A planet pulled from a star's glare, a copyright wall VPNs can't topple, and diseases of the poor recast as a right

The planet, named Beta Pictoris d, orbits Beta Pictoris, a star about 63 light-years away that is only some 23 million years old, an infant by stellar reckoning.[1][5] Its discovery was announced on 15 July 2026 by a team using the ERIS instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.[1] It is the third planet found in a system that has served as a natural laboratory for planet formation since a vast disk of debris was spotted circling the star in the 1980s.[5]

Beta Pictoris d is a gas giant of roughly 2.4 times Jupiter's mass, as measured by the imaging team, and about 30 percent wider than Jupiter.[1][3] It circles its star at around 26 astronomical units, one unit being the average Earth-Sun distance, and takes about 91 years to finish an orbit.[5] That places it far beyond the system's two previously known planets, Beta Pictoris c at about 2.7 units and Beta Pictoris b at about 10.[5] Its atmosphere sits near 600 kelvin, about 325 degrees Celsius, warm enough to glow in the infrared light that finally betrayed it.[5]

What makes the find unusual is that the planet was in the archives all along. Once the team knew where to look, they recovered its faint signal in more than eleven years of earlier observations from the same telescope and from instruments in space.[1][3] It had escaped notice because it sat buried in the star's overwhelming light, and for stretches of its orbit behind the glare of its brighter sibling Beta Pictoris b.[4] Ben Sutlieff of the University of Edinburgh, who led the imaging work, called it a serendipitous find; the team had set out only to watch the known planet b change over time.[1]

A second team reached the same planet by a different route. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, they detected it not as a point of light but through the chemical fingerprint of carbon monoxide in its spectrum, the object's light split into its component colors.[4] Those spectra also turned up water vapor and methane, a first look at the planet's chemistry.[3][4] The two methods disagree a little on the details, the space-telescope team estimating a somewhat larger mass and wider orbit, the ordinary result of measuring a faint object two ways.[4] Elisabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, who worked on the spectra, said the imaging gives the planet's bulk properties while the spectra probe its air.[3]

Systems with several giant planets caught so soon after their formation are rare enough that each new member sharpens the picture of how such worlds settle into place.[5] Beta Pictoris now offers three planets at three distances around a single young star, a sequence astronomers can measure rather than model. Both teams' results appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.[2][6]

The dispute reached the Court of Justice of the European Union from the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, which asked how EU copyright law treats a work placed online that is free to use in some member states but still protected in others.[6] The manuscripts are in the public domain in Belgium and elsewhere, yet Dutch transitional rules keep them under copyright until 2037.[5] In 2021 the Anne Frank Stichting and two research partners published a scholarly edition on a website, using location-based blocking backed by a prompt that asked visitors to confirm where they were.[5] The Swiss foundation that holds the copyright, the Anne Frank Fonds, sued, arguing that a barrier anyone could slip past was no barrier at all.[5]

The Court disagreed, and in doing so it shifted the test that decides such cases.[1] For years the question had been whether a website targeted a given country, a matter of intent and direction.[4] The judges made the decisive factor something more concrete, whether the site is genuinely sealed off by technological measures that are, in their words, state of the art.[1] Where a geo-block clears that bar, putting the work online is not a communication to the public in the country where it stays protected, even if a visitor could tunnel in with a virtual private network, a service that reroutes a connection to disguise its location.[1]

The ruling drew a second line, this one around the firms that supply the tools.[1] If a geo-block is too weak and a work leaks into a protected market, the fault lies with whoever published it, not with the private-network service.[1] Such providers offer, in the judgment's phrase, lawful technical tools which users may legitimately use, and so cannot themselves be treated as communicating the work.[1] Whether the scholars' particular block was strong enough is left to the Dutch court to settle.[1][6]

The reasoning reaches well past one archive. Libraries, museums, and other publishers that release material lawful at home but protected abroad now carry a duty to build effective blocks or risk infringing in the stricter country.[4] Legal commentators note the logic could ripple into disputes over artificial intelligence, where the question of who must fence off protected content, and how well, is only starting to be argued.[2] The judgment does not reopen who owns Anne Frank's words; it changes what it takes to publish them across a border.[3]

On 7 July 2026 the UN Human Rights Council adopted, by consensus, its first resolution devoted to neglected tropical diseases, the cluster of 21 conditions that fall hardest on the world's poorest communities.[1] Earlier measures had addressed only the stigma tied to leprosy; this one covers the whole group and names their roots, among them unsafe water, poor sanitation, inadequate housing, and displacement driven by disaster and a changing climate.[1] The text was led by Malawi and co-sponsored by a bloc of African states including Kenya, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, and Morocco.[1][6] It describes the diseases as conditions that reflect and reinforce inequality and exclusion, and it directs the UN human-rights office to report back in 2027 on how to treat them as a rights concern.[1]

The reframing changes who is held to account.[5] Casting these illnesses as a rights issue rather than a misfortune presses governments to tackle the conditions that spread them, not only to treat the people they sicken.[5] Malawi's health minister said the Council had affirmed that no one should be denied dignity, health, or inclusion because of a preventable and treatable disease.[5] A senior World Health Organization official, Daniel Ngamije Madandi, said the diseases cannot be seen as a purely medical matter.[1]

The abstraction gained a concrete example on 13 July, when the World Health Organization certified El Salvador as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem.[2] Trachoma is a bacterial infection of the eye, spread by flies and by contact, that scars the eyelids over years until the lashes turn inward and rake the cornea; it is the world's leading infectious cause of blindness.[4] El Salvador is the 32nd country to clear it and the first in Central America, a result confirmed after surveys between 2023 and 2026 found no active transmission and no new blinding cases.[2][3] The country's health minister said it was proud to have done so in just three years.[2]

The scale of what remains is large but no longer fixed. Some 97 million people still live where trachoma spreads, and about 1.9 million already live with blindness or dimmed sight from it.[4] The World Health Organization fights the disease with a four-part routine of surgery, antibiotics, facial cleanliness, and environmental improvement, and it delivered 44.4 million antibiotic courses in 2024 alone.[4] Sixty-four countries have now eliminated at least one such disease, and the agency's director-general called El Salvador's result a vital step toward wiping out trachoma worldwide by 2030.[2][5]