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  • Iran’s Missiles vs. Israel’s Air Defense: A Tactical Showdown

    Iran’s Missiles vs. Israel’s Air Defense: A Tactical Showdown

    Since the conflict began on Friday, Iran has launched around 370 ballistic missiles at Israel, according to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). But what kinds of projectiles are being used—and how robust is Israel’s air defence system against potential waves of retaliatory attacks from Tehran?

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    US officials estimate that Iran possesses the largest arsenal of ballistic missiles in the Middle East, with over 3,000 units. Some of these high-speed missiles can reach Israeli territory in as little as 15 minutes.  
    However, only medium-range ballistic missiles—those capable of travelling over 1,000 km—can strike Israel from Iran. According to Iran’s semi-official news agency ISNA, the country has nine different missile types with that capability.  

    “Most estimates I have seen put the number of Iranian missiles capable of hitting Israel closer to 2,000,” Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, posted on X this week.
    While much of Iran’s missile arsenal remains classified, ISNA published a graphic in April last year showcasing some of its key weapons. These included the Sejil, which can reach speeds of over 17,000 km/h and has a range of 2,500 km; the Kheibar, with a 2,000 km range; and the Haj Qasem, with a range of 1,400 km.  
    A recent threat assessment by the US military found that Iran fields a “large quantity” of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones capable of striking targets across the region. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Iran intends to continue expanding this capacity.  
    In a video statement on Friday, Netanyahu said Iran had accelerated production and was aiming to manufacture 300 ballistic missiles per month—potentially producing 20,000 rockets over the next six years.  

    Israel vs Iran: A military comparison

    According to the latest estimates from SIPRI’s Military Balance, Israel’s defence budget in 2023 was more than double that of Iran—$27.5 billion compared to $10.3 billion.  

    Iran’s missile programme draws heavily from North Korean and Russian designs, and has reportedly benefited from Chinese assistance, according to the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based non-profit. 
    It now has 610,000 active personnel and 350,000 reserves with the addition of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Iran also has 334 combat-capable aircraft, as well as air defence systems such as the Russian S-300, which has limited capabilities when it comes to defending against ballistic missiles. 
    Israel, for its part, has developed one of the most advanced missile arsenals in the world, combining decades of homegrown innovation with strong support from the US.  FILE - Israeli Iron Dome air defence system fires to intercept a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, 20 October 2023FILE – Israeli Iron Dome air defence system fires to intercept a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, 20 October 2023
    AP Photo

    At the top end of this arsenal are long-range ballistic missiles such as the Jericho II and Jericho III. While the exact numbers are classified, the Jericho II is believed to be nuclear-capable with a range of around 1,500 kilometres, while the Jericho III may be able to reach targets over 6,000 kilometres away, giving Israel a strategic deterrent that extends far beyond its borders. 
    Alongside these long-range systems, Israel has hundreds of short- and medium-range missiles designed for quick, precise strikes. These include the Predator Hawk, which can hit targets up to 300 kilometres away, and cruise missiles such as the Popeye and the Delilah, which are launched from the air or sea.  
    In practice, each incoming missile usually requires its own interceptor missile to neutralise it. For example, if Iran were to launch 100 missiles, Israel would need to fire almost the same number of interceptors to stop them. 
    “The types of interceptors that are required to shoot down ballistic missiles are expensive and difficult to produce in mass quantities,” Dan Caldwell posted on X this week, adding that he think it likely that Israel and the US “are going to have start rationing their interceptors soon (if they haven’t already) – further increasing the effectiveness of even smaller Iranian barrages.”
    Its multibillion-dollar military arsenal also includes around 340 combat aircraft—among them advanced US-made F-35 stealth fighters—46 helicopters, a combined 634,500 active and reserve personnel, and a multilayered air defence system.   
    Approximately 370 ballistic missiles have been launched by Iran at Israel since the conflict began on Friday, claims the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). On Saturday, an Israeli military official said that the country’s air defence shield had an “80 to 90% success rate”, while stressing that “no system is 100% effective”—implying that some Iranian missiles had breached Israeli air defences, Reuters reported.  
    The Iron Dome, Israel’s well-known air defence system, is just one component of a broader system designed to counter a range of aerial threats, from rockets and missiles to drones and aircraft.  
    The first layer, the Iron Dome, intercepts short-range rockets and artillery shells—typically within 70 kilometres—and is primarily used to protect civilian areas.  
    Next is David’s Sling, which targets medium-range ballistic missiles launched from distances between 100 and 200 kilometres.  
    Finally, the Arrow system—comprising Arrow 2 and Arrow 3—provides long-range defence. Arrow 2 is designed to intercept missiles in the upper atmosphere, roughly 50 kilometres above ground and within a 100-kilometre radius. Arrow 3 pushes that boundary into space, capable of intercepting missiles at distances of up to 2,400 kilometres.  
    Israel’s Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow systems are all missile interceptors. This means that they are not designed to launch attacks, but rather to detect and destroy incoming missiles before they reach their targets. 
    In practice, each incoming missile usually requires its own interceptor missile to neutralise it. For example, if Iran were to launch 100 missiles, Israel would likely need to fire almost 100 interceptors to stop them — one for each threat. 
    However, despite all these protection layers, analysts argue that Israel’s decision to target the heart of the Iranian regime is raising the stakes, as the latter could respond by striking other targets in neighbouring countries, thus escalating the conflict in the region, or by attempting to block trade in the Persian Gulf.  
    “If Israel continues to attack its nuclear and military facilities, Iran has a strong incentive to put together a rudimentary nuclear weapon as quickly as it can to deter any further damage of its facilities and demonstrate that it is capable of defending its sovereignty,” senior research fellow at Chatham House Dr Marion Messmer wrote in an analysis.  

