Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By David Campbell, Professor of Public Administration, Binghamton University, State University of New York

The 50 American individuals and couples who gave or pledged the most to charity in 2025 committed US$22.4 billion to foundations, universities, hospitals and more. That total was 35% above an inflation-adjusted $16.6 billion in 2024, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s latest annual tally of these donations.

Media entrepreneur and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg led the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 list, followed by Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Allen died in 2018, but his estate is still being settled.

The Conversation U.S. asked David Campbell, Lindsey McDougle and Hans Peter Schmitz, three scholars of philanthropy and nonprofits, to assess the significance of these gifts and to consider what they indicate about the state of charitable giving in the United States.

What trends stand out overall?

Schmitz: Higher education, hospitals, medical research, foundations and donor-advised funds – which serve as savings accounts reserved for charitable giving – drew the biggest gifts in 2025. The education and medical fields are a perennial favorite of high-dollar donors. To a degree, these preferences for supporting education and health were first expressed by Andrew Carnegie in his 1889 essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which he famously claimed that “the man who dies rich dies disgraced.”

Campbell: This list changes little from year to year. Of this year’s top 20 donors, 16 have appeared at least one other time over the past five years. Six others have also made this list at least two other times since 2021. For the third year in a row, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is at the top of the list. He gave away over $4 billion in 2025, over $500 million more than the next highest donor.

Half of these 22 repeat top-50 givers have signed The Giving Pledge, in which they made a public commitment “to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetime or wills.” Their appearance on the list shows that they are making at least some progress toward that commitment.

How they give their money hasn’t changed much either. A dozen of the 22 who make this list year after year regularly fund the same causes – often their own family foundations. Donations to foundations increase the amount of money those philanthropic institutions may give away in the future, but that money might not be disbursed anytime soon. By law, foundations only have to donate or spend 5% of the money they possess every year.

McDougle: The top 50 donors gave more in 2025 than they had since 2021. But this growth is highly concentrated. Mike Bloomberg alone accounts for 19% of the $22.4 billion they gave in 2025, and the top 10 accounted for nearly three-quarters of what all 50 gave to charity.

This pattern reflects a broader reality: A small number of ultra-wealthy individuals increasingly dominate American philanthropy. This concentration is raising questions about democratic accountability, including this one: Whose priorities define the public good?

In my opinion, this kind of concentration can skew philanthropic priorities. Decisions about education, health care, climate policy and democracy can increasingly become influenced not through public deliberation, but through the discretionary choices of a few members of a financial elite.

What surprises you about the biggest donors?

Schmitz: I find it odd that MacKenzie Scott isn’t on this list. She says she gave $7.1 billion in 2025. If she had met the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s criteria, that would have landed her in first place by far. Unfortunately, the Chronicle says that MacKenzie Scott has never provided sufficient information about her generosity since becoming a major donor on her own, following her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And that leaves her off the list year after year.

Campbell: The Trump administration’s defunding of the U.S. Agency for International Development is among the most significant events of 2025. When it began, some philanthropy scholars wondered whether wealthy donors would replace at least a portion of the lost funds.

One example of that happening: Jacklyn and Miguel Bezos, the parents of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, pledged up to $500 million to UNICEF, the United Nations humanitarian relief organization. No other donors on this list clearly made gifts for international development or foreign aid such a high priority. However, some of these donors’ foundations, notably the Gates Foundation, do support those efforts.

Similarly, it’s unclear to what extent these donors are responding to the huge funding cuts to research that the Trump administration made in 2025.

Several of them have supported medical research in the past and continued to do in 2025. Sergey Brin gave the Michael J. Fox Foundation $50 million for Parkinson’s disease research, a continuation of his past commitment to that organization. Phil and Penny Knight, the founder of Nike and his wife, announced plans to give $2 billion to the Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute.

McDougle: I think it’s striking that there are no women who made this year’s Philanthropy 50 list on their own. The women listed appear only as part of a married couple, as members of a family, or within joint giving structures that include a male donor. By contrast, there are 24 male donors listed on their own.

Last year’s list included multiple women as sole donors, including two in the top 10.

The absence of women listed here who gave independently of men mirrors broader wealth disparities in the U.S.: About 86% of U.S. billionaires are men, according to the Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list.

