The Leonid meteor shower is peaking this week, potentially bringing hundreds of long-tailed meteors with it. This annual fall display is an excellent opportunity to spot fireballs in the night sky.
Meteor showers are the beautiful result of Earth moving through the trail of debris streaming from comets and asteroids as they make their own way around the sun. As these chunks of space rock enter our atmosphere, they burn up as shooting stars. And if they land, they become meteorites.
The Leonids are an annual shower that occurs in early November and lasts through early December, when Earth passes through the stream of debris of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.
Perhaps the most famous Leonid display in modern memory took place on November 17, 1966, when meteors seemed to fall like rain, and some witnesses said it felt as if Earth was plunging through space.
These storms tend to follow a 33- to 34-year rhythm tied to the comet’s orbit. Most years are quieter, however, which is the most likely outcome this week. The last major event occurred in 2002.
How to Watch the Leonids
The Leonids will reach their peak at 1 P.M. EST on November 17. Hundreds of long-tailed meteors will cross the sky at 44 miles per second, giving sky watchers a good chance to catch the display closer to dawn on November 18.
When many meteors appear to streak from the same point in the night sky, that point is known as the radiant. This year, the shower’s radiant rises around midnight and climbs highest just before dawn, making the predawn hours the best time to watch.
Favorably for sky-gazers, the next new moon will arrive on November 20, which means there is only a thin waning crescent in the sky during the Leonids’ peak this week. Under dark sky conditions, observers might see as many as 10 to 15 Leonids per hour. Experts recommend using binoculars or telescopes and lying flat on your back with your feet toward the east. After about 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adjust, and you will begin to see meteors.
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The Leonid meteor shower above Wrightwood, Calif., in 1966. NASA/Getty Images
US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose government called the seizure “an act of international piracy”.
Trump confirmed the operation on Wednesday, saying: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually.”
“It was seized for a very good reason,” the US president added, declining to say who owned the vessel.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, posted footage of the seizure on X. The grainy, unclassified 45-second video shows US forces landing on the tanker from a helicopter.
In an accompanying statement, Bondi said the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the US Coast Guard, with support from the Department of Defense, had “executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.
She said the tanker had been sanctioned by the US for “multiple years” due to its “involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations”.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted its own video edit of the seizure, soundtracked with an excerpt from LL Cool J’s song Mama Said Knock You Out. DHS has repeatedly faced criticism for poaching music for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruitment ads. DHS recently used a Sabrina Carpenter song, without permission, prompting the pop star to respond that the video was “evil and disgusting”.
LL Cool J did not immediately address the use of his song.
Venezuela’s government said in the statement that the seizure “constitutes a blatant theft and an act of international piracy”.
It continued: “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed … It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”
Earlier, speaking at a rally in Caracas, Maduro urged citizens to act like “warriors” and be ready “to smash the teeth of the North American empire if necessary”.
Maduro has been in power since 2013, when he succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death from cancer. Widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election, Maduro has clung to power after launching a wave of repression that forced Edmundo González, the apparent winner of the 2024 vote, into exile in Spain.
Since August, the US has put a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people.
On Tuesday, two US fighter jets circled the Gulf of Venezuela for about 40 minutes. The aircraft flew just north of Maracaibo, one of Venezuela’s most populous cities.
On Wednesday, González’s most important backer, the opposition leader María Corina Machado, was awarded the Nobel peace prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a peaceful and just transition from dictatorship to democracy”.
Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the prize, telling a ceremony in Oslo that her mother’s struggle to end years of “obscene corruption” and “brutal dictatorship” would go on.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and, although years of mismanagement and corruption have done severe damage to its oil industry, oil exports remain Venezuela’s main source of revenue. The main customer is China.
The objective of this week’s reported tanker seizure was not immediately clear.
