Former Vice President Mike Pence and 107 other former world leaders on Tuesday signed a letter to President Joe Biden and his counterparts in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe calling on the West to adopt a tougher approach to Iran and support Iranian anti-government protesters demanding regime change.

The letter came after U.S. lawmakers last week expressed bipartisan support for the Iranian people demonstrating against their government and slammed Biden for in their view not having a coherent or comprehensive strategy toward Iran.

‘We believe it is time to hold the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran to account for its crimes,’ the letter states. ‘We urge your nations to stand with the Iranian people in their quest for change and to take decisive steps against the current regime. This includes blacklisting the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and holding regime officials accountable for their crimes against humanity.’

The IRGC is an Iranian military force designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization.

The letter — addressed to Biden, the prime ministers of Canada and the U.K., and heads of state across Europe — condemns Iran’s ‘meddling’ in the Middle East and Europe, noting Iran has supplied Russia with lethal drones to use in Ukraine and attempted terrorist attacks on European soil.

Experts and U.S. officials have also accused Iran of being behind a wave of attempted assassinations against American citizens on U.S. soil, including senior figures in the former Trump administration.

As for Iran’s internal situation, the letter highlights how Iran notoriously executed thousands of political prisoners in 1988, when current Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was part of a so-called ‘death committee’ that ordered several of the killings.

The world leaders also focus on ongoing nationwide anti-government street protests in Iran. The protests erupted across Iran in September when a young woman died in the custody of Iran’s so-called morality police, which had allegedly detained her for wearing a hijab, an Islamic head covering that’s mandatory for women in Iran, in an ‘improper’ way.

Since then, the protests have grown in scope and intensity, reaching all of Iran’s 31 provinces and nearly 300 cities, according to local reports and the organized Iranian resistance movement. Chants calling for the Iranian regime’s overthrow have been common at protests.

In response, the regime has violently cracked down on the demonstrations, during which hundreds of protesters have been killed and tens of thousands arrested, according to reports. Critics have also accused the regime of being involved in the recent poisoning of hundreds of school girls in the country. Iran has also increased its executions, most recently executing three protesters las week. The latter decisions triggered bipartisan outcry from U.S. lawmakers, including those on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In Tuesday’s letter, the world leaders call on Biden and his counterparts to stand with the protesters in their bid to topple the current regime.

‘We encourage you to stand in solidarity with the people of Iran in their desire for a secular and democratic republic where no individual, regardless of religion or birthright, has any privilege over others,’ the letter states. ‘Through their slogans, the Iranian people have made it clear that they reject all forms of dictatorship, be it that of the deposed Shah or the current theocratic regime, and thus reject any association with either.’

The leaders also express support for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition of Iranian opposition group, and its leader, Maryam Rajavi, who has called for democratic change.

Beyond Pence, an outspoken supporter of the Iranian opposition movement, signatories of the letter included former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and two former European Commission presidents, among dozens of other ex-heads of state.

The letter came after last week the newly formed Iranian Women Congressional Caucus held its first joint meeting with the Iran Human Rights and Democracy Caucus — both bipartisan — to express support for the Iranian protesters.

‘We offer our unwavering commitment to advocating for freedom and the rights of women worldwide. This can transcend party lines and unite on issues of human rights,’ Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said at the event. ‘We must send a strong message that the international community stands in solidarity with Iranian women and will not tolerate the suppression of their rights.’

The event came two days after Biden administration officials gave a classified briefing on Iran to all 100 senators. After the briefing, several senators said they were dissatisfied with what they heard about the administration’s approach to Iran.

‘It’s been six months since President Biden declared the [Iran nuclear deal] ‘dead’ and we’re still no closer to a more comprehensive Iran policy,’ Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement after the briefing. ‘Strategic ambiguity on Iran policy only serves to embolden the regime and push our partners closer to China. As Iran continues to illegally seize vessels, target Americans in the region, and support its terror proxies and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Americans deserve a policy that is more than a failed nuclear negotiation.’

