2020-2025), we find that over 80% of collaborations occur within either the safety or ethics communities, and cross-field connectivity is highly concentrated: roughly 5% of papers account for more than 85% of bridging links. Removing a small number of these brokers sharply increases segregation, indicating that cross-disciplinary exchange depends on a handful of actors rather than broad, distributed collaboration. These results show that the safety-ethics divide is not only conceptual but institutional, with implications for research agendas, policy, and venues. We argue that integrating technical safety work with normative ethics--via shared benchmarks, cross-institutional venues, and mixed-method methodologies--is essential for building AI systems that are both robust and just.


That's So FETCH: Fashioning Ensemble Techniques for LLM Classification in Civil Legal Intake and Referral

Steenhuis, Quinten

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Each year millions of people seek help for their legal problems by calling a legal aid program hotline, walking into a legal aid office, or using a lawyer referral service. The first step to match them to the right help is to identify the legal problem the applicant is experiencing. Misdirection has consequences. Applicants may miss a deadline, experience physical abuse, lose housing or lose custody of children while waiting to connect to the right legal help. We introduce and evaluate the FETCH classifier for legal issue classification and describe two methods for improving accuracy: a hybrid LLM/ML ensemble classification method, and the automatic generation of follow-up questions to enrich the initial problem narrative. We employ a novel data set of 419 real-world queries to a nonprofit lawyer referral service. Ultimately, we show classification accuracy (hits@2) of 97.37\% using a mix of inexpensive models, exceeding the performance of the current state-of-the-art GPT-5 model. Our approach shows promise in significantly reducing the cost of guiding users of the legal system to the right resource for their problem while achieving high accuracy.


LegalWebAgent: Empowering Access to Justice via LLM-Based Web Agents

Tan, Jinzhe, Benyekhlef, Karim

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Access to justice remains a global challenge, with many citizens still finding it difficult to seek help from the justice system when facing legal issues. Although the internet provides abundant legal information and services, navigating complex websites, understanding legal terminology, and filling out procedural forms continue to pose barriers to accessing justice. This paper introduces the LegalWebAgent framework that employs a web agent powered by multimodal large language models to bridge the gap in access to justice for ordinary citizens. The framework combines the natural language understanding capabilities of large language models with multimodal perception, enabling a complete process from user query to concrete action. It operates in three stages: the Ask Module understands user needs through natural language processing; the Browse Module autonomously navigates webpages, interacts with page elements (including forms and calendars), and extracts information from HTML structures and webpage screenshots; the Act Module synthesizes information for users or performs direct actions like form completion and schedule booking. To evaluate its effectiveness, we designed a benchmark test covering 15 real-world tasks, simulating typical legal service processes relevant to Québec civil law users, from problem identification to procedural operations. Evaluation results show LegalWebAgent achieved a peak success rate of 86.7%, with an average of 84.4% across all tested models, demonstrating high autonomy in complex real-world scenarios.


The age of unipolar diplomacy is coming to an end

Al Jazeera

What is a Palestinian without olives? In Gaza, the world has seen the cost of a diplomacy that claims to uphold a rules-based order but applies it selectively. The United States intervened late, and only to defend an occupation the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled illegal. Alongside other Western nations that built multilateral institutions, the US increasingly pursues nationalist agendas that undermine them. The hypocrisy is stark: one set of rules for Ukraine, another for Gaza.


Can LLMs Create Legally Relevant Summaries and Analyses of Videos?

Hoeben-Kuil, Lyra, van Dijck, Gijs, Savelka, Jaromir, Gunawan, Johanna, Kollnig, Konrad, Kolacz, Marta, Duffourc, Mindy, Chakravarthy, Shashank, Westermann, Hannes

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding the legally relevant factual basis of an event and conveying it through text is a key skill of legal professionals. This skill is important for preparing forms (e.g., insurance claims) or other legal documents (e.g., court claims), but often presents a challenge for laypeople. Current AI approaches aim to bridge this gap, but mostly rely on the user to articulate what has happened in text, which may be challenging for many. Here, we investigate the capability of large language models (LLMs) to understand and summarize events occurring in videos. We ask an LLM to summarize and draft legal letters, based on 120 YouTube videos showing legal issues in various domains. Overall, 71.7\% of the summaries were rated as of high or medium quality, which is a promising result, opening the door to a number of applications in e.g. access to justice.


How the Supreme Court Defines Liberty

The New Yorker

Recent memoirs by the Justices reveal how a new vision of restraint has led to radical outcomes. To understand how grudging Amy Coney Barrett's new book is when it comes to revealing personal details, consider that one of the family members the Supreme Court Justice most often refers to is a great-grandmother who died five years before she was born. On Barrett's desk at home, she recounts in " Listening to the Law," she keeps a photograph of her great-grandmother's one-story house, where, as a widow during the Great Depression, she raised some of her thirteen children and took in other needy relatives. "Looking at the photo reminds me of a woman who stretched herself beyond all reasonable capacity," Barrett explains. "I'm not sure that I'll be able to manage my life with the same grace that she had. But she motivates me to keep trying." For Barrett, the mother of seven children, that effort entails setting her alarm for 5 "Our kids get up at six thirty during the school year, so I start early if I want to accomplish anything on my own to-do list," she writes. This is what passes for disclosure from Barrett; she measures out the details of her life with coffee spoons, careful not to spill.