Powderhorn

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.

The young woman at the heart of what has been called the tech industry’s “big tobacco” moment was on YouTube at six and Instagram by nine. More than a decade later, she says, she still can’t live without the social media she became addicted to.

“I can’t, it’s too hard to be without it,” Kaley, now 20, told a jury at Los Angeles’ superior court. This week, five men and seven women handed down a verdict on the design of two of the world’s most popular apps that vindicated Kaley’s position.

The ruling sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and sparked hope among families and child safety campaigners that change may finally be coming to social media. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Google’s YouTube were found liable for deliberately designing addictive products used by Kaley and millions of other young people.

It was one case centred on the suffering of one young person who became depressed at 10 and self-harmed, but Kaley, referred to by her first name or the initials KGM in order to protect her privacy, was the figurehead for a much bigger fight.

“We wanted them to feel it,” one of the jurors explained to reporters. “We wanted them to realise this was unacceptable.”

Was I any good at it? Was this a perceived trajectory?

No.

Had I gone to Cornell or Berkeley, both of which I'd been accepted to, my life would not involve journalism. After all, I was there for computer science.

Oops.

The issue with CSE142 was it was stupid. Yay! Writing Hello World in C! I had a specific disinterest in wheel reinvention, and holy shit did the CS department want that.

I took precisely one course and realised these were not the people I wanted to be around.

But who were? Because you can't just want "not x" but rather elucidate "y".

Well, this was an entire accident, and there's some sex involved. It's a college paper! But I quickly learned I wasn't here for fun.; rather, I wanted to learn and excel.

When one lives with his editor, shit starts looking a bit dicey. I mean, we didn't move in together immediately, but eight days in, well, I told my parents that my editor gave me a raise.

This of course refers to tumescence, but I was trying to be less than obvious.

The only reason that I moderate U.S. News is Rachel. I figured it would be fun to try journalism as part of my time in college. And it was, but ... there's simply no way I would land here without everyone at UW in 1998.

Now, you may look at eight days and think "wow, how did it take that long?" It didn't. The issue was we were both 19 ... she was six-and-a-half days older than me. She doesn't get the full week because I was born in the morning, and she was born in the evening.

No, we were already exuding clues. Everything kept piling up in those eight days. I was rubbing her shoulders, and she was fixing my layouts. It would later become apparent that literally everyone in the newsroom realised we were an item.

My god, we hated each other. But, you know, that's usually where you're fucked. If you care enough to hate, there's an underlying emotion that's not been expressed, and eight days isn't really enough time to deal with your first true love while also attempting to think this isn't happening in the first place alongside "oh, fuck, I have no idea what's going on here."

We got a place a few months later, and we wallpapered the bedroom with layouts. This immediately meant the escalation of page design; now we were in competition, and what generally takes years happened in weeks. I wasn't going to lose to her, and, as a result, suddenly, we were winning national design awards.

Just to one up each other.

She ended up as managing ed the next year. I'd decided to go raver and fuck up our life (there was a party in B.C. that she came with on), but I'd decided if I'm going to have the full college experience, I needed crazy.

The second Rachel was a raver in Canada. Yeah, I ended up with the horrific "Canadian girlfriend" in the '90s. To the extent that on Thanksgiving 1999, I drove from Portland to Victoria (there's obviously a ferry involved here) and brought her down to the gathering at my roommate's.

They were surprised in two ways. First, I actually had a Canadian girlfriend, which at the time was a protomeme, and one of his friends "had a girlfriend in Canada," leading to my holiday sojourn. Like, fuck you, I will spend the better part of a day proving that.

She was also 6'2" and, well, sturdy. She was still doing the hair-down-to-her-ass thing, which thankfully got solved a month later. Of course, the problem there was not recognizing her at the restaurant we'd agreed to meet at.

She didn't just cut off four feet of hair; she bleached what was left. This is not a complaint. It was just a point of confusion.

Rachel Nr 1 was displeased with my shenanigans, but I relieved her as managing editor, and she ended up marrying my best friend (long story that starts in Vic).

But without her, you would not have a U.S. News mod. I would have dabbled in journalism and moved along.

AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Safety Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

The snapshot of scheming by AI agents “in the wild”, as opposed to in laboratory conditions, has sparked fresh calls for international monitoring of the increasingly capable models and come as Silicon Valley companies aggressively promote the technology as a economically transformative. Last week the UK chancellor also launched a drive to get millions more Britons using AI.

