Monday, March 23, 2026
Alleged Iranian spies are already in the US — and infiltrating Silicon Valley
Alleged Iranian spies with ties to regime bigwigs have been charged with infiltrating Silicon Valley.
Last month, a federal grand jury indicted three Iranian software engineers for allegedly stealing trade secrets from tech companies, including Google.
Two of the suspects are sisters, Samaneh Ghandali, 41, and Sorvoor Ghandali, 32. They were charged alongside Mohammadjavad Khosravi,40, who is Samaneh’s husband, with allegedly using their employment at unidentified technology companies to “obtain access to confidential and sensitive information,” according to the Department of Justice.
The tech workers then allegedly “exfiltrated confidential and sensitive documents, including trade secrets related to processor security and cryptography and other technologies, from Google and other technology companies.”
They are then accused of transferring the confidential data to other locations, including Iran, according to the indictment. They have all pleaded not guilty.
The Ghandali sisters’ father is Iranian regime insider Shahabeddin Ghandali, a former chief executive of the Teachers Investment Fund Corporation back in Iran. He was arrested and charged over an embezzlement of $2.5 billion in 2016, and fraud involving Iran’s Bank Sarmayeh, according to reports. Although arrested, it is unclear if he was ever prosecuted in relation to the scheme, as others were.
Opponents of the Iranian regime in the US say that the family connections could have facilitated the alleged spying.
“The issue is risk, access, and vulnerability,” said Iranian human rights activist Lawdan Bazargan, who heads up the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists.
“When individuals connected to powerful networks in an authoritarian system enter universities and research centers, they gain access not only to advanced technology but also to professional networks and institutional trust. In certain cases … access can be abused.”
There are other examples of the Iranian regime’s tentacles finding their way into US institutions.
Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi, a prominent Iranian-American political science professor who has taught at Harvard and other elite universities, was charged with failing to register as a foreign agent for Iran under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 2021.
Prosecutors claimed that for more than ten years he was secretly working for the government of Iran and the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations (IMUN) “to spread their propaganda.”
Afrasiabi, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, had collected more than $250,000 in checks drawn on IMUN’s official bank account since 2007 and received health insurance through the IMUN employee health benefit plans since 2011, according to a federal complaint against him.
“Mr. Afrasiabi never disclosed to a congressman, journalists or others who hold roles of influence in our country that he was being paid by the Iranian government to paint an untruthfully positive picture of the nation,” claimed the Department of Justice in a press release. The same document alleged Afrasiabi lobbied an unnamed congressman and gave the Iranian ambassador to the UN advice for “retaliation” for the US military airstrike that killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani was killed in a US strike in Baghdad on January 3, 2020.
Afrasiabi also allegedly proposed the Iranian government “end all inspections and end all information on Iran’s nuclear activities pending a [United Nations Security Council] condemnation of [the United States’] illegal crime,” of killing Soleimani, according to the complaint. Afrasiabi claimed the move would “strike fear in the heart of [the] enemy.”
Afrasiabi pled not guilty, calling himself a “consultant” to Iran’s UN mission in a televised interview last year.
He said he was a political target of the first Trump administration and called himself “an agent of peace committed to US-Iran reconciliation and peace and dialogue.”
President Biden issued a full pardon for Afrasiabi as part of a prisoner swap in 2023. He is still believed to be in the US.
In another case, Iranian-American Ahmadreza Mohammadi Doostdar pleaded guilty to acting as a foreign agent of Iran in 2019. Mohammadi-Doostdar, whose brother teaches Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago, conducted surveillance of Jewish organizations at that school, federal prosecutors claimed.
They also accused him of conducting surveillance of Iranian-Americans who were members of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a militant Iranian regime opposition group.
Mohammadi-Doostdar’s father, Hossein Mohammadi-Doostdar, is the former head of Iran’s College Publications Center.
Ahmadreza was sentenced to just over three years in prison. An Iranian co-conspirator based in California, Majid Ghorbani, was sentenced to 30 months, according to the Justice Department.