  • Stanford sticks with legacy admissions

    Stanford University has confirmed its admissions policies for fall 2026 will continue considering legacy status, a decision that could influence access to one of Silicon Valley’s most important talent pipelines. Stanford is also ending its test-optional policy, requiring SAT or ACT scores for the first time since 2021.

    According to the Stanford Daily, the university is so committed to keeping legacy preferences that it’s withdrawing from California’s Cal Grant program, choosing to forgo state financial aid rather than comply with legislation signed by California governor Gavin Newsom last fall — Assembly Bill 1780 — which bans legacy admissions. The university promises to replace that funding with its own money.

    Stanford has been the launching pad for numerous tech leaders, from the founders of Google, Nvidia, Snap, and Netflix, to many other renowned CEOs and VCs. With legacy admissions intact, children of Silicon Valley’s elite arguably maintain an advantage in accessing the network that has powered numerous tech booms.

    The return of test requirements adds another wrinkle, potentially favoring students with resources for test prep. While supporters believe it maintains academic standards, critics argue that for an industry built on meritocracy rhetoric, Stanford’s decisions represent a step in the wrong direction — reinstating standardized barriers and perpetuating inequality.

    Stanford last year announced it would reverse its 2021 decision to remove standardized testing as an application requirement. That the university will continue to consider legacy status was revealed last week in newly released admissions criteria.

    The policies take on added importance given universities’ financial dependence on alumni support. Alumni donations are major financial contributors to educational institutions, particularly Ivy League schools. Princeton University, for example, received nearly half its donations — 46.6% — from alums in the 2022-2023 academic year.

    At Stanford specifically, most donations are either directed toward annual giving via The Stanford Fund, which spends the money immediately on current operations, financial aid, and other programs, or they are provided — more often — as gifts to Stanford’s massive endowment (managed by Stanford Management Company), which spends roughly 5% annually on university operations, accounting for roughly 22% of its operating budget.

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    Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda

    Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $600+ before prices rise.

    Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda

    Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise.

    San Francisco
    |
    October 27-29, 2025

    REGISTER NOW

    Universities depend even more heavily on alumni donations when facing external financial pressures, and new federal policies targeting higher education have created unforeseen and unprecedented budget issues for institutions like Stanford.

    Stanford confirmed to the San Francisco Chronicle just last week that it will permanently lay off 363 employees, which is nearly 2% of its administrative and technical workforce, owing to what officials described as “ongoing economic uncertainty” and “anticipated changes in federal policy.” These include, most notably, a whopping increase in endowment taxes from 1.4% to 8% included in the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that was signed into law last month.

    That tax increase alone will cost Stanford an estimated $750 million annually.

    We’re always looking to evolve, and by providing some insight into your perspective and feedback into TechCrunch and our coverage and events, you can help us! Fill out this survey to let us know how we’re doing and get the chance to win a prize in return!

  • Government health minister says eating at desks is ‘disgusting’, but should it be banned?

    Government health minister says eating at desks is ‘disgusting’, but should it be banned?

    Recent research has found that nearly two thirds of workers eat their lunch at their desk every day, with many admitting they would feel ‘guilty’ if they left the office for their allocated hour.

    Many workers are no longer paid for their lunch breaks, and therefore have every legal right to leave the premises for a full 60 minutes each and every day.

    So why are we rushing out to pick up a quick meal deal and heading straight back to dine ‘al desco’?

    Put simply, times are tough for most companies at the moment and employees are feeling this strain more than anybody. So while stomachs might be calling for lunch, there’s a good chance that the boss is calling even louder for the completion of the next piece of work.