Four weeks into a war that was going to take four days, and that has so far cost the US about $30-40bn and Israel $300m a day, Washington is further away from a diplomatic agreement with Iran than it was in May 2025.

Not only has the war failed to persuade Iran to agree to dismantle its nuclear programme in the comprehensive and irreversible way the US demanded in a 15-point paper that it tabled on 23 May last year, Washington is now having to negotiate to reopen the strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway that has been open ever since the invention of the dhow, with a short exception of a tanker war in the 1980s between Iran and Iraq.

This regression is proving to be perplexing for the American high command. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, recently said that “the only thing prohibiting transit in the strait right now is Iran shooting at shipping”, but this was not quite right. Iran has not been shooting at shipping that much in recent weeks. Instead, it is the fear of Iran shooting at shipping that is scaring off insurers and tanker owners.

WINNING! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER. SIGNED, PRESIDENT MICROPENIS.

From Wall Street to the White House, the dish everyone’s talking about this week is the Persian Taco. It’s what’s served when Trump chickens out in Iran.

In the early hours of Monday morning, witnessing oil prices surge, stock futures plummet and bond yields climb due to his threat to pummel Iran’s civilian power infrastructure, the president hurriedly walked it back, announcing he would put off the bombing because talks with Iran were actually going great. After the bombast and bloodshed, it was time for Taco (Trump Always Chickens Out), a move he first put on display during the tariffs crisis last year.

Bonds snapped back in instants and the price of Brent crude recoiled to below $100 a barrel from more than $112 seconds earlier. By 9.30am in New York, the S&P 500 stock index had jumped 1.5%, defying futures contracts that had earlier signalled a 1% daily decline.

Maybe we should thank Trump for stopping American forces before they committed a war crime, setting off an inevitable tit-for-tat with Iran to blow up civilian infrastructure around the Gulf; delivering a gut punch to the global economy that would send financial markets into a tailspin.

Or we could say this whole excursion was a fucking farce to distract from Epstein.

Nichol's apartment complex just fucked up royally, and the water is to be shut off. She doesn't want to be involved in the coverage, so I said, "Let me handle this. This is exactly the hour to provide a news tip."

So, I call the Killeen Daily Herald, and the first person I speak with is a designer (I don't miss that entry-level function ... it's often idiots trying to settle bar bets). I get transferred to what I expect to be a reporter, but turns out ... well, he's on the desk.

So much the better. Now I can be blunt.

I fucking miss talking with other journalists. We aren't here to shoot the shit, and I was clear about what I'd personally experienced in the complex and what was hearsay.

It's funny ... I once wrote a column entitled "Don't piss off the news editor," and this is the sort of thing where, well, you don't know who you've just pissed off, and you also don't know whether their ex-husband happens to be able to get through newsroom structures to provide a tip.

I closed the conversation by wishing him a pleasant evening -- but hoping it won't be too boring. "Easy nights are not why I enjoy being on the desk." And he responds in kind: "Completely agree." I provide my number and mention the reporter should text first, as I don't answer calls from people not in my phone. His response? "Neither do I. Too much bullshit."

Afterward? Calling KXXN. You want redundancy in this situation. I had good conversations with both, but I'm a source in Austin covering a problem in Killeen, which I can't effectively do and therefore need local journalists to finish the job.

Nichol has switched her approach from "I'd never be caught talking to a journalist" to (after much explanation of what all of this is going to entail) to ... "well, I didn't ask for your help, but you knew I was asking for your help."

Yeah, babe, I do. You didn't bring this to my attention because you wanted pity. You wanted me to step in and do what, well, I do.

And I have now gotten the ball rolling. Which, as manipulative as it may have been, was what needed to happen.

If a reporter shows up, she's now happy to entertain them. She wasn't going to be able to sell the story to anyone, so, well ... I just had to step in. Of course she didn't ask, as that would be weakness.

This said, she remains the only person who can, with a single touch, make me twitch violently.

And I remain the only person in her life that can blast through newsroom walls and get shit done. Will they cover her situation? I put 60% odds between the pair of outlets.

But she had a 0% shot without me navigating this, so that's an improvement. Sometimes I wish I didn't still love her, but I had no choice in this case. She was pleading without pleading, and I knew exactly how to get through the gates.