May 25, 2026

This Alien Planet Has Rock Clouds That Vaporize Before Sunset

JWST has revealed a surprising daily cloud cycle on a distant hot Jupiter, giving scientists a clearer look at its atmosphere.

https://scitechdaily.com/this-alien-planet-has-rock-clouds-that-vaporize-before-sunset/


Artistic representation of WASP-94A b, a gas giant in the Microscopium constellation. Clouds build as air flows over the dark side of the planet, reaching a large swell by daybreak. The clouds dissipate on the dayside, leaving clear skies in the early evening. Credit: Hannah Robbins/Johns Hopkins University

On WASP-94A b, the forecast changes fast. Clouds made from rock-forming minerals gather in the planet’s morning skies, then vanish by evening as the atmosphere sweeps into hotter territory.

This world is a hot Jupiter, a giant planet that orbits extremely close to its star. Located nearly 700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Microscopium, WASP-94A b is far too distant to image in everyday detail. Instead, scientists used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to read subtle changes in starlight as the planet crossed in front of its star.

The result is one of the clearest detections yet of a daily cloud cycle on this type of exoplanet. By separating cloudy regions from clearer parts of the atmosphere, the team was able to refine its view of the planet’s chemistry and overturn an earlier puzzle about its composition.

“I’ve been looking at exoplanets for 20 years, and general cloudiness has been a thorn in our side. We’ve known for quite a while that clouds are pervasive on Hot Jupiter planets, which is annoying because it’s like trying to look at the planet through a foggy window,” said co-author and program PI, David Sing, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins. “Not only have we been able to clear the view, but we can finally pin down what the clouds are made out of and how they’re condensing and evaporating as they move around the planet.” The findings were published in the journal Science.

JWST Reveals a Planet’s Daily Weather Cycle......................

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May 24, 2026

How a Curious FIFA Boardroom Deal Handed Fox an Astounding Bargain

A decision to stave off litigation between Fox and FIFA turned into a bonanza worth hundreds of millions of dollars in discounted World Cup rights to the broadcaster.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/world/europe/fifa-world-cup-fox-broadcast-rights.html


FIFA headquarters in Zurich in 2024. Credit...Michael Buholzer/EPA, via Shutterstock

Fox Corporation is getting an enormous bargain to broadcast the 2026 World Cup next month, industry analysts say. It is paying less than $500 million to air the tournament, according to people familiar with the agreement who were not authorized to speak on the matter. Yet experts say the rights are worth as much as three times that amount, raising questions about how Fox secured such an incredible deal.

The answer stretches back to March 2014, when FIFA’s board convened in a soundproof room reserved for the most important decisions, deep in the subterranean layer of its glass-and-steel headquarters in Zurich. There, some of the most powerful figures in soccer were told that a decision worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the sport’s governing body was needed to make a problem go away, according to people with direct knowledge of what was said in the meeting.

A separate resolution, made in the same room four years earlier, was to blame. That’s when FIFA chose tiny but wealthy Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, which would go on to create a conflict with Fox, one of its biggest broadcast partners. Many of the details of the meeting, including the conversations that took place, and what Fox paid for the 2026 World Cup rights have not been previously reported. Qatar’s searingly hot summers made it unsuitable to host an event traditionally played in June and July. FIFA officials would eventually acknowledge the problem by shifting the tournament to late fall, but the English-language rights in the United States had been won by Fox years earlier.

Fox, which had never broadcast the World Cup, beat ESPN, the longtime rights holder, in a bidding war to broadcast both the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The rights, Fox had argued, were worth the record $425 million paid only if the tournaments were played on their usual summer dates. Now FIFA wanted to move the Qatar World Cup to a time when the American sports calendar is jammed with football, basketball and hockey.

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May 23, 2026

The best cocktail recipes -- according to bartenders

This week: a rich and herbaceous twist on a classic Cin-Cyn from Eleanore restaurant in Edinburgh

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/best-cocktail-recipes-jflz2ck20

https://archive.ph/EmTDQ

We love a cocktail at Alba, so we’ve asked mixologists from across Scotland to share the recipe for their signature drink. We’ll update the list regularly, so if you’re a cocktail fan, make sure you save this page. And please let us know if you’ve come across any bars or drinks worth shouting about in the comments section below. We’ll check them out ourselves, and add the best of them to our list. Slainte mhath!


