Powderhorn

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated Ali Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as supreme leader of Iran, which would pitch a hardliner into the task of steering the Islamic republic through the most turbulent period in its 48-year history and offer a powerful signal that, for now, it has no intention of changing course.

No official confirmation has been given and the announcement may be delayed until after the funeral of Ali Khamenei, which was on Wednesday postponed.

His son is believed to have been the choice of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Israeli defence minister, Gideon Saar, has warned he will be assassinated.

Ayatollah Seyed Khatani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses the new supreme leader, said the assembly was close to selecting a leader.

Rigid in his anti-western views, Mojtaba Khamenei is not the candidate Donald Trump would have wanted. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said on Tuesday that Iran was run by “religious fanatic lunatics” – and Khamenei’s appointment is hardly likely to dispel that opinion.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had her ass handed to her during a congressional hearing on Tuesday — and not just by Democrats. In a shift from their usual coddling of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members, some Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee laid into Noem, grilling her on her leadership at the agency amid growing public disapproval of the administration’s increasingly violent anti-immigration crackdown.

Noem still got plenty of softballs from Republican lawmakers, but the pressure from other members of the GOP was notable given the degree to which Trump’s immigration policies could shape the midterm elections.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is not running for reelection this year, berated Noem as the arbiter of a “disaster” for the federal government, taking her to task for everything from her handling of investigations into ICE misconduct, to shooting her dog. “I’m giving you a performance evaluation here — I’m not looking for a response,” he said.

“Quality matters, not quantity,” Tillis said of the administration’s demand that DHS meet certain deportation quotas. “What we have seen is a disaster under your leadership Mrs. Noem, a disaster. What we’ve seen are innocent people getting detained that turn out are American citizens. … Time after time after time, I have been disappointed.”

A curious thing happened the day after Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack Iran: None of the administration’s most senior officials appeared on any Sunday talk shows to defend the joint offensive with Israel, or make the case for why Americans should support the campaign. It was especially surprising given how much Trump — who campaigned against “endless” wars — seemed to be struggling to justify the extraordinary decision to authorize dozens of airstrikes across Iran, including the one that wiped out the country’s longtime leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

By Monday afternoon, it was clear why no one had raised their hand for the job: There isn’t a convincing rationale for why the United States needed to go to war with Iran right now.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters that afternoon, was the first Cabinet official to shed light on the timing and motivation for the attacks: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action [against Iran]. … We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

In other words: The U.S. went to war with Iran — a war that has cost the lives of more than a hundred school innocent children and at least six U.S. service members in its first few days — because Israel forced its hand.

IT consultant and services provider Accenture has agreed to buy Speedtest and Downdetector owner Ookla from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash.

Accenture plans to integrate Ookla’s data products into its own offerings that are targeted at helping communications service providers, hyperscalers, government entities, and other types of customers “optimize … mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks,” Accenture’s announcement today said.

Ookla’s platform also includes Ekahau, which offers tools for troubleshooting and designing wireless networks, and RootMetrics, which monitors mobile network performance.

Accenture plans to use data gathered from Ookla’s services for applications such as helping hyperscalers and cloud providers “ensure the resilience of AI infrastructure and edge datacenters, which deliver most of the inference workload,” improving fraud prevention in banks, conducting smart home analytics in utilities, and retail traffic optimization.

News Corp’s global chief executive has described news organisations as a valuable “input” for artificial intelligence, as the media empire signs an AI content licensing deal with Meta worth up to US$50m (A$71m) a year.

In an upbeat presentation, the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s company, Robert Thomson, said the “reliable” breaking news and information in publications like the Australian, the Times of London and Dow Jones was “hard to beat” as an “input” for AI.

The Meta deal, which was revealed by the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal earlier this week and is expected to last at least three years, will allow Facebook and Instagram’s parent company to scrape News Corp’s US and UK content to train its artificial-intelligence products.

The outlets include the Journal and the New York Post, but the Australian mastheads, which include the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, are not part of the deal.

“We’re essentially an input company,” Thomson told a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco on Monday ahead of the landmark Meta deal.

The hed here is a bit misleading ... 40% of total staff is not 40% of an individual job.

Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind cutting 40% of his company’s employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a declining stock price may also have motivated the move.

Last week, the financial technology company Block announced that it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 workers. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI “have changed what it means to build and run a company”.

“We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week,” he wrote. He also said that Block’s business remained strong and that these cuts weren’t an austerity measure.

Can AI operate 40% of a business? Perhaps, but other specters haunt Dorsey’s company.

I'd be surprised if LLMs can handle 40% of anyone's job. You know what often can? Good, old-fashioned automation. It handles tedious tasks no one wanted to do in the first place and produces improved, predictable and testable results.

In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town.

The university’s most recent changes include the consolidation of African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies into a single “Social and Cultural Analysis” department, as well as a UT system-wide policy asking faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in the classroom. While the shift seems sudden, these attacks are in line with an ant-DEI, right-wing agenda that has been years in the making.

