Powderhorn

The meeting on Sunday of the foreign ministers of Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in Islamabad not only represented the best hope for a ceasefire in Iran but was also the embryo for a new order designed to curb Israeli and Iranian dominance after the war.

Although the four nations have met as a quartet before, the one-day meeting of foreign ministers in Islamabad on Sunday was, in a way, the official opening ceremony of an initiative that is intriguing diplomats.

The group’s first goal, in an increasingly complex web of disputes, is to persuade all sides to stop the escalation and agree a ceasefire. As such, the group will be meeting much more frequently, according to Yasmine Farouk, a Gulf specialist at the International Crisis Group.

“This group of four started becoming very active because this is really a dangerous stage of the war,” Farouk said. “We’ve already seen Israel damage nuclear plants inside Iran and the potential deployment of troops. This is the nightmare … that could make some of the Gulf countries who so far say they don’t want the war to stop to realise that this is getting out of hand.

“Because if you target desalination waters and the power plants, if you have a nuclear leak in the waters of the Gulf, this is when it becomes a nationwide crisis inside those countries.”

Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro – but it's just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon.

Fruit-sniffers extraordaire 9-to-5 Mac got the news yesterday, complete with official confirmation from Apple itself. It's official and it's happened, but there have been warning signs for months – in November 2025, Bloomberg's Matt Gurman said "The Mac Pro is on the back burner."

The phantom fruit-flingers of Silicon Valley launched the seven-thousand-buck Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro in June 2023, with an M2 Ultra SoC. It sported seven PCIe slots – but the problem was that cash-rich customers couldn't add the sorts of expansion that normally go into a PCIe slot… to the extent that Apple publishes a page about PCIe cards you can install in your Mac Pro (2023). Notably, the machine did not support add-on GPUs: only the GPU that's integrated into the CPU complex along with the machine's RAM and primary flash storage. The machine also had no RAM expansion whatsoever.

Presumably, this limited its appeal for many traditional buyers, and the machine never saw an M3 or M4 model, let alone the M5 SoC that The Register covered shortly before Bloomberg called the Arm64 cheesegrater's fate.

The BBC has a new head honcho in waiting, the Director-General designate Matt Brittin. His job: helming one of the world's most famous and oldest international media brands, one with a vast and sensitive domestic position. His last job: President of EMEA Business and Operations at Google. You can imagine a greater culture clash, but you'll have to work at it.

It is far too early to predict how Brittin will steer the largely unsteerable BBC, an organization in perpetual crisis in a rapidly mutating media, political, and economic hellscape. Some say his decades of experience in Google and impeccable institutional background make him the ideal guide and defender for the Corporation, which until very recently didn't even have a YouTube policy. Others point out his complete lack of broadcast, editorial, or media managerial experience, his lack of presence in the Google C-suite, and Google's role as a predatory destroyer of journalism.

So, Bari Weiss, just across the pond.

The Trump administration is turning to the nuclear option on endangered-species protections in the name of national security.

A rarely tapped panel nicknamed the “God Squad” will meet Tuesday to discuss whether overriding Endangered Species Act regulations for all federally regulated fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico is more important than preventing the extinction of several imperiled species. That includes sea turtles and a whale species down to its last 51 individuals.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the upcoming Endangered Species Committee meeting last week, with no details on specific projects in the Gulf or the basis for what would constitute an extraordinary action. Only twice in the panel’s nearly half-century has it ever lifted restrictions.

But after the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the meeting, the Trump administration told the court that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf exempted “for reasons of national security.”

A federal judge declined Friday to block the meeting.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think an official government app should be loading executable code from a random person’s GitHub account. Or tracking your GPS location in the background. Or silently stripping privacy consent dialogs from every website you visit through its built-in browser. And yet here we are.

The White House released a new app last week for iOS and Android, promising “unparalleled access to the Trump Administration.” A security researcher, who goes by Thereallo, pulled the APKs and decompiled them — extracting the actual compiled code and examining what’s really going on under the hood. The propaganda stuff — cherry-picked news, a one-tap button to report your neighbors to ICE, a text that auto-populates “Greatest President Ever!” — which Engadget covered, is embarrassing enough. The code underneath is something else entirely.