Johanna Cole from Eleanore in Edinburgh with her play on a Cin-Cyn











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more




https://archive.ph/PGG8S

















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May 23, 2026

2 Assholes,1 Cup: Bill Maher & John Fetterman Laugh at Trump's 'Quiet Piggy' Insult & Admire His 'Authenticity'

https://www.tvinsider.com/1263627/bill-maher-john-fetterman-laugh-at-trumps-quiet-piggy-insult-admire-his-authenticity/



Real Time host Bill Maher and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman enjoyed a good laugh on Monday’s (May 11) episode of the Club Random podcast as they discussed President Donald Trump‘s “refreshing honesty.”


Touching on Trump’s often blunt remarks and insults, Maher said it makes the president authentic. “The things that he says aloud, the way he just voices his interior monologue… There is something not exactly psychologically normal about someone who just vomits their interior monologue, but it gives him an authenticity with people that no one else can possibly match,” Maher said.

The HBO host brought up Trump’s recent interview with CBS News reporter Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes, in which the president called her a “disgrace” for reading from the alleged manifesto of Cole Allen, the suspect who stormed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

"That pissed him off a lot,” Maher stated. “I could see both sides. As a reporter, it is news. Also, it’s giving access to the president from the terrorist.” "[Trump’s] reaction to her was, ‘You’re a terrible person,’ and he didn’t just think it like any politician. That’s exactly what they’re thinking. He just says it,” he continued. “It’s at the same time horrifying and also kind of refreshing. It’s shockingly honest.”

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May 23, 2026

Timothy Snyder: The Era of the Superlosers: Trump, Putin, and the World

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-era-of-the-superlosers

(Video at the link)

The United States and Russia are both losing wars. And they are losing wars that make no sense, in an uncanny folie à deux, to the benefit of China. This video, which I filmed after dozens of meetings and public discussions in Europe this month, supplies an explanatory concept: the superloser.

A superloser is a leader of a great power, or (onetime) superpower, whose disastrous choices lead to a crash. He possesses a combination of skills that allow for a rise to personal power and the collapse of state power. In the video I spell out the five C’s of the superloser phenomenon:

A conflict that is being lost, in the strong sense of a war: Iran for Trump, Ukraine for Putin. A concept of power that is betrayed, by the war and generally, such that it is not only defeat that is at hand, but the continuous undermining of structures. A corruption that makes national interests irrelevant; a shared example, one of many, is giving tax money to billionaires.

Cooperation with the other superloser, which somehow makes matters worse both for the other superloser and for the world; Trump’s nonsensical war, for example, funds Putin’s criminal war of aggression by raising oil prices, but Putin is still unable to win and now lacks excuses for failure. A special superloser charisma, a subjective sense in society or the media that the superloser is somehow a strong man, which makes it harder to describe losses as such, and allows the damage to continue.

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May 23, 2026

Inside the world's biggest curry house serving 10,000 meals a week

The Royal Nawaab in Stockport is a spectacular all-you-can-eat restaurant that has served both Tyson Fury and Lisa Nandy

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/food-drink/article/worcurry-house-royal-nawaab-manchester-bhd635ggn

https://archive.ph/kZJ9o


There are more than 180 dishes at the Royal Nawaab Rachel Adams for the Times

It is remarkable that Abdullah doesn’t spend his whole working day in tears. Sitting statuesque on an upturned bucket at the back of a bustling kitchen, his job is to peel hundreds of onions that will make their way into vast cauldrons of dal, curry and bhajis. It is repetitive, eye-watering work. Yet it takes exactly this kind of military-style discipline to run the world’s largest curry house.


Abdullah preparing onions for dishes Rachel Adams for the Times

At least, that is the title bestowed upon the Royal Nawaab, an upmarket all-you-can-eat restaurant which is the subject of a new documentary airing on Friday. The building housing it is already a local celebrity. The blue glass pyramid that towers above the residential streets of Stockport, Greater Manchester, is an incongruous sight. Built in 1992, it was supposed to be one of five pyramids in the town’s very own “Valley of the Kings”, but it stands alone after the main contractor for the project went bust. It housed the Co-op bank between 1995 and 2018, before sitting empty for five years until the restaurateur Mahboob Hussain took it over.