What concerns do you have?

Schmitz: The list excludes donors like MacKenzie Scott, but includes other very rich donors with serious ethical issues. Businessman Denny Sanford is one example. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2010. He was removed from it in 2023 after being investigated for the alleged possession of child pornography. South Dakota prosecutors ultimately declined to levy charges against the philanthropist, who ranked 14th among the top 50 donors of 2025.

The reputation of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, one of the world’s biggest donors, is also getting tarnished. In February 2026, he apologized to the staff of the Gates Foundation for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

I suggest that the Chronicle of Philanthropy take ethically problematic behavior into consideration when it composes this annual list.

Campbell: It’s a bit surprising to see that only 19 of the top 50 donors are also on the Forbes 400, which lists the nation’s richest people. The wealthiest Americans have the most to give, and I would have expected to see more of them among the top 50 givers as well. Instead, what we see is that philanthropy is a higher and consistent priority more for some than for others, which I find disappointing.

I would like to see more members of the Forbes 400 on this list next year.

What do you expect to see in 2026 and beyond?

Campbell: We are living in a politically volatile moment, with high levels of polarization and increased concerns about democratic backsliding in the United States.

Several of these donors have made strengthening democracy a high priority, including Pierre and Pam Omidyar, and Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, through his family foundation. However, I don’t believe that this issue has been a high enough priority among the biggest givers in recent years. I would think that this kind of giving could increase in 2026.

McDougle: Another factor is demographic. Most of the top 50 donors are in their 60s or older. In the years ahead, philanthropy is likely to be influenced by a significant intergenerational transfer of wealth. Philanthropy scholars and consultants estimate that tens of trillions of dollars will transfer from older Americans to their younger heirs over the coming decades.

That shift could have substantial implications for large-scale giving. At the same time, it remains unclear whether the top 50 donors under 60 will be inclined to establish foundations. Surveys of very wealthy families suggest that younger donors often express different priorities than older ones.

Whether those preferences will reshape elite philanthropy remains an open question.

David Campbell is chair of the Conrad and Virginia Klee Foundation Board.

Lindsey McDougle is president-elect of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).

Hans Peter Schmitz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Gifts from top 50 US philanthropists jumped to $22.4B in 2025 − Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates and the estate of Paul Allen lead a list of the biggest givers – https://theconversation.com/gifts-from-top-50-us-philanthropists-jumped-to-22-4b-in-2025-mike-bloomberg-bill-gates-and-the-estate-of-paul-allen-lead-a-list-of-the-biggest-givers-276825

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Doug Jacobson, University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University

When most people think about the internet, they likely picture websites and apps. What they rarely see are the invisible services that make those experiences possible: systems that translate names into numbers, verify who you are, deliver messages and block malicious traffic.

For example, DNS, the Domain Name System, has quietly become a single point of failure. DNS is the internet’s phone book. When it fails, large parts of the internet effectively disappear, even if servers are still running.

DNS is not alone. Over the past decade, four core internet services – DNS, authentication, email and security infrastructure – have consolidated into a small number of global platforms. As a cybersecurity researcher, I see that this concentration has fundamentally changed how outages unfold. What would once have been a local failure is now often a systemic event, affecting thousands of organizations simultaneously.

The internet was designed to assume failure. Mail servers, DNS resolvers, authentication systems and security monitors were meant to be distributed and locally controlled. Today, for reasons that make economic sense, many companies and organizations outsource all four to the same handful of providers. One cloud service monitoring organization referred to 2025 as the year of the global cloud outage.

DNS, authentication, email and security

Outages are no longer rare exceptions, but a predictable byproduct of efficiency at a global scale. That pattern becomes apparent when you look at a few major outages that have affected each of the four services.

DNS outages are a prime example of systemic risk. If DNS cannot resolve a name, a website may as well not exist. A growing share of global DNS resolution now depends on a small number of providers. That concentration means that a single configuration error, routing issue or attack can ripple across much of the web.

Authentication outages are less visible to the public but often more disruptive inside organizations.

For example, on Oct. 29, 2025, Microsoft Azure experienced a major outage that disrupted authentication and access for millions of users worldwide for over five hours. Another authentication provider, Okta, suffered an outage on Oct. 3.