Let’s start with the most alarming behavior. Every time you open a link in the app’s built-in browser, the app silently injects JavaScript and CSS into the page. Here’s what it does:

It hides: Cookie banners GDPR consent dialogs OneTrust popups Privacy banners Login walls Signup walls Upsell prompts Paywall elements CMP (Consent Management Platform) boxes

It forces body { overflow: auto !important } to re-enable scrolling on pages where consent dialogs lock the scroll. Then it sets up a MutationObserver to continuously nuke any consent elements that get dynamically added.

An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.

The head of Canada’s largest airline is stepping down after his video tribute to pilots killed in a fatal collision became a public relations nightmare for Air Canada, prompting a wave of mockery and indignation at him from both the public and politicians for not speaking French.

Air Canada’s CEO, Michael Rousseau, will retire by the end of the third quarter of 2026, the company said on Monday. He will continue to lead the company and serve on the board of directors until that time, the carrier said.

Last week, an Air Canada Jazz flight landed at LaGuardia airport in New York and then collided with a fire truck on the runway, killing its two pilots, Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther. The pair were praised by aviation experts for taking actions that saved passengers’ lives.

In response to the tragedy, the company posted a four-minute condolence video in which Rousseau spoke only two French words – bonjour and merci.

Canada’s largest airline is headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, where French is both widely spoken and the official language. Forest, the 30-year-old pilot, was francophone, as were a number of passengers onboard the flight.

Yekaterina Chudnovsky, online biographies say, is a mother-of-four who “enjoys spending time with her family and teaching them the importance of giving back and helping others”. They add that Ukrainian-born Chudnovsky, known as Katie, finds sanctuary in walks on the beach.

In interviews, Chudnovsky has spoken warmly about her commitment to philanthropy, her dedication to supporting cancer research and her work as a lawyer for an unnamed global technology firm. Pornography is never mentioned.

Now, it may become unavoidable. After the death of Chudnovsky’s husband, Leonid Radvinsky, from cancer last week at the age of 43, she is now understood to have a controlling interest through a family trust in the London-based adult content site, OnlyFans.

Chudnovsky is set to have a crucial role in deciding what happens to the business that made her husband a billionaire before he turned 40. The family stake is valued at about $5.5bn (£4.1bn).

Chudnovsky’s views on pornography will determine the site’s future business model, and whether it continues to generate huge sums of money by taking a 20% cut from the earnings of about 4 million content creators globally, a large proportion of whom generate money for the business by undressing and performing explicit content on the platform.

I was not hungry when I arrived at Taix on Thursday night, Los Angeles’s venerable, soon-to-close French restaurant and de facto museum of a long-gone era of fine dining. I’m rarely hungry when I go to Taix. Not because I don’t thoroughly enjoy their french onion soup, the mussels, or the decadent hamburger. I’m not hungry because it’s never my first stop of the night. Taix isn’t a destination. It’s a nexus point for LA.

No one in Los Angeles ever thought it would be gone, until it was. Sunday will be the last service for a restaurant that has anchored the neighborhood of Echo Park for the past 64 years, before it is torn down to make way for a large-scale luxury apartment development. The impending closure has sparked an end-of-an-era frenzy, with lines down the street, packed tables and loyal fans pinching menus and other memorabilia for their personal collection.

As the city’s cost-of-living crisis continues to grow, and as other historical meeting places like Cole’s French Dip close after decades, the loss of Taix (prounounced “Tex”) stands out as a symbol of the city’s grief. From civic leaders to artists and writers, people from all corners of LA have sat at Taix’s bar or luxuriated in its massive dining rooms. Losing it is significant for so many Angelenos, but especially the residents of Echo Park, which has been roiled by gentrification for a number of years.

