Powderhorn

The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.

Drawing on years of scientific data, I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists – and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security, with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.

While some MPs got it, governments as a whole simply don’t seem to understand what we’re facing. It’s this: the global food system is systemically fragile in the same way that the global financial system was before the 2008 crash.

It’s easy to see potential vulnerabilities, such as a fertiliser supply crunch caused by the closure of the strait of Hormuz, or harvest failures caused by climate breakdown. But these are not the thing itself. They are disruptions of the kind that might trigger the thing. The thing itself is the entire system sliding off a cliff. The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.

I'm old enough that digital cameras only came out about the time I was legal to drink. Photos were a way to capture vacation moments, not food styling with a conspicuous bite missing. I rarely even take photos anymore, despite having been heavily into photography in college, to the extent that I developed my own Tri-X in the newsroom darkroom and going E-6 Velvia 50 when I wanted to do landscapes in colour. I bought film in bulk and had one of those machines that spooled film into canisters, which worked out in my favour, as Ivy Seright charged the same for processing a 36-shot roll even if I'd squeezed 40 into the canister.

All of which is to say: What the fuck problem is MS solving?

Microsoft is rolling out technology to transform OneDrive photos into AI-infused masterpieces. Or top up the bucket of slop, depending on your perspective.

The feature, called AI Restyle, allows users to apply a range of styles to photos in OneDrive. Where users might once have been happy with contrast tweaks or lighting adjustments, Microsoft has gone further by adding the ability to create a new version of a photo using either a preset or a prompt.

Reckon your family photos would look better in anime style? Microsoft's OneDrive can now make your dreams come true.

The ability to "Ghibli-fy" images with AI is not new. However, the functionality turning up in OneDrive - which means users can skip third-party services - is.

Microsoft is rolling the feature out to iOS and Android versions of the OneDrive application, and the web for users with a Microsoft 365 subscription. We asked the company whether processing is on-device or in Microsoft's cloud, but it has yet to respond.

If processing takes place in the cloud, users will need to consider where their data is going. Then again, if you're using OneDrive, that ship has already sailed.

When the Trump administration announced plans last year to rescind a rule limiting roadbuilding and timber harvests on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands, officials called the repeal necessary to prevent and manage wildfires.

But as the U.S. Department of Agriculture prepares to release its draft environmental impact statement for the rescission, that justification is unraveling. And many critics of the move see the claim that roads are needed to fight fires in remote forests as cover for a giveaway to the timber industry.

On average, about 8 million acres have burned each year between 2017 and 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly double the average from 1987 to 1991. Wildfires on federal lands average about five times the size of those in the rest of the country, leading some of the nation’s top land managers to argue that national forests are a front line for fighting the nation’s steep increase in wildland blazes.

Yet a chorus of fire scientists, frontline firefighters, legal experts and the agency’s own historical record have contradicted that reasoning, saying that roads don’t reduce wildfire risk; they multiply it.

If he had to name the five biggest obstacles to effective wildfire response, lack of roads “probably either wouldn’t be on the list, or it’d be at the bottom,” said Lucas Mayfield, a former Hotshot firefighter and co-founder of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates for policy on behalf of firefighters.

“Exhaustion” is a legal term. It means plaintiffs need to explore the rest of their options before asking a court to handle their case or ask a higher court to handle a case the lower court has declared not quite exhausted enough.

“Exhaustion” is also a human term. And that’s where we are with this case, nearly nine years since a federal court first told the (then-anonymous) cop to GTFO with his weird-ass complaints against [checks original filing] Twitter, the entire Black Lives Matter social movement, and lifelong anti-police violence activist DeRay Mckesson.

The origin of this case is Mckesson’s appearance at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Baton Rouge, Louisiana all the way back in July of 2016. So, we’re a decade in and yet, this cop (now known as John Ford) gets to keep trying to make things worse for DeRay and the First Amendment. And the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court seems hellbent on letting him do this.

The 2019 ruling made it abundantly clear Officer John Ford could not sue Twitter, a Twitter hashtag, or Mckesson for injuries he sustained when someone who was not DeRay Mckesson lobbed a projectile and hit him in the head.

This should have been obvious to everyone, even someone recently recovering from a head wound. But on appeal, the Fifth Circuit simply feigned ignorance of the law. I am not even kidding. It said Mckesson had a duty of care during his peaceful protest that it would never apply to cops who hurl flashbangs into toddler’s cribs.

NASA's ambitious plans to build a space station in orbit of the Moon are officially on hold, administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday, with the space agency instead skipping the orbital habitat in favor of building a permanent base on the Lunar surface.

Isaacman made the announcement during the opening keynote for NASA's Ignition Day event during which the space agency was providing updates on a number of Artemis-related initiatives and Trump's National Space Policy.

"It should not be much of a surprise that we intend to pause Gateway in its current form and focus on building lunar infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the surface," Isaacman told attendees. "We will pivot agency talent and hardware already working on Gateway to the surface or other programs."

However, suspension of the Gateway project - which would have resulted in the construction of the first space station outside of Earth orbit - may come as a surprise to NASA's international partners on the project, namely the European Space Agency, Canada, and Japan. All had discussed the project as an international effort to continue the partnership established on the ISS into the next frontier in space.

JAXA, the CSA, and ESA have already supplied components and systems for the Gateway, most notably the European-built HALO habitation module, which was delivered to NASA in April 2025, along with multiple modules constructed by ESA for inclusion on the now-mothballed space station.