Authentication has become a universal gatekeeper. When identity services fail, modern organizations don’t degrade gracefully; they come to a halt.

Despite decades of predictions about its decline, email remains a central component of how employers function. Password resets, invoices, legal notices, emergency notifications and incident response coordination all depend on it. When large cloud email providers experience outages, companies and organizations not only lose communication but also struggle to recover accounts and coordinate recovery efforts effectively. In 2025, both Yahoo and Microsoft email services suffered outages.

Since many companies and organizations no longer operate independent mail systems, email outages are increasingly affecting entire industries simultaneously. In an emergency, the system that people rely on to respond may be unavailable.

Security as a service is a rapidly growing market. Cybersecurity infrastructure, including distributed denial-of-service mitigation, firewalls and bot protection, is designed to keep services online. When this infrastructure fails, it can have the opposite effect.

Misconfigured security rules and routing errors at global security providers have repeatedly blocked legitimate traffic on a massive scale. In one well-documented incident in 2024, a routine configuration change by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused widespread outages across thousands of unrelated websites.

Why outages are getting more expensive

Industry data suggests that while outages may be becoming less frequent, they are becoming far more costly.

The professional services organization Uptime Institute reports that more than half of major outages now cost over US$100,000, and roughly 1 in 5 exceeds $1 million. These estimated costs reflect lost revenue, stalled operations, reputational damage and, in some cases, risks to health and public safety.

Centralization magnifies these costs. A single failure now affects a greater number of users, employers and critical services simultaneously. What was once an IT problem has evolved into a multifaceted economic and societal issue.

Concentration is the real risk.

Regulators are beginning to recognize this pattern. In the United States, federal guidance now emphasizes the importance of inventorying cloud dependencies and reducing reliance on a single provider. These efforts reflect a growing realization: The greatest risk is not any one outage, but the structure of dependency that makes those outages unavoidable and wide-reaching.

Accounting for inevitable failures

The internet was designed to route around damage. In the pursuit of convenience and scale, the tech industry has rebuilt key parts of it around a small number of global trust brokers for names, identity, messaging and security. The result is a byproduct of the cloud services business model, where routine failures become systemic events.

Companies and organizations don’t need to abandon the cloud to address this issue. But I believe that it’s important to measure concentration, design for diversity, and rehearse what happens when shared services fail. Resilience does not come from perfection. It stems from choice, redundancy and the ability to fail locally rather than everywhere at once.

Doug Jacobson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why cloud service outages ripple across the internet – and the economy – https://theconversation.com/why-cloud-service-outages-ripple-across-the-internet-and-the-economy-272241

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Vice Provost and Dean of College of Arts, Sciences, and Education, Missouri University of Science and Technology

It has been said that trust is like glass: Once it is shattered, nothing will ever be the same. In the case of the enduring hostility between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States over the past 47 years, even this metaphor may be an understatement.

The tone of the relationship is indicative of this fact.

In 2020, Iran’s supreme leader denounced President Donald Trump as a “clown” who only pretends to support the Iranian people while ultimately plunging a “poisonous dagger” into their backs.

And in a U.S. version of this hostility, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said on Feb. 23, 2026, about the president’s approach to Iran: “I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated,’ because he understands he has plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious as to why they haven’t … I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they haven’t capitulated.”

The war that began on Feb. 28, 2026, hews to a familiar but dangerous pattern. Deep, historical mistrust, incompatible strategic interests, domestic political constraints on both sides, miscommunication and misperception, zero-sum thinking and repeated diplomatic overreach gradually pushed the relationship between Iran and the U.S. toward open conflict.

Rhetoric, not reality

When Tehran refused to yield to Trump’s demands, he described Iranian leaders in blunt terms: “They’re sick people. They’re mentally ill. Sick people. They are angry. They are crazy. They are sick.”

For a deeper understanding of Iran, policymakers in Washington could have looked to the insights of John W. Limbert, a distinguished diplomat with four decades of experience in Iranian affairs and a hostage during the Iran hostage crisis.