Both measures are purposefully vague on the timeline, procedure, and funding. “We are in difficult times,” said UT board of regents chair Kevin Eltife during the meeting at which the topics policy was approved. “Vagueness can be our friend.”

For the impacted students and faculty, this lack of specificity serves only to plunge their work and studies into a state of precarity. Reid Pinckard, a first-year PhD student in American Studies, said when the consolidation was announced on February 12, “it genuinely sucked the energy out of the office we were in.” In chats with other graduate students, the measure also caused a “frenzy,” he said. “There were questions like, ‘What are we supposed to do? How can we handle this?’ People that are graduating this semester were like, ‘Is my degree going to be in American Studies, or is it going to be this or that?’ That’s really what this is serving to do, which is to make people feel like they don’t know what’s going on.”

(this could have used another pass by a copyeditor)

“Please send help. It hurts so bad,” Regina Santos-Aviles told a police dispatcher the night she set herself on fire. Standing in her backyard on September 13, 2025, Santos-Aviles had doused herself in gasoline then used a lighter to ignite the flames, according to a fire department report. The 35-year-old mom was airlifted to a hospital in San Antonio, where she was pronounced dead.

For the four years leading up to her death, Santos-Aviles had worked as the regional director of Congressman Tony Gonzales’ district office in Uvalde, Texas. In the spring of 2024, text messages recently released by her family show, the Republican repeatedly pressured his aide for “sexy” photos and quizzed her about her favorite sexual positions, even as Santos-Aviles resisted his advances and told him he was going “too far.”

The fallout from the subsequent affair was swift and total for Santos-Aviles. Her husband found out and broadcast his knowledge of it in a text sent to Gonzales and seven of her coworkers. She was ostracized at work, as her husband ended their 21-year relationship and moved out of their home. Santos-Aviles’ mental health deteriorated, people close to her said, even as she remained in her job until her death a year and a half later.

In November, the Office of Congressional Conduct opened an inquiry into Gonzales’ conduct — an inquiry the Texas congressman has reportedly refused to cooperate with. Per House protocol, the findings of that investigation will remain secret, even if they are deemed serious enough to refer to the House Ethics Committee.

Within hours on Friday, the Pentagon blacklisted one AI company for refusing to drop its safety commitments on surveillance and autonomous weapons, then turned around and praised a competitor for signing a deal that supposedly preserved those exact same commitments.

This confused some people. Why would the Pentagon seek to destroy one company over the same terms it agreed to with its largest competitor just hours later?

There’s an answer though: the words in OpenAI’s contract likely don’t mean what most people think they mean.

This isn’t speculation about future abuse. It’s the documented operating procedure of the NSA for decades—a practice exposed repeatedly by whistleblowers, litigated in courts, and eventually confirmed in declassified documents.

Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.

The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.

The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds.

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Protestors stood in the snow outside the offices of Ohio’s utility regulator in January to say they were fed up with rising electricity rates.

Even a few years ago, the scene would have been hard to imagine, considering the complexity of utility costs and the obscurity of state regulatory agencies. But rate hikes in Ohio and across the country have provoked frustrated consumers to demand answers.

“It’s just getting harder and harder now to live,” said Steve Van Kuiken, a United Church of Christ pastor in Columbus who is part of a community group opposing rate increases. “The working class is really getting squeezed, and everything’s going up.”

Van Kuiken was describing the resentment that has gripped much of the country. U.S. residential electricity rates increased by 5 percent in 2025 compared to the prior year, according to data released Feb. 24 by the Energy Information Administration that provides a comprehensive look at the price shift during President Donald Trump’s first full year in office. A few states, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, saw double-digit growth, which has an extra sting because it followed a period of relatively flat growth.

Consumers are asking why, but the answers don’t come easily and vary by state and utility. One factor is utilities’ surge in spending on wires and other equipment used to deliver electricity, a trend partly attributable to rising power demand from data centers, according to researchers. Another factor is the increase in natural gas prices, which hits hardest in states such as Pennsylvania that rely heavily on gas for generating electricity.

The outcome and duration of the war in the Middle East may be decided by a grim calculus based on the size of Iran’s drone and missile stocks v vital air defence munitions held by the US, Israel and Gulf states, analysts and officials say.

Since Saturday, Iran and its proxies have sought to counter the intensive joint US and Israeli offensive with more than 1,000 strikes against targets across almost a dozen countries spread over 1,200 miles. With its antiquated air force unable to compete with those of Israel and the US, Tehran has relied on its arsenal of missiles and drones.

The geographical extent of Iran’s retaliatory attacks have made the conflict the widest in the Middle East since the second world war. Israeli and US aircraft and missiles have struck hundreds of sites across Iran, without losing a plane to hostile fire.

The US and Israel are seeking to destroy as much of Iran’s missile stockpile and infrastructure as possible, targeting launchers, stores and personnel.