Kuwait says 7 power lines out of service due to falling debris
Kuwait's Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy (MEW) said that seven overhead power transmission lines have gone out of service after being damaged by falling debris following air defense interceptions.
"This has led to a partial power outage in some areas of the country, and work is underway to restore power as quickly as possible," the ministry said in a statement on X.
It added that specialized teams would start their work as soon as the sites are secured.
"This Is Election Interference": ChatGPT Safety Warnings Target WinRed Links But Spare ActBlue
OpenAI claimed Friday that a so-called technical glitch was the culprit behind ChatGPT slapping safety warnings on links to affected links to WinRed, the leading online fundraising platform for the Republican candidates. Unsurprisingly, ActBlue, the main Democrat fundraising platform, did not trigger a similar warning.
The issue was flagged in an X post by Mike Morrison, an eagled-eyed digital marketer, when he asked ChatGPT to produce links from WinRed and ActBlue.
“WILD. ChatGPT universally marks [WinRed] links as potentially unsafe,” Morrison told his followers. “Of course ActBlue links are totally fine.”
When ChatGPT provided links to GOP-affiliated stores hosted on WinRed, it appended a warning urging users to check whether the link was “safe,” adding that it may contain data from your conversation that will be shared with a third-party website. Morrison said that the OpenAI chat bot did not replicate the same warning for the Democrat fundraising platform.
WinRed CEO Ryan Lyk blasted the blatant bias, calling it “election interference.”
An OpenAI spox scrambled to save face for the company, telling the New York Post in a statement that “this shouldn’t be happening and it’s getting remedied.”
OpenAI was so jilted by getting caught (errr, finding the bug), that another press person from the AI behemoth issued a longer statement attempting to cover it’s behind.
“As soon as we saw the post, we reached out to the individual and looked into it,” OpenAI’s Kate Waters said in a statement to the Post. “This wasn’t about partisan politics. The model generated some website links that weren’t in our search index yet for both WinRed and in one instance for ActBlue, and our systems flagged them as AI-generated as part of our standard safeguards."
“The issue is now in the process of being fully resolved,” Waters added. "The company added later that “this issue is related to how URLs are discovered.”
Trump Admin Strikes Deal With Energy Firm To Nix Offshore Wind Plans
by John Haughey via The Epoch Times,
A global energy corporation based in France has ceded leases off North Carolina and New York where it planned to spend nearly $1 billion to build offshore wind turbines back to the U.S. Department of Interior and will instead redirect that investment into natural gas projects in Texas.
The “landmark agreement” was jointly announced by the department and TotalEnergies in Washington on March 23, and confirmed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné during a press conference at the 44th annual CERAWeek by S&P Global conference at the Americas Hilton-Houston.
Burgum said much of TotalEnergies’ offshore wind investments were tied to Biden-era “green energy” subsidies rather than in direct power generation, forcing American taxpayers “to pay for energy sources twice. They were paying for it in terms of high utility bills, but they were all paying for it in terms of the taxpayer subsidies.”
Under the agreement, he said, the department will reimburse TotalEnergies “dollar for dollar” for the $928 million it spent on securing the leases, much of that placed in bonds required to develop federal lands, in exchange for the company agreeing to reinvest that money into a Texas LNG project it was already developing.
The vacated offshore leases were acquired in 2022.
They are in the Carolina Long Bay area off North Carolina and in New York Bight off Long Island.
“With this agreement, we’re allowing this great company to redirect those dollars to affordable, reliable, and secure oil and natural gas production in the U.S.,” Burgum said.
Pouyanné said offshore wind development in the United States, “unlike those in Europe,” is costly and “might have a negative impact on power affordability” for the electrical customers they were designed to serve. “TotalEnergies considers there is no need to allocate capital to this technology in the U.S.,” he said.
The abundance of natural gas and domestic producers’ growing capacity to liquify natural gas for transport by ship is “a more affordable way” to generate energy in the United States, he said.
