Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi has been handed further prison sentences of seven-and-a-half years by an Iranian court, her lawyer has said. The human rights activist was sentenced to six years for gathering and collusion, and one-and-a-half years for propaganda activities by a court in the north-eastern city of Mashhad, Mostafa Nili announced on social media on Sunday. Mohammadi was arrested in December for making provocative remarks at a memorial ceremony, Iranian authorities said at the time. Her family said she was taken to hospital after being beaten during the arrest . The 53-year-old was made a Nobel laureate in 2023 for her activism against female oppression in Iran.

Campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse delivered a petition to Downing Street calling for greater protection against deepfake image abuse. Campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse delivered a petition to Downing Street calling for greater protection against deepfake image abuse. Victims of deepfake image abuse have called for stronger protection against AI-generated explicit images, as the law criminalising the creation of non-consensual intimate images comes into effect. Campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse delivered a petition to Downing Street with more than 73,000 signatures, urging the government to introduce civil routes to justice such as takedown orders for abusive imagery on platforms and devices. "Today's a really momentous day," said Jodie, a victim of deepfake abuse who uses a pseudonym.

The campaign is among the largest anti-ICE protests by workers at a single company since federal agents shot and killed two people in Minneapolis last month. More Than 880 employees and contractors working for Google signed a petition this week calling on the company to disclose and cancel any contracts it may have with US immigration authorities . In the letter unveiled on Friday, the workers said they are "vehemently opposed" to Google's dealings with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). "We object to the technology we build being used to power state violence around the world," a Google software engineer, who declined to give their name out of fear of retaliation, told reporters on Friday. "I stand to benefit from other people's suffering, which I find abhorrent and I refuse to be a quiet participant in that system," added a second Google staffer, who went by Alex. Google declined to comment on the petition's demands.

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice says that over 1,000 workers have signed a petition raising "serious concerns" about the company's "aggressive rollout" of artificial intelligence tools. Over 1,000 Amazon employees have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the company's allegedly "all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development" could cause "staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth," an internal advocacy group announced on Wednesday. Four members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tell WIRED that they began asking workers to sign the letter last month. After reaching their initial goal, the group published on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon employees who signed and disclosed that more than 2,400 supporters from other organizations, including Google and Apple, have also joined in. Backers inside Amazon include high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, marketing managers, and warehouse staff spanning many divisions of the company.

He Wrote a Book About Antifa. Rutgers historian Mark Bray is trying to flee to Spain after an online campaign from far-right influencers was followed by death threats. He was turned back at the airport on his first attempt. A professor at Rutgers University who wrote a book about " antifa " almost a decade ago is trying--and struggling--to flee the US for Europe after a weeks-long online campaign against him by far-right influencers was followed by death threats. Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers who specializes in Spanish history and radicalism, has been a far-right target ever since he published in 2017.

The Utah court of appeals has sanctioned a lawyer after he was discovered to have used ChatGPT for a filing he made in which he referenced a nonexistent court case. Earlier this week, the Utah court of appeals made the decision to sanction Richard Bednar over claims that he filed a brief which included false citations. According to court documents reviewed by ABC4, Bednar and Douglas Durbano, another Utah-based lawyer who was serving as the petitioner's counsel, filed a "timely petition for interlocutory appeal". Upon reviewing the brief which was written by a law clerk, the respondent's counsel found several false citations of cases. "It appears that at least some portions of the Petition may be AI-generated, including citations and even quotations to at least one case that does not appear to exist in any legal database (and could only be found in ChatGPT and references to cases that are wholly unrelated to the referenced subject matter," the respondent's counsel said in documents reviewed by ABC4.

The persistent accumulation of unresolved legal cases, especially within the Indian judiciary, significantly hampers the timely delivery of justice. Manual methods of prioritizing petitions are often prone to inefficiencies and subjective biases further exacerbating delays. To address this issue, we propose LLMPR (Large Language Model-based Petition Ranking), an automated framework that utilizes transfer learning and machine learning to assign priority rankings to legal petitions based on their contextual urgency. Leveraging the ILDC dataset comprising 7,593 annotated petitions, we process unstructured legal text and extract features through various embedding techniques, including DistilBERT, LegalBERT, and MiniLM. These textual embeddings are combined with quantitative indicators such as gap days, rank scores, and word counts to train multiple machine learning models, including Random Forest, Decision Tree, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost. Our experiments demonstrate that Random Forest and Decision Tree models yield superior performance, with accuracy exceeding 99% and a Spearman rank correlation of 0.99. Notably, models using only numerical features achieve nearly optimal ranking results (R2 = 0.988, \r{ho} = 0.998), while LLM-based embeddings offer only marginal gains. These findings suggest that automated petition ranking can effectively streamline judicial workflows, reduce case backlog, and improve fairness in legal prioritization.

The State Bar of California announced Friday that its embattled leader, who has faced growing pressure to resign over the botched February roll out of a new bar exam, will step down in July. Leah T. Wilson, the agency's executive director, informed the Board of Trustees she will not seek another term in the position she has held on and off since 2017. She also apologized for her role in the February bar exam chaos. "Accountability is a bedrock principle for any leader," Wilson said in a statement. "At the end of the day, I am responsible for everything that occurs within the organization. Despite our best intentions, the experiences of applicants for the February Bar Exam simply were unacceptable, and I fully recognize the frustration and stress this experience caused. While there are no words to assuage those emotions, I do sincerely apologize."

For the second time in the last month, Microsoft employees disrupted high-level executives speaking at an event celebrating the company's 50th anniversary on 4 April, in protest against the company's role in Israel's ongoing siege on Gaza. The two were fired within days. The Microsoft president Brad Smith and the former CEO Steve Ballmer were shouted down at Seattle's Great Hall on 20 March by a current and former employee. The April event was preceded by a rally outside that also included current and former employees of the tech giant. Protesters projected a sign onto the hall's wall saying, "Microsoft powers genocide" – a reference to Israel's extensive use of the company's AI and cloud computing services since 7 October 2023, as "the IDF's insatiable demand for bombs was matched by its need for greater access to cloud computing services," the Guardian reported.

Legal immigrants are increasingly turning to high-tech solutions to help navigate America's immigration landscape. It's no secret that America's immigration policy is in desperate need of a high-tech overhaul. Most online immigration tools so far have been rudimentary, and that's often left legal immigrants complaining of long wait times, contradictory instructions, and a web presence that doesn't help with things like green card renewal or family petitions. Now President-Elect Trump is promising a big deportation push when he comes into office for his second term, and it's more important than ever for immigrants to have their paperwork in order. "Immigration, legal immigration should be efficient and accessible and affordable for everyone," says Yasaman Soroori, the co-founder and CEO of Consulta, a new A.I.-powered platform offering high-tech solutions for those immigration issues.