    Sure, we would all enjoy being able to leave the office – and to leave our emails there while we’re at it – to enjoy a leisurely lunch for a full 60 minutes, but the fact is it just isn’t viable for the majority of employees anymore.

    So is eating at your desk as disgusting as Anna Soubry has suggested, and if so, can it harm your health?

    Dr Ron Cutler, a microbiologist at Queen Mary University of London, believes a quick lunch at the desk could be potentially threatening to your health:

    He said: “The crumbs that accumulate on your desk and in your keyboard provide a perfect environment for bacteria and fungi to thrive.

    “The temperature in offices is typically around 20C, the point at which staphylococcus can breed, causing diarrhoea and vomiting — which is why leaving your sandwich on your desk all morning is also a risk.

    “And the more people who share office equipment or desks, the greater the risk of catching a bug.

    “The more people use certain equipment, the more germs will be on it.”

    It appears then, that your desk probably isn’t the most hygienic place to consume your lunch.

    So how can companies maintain staff productivity levels, while lowering their exposure to such potentially unsanitary conditions?

    The simple answer would be to introduce a ban on staff eating at their desks and force them to leave the office. However, this might result in them feeling extra pressure to meet deadlines and leave them feeling frustrated.

    Although, having said that, I used to work at a busy law firm in Paris, were the lunchtime culture resulted in two-hour breaks filled with eating and exercise – not at the same time of course – and productivity levels didn’t seem to suffer at all.

    Eating away from the desk may even result in workers taking less sick leave, as germs are prevented from traveling around the office so freely, and therefore output levels might actually increase.

    The other option, and probably the more viable one to many businesses, is to introduce a regular cleaning process. This would ensure that desks and workstations are fully cleaned and sterilised, reducing the number of germs in circulation.

    To ensure that employers are acting lawfully, they must also be aware of their employees’ rights when it comes to lunch-time dining:

    • For employers, ensure that you include break periods within contracts of employment so that your staff know what to expect each lunch time.
    • If this is not the case, the Working Time Regulations state that an adult employee is entitled to a 20 minute rest break, during a daily working time of more than 6 hours per day, and under normal circumstances, they are absolutely entitled to take that rest break wherever they want, including leaving the premises.
    • However, breaks cannot be taken at the end of the working day – it must be somewhere in the middle.
    • Employers have the right to manage the time when breaks are taken, as long as it meets these conditions.
    • Employees have no statutory right to take smoking breaks.

    To summarise, however your company chooses to combat the issue of eating ‘al desco’, the most important factor for many employers is the productivity and motivation of their staff. Whatever you decide to do, be sure to consult your team and involve them in any decision you make. If you can achieve staff buy-in, creating the lunchtime culture you want will be much easier.

  • How to use social media platforms to successfully scale your business

    How to use social media platforms to successfully scale your business

    Scaling your business, whilst maintaining efficiency, is possibly one of the hardest things to do in performance advertising. The reason for that is down to the way the platforms are set up.

    There are two traditional scaling methods – horizontal scaling and vertical scaling

    Vertical scaling

    Vertical scaling increases the daily spend on each of the ads. As an example, you could start off at £10 a day and push that up to £1000 or £10,000 per day. This used to work, but things have changes and now it’s pretty difficult to do unless you’ve got an amazing advert and performance.

    Horizontal scaling

    Instead of increasing daily spend from, for example, £10 to £1000 per day, you run 10 different £10- a-day ads to get you to that £1000 per day total spend. To scale horizontally you need to create more adverts rather than just increasing the daily spend.
    You will see much better performance from horizontal scaling when you use rules to incrementally increase daily budgets, rather than massively increasing them over a given time frame.
    You can set up automatic rules; if your target is 3 times your return on ad spend, you can tell Facebook to automatically increase the daily budget by 10 or 15% if your ad is hitting that target and this is probably the most effective way to scale vertically.
    Comparability between accounts and platforms
    There is a huge advantage to outsourcing your performance marketing as not only do you get access to a specialist but also the advantage of that agency being able to compare against other brands in other locations, and potentially even brands in similar verticals
    For example, if we can see that the CPM’s are really high in the US and this is consistent throughout, this identifies a universal trend across the platform. If you are only working on one brand and one ad account, it would be almost impossible to make those sorts of assumptions with such limited data. With multiple clients, you can study overall performance and whether specific ad platforms are broken or have been down for a period of time. This insight can then be offered to the client and changes suggested to their plan or strategy based on this evidence.