In 2008, as part of a U.S. Institute of Peace study of Iranian negotiating style, Limbert outlined 15 principles for Americans seeking successful negotiations with Iranian counterparts. Among his most important observations was that each side tends to assume the worst about the other, viewing its adversary as “infinitely devious, hostile, and duplicitous.”

Little evidence suggests that such hard-earned wisdom has informed recent rhetoric.

Instead, American leaders’ and media’s discussions of Iran over the past few decades have often relied on a familiar narrative: the portrayal of Middle Eastern leaders as irrational or “lunatic” figures − first, revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Saddam Hussein, followed by Moammar Gadhafi, Bashar Assad, and now Ali Khamenei.

This narrative conveniently overlooks inconvenient facts.

Getting to breakdown

It was Trump who withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran during his first term. It was also the United States that during renewed negotiations in 2025 and 2026 chose to bomb Iranian targets twice while talks were still underway.

Nor were the negotiations ever strictly bilateral. There was always an unoccupied chair at the table metaphorically reserved for a ghost participant: Israel. In my view, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu skillfully used political leverage and diplomatic pressure to shape the process publicly and privately.

When it came to Iran, Trump often violated a basic principle of diplomacy: asking Iran to concede without any reciprocity. Meanwhile, Netanyahu would repeatedly move the goal posts − asserting that Iran was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, insisting it had no right to enrich uranium on its own soil, demanding the dismantling of its nuclear infrastructure, calling for the elimination of its ballistic missile capability, and ultimately advocating regime change.

The extent to which Israeli pressure shaped successive American policies is a question historians and investigative journalists will continue to debate.

Yet responsibility for the breakdown cannot be placed on Washington and Jerusalem alone. Iranian leaders contributed significantly to making the conflict with the United States so intractable.

A corrupt, repressive and economically struggling regime relied heavily on performative anti-American politics for domestic legitimacy. Tehran matched American and Israeli rigidity with intransigence and strategic overreach of its own.

Limiting inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, failing to provide credible answers about past nuclear activities, constructing secret facilities and attempting to negotiate from a position of weakness ultimately proved disastrous when dealing with an impatient and impulsive American president.

The unknown unknowns

What comes next?

If regime change does not occur in Tehran, the two sides will almost certainly find themselves negotiating again once the fog of war dissipates.

The hostility between them will not disappear, and diplomatic niceties may become rarer. Yet diplomacy rarely requires trust; it requires interests.

I believe that future talks are therefore likely to be transactional rather than transformational. Technical and legal parameters will still need to be negotiated. Hawks and doves will continue to compete for influence in both capitals.

And the oldest rule of bargaining will remain unchanged: When you lack leverage, acquire it – then negotiate.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. 47 years of deep mistrust and misperception paved the way to war between Iran and the US − and complicate any negotiations – https://theconversation.com/47-years-of-deep-mistrust-and-misperception-paved-the-way-to-war-between-iran-and-the-us-and-complicate-any-negotiations-277789

Source: The Conversation – USA – By David Mednicoff, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Public Policy, UMass Amherst

The war that the U.S. and Israeli governments launched against Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, is unprecedented in its scope across the Middle East. With the Arab Gulf states under Iranian attack, and Israel targeting Iran’s militia ally Hezbollah, even experts on the Middle East like me cannot predict the war’s course and especially its likely political consequences.

Still, to better understand this complex situation, I am paying particular attention to four major questions. How these specific issues play out will shed light on how this war might end and what it will mean for Iran, the rest of the Middle East and the world.

What does the US hope to accomplish?

One leader who began the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been dead set for decades on crippling, and ideally toppling, Iran’s Islamic Republic. Iran has a long track record of sponsoring militant threats to Israel and American Arab allies.

Yet U.S. President Donald Trump has not been clear on what the goals of this war are and has said even less about what conditions would lead the U.S. to cease hostilities.

Early signs are that Iran’s capacity to project force across the Middle East is now diminished. What amount of damage to Iran’s military might be enough for the White House to believe that its mission was accomplished? Or does Trump expect Iran’s current authoritarian, theocratic political system to be removed, and for Iranians to establish a government more favorable toward American interests?

Any clarity from Washington on the true aims of this war will help observers understand under what circumstances it can end and what future Iranian-American relations might look like.