Mahboob Hussain outside Royal Nawaab, housed within the Pyramid Rachel Adams for the Times

“I wanted to do something massive. This is my legacy now,” Hussain told The Times. The 71-year-old, who sports a chunky gold watch, has been running buffet-style restaurants in both London and Manchester for decades, including a curry house in the Hoover building just off the A40 in Perivale. This restaurant, which opened last year and serves 10,000 covers a week, is his most ambitious to date. “It was a big risk,” he said. “People said that this place is in the middle of nowhere, it’s not on the high street, but I don’t call my place a restaurant, it’s a destination.”



Despite the rather uninspiring backdrop of the M60 and the sound of low-flying planes coming and going from Manchester airport, inside the building feels more like a Dubai hotel. There are marble floors, polished around the clock, a glass chandelier hovering over a cascading fountain and hundreds of gleaming baubles which are shined fortnightly by a member of staff in a cherry picker. Most customers stick to the ground floor, where the enormous restaurant serves more than 180 dishes for £31.99 a head. But upstairs lies a labyrinth of reception rooms hosting weddings, sweet sixteenths, and corporate board meetings, all serviced by adjoining kitchens providing a constant stream of authentic Pakistani cuisine.



Famous guests have included Tyson Fury and Lisa Nandy, the culture minister and MP for Wigan. Other VIPs have been known to fly into Manchester airport specifically to visit the restaurant. Every dish has been conceived with the approval of Hussain, who opened his first restaurant in Bradford in the Eighties, having moved to the UK in the late Sixties at the age of 15. The head chef, who goes by “Honey”, made no secret of his boss’s exacting standards; the entire pyramid is covered by high-definition cameras, allowing Hussain to examine dishes remotely. If the presentation isn’t exactly right, he has been known to call in from afar and order that the dish be sent back to the kitchen.

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May 23, 2026

How Israel Got This Way - A new book by a genocide scholar traces the roots of the nation's descent.

Implied in the question posed by the title of Omer Bartov’s new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, is the equally unsettling question of whether the state of Israel can be fixed. (If you are convinced it never should have existed in the first place, you might want to stop reading now.)

https://prospect.org/2026/05/22/how-israel-got-this-way-bartov-review/


An Israeli soldier stands guard during the inauguration ceremony for the newly legalized Jewish settlement of Yatziv, near the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour, in the West Bank, January 19, 2026. Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP Photo

For many, the death and destruction wrought by Israel in the Gaza Strip since 2023 have been so horrific—even as a response to the mass slaughter with which Hamas initiated the war—that they have lost any sympathy they may once have had for the Jewish state. What Bartov’s book makes clear, however, is that there is also a war going on within Israel, one that pits democracy, equality, pluralism, and the rule of law against a growing and increasingly violent camp—which includes the government—that is working to dismantle the country’s legal institutions, its press freedoms, its pretense to being a liberal democracy, and any conviction that it can and needs to seek an equitable resolution to its conflict with the Palestinians.




Understanding the nature and background of that war—the internal one—is essential to comprehending how and why Israel has fought its war in Gaza (and elsewhere) in the relentless and unrealistic way that it has. Such understanding also sharpens just what a critical moment this is in Israel’s history. By law, the country must hold an election before November, and if the coalition of parties led by Benjamin Netanyahu is not defeated, it could well seal the state’s one-way descent into autocratic theocracy. Sending Netanyahu home in no way guarantees a restart for the country, but it is certainly a necessary condition for it.

Bartov is an Israeli-born professor of genocide and Holocaust studies at Brown University. He has deliberately made his life outside his birthplace since the 1990s, but like a latter-day wandering Jew, he carries with him an identification with and concern for the state. He fought in its army, his grandchildren are being raised there, and if he hasn’t visited in two years, it’s because the last time he came, he felt alienated from even his closest friends.

It should not be surprising, then, that Bartov has been preoccupied with whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. In two prominent New York Times opinion pieces, in November 2023 and July 2025, respectively, he progressed from identifying “genocidal intent” on the part of Israel, to determining that its actions now amounted to genocide. That line was crossed, he tells us, when, by the summer of 2024, when Israel attacked and plowed under the city of Rafah (population 275,000), it “demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards … [and] indicated that the ultimate goal of this whole undertaking from the very beginning was to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable.”