Just what I want in my distro.

After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world's favorite system management daemon.

Pull request #40954 to the systemd project is titled "userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records." It's a new function for the existing userdb service, which adds a field to hold the user's date of birth:

Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

The contents of the field will be protected from modification except by users with root privileges.

The change comes after the recent release of systemd 260 but unless it is reverted for some reason, it will be part of systemd 261. One of the justifications is to facilitate the new parental controls in Flatpak, which are still in the draft stage.

Donald Trump has described voting by mail as “cheating” at an event in Memphis, Tennessee, just days after casting a mail‑in ballot himself.

“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” the US president said on Monday, in remarks to a roundtable on his administration’s crime taskforce.

Records show Trump voted by mail in the special election for House district 87, which encompasses his Mar-a-Lago golf club, according to the Palm Beach county supervisor of elections website. Trump has endorsed the Republican candidate, Jon Maples, in the race against Democrat Emily Gregory.

Trump chose to mail his ballot even though he has recently been in Palm Beach where early in-person voting was available until Sunday evening.

Rules for thee ...

For decades, the US and its allies have painted Iran as the world’s biggest sponsor of state terrorism – invoking its Islamic rulers’ supposed revolutionary fanaticism and determined support for militant proxies.

Now a long-standing but mainly latent threat is coalescing, with the war waged on the country by the US and Israel, to raise the risk of an attack on American soil to levels unseen since the murderous al-Qaida assaults of 11 September 2001, experts say.

In an election year, opponents of Donald Trump are warning that such an event could rebound to his advantage – providing him with a pretext to crack down on critics by declaring a state of emergency or even cancelling November’s congressional midterm elections.

Two attacks on Thursday alone illustrated the heightened dangers.

Note that this is from March 15, so the time element doesn't track.

The primary unit of climate collapse is the zettajoule. If you have never heard of this term, you are not alone. Even scientists who work on a planetary scale struggle to relate the immensity of the change measured by this titanic unit of energy.

What is a zettajoule?

A zettajoule is a billion trillion joules. Typed out on a calculator or computer screen, the row of 21 zeros looks absurdly long – a train of seven carriages, each with three empty windows. Experts often have to resort to abstract terms like “unfathomable”, “almost beyond comprehension” and “really big” to ensure our tiny human minds are sufficiently blown away by what these numbers convey.

Why are zettajoules in the news (again)?

When used to calculate the heat on our planet, that train is accelerating and running out of track. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned this week in its latest annual State of the Global Climate report that our world has a huge and growing energy imbalance, which is warming the oceans, the land and the air to dangerous levels.

The new report says Earth’s energy imbalance increased by about 11 zettajoules a year between 2005 and 2025, which is equivalent to about 18 times total human energy use.

Finally! We just don't get enough mergers these days.

The US cosmetics company Estée Lauder is in talks over a potential merger with the Spanish group Puig, the owner of brands including Jean Paul Gaultier and Rabanne, to create a $40bn fashion and beauty giant.

Estée Lauder is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of skin care, makeup and fragrances with a portfolio that includes Clinique, Bobbi Brown and Tom Ford Beauty.

Puig, which floated on the Madrid stock market two years ago, owns brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Carolina Herrera and Dries van Noten.

Both brands confirmed that they were holding discussions over a potential “business combination”, but gave no detail on the possible structure of the merger.

“No final decision has been made and no agreement has been reached,” Puig said. “Until an agreement exists, it cannot be guaranteed that any transaction will take place or what its terms would be.”

‘What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke [and] you can drink Coke, too … The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is.”

Fifty years later, it’s still true that the Diet Coke Donald Trump is chugging by the caseload in the Oval Office is exactly the same stuff his public can buy in a local shop. But the idea that mass consumerism is characterised by equality is about as dead as Warhol is. There are precious few products or experiences that haven’t been segmented into multiple tiers, from “embarrassing pauper” to “ultra-VIP”, in order to extract as much money from the consumer as possible.

Airlines are the most obvious example of this, of course. What used to be a standard experience (a free checked bag and snacks) are often now add-ons. And the airline model is steadily infiltrating other spaces, even the cinema. Paying for better seats is already common in the UK, in chains such as Odeon and Vue, but now it’s rolling out across the US. Earlier this year Adam Aron, the CEO of the cinema chain AMC, said on an earnings call that paying members of its VIP loyalty programmes will soon get priority access to seats with the best “sightline”. Which, honestly, seems a shortsighted strategy considering cinema attendance is dropping. But I don’t get paid $11m to $25m a year, depending on how shares are doing, like Aron does, so what do I know, eh?

A couple of weekends ago, as dusk was falling over the Escandón neighbourhood of Mexico City, Abel Ortiz was startled by the sound of two American women yelling at each other on the street outside his apartment.

They were nose to nose, screaming in English while bemused Mexicans looked on.

“I can’t believe you called my fucking mom!” said one.

“You should go back home!” bellowed the other.

What jarred Ortiz even more than the spectacle of two American tourists behaving badly was his own reaction. He wanted to run out and confront them.

“No, you don’t get to do that!” he imagined himself telling them. “Not in my country!”

His visceral response surprised him. Though Mexican by birth, Ortiz has spent a total of only nine months in the country. He was spirited away by his parents in search of a better life in the US when he was only two months old. He went on to live for 38 years in Los Angeles, rarely stepping outside the city.

Until Donald Trump came along, casting undocumented people like him as public enemy No 1, Ortiz perceived himself to be wholly American.