How will the war affect Gulf states’ short-term or long-term relations with Washington?

The U.S. has long prioritized deep economic and strategic relationships with the Gulf Arab states, especially Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These relationships have grown closer under Trump’s presidency.

So far, Iranian attacks have not caused significant casualties or damage to oil or commercial infrastructure in Gulf Arab states, collectively the source of 10% of the oil used in the U.S.

Indeed, some Gulf Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, already collaborate enough with Israel that being subjected to attacks from Iran has solidified their current alliance with it and the U.S.

At the same time, Gulf Arab states value long-term political stability to preserve their status as major exporters of oil and natural gas, centers of global commerce and trade and global travel hubs. While each country has its own geopolitical priorities, none wants conflicts that leave it vulnerable.

Iran’s military strategy seems designed to raise the economic and human costs for Gulf Arabs who support the U.S. and Israel.

Greater pain for citizens of the Arab Gulf could fuel leaders there to pressure Washington to stop the war. It’s also possible that Gulf leaders will rethink or rebalance their relations with the United States or Israel should the end state of the war undermine their sense of security.

Such a rethink is more likely if the war continues for weeks and creates major shocks to the global economy. Even if the war ends well for Gulf leaders, by ending concerns about Iranian regional aggression, Washington’s willingness to put Gulf states in the path of destabilizing conflict may lead them to seek less alignment with the U.S.

Who will likely rule Iran?

Mojtaba Khamenei, the hard-line son of the previous supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has just been named his father’s replacement. This is a clear signal that Iran is not yet moving toward the more cooperative government that the Trump administration wants. But with the fluid state of the war and its effects in Iran, perhaps the most important question is who will ultimately govern the country. Given Iran’s large size, predicting a long-term political outcome at this point makes little sense.

However, several factors do not bode well for a democratically representative government that could benefit ordinary Iranians. First, the Islamic Republic has been in power for decades, going to great lengths to prevent unified political opposition. Iranians’ recent waves of protests have not meant consensus on a future political order.

Second, Iran’s political system may still have support, including among members of the clergy and army. Third, the Trump administration may hope that Iranian ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, may attack or dislodge the remnants of the government. Yet such groups lack the level of military force to ensure success.

For these reasons, the current government or a similarly authoritarian one may well remain in place after this war.

How do Iranians and people throughout the region view the war?

The Islamic holy month of Ramadan runs this year from Feb. 18 to mid-March. It changes the basic rhythm of life for most Muslims to one in which they fast from dawn to dusk and enjoy family and communal festivity late into the night. Throughout Iran and the Arab Gulf countries, these longtime practices have been disrupted by war and nighttime bombings.

Religion is not the primary driver of this war. Still, that war began during a sacred time is one example of an issue that might influence how the people in the middle of this conflict experience it. A less militaristic, more democratic Iranian government is a desirable outcome from a devastating war launched in violation of international law.

How popular attitudes in the region unfold will matter both to Iran’s political outcome and to whether Iran has better relations with Washington in the future.

For now, it is hard to know whether Iranians’ support for the government is growing during a major foreign attack, as it did when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein began a war against Iran in 1980. Certainly, a large swath of Iranians are content with the end of decades of Ayatollah Khamenei’s stifling rule.

Gulf Arabs may be frustrated with Washington and Tel Aviv for starting the war but also want Iran to end up with a less militant government. Most Lebanese have no love for Israel. Yet many also blame their local Iran-backed Hezbollah faction for dragging their country into the current war.

The experiences and views of these diverse populations matter. Trump has launched a war that is different from earlier American wars in the Middle East, both in the number of countries directly experiencing attacks and in the degree of direct coordination with Israel.

In addition to this war’s illegitimacy under international law, Washington has a long record of failing to achieve political results favorable to American interests after using military force in the Middle East. Given this, it is hard to believe that Operation Epic Fury will be an epic success in the long run.

However, how these four questions come to be answered in the weeks ahead will provide better indication of what this new war’s political consequences will actually be.

David Mednicoff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Iran war: 4 big questions that help clarify the future of the Middle East – https://theconversation.com/iran-war-4-big-questions-that-help-clarify-the-future-of-the-middle-east-277473