Going on to direct Gary to pay his sister and niece’s court costs of £216,013.85, with a £150,000 up front payment, the judge concluded: “I can see no good reason for not ordering that Gary should make a payment on account. It seems to me that a payment on account of £150,000 is reasonable in the circumstances and I will so order.” Source link
The Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET) will collect sunlight and redirect it to ESO’s ESPRESSO instrument, which will obtain highly detailed spectra of both the entire Sun and specific regions such as sunspots. These observations will be key to understanding the ‘noise’ that similar features in other stars introduce in observations aimed at detecting exoplanets around them. PoET, installed at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal site in Chile, has made its first observations. The telescope will work with ESO’s ESPRESSO instrument to study the Sun in detail. Described as a solar telescope for planet hunters, PoET aims to understand how the variation in the light from stars like the Sun can mask the presence of planets orbiting them, helping us in our search for worlds outside the Solar System. PoET’s main telescope, seen above being lowered into its dome, has a 60-cm mirror. PoET also has a second smaller telescope that collects light from the entire disc of the Sun. “One of the greatest challenges for the detection of other Earths orbiting other Suns …
‘For many years, I’ve called myself a surrealist blues poet,” says Aja Monet in her warm, deep voice. Sitting in a London cafe, the Los Angeles-based artist looks striking, with her blue braids woven up in an intricate style. She was up late uploading the final master recordings for her new album, The Color of Rain, which she says was heavily influenced by her reading around how “surrealism was a real intentional device that artists used in response to the rise of fascism throughout history”. High-minded and yet invested in the cut-and-thrust of our lives today, it’s a typical comment from Monet. With themes around love, resistance and the absurdity of our current times, her performance, poetry and music offers a balm for the suffering and abuse meted out by establishment power. Already in 2026, her second poetry book Florida Water was nominated for an award by the foundational US civil rights organisation the NAACP, and she performed alongside Stevie Wonder at Time magazine’s event celebrating Martin Luther King Day. She’s gearing up for a …
p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”> Art isn’t easy, Stephen Sondheim articulated about the creative process. Then again, if one’s chosen art seems especially out of reach, life is no piece of cake either. Colombian writer-director Simón Mesa Soto’s acutely observed Cannes-recognized “A Poet” lays bare that torment with the tale of a has-been writer for whom exquisite suffering has curdled into garden-variety middle-age failure. Given a modicum of hope, there’s always room to make matters worse. There’s a wry grace to this misadventure-palooza, forged in the key of melancholic mid-career Woody Allen but with variations on those themes which achieve their own pointedly funny clarity, especially where Ubeimar Rios’ all-time portrayal of a sad sack is concerned. Decades from his prize-winning days as a published young poet, Oscar (Rios) is now divorced, creatively blocked and penniless, living with his ailing mother (Margarita Soto), estranged from his teenage daughter (Alisson Correa) and prone to crying fits of self-pity when he isn’t drunkenly raving to anyone who will listen about the sorry state of the written word in his country. …
In a world where poetry wields the power to reshape reality and dynasties balance on the edge of blades, Shen Tao’s debut novel delivers a harrowing tale of survival, forbidden knowledge, and the transformative power of literacy. The Poet Empress by Shen Tao introduces readers to Wei Yin, a desperate village girl thrust into the deadly political machinations of the Azalea House, where being chosen as a prince’s concubine might be a death sentence disguised as an honor. A Heroine Forged in Desperation Wei Yin’s journey begins not with ambition but with grief. After burying her fifth sibling while her village starves under the weight of an empire-wide famine, she makes a choice that will alter the course of her life: she offers herself to the concubine selection for Prince Terren, the cruel heir known as the Winter Dragon. What follows is not a fairy tale but a brutal education in palace politics, where every smile conceals a dagger and survival requires becoming as dangerous as those who would destroy you. Tao crafts Wei with …