    Interest based versus lookalikes

    New clients often haven’t had a pixel setup implemented, so there is no pre-existing data to work from. This means that from an audience perspective, you have to target cold or upper funnel audiences, and the way to do that is through interest-based audiences. On most platforms, you can target people based on their interests, age and in some cases, financial information. Using some of our bike brands as an example, we have generic bike audiences which are really broad- those who have an interest in cycling, cycling teams, the Tour de France and so on, but we also have a specific audience in cycling publications which have similar attributes.
    In addition, you can also create persona-based audiences. These are created based on different interests but instead of getting everyone interested in cycling (from the previous example), we would target someone of a certain age group. We can then use this customer profile and target your ideal customer through their interests; this is really effective.
    Once you have over 100 conversions through the pixel, or if you’re working with a client who has pre-existing data, you are then able to create lookalike audiences and these audiences are your best performers

    What is a look alike audience?

    If you have 100 customers, Google will then duplicate that audience by targeting people with similar characteristics to your customers, based on aspects such as finance or demographic. Your existing audience has already bought your product so by duplicating it, you have doubled your audience. Therefore, on a paid social, the lookalike audience will probably be your best performing audience.
    You can also stack lookalikes. Instead of targeting one lookalike audience, you can put lookalike audiences together, creating an even wider reach.

    Funnel/messaging structure

    Brands love to hit people with offers because they are a good converter. If you offer a 20% discount on your product, you’ll get a much higher clickthrough rate and probably a conversion. One of the problems that we see over and over is that brands are only trading on discounts. As a first interaction with your brand, customers are likely to make a purchase because people like the offer and want to buy it ‘now’, but this means you are only trading on one messaging style. To avoid this, it’s better to tailor the copy or the type of creative specifically, depending on where people are within the funnel.
    In the upper funnel, videos explaining the proposition of the brand and the USP of the product are effective, making sure that you are educating your audience about your brand and offering so that even if they don’t purchase, they will know more about you, and you will have infiltrated their subliminal radar.
    In your lower funnel, your audience is already educated about your brand and this allows you to push the sales boundaries and provide them with an offer because they’ve already been through multiple touchpoints, so your final right hook could be a 5 or 10% offer.
    The results from these methods will be your guide on what is working and what to avoid but regular tweaks and refinement are key. And your safest bet? The advice of an expert who does this morning, noon and night – it’s a minefield out there!

  • The Insider’s Guide to Employment Law Updates

    The Insider’s Guide to Employment Law Updates

    Welcome to April – Pay & Leave Updates!

    Hey there, workers and employers alike! April 6th is a big day for your wallets and your schedules. Below is the latest scoop on statutory pay changes and family‑friendly leave policies, all laid out in a breezy, friendly style. Grab a cup of tea and let’s dive in.

    Statutory Pay Tweaks

    • Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) jumps from £87.55 to £88.45 per week.
    • Maternity, Paternity and Adoption Pay nudges up from £138.18 to £139.58.
    • Redundancy Pay now uses a maximum weekly figure of £475 for calculations.

    Shared Parental Leave: Splitting the Love

    New rules allow parents of babies born on or after April 5th, 2015 to share a part of the mother’s maternity entitlement. Here’s the nutshell:

    • Each eligible parent can submit up to three notice periods for leave.
    • ‘Share’ the 12 months of leave between the two of you – even on a monthly basis if you fancy it.
    • Extra perks: 20 optional “in‑touch” days (SPL‑IT) plus the usual 10 KIT days for maternity.
    • Keep in mind that standard maternity/adoption/paternity leave stays the same unless you opt for SPL.
    • Birth mothers still need to take at least two weeks off after the little one appears.
    • Fathers can grab an additional two weeks of statutory parental leave on top of any SPL.

    Before you hit the “send” button, chat with the employee about how the leave will work. Re‑requests can be a time‑sink for HR. Remember, a proper SPL can’t be denied unless there are legitimate reasons, just like flexible working. No pressure to cancel, no penalties—just a smooth process.

    More Rights for Surrogates & Adoptive Parents

    • From April 6th, adoptees and surrogates are treated like any other employee when it comes to pay and eligibility for maternity leave.
    • Unpaid parental leave extends up to the age 18 for all kids.

    New Compensation Limits

    • When it comes to unfair dismissal, the weekly pay cap rises to £475.
    • Max compensation for such cases now tops out at £78,335.

    Coming Soon: Managing Sickness Absence

    The Health and Work Assessment and Advisory Service is launching soon to help employers support staff with absences longer than four weeks. Expect:

    • A thorough assessment of the situation.
    • A tailor‑made return‑to‑work plan showcasing how the employee can get back on track.
    • Regular updates so everyone stays in the loop.

    Need a hand planning your next move or figuring out these new rules? The Forum’s business advice team is ready to help. Don’t forget to give them a shout at 0845 130 1722 or swing by www.fpb.org for more details. Good luck, and let’s make April a month of fewer headaches and more smiles!