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., expressed similar concerns when speaking to reporters immediately after the briefing.

‘Based on what I heard for the last 40 minutes, they [the Biden administration] don’t really have much to say on the topic [of Iran],’ said Hawley. ‘I didn’t think it was a particularly useful briefing. I don’t know if they really have a coherent strategy. If there is one, I didn’t hear it … We didn’t learn anything new or remotely classified.’

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Daniel Werfel denied intervening to retaliate against whistleblowers in connection with the Hunter Biden complaint, according to a letter he sent to the majority and minority on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Fox News obtained the letter sent by Werfel on May 17, in which he responded to concerns that whistleblowers may have faced retaliation for voicing concerns in the probe into Hunter Biden.

‘I want to state unequivocally that I have not intervened – and will not intervene – in any way that would impact the status of any whistleblower,’ Werfel said. 

However, the letter states that the particular whistleblower referenced by Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., in their initial letter experienced a change in work assignment at the direction of the Department of Justice.

‘The IRS whistleblower you reference alleges that the change in their work assignment came at the direction of the Department of Justice. As a general matter and not in reference to any specific case, I believe it is important to emphasize that in any matter involving federal judicial proceedings, the IRS follows the direction of the Justice Department,’ Werfel wrote in the letter.

In response to the May 16 letter sent by Smith, the IRS commissioner said that he contacted Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to learn more, but isn’t able to share particular details on the matter.

‘When I first learned of the allegations of retaliation referenced in your letter and in media reports on May 16, 2023, I contacted the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). In light of laws and policies designed to protect the integrity of pending proceedings, I am unable to provide details on this matter,’ Werfel wrote.

‘TIGTA confirmed that my role as Commissioner in any whistleblower proceeding is not an investigative one. When an IRS employee raises allegations of this kind, the Commissioner’s office does not run an investigation, seek the identity of the whistleblower, or similarly intervene; instead, the Inspector General serves as a critical guardian of the whistleblower process and conducts relevant inquiries into the matter,’ he added.

Attorneys for one IRS whistleblower told Congress earlier that the entire team that the individual was in charge of have been removed from the Hunter Biden probe.

The attorneys told Congress that the removal was based on the Department of Justice’s order.

‘Today the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Supervisory Special Agent we represent was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress,’ the letter states.

‘He was informed the change was at the request of the Department of Justice,’ attorneys Mark Lytle and Tristan Leavitt wrote.

The special counsel investigating former President Trump’s alleged improper retention of classified records at Mar-a-Lago is working to wrap up his probe, a source familiar with the investigation told Fox News Digital.

The source told Fox News Digital that Special Counsel Jack Smith has been working to wrap up the probe for weeks. It’s unclear when Smith will announce his findings or whether he plans to prosecute Trump.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Smith has completed interviews with almost every employee at Mar-a-Lago, including top political aides and other staff, and has conducted numerous grand jury interviews in recent weeks.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith, a DOJ official, as special counsel to investigate Trump’s alleged improper retention of classified records from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago home.

Smith was appointed in November, soon after the FBI raided Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago in connection with the Justice Department’s investigation into the matter, after the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) claimed Trump took 15 boxes of presidential records to his personal residence in Florida.

Those boxes allegedly contained ‘classified national security information,’ and official correspondence between Trump and foreign heads of state.

NARA notified Congress that the agency recovered the 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago and ‘identified items marked as classified national security information within the boxes.’ The matter was referred to the Justice Department by NARA.

Trump said this year that the National Archives did not ‘find’ the documents, but that they were ‘given, upon request.’ Sources close to the former president said he had been cooperating and there was ‘no need’ for the raid.

Classified material that was reportedly confiscated by the FBI during the raid Monday included a letter to Trump from former President Obama, a letter from Kim Jong Un, a birthday dinner menu and a cocktail napkin.

Smith also took over the Justice Department’s investigation into the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. In that role, he examined whether Trump or other officials interfered with the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election, including the certification of the Electoral College vote on that day.