Taix, though, is a symbol of the old Echo Park: a place for communion with the spirits of the past, a chance to chat with good friends or new friends. It can be a launching pad for a rollicking night out or a soft landing spot at the end of one. It has long been an ornate, crumbling, cavernous playground of possibilities. It’s a contradiction in terms: a safe space for the gay arts community of the city, but also a symbol of the city’s traditions. The restaurant will reopen on the ground floor of the new apartment complex, but can it possibly be the same?

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for authorization to use military force in south-east Asia. His resolution passed unanimously in the House, and only two voices dissented in the Senate. As for the public, 77% of Americans said they trusted the government to do what is right, and more than 60% supported war.

It is common today to hear that the US war in Vietnam was unpopular, but it certainly did not begin that way. It took several years, billions of dollars, tens of thousands of deaths, and constant anti-war mobilization before Americans changed their minds.

The reality is that Americans have historically backed their government’s wars. Let’s not forget that most Americans not only falsely believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, but also supported the illegal US war on Iraq. A month after the invasion, support for the war increased to 74%.

Not any more. President Donald Trump did not even bother seeking congressional approval to attack Iran. Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose the Israeli-US war, and only 17% trust the government to do what is right. And the war is only a month old.

Wherever you go, there you are, the saying goes. It was a lesson Donald Trump’s Maga faithful may have been reminded of last week when they gathered in a convention center near Dallas for a revival of the president’s political movement, only to find that there was no escape from the problems it faces.

The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is usually a place of optimism, if not, triumph. It was on its stage last year that Elon Musk pumped a chainsaw in the air amid his abortive foray into clear cutting government bureaucracy, and where JD Vance named undocumented immigration as the “greatest threat” facing the United States and Europe. Trump is a regular, regaling the audience with lengthy monologues about his accomplishments.

Not this year. For the first time in a decade, the president did not attend, apparently consumed with the war in Iran. In his absence, the audience gathered in a cavernous ballroom heard well-known but less powerful Maga figures debate where their movement was headed. Chief among their concerns is how a president who campaigned on ending wars could find himself mulling a ground invasion of Iran.

“I counseled as loud as possible against doing this in the first place,” said Erik Prince, the former CEO of the Blackwater mercenary group, who predicted that if Trump orders an incursion, “you will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks. And I don’t think people are really prepared for that.”

The Brent crude oil price is on track for its biggest monthly gain on record in March after the Iran war caused mayhem in the markets.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, has climbed by 51% since the start of March, LSEG data shows, beating the previous monthly record of 46% in September 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, leading to the first Gulf war.

Brent closed at $112.57 a barrel on Friday, up from $72.48 a barrel on 27 February, the day before the US-Israeli war on Iran began. Brent traded as high as $119.50 a barrel during March, its highest level since June 2022, after Iran all but closed the strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil and gas would normally pass.

US crude prices also rose during March; West Texas Intermediate has gained 48%, on track for its strongest month since May 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was disrupting the world economy.

Oil prices climbed through the month despite the coordinated release of 400m barrels of oil from emergency reserves announced on 11 March. Analysts at BloombergNEF estimate that 9m barrels of oil per day have been knocked off global oil supply by the Middle East conflict.

Donald Trump appeared to lose his ability to talk down the oil price as the war continued. Earlier in the month, the president’s claims of progress in negotiations pushed down crude prices, but by late March his declaration of a 10-day extension for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz was followed by a rising oil price and falling stock markets.

Almost 30 years after the intricate web of nerves inside the penis was plotted out, the same mapping has finally been completed for one of the least-studied organs in the human body – the clitoris.

As well as revealing the extent of the nerves that are crucial to orgasms, the work shows that some of what medics are learning about the anatomy of the clitoris is wrong, and could help prevent women who have pelvic operations from ending up with poorer sexual function.

The clitoris, responsible for sexual pleasure, is one of the least studied organs of the human body. Cultural taboo around female sexuality has held back scientific investigations and the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1995.

A Melbourne urologist, Helen O’Connell, says the clitoris has been ignored by researchers for far too long. “It has been deleted intellectually by the medical and scientific community, presumably aligning attitude to a societal ignorance,” she said.