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US President-elect Donald Trump named controversial movie legends and long-standing supporters Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as special envoys to Hollywood on Thursday in a bid to make the entertainment industry “stronger than ever before.”The trio of stars, who have 10 Oscar nominations between them and three wins, stand out in Tinseltown, breaking ranks with the bulk of their colleagues who have long leaned to the Democrats.But all three are as famous for their personal lives as their politics and two — like Trump — have been in very serious scrapes with law enforcement.”It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK — BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”Jon Voight made headlines in 2020 when fellow actor Frank Whaley accused the star of slapping him while they worked on the crime drama Ray Donovan — but his controversies have otherwise mainly been tied to his support of Trump.Gibson, on the other hand, has been plagued by accusations of anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism and domestic violence. He has been on a comeback since being shut out from Hollywood after his 2006 Malibu drunk-driving arrest during which he went on an anti-Jewish rant.The scandal was followed by leaked tapes in 2010 where Gibson used racist slurs against the mother of one of his nine children, Oksana Grigorieva, who later alleged that he was physically abusive. Stallone — who recently called Trump the “second George Washington” — has faced a string of sexual assault allegations, all of which he has denied.In 2018, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said there was not enough evidence to prosecute the star over allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in 1987 and 1990.In 2007, Stallone admitted importing 48 vials of banned human growth hormone into Australia. He said he was taking them under doctor’s orders and had not intended to break the law.”These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest. It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!” added Trump, who has 34 felony convictions of his own.Trump and the Republicans have traditionally received scant support from the entertainment industry, and a galaxy of stars from Taylor Swift to George Clooney backed Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Underlining the limited impact of star endorsements, Trump sidestepped Hollywood by tapping into a targeted subset of well-known, hypermasculine YouTube influencers.

For seven years, US director David Lynch drank the same chocolate milkshake each day at the same time from the same place in Los Angeles because he believed it helped his creativity.But given the famously weird apparitions in his work, from a human ear in the grass to telephones ringing in empty rooms and dancing dwarves in red suits, his imagination hardly needed to be fired up.From the sadomasochist intrigue “Blue Velvet” (1986) to the lesbian thriller “Mulholland Drive” (2001), Lynch — who has died aged 78 — gained a global cult following with his unsettling portraits of American life. He may be best remembered for his mesmerising network series “Twin Peaks”, which blazed a trail for the prestige television dramas that would follow.”It would be tough to look at the roster of television shows any given season without finding several that owe a creative debt to ‘Twin Peaks’,” said The Atlantic in 2016, hailing his influence on directors from Quentin Tarantino to the Coen brothers.With four Oscar nominations including a trio of best director nods, the filmmaker recognizable by his shock of white hair took home just one honorary statuette, in 2019.- Monstrous attraction -Lynch had a peripatetic childhood, born in Montana on January 20, 1946 but moving around several times as one of five children with a scientist father and teacher mother.He began painting and shooting short films at arts college in Pennsylvania in the 1970s.From the start, his work spotlighted weird and marginal characters: his first feature in 1977 was “Eraserhead”, a grainy black-and-white film about a deformed monstrous baby.Supporting himself with odd jobs, Lynch shot his creepy and now cult classic on a shoestring budget, taking five years because he kept running out of money and had a wife and daughter to support.”A dream of dark and troubling things” is how the then 33-year-old Lynch described “Eraserhead” when it finally appeared, set in the depressed industrial landscape of Philadelphia and infused with an eerie calm that would become one of his hallmarks.Few people who saw it forgot the experience, including another Hollywood master-in-the-making Stanley Kubrick, who expressed admiration.Lynch pursued his penchant for bringing human deformities to the screen in “The Elephant Man”, dramatizing the tragic life of Joseph Merrick, who was born with severe physical deformities.”Loving textures to start off with”, Lynch said about why he was drawn to the subject, “and this idea of going beneath the surface was intriguing to me. There is the surface of this elephant man and beneath the surface is this beautiful soul”.An unrecognisable John Hurt in the title role earned one of the film’s eight Oscar nominations, while Anthony Hopkins played the doctor who befriended Merrick in the years before his death by suicide at the age of 27.The international hit propelled Lynch into the Hollywood limelight, but his star power dimmed after he followed it with a calamitous $40 million flop adaptation of the sci-fi novel “Dune”.