In an interview last week, Joe Biden’s former chief Latin America adviser, Juan González, said that at around the time of last year’s election he had pushed for the US to station two navy destroyers off Venezuela’s coast “and even impose an oil blockade”.
That never happened, but González believed one possible way out of the current crisis might be for the Trump administration to push Maduro into accepting a recall referendum, perhaps in 2027, but threatening “real hardline consequences” such as a blockade if the result was not respected.
“I think it is potentially a viable option where there should be a very credible and aggressive snapback associated with it,” González said, adding: “Imposing an oil blockade would shut down the entire economy.”
“It’s less aggressive [than a land strike] but it’s still considered an act of war,” added González, who was the national security council’s senior director for the western hemisphere during the Biden administration.
“He [Trump] could take unilateral action by blocking oil tankers from leaving or entering the country, and that I think would precipitate Maduro’s departure.”
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Footage shows US forces taking control of oil tanker off Venezuelan coast – video
Opinions on Donald Trump’s mental state vary widely; some critics label him as “insane” due to his behavior and rhetoric, while others argue he is simply a product of mediocrity and privilege. Ultimately, whether he is considered “crazy” is subjective and depends on individual perspectives.
Hours after missing the ceremony in Norway’s capital that awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado appeared in the city’s streets after midnight on Thursday, greeting a cheering crowd.
She appeared on the balcony of the historic Grand Hotel in Oslo, the capital, around 2:30 a.m., waving to journalists and supporters who had been waiting for hours. People in the crowd started to sing the Venezuelan national anthem. Ms. Machado emerged from the hotel and approached the crowd, climbing over a metal barrier to embrace supporters and grasp their hands.
Ms. Machado’s decision to leave Venezuela, after more than a year in hiding, has thrust her back into the global spotlight and escalated the intensifying standoff between President Trump and Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian president. She was expected to hold a news conference in Oslo later on Thursday.
Ms. Machado, 58, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for leading a successful electoral challenge to Mr. Maduro last year. He disregarded the election results, declared himself the winner, and cracked down on dissent.
In an audio message published by the Nobel Peace Prize committee on Wednesday, Ms. Machado said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo to participate in the day’s festivities surrounding the awarding of the prize. But she arrived too late to attend the ceremony, at which her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the Nobel on her behalf.
Mr. Trump’s administration, which accuses Mr. Maduro of leading two drug cartels, has deployed the largest U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis, carrying out fatal strikes on boats that it says were trafficking drugs and, on Wednesday, seizing an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.
Yet the two leaders spoke by phone last month, and Venezuela recently began accepting U.S. deportation flights, raising the possibility that both sides could be edging toward a diplomatic settlement.
Ms. Machado has consistently rejected talks with the Venezuelan government and backed a hard-line, force-based approach, embracing the Trump administration’s military pressure and refraining from criticizing its strikes on alleged drug traffickers.
Her challenge now will be to turn this moment in the spotlight into real political leverage. Past opposition leaders who left Venezuela have faded from relevance, and the government has already branded her a fugitive. Given that hundreds of her supporters have been arrested, analysts say that Mr. Maduro is unlikely to let her return unless he secures guarantees that keep his government intact.
Aides to Ms. Machado had said in the past that she would never leave Venezuela. In an interview last year, a top opposition leader, Perkins Rocha, said, “My knowledge of María Corina Machado is to have the certainty that she would never abandon the country.”
By her side in Oslo on Thursday were two senior aides, Magalli Meda and Pedro Urruchurtu, who spent more than a year sheltered at the Argentine diplomatic residence in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, before making their way to the United States in May.
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María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, greeted supporters in the Norwegian capital, hours after missing the ceremony at which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.CreditCredit…Jonas Been Henriksen/NTB Scanpix, via Associated Press
In 2018, at a Dubai resort next to the blue-green waters of the Persian Gulf, Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, stood before an audience of hundreds of petrochemical executives to set out his vision for the future of the world’s largest oil company. The goals he described weren’t primarily about energy. Instead, he announced plans to pour $100 billion into expanding production of plastic and other petrochemicals.