President Biden is also currently under special counsel investigation for his alleged improper retention of classified records from the Obama administration. Former Vice President Pence also had classified records at his home, a matter under review by the Justice Department.

Every administration since President Reagan has mishandled classified materials, according to testimony from officials from the National Archives and Records Administration.

The officials testified that NARA was ‘not aware of missing classified information’ when it was reviewing Trump’s presidential records, but instead, ‘were aware of missing records.’

The official said NARA’s initial outreach to the Trump team came after officials noticed that they were missing ‘high-visible items’ from the Trump administration.

One Seattle official is refusing demands to resign after a tense committee hearing concerning the nomination of a convicted sex offender to a Seattle homelessness board resulted in her shouting at a board member.

The incident occurred during a May 3 Zoom meeting of a subcommittee of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) when Marine veteran and sexual assault survivor Kristina Sawyckyj claimed the nominated sex offender, Thomas Whitaker-Raven Crowfoot, ‘touched’ her on a previous occasion.

‘We have a code of ethics on this board and Thomas Whitaker-Raven Crowfoot is a sex offender — repeat sex offender — and I have had a bad experience with him,’ Sawyckyj said.

Committee co-chair Shanee Colston then angrily jumped to defend Whitaker and scolded Sawyckyj for using the meeting to ‘out’ someone despite the past convictions being public knowledge.

‘That’s just not okay, at all. I won’t stand for that as a co-chair. We’re not here to discover people’s backgrounds,’ Colston yelled, as Sawyckyj appeared to try and change the subject.

Colston interrupted Sawyckyj, saying: ‘And I’m actually glad that is the case that he’s here because sex offenders are another population that is most vulnerable that don’t have housing. People do change.’

Another board member jumped in, agreeing with Colston and asking Sawyckyj if she had taken the issue to the police, to which she said she had.

Colston, however, continued laying into Sawyckyj, saying: ‘As the co-chair, I’m telling you that you cannot talk like that in this meeting. I will not have that here. If anyone wants to talk like that you will be muted and removed from this board meeting.’

‘This is about equity and everyone, everyone, deserves housing. I don’t care if they’re a sex offender. I don’t care if they’re Black. I don’t care if they’re indigenous. I don’t care if they’re a criminal. I don’t care if they’re coming out of jail or prison. Everyone deserves housing,’ she continued.

According to the King County Sheriff’s Office, Whitaker is a registered sex offender with two offenses described as ‘communication with minors for immoral purposes.’

KCRHA Chief Program Officer Peter Lynn appealed unsuccessfully for Colston to resign from the subcommittee this week, according to local affiliate KOMO-TV.

In a statement, KCRHA said it ‘shares the concerns of our community about the nomination of a registered sex offender for the Continuum of Care Board, and does not support that nomination’ of Whitaker to the board. 

The statement also blasted Colston’s behavior toward Sawyckyj.

‘We agree that the behavior by the current Board Co-Chair in shouting down the board member who identified that the nominee is a registered sex offender was unacceptable, and we immediately asked the Co-Chair to resign,’ it said.

Colston continues to oppose resignation requests.

Artificial intelligence systems are modeled after the human brain, but a new branch of research at Columbia University in New York is examining whether developments in AI might contain clues as to how living brains work and how their function might be improved.

Columbia was one of seven universities that the National Science Foundation designated as a new national AI research institute, and the $20 million it received will boost the school’s AI Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence (ARNI). The goal is to conduct research ‘connecting the major progress made in AI systems to the revolution in our understanding of the brain.’

Richard Zemel, professor of computer science at Columbia, told Fox News Digital that the ambition is to bring together top AI and neuroscience researchers together in a cross-training exercise that can benefit AI systems and people.

‘The idea is that it’s going both ways,’ Zemel said. ‘AI has gotten inspiration from the brain and the neural nets have things that are loosely connected to the brain.’

