Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may whine all he likes about how U.S. President-elect Donald Trump made him do it. He is already selling the "I had no choice, we managed to postpone this for months" message to his ultranationalist, messianic, warmongering ruling coalition partners. But the truth is very clear: he has agreed to a deal he could and should have signed many months ago.

The deal that may – and still may not – be agreed and signed on Tuesday or Wednesday was on the table last May, again in July and practically ever since. But Mr. Netanyahu, in the name of "an existential war" that will produce a "total victory," waited for the U.S. election and then for the presidential inauguration before agreeing to a deal.

Explaining why he opposes the deal, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir specifically recalled how he previously prevented a deal by threatening Netanyahu, validating the claim that the prime minister's entire calculus was politically motivated. He never intended to end the war even when since-dismissed Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the Israel Defense Forces stressed that all military goals had been achieved. The "strategic importance" of the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza-Sinai border, meanwhile, was a bogus and cynical argument he had concocted.

It’s not as bad as you think—it’s worse.

Mathematicians are working to fully explain unusual behaviors uncovered using artificial intelligence.

Abstract page for arXiv paper 2310.06770v2: SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?

We provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants' incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated (30 percent relative to US-born Whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline is part of a broader divergence of outcomes between less-educated immigrants and their US-born counterparts.

A textbook example of shifting the standards of evidence to suit its authors’ needs.

A post for developers about the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet and the SWE-bench eval