Vice-president’s war doubts and his boss’s desperation to reopen Red Sea look like a weak deck against bolstered opponents

As JD Vance arrives in Islamabad to negotiate a peace deal with Iran, his first high-profile assignment of the war looks to be a poisoned chalice.

Vance, a vocal opponent of US wars in the Middle East gone quiet since the beginning of the current military campaign, will now face off with Iranian negotiators who feel emboldened by their new control of the Hormuz strait and their resilience in the face of the largest US-Israeli onslaught in history. Vance’s presence at the talks as vice-president will make it the highest-level meeting since the Iranian revolution of 1979.

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• Six birdies in final seven holes for defending champion

• Burns and Reed at -6, Rose, Lowry and Fleetwood at -5

After spending 16 years as the hunter, Rory McIlroy is relishing his position as the hunted. The defending Masters champion has reached the halfway point of the 2026 staging in a style that asserts his desperation to hang on to the Green Jacket. Elk, served as sliders in the 36-year-old’s champions dinner on Tuesday evening, were seen diving for cover in mountainous regions as McIlroy placed daylight between himself and pretenders to his throne.

McIlroy won at Augusta National in 2025 and eventually discovered that was not his final career destination after all. He is now 36 holes from becoming only the fourth man in history to back up a Masters win with a Masters win. McIlroy’s distinctly relaxed state of mind means only the bold will back against him from here. Even the prospect of falling short is unlikely to perturb McIlroy. He did quite enough of that in earlier years before rebounding in ferocious fashion. A grand slam winner has a mindset to match.

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• Fans jeer as draw follows losses to Mallorca and Bayern

• Marseille go third in Ligue 1 as Paris FC stun Monaco

Real Madrid had to settle for a 1-1 draw against mid-table Girona in La Liga on Friday, extending the hosts’ winless run to three games in all competitions and giving leaders Barcelona the chance to stretch their advantage at the top.

Federico Valverde put Madrid ahead six minutes after half-time but Girona levelled in the 62nd minute through Thomas Lemar. Álvaro Arbeloa’s side are six points behind with league leaders Barça, who have a game in hand against Espanyol on Saturday and could move nine clear with seven games to play.

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Drain the pool, Mimi Plumb

The great wide open, Catherine DeLattre

Grave of the fireflies, Slava (Thisset) Semeniuta

Nowhere’s home, Jordan Sullivan

Last year I wrote popup-video.js, a Google-surveillance-defeating YouTube player. You may have noticed it in action on the DNA Lounge calendar pages and galleries but I've made some improvements recently.

• The web page contains only a locally-hosted thumbnail. Nothing from YouTube is loaded until someone clicks play. This means no surveillance trackers on every one of your pages that has a video, and also the pages load dozens fewer megabytes.

• When you click play, a fake-window pops up inside the page with a YouTube player.

• Clicking anywhere makes it go away.

• There's a "minimize" button that makes it drop back down into the place where the thumbnail was and continue playing.

• If the inline thumb is nearly as wide as the page, it plays inline instead of doing the popup thing (this is often the case on mobile).

• It works on playlists as well as single videos.

• For single videos, it generates an ad-hoc playlist of all of the other YouTube videos linked on the current page, so the "previous" and "next" buttons show those.

• It works on portrait videos and videos with weird aspect ratios.

Dear Lazyweb,

If you understand the ever-changing rules about auto-play, perhaps you can offer some guidance.

On desktop Safari, you have to click twice to get the first video to play: the YouTube player pops up but does not then auto-play, unless you have done "Website settings / Allow all auto-play" for jwz.org. This is -- what's the word -- fucked up, because the creation of the IFRAME and the sending of the "play" event all happen underneath the user's "click" event, so this should be considered interactive.

And on mobile Safari you always have to click twice.

(I don't remember what the situation is on Chrome or Firefox on account of not caring.)

Anyway, if you know how to make it play with one click instead of two, I would like to know how to do that. Your suggestion should take the form of, "Here's a modified version of your JS file that works". Your speculation is acknowledged and ignored.

Previously, previously, previously.

BertvB posted a photo:

From Daphni (aka Caribou), a 7hr DJ set. 7 hours!