TotalEnergies will invest the reimbursed offshore lease money into the Rio Grande LNG project in Brownsville, Texas. The century-old company, which began drilling oil in Iraq in 1927, is among the project’s three major investors.
“These investments will contribute to supplying Europe with much-needed LNG from the U.S. and provide gas for U.S. data center development,” Pouyanné said. “We believe this is a more efficient use of capital in the United States.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-admin-strikes-deal-energy-firm-nix-offshore-wind-plans
Tang Seizes Control of Aurinia, Taking CEO Post in Total Transformation of C-Suite
Healthcare investor Kevin Tang and his allies now hold almost every leadership position at Aurinia Pharmaceuticals, the company at the heart of former CDER Director George Tidmarsh’s exit from the FDA.
Six months after clashing with former Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Director George Tidmarsh over his comments regarding Aurinia Pharmaceuticals, Kevin Tang is taking over as CEO of the company—and has appointed his associates to other key positions.
Tang, who has been chair of Aurinia’s board of directors since 2024, has replaced Peter Greenleaf as CEO, the company announced Monday. The new CEO is president of Tang Capital Management, an investment group that made its name offering an exit route to troubled biotechs. Tang Capital has built a position in Aurinia in recent years, growing its stake from 5.1% in September 2024 to 9.2% by late last month.
The investment group has now secured control of Aurinia’s C-suite. Tang’s appointment as CEO is part of sweeping changes that have given other Tang Capital employees key roles in Aurinia’s leadership team.
Ryan Cole is Aurinia’s new chief operating officer; Michael Hearne has joined as chief financial officer and Thomas Wei is the new chief scientific officer. Cole has worked at Tang Capital since 2014, while Hearne and Wei joined the investment company in 2015.
They join Stew Kroll, Aurinia’s chief development officer who has worked at Tang Capital since 2016. According to Aurinia’s current leadership page, Kroll joined the biotech last year. Kroll’s appointment by Aurinia was not announced, and he is not listed on an archived version of the company’s leadership page that was live last month.
Greenleaf, who spent seven years as Aurinia CEO, is one of several executives who are leaving the biotech as part of the changes. Chief Operating Officer Matthew Donley, Chief Medical Officer Gregory Keenan and Chief Financial Officer Joseph Miller are all following Greenleaf out the door. Donley, Miller and Keenan joined Aurinia in 2019, 2020 and 2023, respectively.
Stephen Robertson will continue as general counsel, Aurinia said Monday. Robertson joined Aurinia in 2020, making him the most senior person still left at the company who arrived before the Tang era.
The new-look leadership team takes over as the company focuses on growing sales of lupus nephritis treatment Lupkynis, the target of a social media attack from Tidmarsh. Last fall, Tidmarsh posted to LinkedIn that Lupkynis’ active ingredient vocolosporin had “significant toxicity” and that it had “not been shown to provide a direct clinical benefit for patients.”
The post, which was quickly removed, prompted Tang to file a complaint with the FDA, which was ultimately handed off to the Office of Inspector General. Aurinia also filed a lawsuit that accused Tidmarsh of a “longstanding personal vendetta against Kevin Tang.” In the end, Tidmarsh left the agency amid an investigation into his “personal conduct.”
In addition to Lupkynis’ growth, Aurinia is working on showing that its investigational drug aritinercept is a challenger in a competitive autoimmune disease market. Aritinercept is a dual inhibitor of BAFF and APRIL, a mechanism it shares with Vertex’s povetacicept and Vera Therapeutics’ atacicept. Vertex and Vera could win FDA approval for their drugs in immunoglobulin A nephropathy this year. Jefferies analysts said last year that Aurinia’s drug candidate looks at least as good as povetacicept on all measures.
Aurinia recently forecast sales of $305 million to $315 million this year, compared to $271 million in 2025. Jefferies analysts said in a February note to investors that the outlook could be considered conservative.