- ‘Twin Peaks’ phenomenon -“Blue Velvet” got Lynch back on track — made the same decade he was ritually downing milkshakes — and also marked the beginning of a five-year relationship with the star of the film, Isabella Rossellini.He returned to the A-List in 1990 with arguably his most influential work: “Twin Peaks”. Set in the fictitious town of Twin Peaks in Washington near Canada’s border, Lynch’s tale began with the simple mystery of the young and beautiful Laura Palmer found in a body bag fished out of the lake.But over eight episodes, a quirky normality curdled and the killing became buried under layers of mystery investigated by the endearing FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by frequent Lynch collaborator Kyle MacLachlan.A hit when it first aired on ABC, the show was part of a bumper year for Lynch, who also scooped Cannes’ top prize that year with his road movie “Wild at Heart”.Lynch made a second season of “Twin Peaks” and a spin-off film a year later, before again returning to the world with an acclaimed sequel series for cable network Showtime in 2017.- Meditation and photography -The dark side of the American dream was a Lynchian leitmotif, but he strayed from the theme in “The Straight Story” to tell the true tale of a man who rode his lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his sick brother.In 2006, with the release of “Inland Empire”, a bleak portrait of Tinseltown starring an unhinged Laura Dern as a dejected actress, Lynch called it a day on moviemaking.That year, he also married and then divorced his third wife, Mary Sweeney, a film director and producer who was among his long-time collaborators.In 2009, he wed a fourth time — with the actress Emily Stofle, with whom he had a fourth child.Consumed by his work, he was often absent as a father figure.”You gotta be selfish. And it’s a terrible thing”, Lynch said in 2018 about his parenting skills. “I never really wanted to get married, never really wanted to have children. One thing leads to another and there it is.”In the last decades, the pack-a-day smoker and coffee guzzler explored other mediums from photography and song to becoming a champion of transcendental meditation.

Cuba on Thursday released jailed opposition leader Jose Daniel Ferrer, the dissident’s family confirmed, part of a landmark deal struck with departing US President Joe Biden in return for sanctions relief.”Thank God we have him home,” Nelva Ortega told AFP of her husband, who has been in and out of prison for the past two decades, his latest stint stretching to three-and-a-half years.Ferrer, 54, is the most high-profile of the prisoners that Cuba began releasing Wednesday after Biden agreed to remove the communist island from a list of terrorism sponsors — part of an eleventh-hour bid to cement his legacy before handing power next Monday to Donald Trump.Under the deal, Cuba has promised to release 553 prisoners. So far it has only released about two dozen, according to rights groups. They were mostly people arrested for taking part in mass July 2021 anti-government demonstrations sparked by recurring power outages and food shortages.AFP saw four prisoners emerge from the San Miguel del Padron prison on the outskirts of the capital Havana on Thursday morning. All were jailed for taking part in the 2021 protests.Marlon Brando Diaz, who was serving an 18-year sentence, said he was thankful to “be given a new chance in life.””It’s a new start,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion as he was reunited with waiting family members.Cuba’s removal from Washington’s list of state terrorism sponsors paves the way for increased US investment in the Caribbean island, which has been under a trade embargo for over six decades.In a sign that the thaw may be short-lived, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, suggested he could reverse Biden’s decision.The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio is vociferously critical of that country’s government and said Trump’s incoming administration was not bound by Biden’s policies.”There is zero doubt in my mind that they meet all the qualifications for being a state sponsor of terrorism,” he told his US Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.Analysts said Cuba’s drip release of prisoners was aimed at ensuring Trump upholds the deal agreed with Biden when he returns to the White House, with the remaining prisoners acting as Havana’s bargaining chip with the Republican leader.”We’re in a kind of hostage negotiation here,” Michael Bustamante, chair of Cuban studies at the University of Miami, told AFP.- ‘Stayed the course’ -Ferrer, from the eastern province of Santiago, has been in and out of prison for the past 20 years.A fisherman and father of six, he was one of 75 political prisoners sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in 2003, as part of the so-called Black Spring wave of repression unleashed by authorities.He was released in 2011, alongside 130 other political prisoners, following mediation by the Catholic Church, but resisted pressure to go into exile.Later that year, he founded the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), one of the most active opposition organizations in a one-party state that bans opposition political parties.He was re-arrested on July 11, 2021, after trying to join the biggest protests since the communist revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959.A month later, he was sent back to prison to finish serving a term of four-and-a-half years imposed in 2020 on charges that included beating a man, which he denies.His imprisonment has been a point of contention between Havana and Washington, which along with the European Union and the Catholic Church has regularly called for his liberation.Bustamante described his release as “pretty big” news.”He is someone who has stayed the course,” Bustamante said, noting his “long history of political activism.”

