Powderhorn

Want to buy my business? It’s been very profitable. I’ve run it for more than 25 years. But no, you don’t want to buy it. Like most small businesses in this country, there’s really nothing of value here.

According to the Small Business Administration, there are approximately 33m small businesses in the US. But fewer than 7m actually employ people. The rest comprise freelancers, side gigs and independent contractors. I’m sure many of these people are making a living. But are they building assets? A brand? Probably not. If that “business owner” suddenly disappears, their business disappears with them. No one wants to buy a business like that. There’s no value.

My company is no different. Like so many other business owners, I’m a micromanager and a control freak. My company has a few employees but in reality I’m nothing more than a glorified independent contractor. The business is built around me. If I get hit by a bus, my company crumbles into nothing. No one wants that.

We live in a service-based economy, which according to federal data accounts for as much as 77% of US GDP. My business is part of that. I bill for hours incurred. I manage a handful of open projects at any given time. I’m constantly scrambling for more work. There’s no commitment. There’s no requirement to use us. Unlike big tech companies, my clients are not bound to any contract. And even if they were, there would be little benefit to me – enforcing contracts is too expensive and time-consuming for a company my size. A buyer of my company would not be buying any customers – they’re free to go wherever they want. There’s no value in that.

A parcel of land behind Little Rock AME Zion church in Charlotte, North Carolina, remained mostly empty for nearly a decade before the congregation approached the city with a proposal.

The land sat unused while housing prices climbed and locals were being pushed out of their neighborhoods. So, the church proposed in 2018, why not develop housing there?

About six years after the project was approved, Varick on 7th opened 105 apartment units, half of which were designated as affordable housing.

“Little Rock has been a staple in this community for years addressing needs, not just affordable housing,” said the Rev Dr Derrill Blue, a pastor at Little Rock. “So we knew, because we had a longstanding relationship in this First Ward community, that this could be the next avenue we could take to address a community need.”

Little Rock is just one of several faith-based institutions in the US that are developing their underutilized land at a time when the country faces a deep housing shortage.

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 abortion rate is holding steady in the US despite total and partial bans in some states – largely because of travel across state lines and a significant increase in telehealth appointments, a new report says.

US regulatory officials are weighing changes to the ways mifepristone, an abortion medication, may be dispensed, but they have reportedly pushed their review until after the midterm elections, given the widespread support for abortion across the US.

The number of abortions in the US increased slightly last year, from 1.124m to 1.126m, according to a Guttmacher Institute report. There’s also a shift away from traveling and toward telehealth, in which providers may prescribe mail-order pills.

One major change in this report is the provision of telehealth for patients in states with total bans – with clinicians in states such as New York or Massachusetts, which have shield laws to protect providers, seeing and prescribing remotely to patients living in states such as Texas or Alabama.

Shield laws have been “extremely important” for protecting providers and increasing access, said Joanne Rosen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and co-director of its Center for Law and the Public’s Health.

Somewhat of a useless overall statistic, as while I appreciate the solidarity of other nations, this is our own fuckup to fix.

More than 8 million people protested against the Trump administration at more than 3,300 No Kings events across the US and in more than a dozen countries on Saturday, according to organizers. It’s the greatest number of protests in a single day in US history, said Britt Jacovich, the deputy communications director for Move On, one of the organizers behind No Kings.

Saturday’s protest was the third No Kings, organized by a coalition that also includes “anti-authoritarian” groups Indivisible and 50501, labor unions and other grassroots organizations. The last one in October drew 7 million people nationwide.

A multiplicity of stressors drew protesters across issues, from ICE raids to the war in Iran to voting rights threats. “Since the last No Kings, we’re seeing higher gas prices and groceries, all while there’s an illegal war in Iran,” said Sarah Parker, the executive director of Voices of Florida and a national coordinator for the 50501 movement. “The people of America are pissed.”

At the “flagship” event in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St Paul, organizers estimate around 200,000 people filled the streets around the state capitol to commiserate, mourn and speak out against the Trump administration.

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.”

On a warm March weekend in the American border town of Lewiston, New York, bakery owner Aimee Loughran is putting the finishing touches on a special order: a state trooper badge-shaped cake for a local officer’s retirement party.

It should be the last task of a busy Saturday at her Just Desserts shop, which sits just 20 minutes north of the rushing waters of Niagara Falls. Dotted with cafes, restaurants and historic buildings from the 1800s, the Lewiston strip is usually catnip for tourists, including the Canadians whose homes can be seen from the banks of the nearby Niagara River.

Local demand for Loughran’s cake and pastries, however, has not made up for a dramatic slump in tourist spending, triggered by a now year-long boycott by Lewiston’s northern neighbours.

Angered by Donald Trump’s hefty tariffs and annexation threats – and compounded by fears of border detentions and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdowns – Canadians have stayed away, refusing to spend their hard-earned dollars in local border towns like Lewiston.

“All of our sales on the strip have gone way down,” Loughran said. That has personally led to a 30% drop in revenues at her bakery, forcing the 41-year-old to cut spending, both at work and at home. “Especially as a single mom, it’s very tough.”