One of the central ideas behind AI has been to mimic the brain’s structure in the hopes of creating something that approximates a thinking machine. Artificial neural networks modeled after the brain are comprised of millions of processing nodes that help AI systems learn when they’re fed data.

The ‘transformer’ neural network that has been in use for the last five years or so is aimed at getting even closer to the human brain by focusing on the context of questions it is asked in order to arrive at a more precise answer. Zemel said transformers focus on the concept of ‘attention.’

‘It’s something they call the cocktail party effect,’ Zemel said. ‘You’re at a party, and you’re barely able to hear, but you hear your name even though there’s tons of conversations going on. But somehow your brain is able to pick up and attend to something.’

He said it’s this concept of ‘attention’ that is making generative AI output more and more usable by people who ask questions of AI systems. This kind of work has opened the door to wondering whether improvements in AI might help researchers better understand the brain.

‘By understanding these complicated neural networks, does that give us some hypotheses or new things to investigate in the brain?’ Zemel said.

Some of the big questions Columbia will look at include understanding the concept of ‘robust flexible learning.’ He said many AI systems so far can get good at a specific task but then don’t do as well when given another job to do, while the human brain shows more adaptability.

But AI has shown it can quickly develop language skills, and Zemel said that’s one example of an AI talent that might help them understand how to more efficiently train the human brain.

‘A lot of these new systems are quite good at picking up on new language tasks. With just an example or two, they learn something very quickly, in some ways faster than people do,’ he said. ‘Then it’s a question of, does this give us an idea on what we want to do differently for human training?’

Another area is continual learning, which gets into the issue of how and when both people and AI systems can forget information and how that information can be recalled.

‘AI does suffer sometimes from a lot of forgetting,’ Zemel said. ‘Both of them have problems in different ways, so this is a good area to study and try to figure out if there are some ways for getting both to help each other.’

A third crossover issue affecting both people and AI systems is the principle of uncertainty.

‘A lot of AI systems that are out there now aren’t very good at knowing when they’re uncertain when they should be uncertain,’ he said. ‘And people aren’t very good at that either.’

Practical applications of this kind of cross-training between AI and human brains are already being developed and improved. One example is the kinds of ‘brain-machine interfaces’ that are helping to build smarter prosthetic devices for people, such as mechanical arms for someone who can’t control his or her arms.

Zemel said ‘AI-assisted prosthetic devices’ are being developed that allow movement partly through the brain and partly through an AI interface.

He said the hope is that AI and neuroscience experts and Columbia can keep making these sorts of connections.

‘We’re trying to put these people together, put these people in the same room and get ideas to go back and forth and find things to test and things to explore,’ Zemel said.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., once said it was ‘very clear’ the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in the 2016 election — a claim later contradicted by the release of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the Russia investigation.

‘It’s become very clear that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in trying to subvert the election,’ Nadler told CNN in November 2018. ‘The president is right to be nervous right now, because it appears that time is running out when he can hold himself above the law.’

The comments now conflict with the Durham report, which concluded in May that federal agencies had no ‘actual evidence of collusion’ to justify its launch of the Trump-Russia investigation. This added to the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report in 2019 that determined there was no evidence of a criminal plot to influence the 2016 election. 

Nadler, in the 2018 interview, said evidence would soon surface to prove Trump’s personal involvement in collusion with Russia.

‘The walls are tightening about his knowledge of the collusion with the Russians,’ Nadler said. 

This evidence never arose, but Nadler later said in a January 2020 interview with CBS that Trump attempted to rig the 2020 election just ‘as he worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election.’ The comments came amid the impeachment push over Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden.

‘The reason he did that was in order to extort a foreign government to smear his political opponents for his personal benefits and to help try to rig the 2020 election as he worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election,’ Nadler said. ‘Same pattern.’

The Durham report concluded the Trump-Russia investigation was based upon ‘raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence.’ The launch of the investigation despite the lack of evidence, the report said, showed the Department of Justice and FBI ‘failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.’ The report also concluded the agencies relied heavily upon leads for information ‘provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents.’