I had flown to Japan and was meeting some friends and enemies at a restaurant where you could play video games while you wait for your food. We played several selections including Devil May Cry, a 4-player minigame collection starring outlandish characters. After a very strange action/karaoke minigame, the people I was with started to leave. I became panicked because I didn’t remember whether I had paid for my food. It was getting late and I was getting ready to speak to an employee who ended up being an American, throwing off my plans to speak in Japanese. My problems were further compounded when I realized that a girl had caused me to drive my car off a cliff by the road and my wallet was at the bottom of the sea along with my car, just as in the City Hunter episode I watched the night before. The restaurant tried calling my enemy, who was the person who had set up the meals, but he was agitated on the phone. I went to the mine-like underground dining area to speak to him in person but he was on the verge of tears. I was trying to get through to him but all he did was tell me that the cops would react badly to me not paying, despite the restaurant agreeing to wait for me to pay if I discovered that I had in fact not paid. My friend went back with me to the counter and as I explained the situation, they prepared another platter of food for me, this time with meat instead of tofu. My friend warned me of this so I said he could have the meat. My friend and my enemy left with the food. My family was there and my mom said my dad was a bitcoin millionaire for now, and he could lend me some money. In our hotel room he had a small ring box full of diamonds and said I should go pawn one to get the cash, but I didn’t have an ID since my wallet was gone. While I was inspecting a diamond, I found two little black pixel squares on each side that you could use to enlarge and explode the diamond like a diagram when you pulled on them. The diamond was full of plastic layers and curved rods in primary colors. I spent some time expanding, disassembling, and contracting the diamond, until I held it near an opened window-mount air conditioner that was on the floor and accidentally mangled its delicate white rubber fans and rubber moisture splatterers with the sharpness of the diamond. Feeling bad about this and about the restaurant situation, I felt worse when I remembered that I hadn’t told anyone at my office that I was going on vacation.
There’s a ‘ghost hurricane’ in the forecast. It could help predict a real one
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A scary-looking weather forecast showing a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast in the second half of June swirled around social media this week—but don’t panic.
It’s the season’s first “ghost hurricane.”
Similar hype plays out every hurricane season, especially at the beginning: A cherry-picked, worst-case-scenario model run goes viral, but more often than not, will never come to fruition.
Unofficially dubbed “ghost storms” or “ghost hurricanes,” these tropical systems regularly appear in weather models — computer simulations that help meteorologists forecast future conditions — but never seem to manifest in real life.
The model responsible this week was the Global Forecast System, also known as the GFS or American model, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s one of many used by forecasters around the world.
All models have known biases or “quirks” where they tend to overpredict or underpredict certain things. The GFS is known to overpredict tropical storms and hurricanes in longer-term forecasts that look more than a week into the future, which leads to these false alarms. The GFS isn’t alone in this — all models struggle to accurately predict tropical activity that far in advance — but it is notorious for doing so.
For example, the GFS could spit out a prediction for a US hurricane landfall about 10 days from now, only to have that chance completely disappear as the forecast date draws closer. This can occur at any time of the year, but is most frequent during hurricane season — June through November.
It’s exactly what’s been happening over the past week as forecasters keep an eye out for the first storm of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.
Why so many ghosts?
No weather forecast model is designed in the exact same way as another, and that’s why each can generate different results with similar data.
The reason the GFS has more false alarms when looking more than a week out than similar models – like Europe’s ECMWF, Canada’s CMC or the United Kingdom’s UKM – is because that’s exactly what it’s programmed to do, according to Alicia Bentley, the global verification project lead of NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center.
The GFS was built with a “weak parameterized cumulus convection scheme,” according to Bentley. In plain language, that means when the GFS thinks there could be thunderstorms developing in an area where tropical systems are possible – over the oceans – it’s more likely to jump to the conclusion that something tropical will develop than to ignore it.
Other models aren’t built to be quite as sensitive to this phenomenon, and so they don’t show a tropical system until they’re more confident the right conditions are in place, which usually happens when the forecast gets closer in time.
The western Caribbean Sea is one of the GFS’ favorite places to predict a ghost storm. That’s because of the Central American gyre: a large, disorganized area of showers and thunderstorms that rotates over the region and its surrounding water.
Beirut, Lebanon
CNN
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A deadly Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut on Friday has left over a dozen people dead, including a high-ranking Hezbollah commander, sharply escalating the conflict between the two sides and raising fears of all-out war.
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Senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, part of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, was assassinated along with “about 10” other commanders, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari said, accusing them of planning to raid and occupy communities in Galilee in northern Israel.
Hezbollah confirmed Aqil’s death on Friday, saying he was killed “following a treacherous Israeli assassination operation on 09/20/2024 in the southern suburbs of Beirut.”
According to Hagari, the targeted commanders were “underground underneath a residential building in the heart of the Dahiyeh neighborhood, using civilians as a human shield” at the time of the attack.
Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 14 people were killed and 66 others injured in the airstrike, which leveled a multistory building in a densely populated neighborhood.
Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head from the United States for his suspected involvement in the 1983 strike on the US Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, as well as the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, which killed 241 US personnel later that year.
A CNN team on the ground in Beirut saw a frantic effort to rescue people from underneath the rubble and rush the wounded to hospital. Witnesses said nearby buildings shook for nearly half an hour after the strike, which the IDF said it had carried out at around 4 p.m. local time.
A week of surprise attacks
Friday’s strike marked the fourth consecutive day of surprise attacks on Beirut and other sites across the country, even as Israeli forces continued deadly strikes and operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The first major attack against Hezbollah this week came Tuesday afternoon when pagers belonging to the militant groups’ members exploded near-simultaneously. The pagers had been used by Hezbollah to communicate after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, encouraged members to switch to low-tech devices to prevent more of them from being assassinated.
Almost exactly 24 hours later, Lebanon was rocked by a second wave of explosions, after Hezbollah walkie-talkies detonated in Beirut and the south of the country on Wednesday.
At least 37 people were killed, including some children, and more than 3,000 were injured in the twin attacks.
In a United Nations Security Council meeting on Friday, UN human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday warned that the detonation of communication devices could violate international human rights law.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon clashed at the heated meeting, with Bou Habib calling on the council to condemn Israel’s actions and Danon slamming the Lebanese envoy for not mentioning Hezbollah.