Donald Trump on Thursday unveiled his official photo as the 47th US president — an image that bears a striking resemblance to his viral 2023 mug shot.In the new photo, the soon-to-be commander-in-chief is leaning slightly forward and looking defiantly at the camera, an eyebrow furrowed and lips sealed —  a pose which drew comparisons with the picture taken of him in an Atlanta prison as he was facing charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election.Unlike the mug shot, where Trump is wearing his trademark red tie, this time around the tie is blue, and there is an American flag pin on the lapel of his navy blue jacket.A year and a half ago, after being released from jail on a $200,000 bond, Trump posted his mug shot on X with the caption “NEVER SURRENDER!”The post marked the Republican billionaire’s return to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where his membership was suspended following the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by his supporters.He was reinstated on the platform shortly after Elon Musk, world’s richest man and now Trump’s political ally, acquired the company.Trump, who called the election interference case a “witch hunt,” used the mug shot to raise funds for his election campaign. T-shirts, mugs, stickers and beverage coolers bearing the image — arguably now the most famous photo of a US president in the country’s history — brought in millions of dollars. Trump returns to the White House on Monday stronger than ever, despite his status as the first felon to be elected US president after being convicted in a separate case of covering up hush money payments to a porn star.

The US Federal Reserve could cut rates three or four times this year if inflation data cooperates, with a first cut possible before July, a senior bank official said Thursday. Headline consumer inflation rose for a third straight month in December as energy prices jumped, according to data published Wednesday, but a widely watched measure eased slightly, raising hopes that underlying inflation may be moderating.”The inflation that we got yesterday was very good,” Fed governor Christopher Waller told CNBC, noting that underlying price pressures excluding volatile food and energy costs had been close to target on a monthly basis. The US central bank has been paring back interest rates in recent months, cutting by a full percentage point since September to bolster the labor market. But in recent months, headline inflation has ticked higher, raising concerns that the Fed may have to pause further cuts throughout much of 2025. At the most recent rate decision in December, Fed policymakers voted to cut rates by a quarter percentage-point to between 4.25 and 4.50, and penciled in just two rate cuts this year. Waller, who is a permanent voting member of the Fed’s rate-setting committee told CNBC that he could support lowering rates as many as four times this year, depending on the data. “I may be a little more optimistic about inflation coming down than the rest of my colleagues,” he said, adding that if the data didn’t “cooperate”, the Fed may be back to cutting just once or twice this year. Asked about the timing of cuts, Waller said if the data came in as he expected, it was “reasonable” to think rate cuts could come in the first half of the year. He also refused to rule out supporting a cut as soon as the Fed’s March rate decision, if the data supported it. “I can certainly see rate cuts happening sooner than maybe the markets are pricing in,” he said. Futures traders assign a roughly 70 percent chance that the Fed will remain on pause through the March rate decision, and a roughly 80 percent probability of no more than two cuts this year, according to data from CME Group. – Tariff inflation shock unlikely -Waller was also asked about the likely impact of President-elect Donald Trump’s tariff proposals, which included threats to impose sweeping tariffs of as much as 20 percent on all goods entering the United States. Many economists have said these policies could push up prices, at least in the short term, while Trump and his allies have either dismissed these concerns, or insisted that any pressures would be counteracted by other policies, including energy deregulation.”I don’t think tariffs are going to have a significant impact or persistent effect on inflation,” Waller said. “But we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”He said most of the analysts on Wall Street estimate that Trump’s tariff plans would have “some marginal effect and short-lived effect on prices,” but that it would not lead to “persistent” inflation. 