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May 22, 2026

Fetterman Secret Israel Handler Exposed - How a little-known writer became one of the senator's closest confidants.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/john-fetterman-israel-palestine-david-safier-aipac.html

https://archive.ph/cXJwN


David “Dovi” Safier shared this selfie with John Fetterman on social media, expressing his gratitude for the senator. Photo: X/Safier

Over the last three years, Democratic Party support for Israel has undergone a dramatic reversal. In 2024, 18 Democratic senators backed a measure to block arms sales to the country. In April of this year, it was 40. Polls show about two-thirds of Democratic voters sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis. And even former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel — who grew up spending his summers in the country and whose middle name is Israel — has recently begun calling for an end to carte blanche U.S. military aid. “More and more Democrats,” Senator Bernie Sanders told NOTUS last month, are “seeing the light.”

And then there’s Senator John Fetterman. While the rest of his party reluctantly retreats from an ironclad allyship, the Pennsylvania senator has promised to be the “last” Democrat standing with Israel. His political identity is increasingly defined by a blanket defense of the country. Online, Fetterman frequently mocks critics of Israel. In interviews, he has pushed back on claims that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. When pro-Palestine protesters came to his home, Fetterman waved an Israeli flag from his roof; asked on Meet the Press about Israel’s pagers attack in Lebanon, which wounded more than 3,000 people and killed 12, the senator said, “I love it.” On May 19, Fetterman was the only Democratic senator to vote against a War Powers Resolution intended to stymie the U.S.-Israel war against Iran. “President Trump has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region,” he said when the war began. “God bless the United States, our great military, and Israel,” Fetterman added, as if these elements constitute some kind of geopolitical holy trinity.

By Democratic Party standards, Fetterman’s position on Israel is extreme. There are a multitude of theories as to why: The senator is a contrarian; he enjoys the attention; he has convinced himself that he is indisputably in the right. But people close to Fetterman cite a previously unreported factor too: Behind the scenes, Fetterman is being encouraged and counseled by a little-known man in his late 30s named David “Dovi” Safier.

Safier, a writer of Jewish history and fundraiser for Orthodox causes, has no public background in government or counseling politicians on Capitol Hill. He is not an official staffer or paid outside adviser. A few years ago, he “just kind of appeared” in the senator’s orbit, one former Fetterman staffer remembers. And then, suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere. Staffers would walk into Fetterman’s office, only to find Safier sitting in the room. When the senator went to Israel in 2025, Safier joined him on the trip; when Fetterman filmed Real Time With Bill Maher, Safier met up with him in Los Angeles. The two are constantly texting and talking, according to multiple former Fetterman staffers, and Safier has unofficially operated as a top campaign fundraiser and senior adviser. He has even set up and attended sensitive meetings with foreign officials; in some cases, he is the only person staffing those meetings, I’ve been told.

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May 22, 2026

Anika Nilles (the new Rush drummer) live - Leverkusener Jazztage 2023 - Jazzline

Line-up

Anika Nilles - drums
Joachim Schneiss - guitar
Johnathan Ihlenfeld- bass
Patrick Rugebregt - keyboards
Hilde Müller - keyboards
Santino Scavelli - percussion

She's got the groove and feels the beats. She sweeps across her drum kit with determination and expressiveness, mastering every nuance between explosive and sensitive. Anika Nilles, a lecturer at the Pop Academy Mannheim, is a wonderful presence in the male-dominated world of drumming and – quite understandably – is truly sick of hearing the phrase: "Not bad for a woman." Anika Nilles, who has drummed for artists such as Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp, combines rhythmic intelligence with an urgent joy in her playing.

https://www.anikanilles.com/

May 22, 2026

The Geddy Lee Interview - Rick Beato

In this interview, I finally get the chance to sit down with Rush frontman and legendary bassist Geddy Lee. We talk about some of my favorite songs from Rush's prolific catalog, his ever-evolving bass sound and going on tour for the first time in over a decade. Keep watching and you might catch the hilarious moment when Alex Lifeson crashes the interview.

Get tickets to the Fifty Something Tour here:

https://www.rush.com/tour/fifty-something/

Rush - Anthem