Nasser predicted that with a growing global population wielding more purchasing power every year, petrochemicals—compounds derived from petroleum and other fossil fuels and of which plastics and their ingredients constitute as much as 80 percent—would drive nearly half of oil-demand growth by mid-century. About 98 percent of virgin plastics are made from fossil fuels. In sectors that include packaging, cars, and construction, he said, “the tremendous growth in chemicals demand provides us with a fantastic window of opportunity.”
In the years since Nasser’s 2018 speech, Saudi Aramco, owned mainly by the government of Saudi Arabia, has acquired a majority stake in the country’s petrochemical conglomerate SABIC. Together, the companies have bought into huge Chinese plastic projects and built petrochemical plants from South Korea to the Texas coast. Aramco aims to turn more than a third of its crude into petrochemicals by the 2030s—a near tripling in 15 years.
Although the industry has framed its plans to pivot to plastic as a response to consumer demand for a material central to modern life, another factor is clearly at play: As the looming dangers of climate change are pushing the world away from fossil fuels, the industry is betting on plastic to protect its profitability. Ramping up plastic and petrochemical output, according to Nasser, will “provide a reliable destination for Saudi Aramco’s future oil production.” As one industry analyst observed of the company’s strategy, “the big picture imperative is to avoid being forced to leave barrels in the ground as demand for transportation fuels declines.”
Even ExxonMobil has acknowledged that electric vehicles’ widespread adoption will probably reduce cars’ need for oil. In one market forecast, the company, already the world’s largest producer of single-use plastics, assured investors that its plans to increase petrochemical production by 80 percent by 2050 will help the industry to pump and sell even more oil at mid-century than it does today.
But there is growing public awareness that all the plastic made for packaging and goods from the absurd to the essential comes at steep costs: the health impacts of the chemicals it contains, the emissions from its production, the mountains of waste that have built up as it is discarded, and the microplastics found everywhere from the most remote corners of the planet to our brains. Some governments have begun enacting legislation, such as bans on certain single-use items, but efforts to deliver more sweeping change hit a wall with the collapse in August of contentious negotiations on a global plastic-pollution treaty. More than 70 nations had pushed for limits on the amount of plastic produced to reduce the flow of waste into the environment. The industry has lobbied heavily against such caps, arguing that improved waste management and recycling are the solution, even though only a small percentage of plastic is currently recycled, and many types cannot be recycled by conventional means.
Companies “know they can’t hold their finger in the dike” of an energy transition, says Judith Enck, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official and president of Beyond Plastics, an advocacy group based at Bennington College. “They have to find a gigantic new market, and they have landed on plastic.”Plastic production has been rising steadily since the end of World War II, when companies poured resources into finding and promoting peacetime uses for a material whose military applications—from nylon parachutes to polyethylene insulation for radar sets—had proved invaluable. Consumers snapped up the flood of new goods and disposable packaging, and the annual output of plastic has climbed from two million metric tons in 1950 to more than 500 million today. A cumulative 8.3 billion metric tons had been produced by 2015, according to a landmark study that was the first to quantify the total amount of plastic created. According to Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who co-authored the study, the total has since risen past 10 billion metric tons. About three quarters of all that plastic has become waste, Geyer’s team reported: 9 percent was recycled, 12 percent was incinerated, and 79 percent ended up in landfills or the environment. If current trends continue, 1.1 billion metric tons of plastic will be made annually by 2050—and the cumulative total will be enough, Geyer says, to cover the U.S. in an ankle-deep layer.
Today, half of all plastic goes into single-use items, which are often tossed away almost as soon as they’re acquired. A million plastic bottles are purchased each minute, according to the United Nations’ environment agency, and five trillion plastic bags are used every year. In 2016, Americans alone used more than 560 billion plastic utensils and other disposable food-service items.
