Altherion

The Biden administration is trying very, very hard to get some kind of agreement, but the US doesn't quite have the resources and/or the resolve to push the two sides to a peace. The administration has some leverage with Israel, but what it absolutely cannot do is convince Israel to have a permanent ceasefire without all of the hostages being released -- this would be a non-starter in Israel and extremely unpopular in the US. The US has much less leverage with Hamas and the latter will not release the hostages without massive concessions which, again, would not be politically palatable in either the US or Israel so... what exactly is Biden supposed to do beyond what he is already doing?

The Israeli strike on Iran was very carefully calibrated to allow Israel's leadership to say that they hit some military target inside Iran (and thus have retaliated for the barrage) while simultaneously allowing Iran's leadership to say that there was no meaningful attack at all (and thus there is no need for further retaliation). It worked out surprisingly well.

Everybody (including even most people who strongly support Israel) disagrees with some subset of Israel's actions, but as far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of Americans do not share the position of the student activists and are mostly aligned with my position. Here's a PDF of a detailed poll from late March. Most Americans support the recently passed aid package (56 to 44), support Israel over Hamas (79 to 21), believe Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties (66-34) and favor a ceasefire only after all of the hostages are released and Hamas is removed from power (63 to 37). There's nothing toxic about any of this and I would appreciate it if you tone down the condescension.

There is a rather fine line between publicly declaring that people from a specific group don't deserve to live and incitement to violence. The protesters are, as usual, a mix of different groups, but in this case, the mix includes some fairly rabid anti-Semites who are barely even trying to mask themselves as anti-Zionists anymore. And yes, it also includes the usual set of the ill-informed, those who have not thought the issue through as well as those with legitimate concerns about humanitarian issues and the people who are joining simply because it seems like the popular thing to do, but the genuinely toxic elements are sufficient for the universities to feel the need for a crackdown. You are completely right that they would definitely prefer not to do this and they know that cracking down will, at least in the short term, lead to larger protests, but they assessed the situation and concluded that the alternative will very likely be worse.

He will almost certainly be convicted again, but with a more legitimate trial. Here's potentially a new way of making false accusations: This accuser was relatively inept (among other things, he used computers at the place where he was employed to research how to do this), but he still managed to get a lot of traction: the principal has been suspended since January and his family needed police protection due to harassment at their home. AI tools are only going to get better from this point on and not everyone will be this sloppy so audio accusations of this sort (and, eventually, also video) will become more common.

Russia has to be extremely displeased with Iran right now. Prior to that drone and missile barrage, it was a pretty safe bet that the US House of Representatives would hold up the aid to Ukraine until at least the election, but it appears that with a sufficiently blunt reminder that the world is burning, they decided to make a deal instead.

It rather depends on why Canada would want a nuclear weapon in the first place. As the article points out, there are significant downsides to suddenly developing one so one would imagine that the reason to do it would be quite substantial. In that case, it's likely that the red tape and resource limitations that account for the overwhelming majority of that 10 years would not be present and it would take considerably less time. Remember, the original development took less than half of that.

I don't think this is within the bounds of expected behavior. Embassies and consulates are supposed to be left in peace, but, as has been pointed out multiple times within this thread, in practice, this is not actually the case and one can find multiple instances of attacks on both diplomatic personnel and diplomatic facilities. Typically, the response to this ranges from a complaint to the host country to attempts to track down the perpetrators to a strike on something associated with the perpetrators similar in scale to the original attack. Nobody -- and I mean literally nobody -- has ever replied to such an attack with a barrage of hundreds of missiles and drones aimed at both civilian and military targets.

That is sad. I had hoped she might recover.

Where did you see this? I saw a report that she underwent surgery and was in the ICU, but not that she died.

First, I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from. The largest number I can find is on Wikipedia which cites some Syrian Observatory for Human Rights for the following: Every news source I've found gives numbers smaller than 16 so it's not clear where you get ~50. Furthermore, it's not really a question of victims. In response to the bombing of a single building, Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at a variety of sites all over Israel. The fact that Israel and its allies managed to mostly neutralize the attack does not make the attack any less of an escalation.

On the one hand, the interceptors appear to have worked exactly as advertised and the damage is relatively modest. On the other, this is a massive escalation relative to the attack on the consulate and the figures I've seen for the cost to Israel are on the order of one billion dollars (the interceptors are much more expensive than the ballistic missiles and drones that they're intercepting). It's also worth noting that the shielding has never been tested on this scale and Iran could not have possibly known that it would work so well -- had this not been the case, they could easily have killed hundreds of people with this attack. The upshot of all this is that the US has work to do. In the very short term, we need to give Israel money and weapons to replenish the interceptor stockpiles and thereby convince them not to escalate further. In the longer term, we need to accelerate work on cheaper anti-drone and anti-missile defenses -- the current approach works, but it is unsustainable and does not scale. We're already working on this a variety of approaches to this, but something complete needs to be here sooner because these hordes of drones are already here.

It's an old problem and one well known enough to warrant an explicit statement in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 11 of the latter states: The presumption of innocence also exists in most national codes... but of course it's not possible to make private institutions to wait years for the decision of a court. Unless they happen to be led by extremely principled individuals or people who are personally invested in the welfare of the accused, most of today's institutions care about money and their public image. In that regard, it is completely irrelevant whether somebody accused is innocent or guilty; the question is whether they are worth protecting or it's cheaper to abandon them. The answer is usually the latter... but there are exceptions.

Either there are enough Trump fanatics to drive the price up or there are some wealthy people who have reached an arrangement with Trump with respect to what he will do should he win in November and overvaluing the company is part of that arrangement.

The issue is actually not unique to Boeing, it's just that Boeing makes a product that makes it obvious. Almost everything constructed today is deliberately made in a way that reduces costs at the expense of quality. That is, the item usually still functions as intended, but some fraction will be flawed from the start and the rest are more likely to break down sooner than expected or function incorrectly in corner cases. There are products (e.g. water heaters) where the manufacturer is actually happy about this because they don't want the thing to last too far past the warranty (the technical name for this is planned obsolescence). There are other products (e.g. most software) where this is not desirable, but people will tolerate it. Boeing's problem is that planes are a rare product where this is not just undesirable, but completely intolerable. They're some of the largest and most complicated machines we design, they operate in an unforgiving environment and can carry hundreds of people. It's not enough for most planes to work properly most of the time and we've reached the point where the latter is pretty much the case. Our problem as a society is that corporate culture is not something that stays confined to a single corporation. It's not really possible to have most corporations run by despicable parasites who mainly care about their own compensation and thus the stock price, but then single out a few critical spaces where these parasites are not welcome -- there simply isn't a pool of leaders to draw anything else from or of investors who would deal with the alternative leadership.