The U.S. has about 2,000 troops deployed in Syria and has already spent nearly $30 billion waging war there — it’s requested an additional $13 billion for fiscal year 2018. The Pentagon wants to keep U.S. forces in Syria indefinitely (as did Rex Tillerson’s State Department), but Trump’s remarks last week at an infrastructure speech in Ohio that “we’ll be coming out of Syria like very soon” threw the U.S. security establishment for a loop. Meanwhile, Trump’s military advisors argue that pulling out of Syria now will only give ISIS the oxygen it needs to re-expand.

…stabilizing Syria will take many more months; rebuilding the nation’s politics and infrastructure will take years. But our core goals of stability, recovery and safety for Syria’s disenfranchised and displaced, and prevention of the emergence of an ISIS 2.0 or the equivalent are within reach, if we stay engaged. It is time to broaden our Syria strategy beyond the simple defeat of ISIS.

The attack comes a week after US President Donald Trump said he wanted the US presence in Syria to end “very soon”.

If the chemical weapons attack is confirmed, it would pose a dilemma for the president, who has promises to hold President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to account over the use of chemical weapons.

Following a chemical attack last year, the US launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the air base from which the attacks had originated.

Officials said the participation of the North Koreans in the preparatory talks give them more confidence that Kim is serious about meeting. Until the talks between US and North Korean intelligence officials began in earnest, Trump and his aides have relied partly on the characterizations of the South Koreans, which have experienced a rapprochement since the Olympic games held in Pyongchang in February that led to Kim’s historic invite to Trump.

President Trump’s promise to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a big deal. Whether or not the talks are successful, or even occur, Mr. Trump has trashed a fundamental assumption of American diplomacy: that talking to the U.S. is a paternalistic reward for good behavior.

Many experts believe that a rushed and ill-prepared summit is likely to fail, prematurely discrediting diplomacy and putting us on a path to war.

This is a plausible, and frightening, scenario… But another scenario is just as plausible: Trump and Kim move quickly to strike a barest-of-bones “grand bargain” that commits Washington to address North Korea’s concerns in return for Pyongyang’s promise to pursue denuclearization, with the details to be worked out later.

So far, Israel has faced little criticism from an international media uninterested in the Gaza story, or else is happy to go along with Israel’s interpretation of events. The vocabulary used by news outlets is often revealing: for instance, the BBC website on 31 March had a headline reading “Gaza-Israel border: Clashes ‘leave 16 Palestinians dead and hundreds injured”. The word “clashes” implies combat between two groups capable of fighting each other, though, as Human Rights Watch says, the demonstrators pose no threat to an all-powerful Israeli military…

In a nutshell, two difficult questions of international law come up: First, whether the marches constitute part of an “armed conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians, and second, if they are part of the armed conflict, whether unarmed civilians participating in the marches fall under the definition of “civilians taking a direct part in hostilities” and therefore can be potentially targeted as irregular combatants by the IDF.

Were all 16 deaths necessary? No one can guarantee that. The Palestinians, by deciding to stage demonstrations that will gain them nothing, knew that it is rare in such events to have everything go as planned. They knew that in such events, a so-called “strategic corporal” — be it a low-ranking soldier, or a hot-headed activist, or a confused officer — can begin an avalanche of events that ends with bloodshed without ever intending to do it.

Imagine your least-favorite world leader. (Take as much time as you need.)

Now, imagine if that person wasn’t a human, but a network of millions of computers around the world. This digi-dictator has instant access to every scrap of recorded information about every person who’s ever lived. It can make millions of calculations in a fraction of a second, controls the world’s economy and weapons systems with godlike autonomy and — scariest of all — can never, ever die.

This unkillable digital dictator, according to Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, is one of the darker scenarios awaiting humankind’s future if artificial-intelligence research continues without serious regulation.

The US doesn’t necessarily need new rules and regulations for AI, but there may be situations where the government could step in to help apply existing laws. In the case of autonomous cars, for example, adapting existing regulations had been an effective approach. Recent accidents involving self-driving vehicles are being investigated by federal agencies to make sure no rules were broken.

The same is true in in dealing with algorithmic bias…

A landmark Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on artificial intelligence and automation was published last month. The estimates for the number of jobs eliminated by technology ranges anywhere between 47 per cent and just 9 per cent.

The survey found almost half of all jobs would change in nature as a result of new technologies. A smaller number of about 14 per cent were vulnerable to elimination. It further found that manufacturing and agriculture were the most exposed sectors. The threat is also greatest for those entering the workforce and preparing for retirement.

She was given a diagnosis of dissociative fugue, a rare condition in which people lose access to their autobiographical memory and personal identity, occasionally adopting a new one, and may abruptly embark on a long journey. The state is typically triggered by trauma—often sexual or physical abuse, a combat experience, or exposure to a natural disaster—or by an unbearable internal conflict. Philippe Tissié, one of the first psychiatrists to study fugue, characterized it as a kind of self-exile.

Jacobson displays none of the Abbi Abrams’s “yas, queen” clowning viewers have come to expect from the Broad City star in 6 Balloons. Instead, she turns in a subtle and nuanced dramatic performance as the devoted sister of a recently relapsed heroin addict (Franco, also shifting gears) in the Netflix film that begins streaming Friday, April 6. Jacobson knows the role is quite a departure—and says it took a lot of convincing to get producers to cast her. “I auditioned a couple of times,” she says. “I don’t think I was a lot of people’s first choice, to be honest. [Writer-director] Marja-Lewis Ryan really fought for me.”

I now have two sons, ages 16 and 18. I do not have custody of them — I lost it when I left the Hasidic world, and so I have no control over their education. Today, they cannot speak, read or write in English past a second-grade level…

Like me, my sons will be expected to marry young and raise large families. They too will receive no guidance on how to provide for them and will be forced into low-wage jobs and rely heavily on government support.