Plastic, of course, is not just in throwaway packaging. It is a defining, inescapable part of modern life, widely used in construction, clothing, electronic goods, and cars. It plays a key role in health care as a component in gloves, syringes, tubing, and IV bags, not to mention artificial joints, limbs, and hearts. It is also not just one material: there are thousands of types and subtypes, each with its own combination of chemicals that yields desired properties—varying degrees of hard or soft, rigid or flexible, opaque or transparent. One analysis found that 16,000 different chemicals are used in making plastics, including additives such as stabilizers, plasticizers, dyes, and flame retardants. More than 4,000 of those substances pose health or environmental dangers, and safety information was lacking for another 10,000, the researchers estimate.
By design, plastic does not readily decompose. Instead, it fragments into increasingly minuscule pieces—reaching down to the nanoscale—that have been found just about everywhere scientists have looked. They suffuse the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. They’ve been detected in blood, semen, breast milk, bone marrow, and placentas. Scientists are only beginning to explore what this omnipresence means for the health of humans and the environment, but the signs are worrying. One recent study found microplastics in tissue from human kidneys, livers, and brains, and a study of 12 dementia patients’ brains showed greater accumulations than those of people without the disease. Other research found the tiny particles in the neck-artery plaque of nearly 60 percent of patients tested; three years later, the rates of heart attacks, strokes, and death were 4.5 times higher among people whose samples contained microplastics.
Buying toys this time of year can be so overwhelming. Everywhere you look, there’s some new, must-have toy being shoved in your face, and it’s incredibly hard to quiet the noise. You want to give your kids toys they’re excited about, but so many options means you’re bound to give them gifts that they are bored with 36 hours after opening the box. This year’s Romper Toy Box is all about toys that are made to last. Some are heirloom quality, some are sturdy and built to take a beating, and some are just the kind of simple toy we’ve forgotten about — the kind of toy that your kids can spend hours playing with.
From pretend play to activity sets, STEM kits, and more, this list has plenty of toys you won’t regret buying for your kids. There are varying price points, as well, and a lot of these are also chosen with you, the parent, in mind. Do you really need toys in your house that take two adults to set up, with 800 small pieces, only for your kids to be over it after 10 minutes?
I think every parent is looking for a toy that will unlock their child’s creativity, their love of play, and actually hold their attention — and that’s what Romper Toy Box 2025 is all about.
There are a million dollhouse options out there, but I love one that’s built to last, like The Dollhouse from Blueberry and Third. It comes completely blank, so you can decorate it however you want with paint, wallpaper, and accessories, and it’s built in a 1:12 scale, so you can add in your own furniture and dolls. It’s also enormous and just so classic. A great, heirloom-quality toy this Christmas.
I know it’s not new anymore, but my son has used his Yoto daily for over a year, and it still looks and works like it’s brand new. This year, we’re asking grandparents for the Yoto Club membership so my son can pick a new card or two each month (we keep them all in this inexpensive little organizer for compact storage and easy travel). We love the classic bedtime stories and the daily kids’ podcasts they put out, and that it’s nice screen-free background noise when we’re playing and drawing together.
I had a microscope set as a kid, and I still remember the countless hours I spent looking at the slides it came with and making my own from leaves, bugs, and feathers I found outside. For the curious kids in your life, it’s a top tier gift.
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Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Footage shows US forces taking control of oil tanker off Venezuelan coast – video
Opinions on Donald Trump’s mental state vary widely; some critics label him as “insane” due to his behavior and rhetoric, while others argue he is simply a product of mediocrity and privilege. Ultimately, whether he is considered “crazy” is subjective and depends on individual perspectives.
María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, greeted supporters in the Norwegian capital, hours after missing the ceremony at which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.CreditCredit…Jonas Been Henriksen/NTB Scanpix, via Associated Press
Ross Woodhall/Getty Images/Image Source
We may receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
James' World 2 