China said Thursday it would launch a probe into US exports of chips used in everything from cars to home appliances over concerns about alleged dumping and subsidies.Washington has expanded its efforts in recent years to curb exports of state-of-the-art chips to China, concerned that these can be used to advance Beijing’s military systems and other tech capabilities.Beijing has accused Washington of protectionism, vowing to defend its interests and urging Washington to halt its “wrong practices”.And on Thursday China’s commerce ministry said domestic firms had accused the US administration of President Joe Biden of having “provided substantial subsidies to the chip sector”.This, they said, gave “US companies an unfair competitive advantage”.”Companies have been exporting related mature-process chip products to China at low prices, harming the legitimate interests of the domestic industry,” a ministry spokesperson said.”The concerns of China’s domestic industry are reasonable, and they have the right to request a trade remedy investigation,” they said.Beijing did not say when the probe would be launched, nor how long it would take.- Chip for tat -But its launch comes a day after the United States unveiled further export controls on advanced computing semiconductors, increasing due diligence requirements for businesses as it seeks to prevent diversion of tech to China despite existing restrictions.The move also followed US officials announcing fresh curbs on AI chip exports, seeking to make it harder for Beijing to access the advanced technology.With the new rules, foundries and packaging companies that want to export certain advanced chips face broader license requirements unless they meet several conditions.The rules also aim to enhance reporting for transactions involving newer customers “who may pose a heightened risk of diversion,” said the US commerce department.Thursday’s probe focuses on US subsidies of “mature” semiconductors, also known as “legacy” chips.While cutting-edge chips are typically used in critical technologies with sensitive military and defence uses, “legacy” chips are used in household items like broadband and medical devices, according to the CSIS think tank.

Terrified residents caught in blazing neighbourhoods, influencers ignoring the ban on drones and the frightening unpredictability of the wildfires are just some of what journalists covering the fires ravaging Los Angeles for AFP have had to manage.The United States’s second-largest city has never faced a blaze of this scale, driven by an extreme autumn drought and fierce Santa Ana winds — the strongest since 2011 — that have turned dry hills into kindling, fuelling a relentless inferno that has raged for more than a week.While the appalling destruction in Pacific Palisades and Malibu in the west — long the home of the rich and famous — has made most of the headlines, Altadena in the east has suffered even more.Though a lot less glamorous, it used to be seen as an affordable paradise for families looking for their slice of the California dream.Photographer Josh Edelson and video reporter Gilles Clarenne were taken aback by the lightning pace at which the fires spread through urban areas.”Usually it’s just the media and firefighters” at the scene of these kinds of blazes, said Edelson, a specialist with 15 years experience covering fires and natural disasters.- ‘Incredibly dangerous’ -But at Altadena everything “happened so quickly, there’s no way firefighters could have evacuated that many people… residents were just walking around in front of their burning homes.”That is wild because it’s incredibly dangerous for people that don’t really know how to handle themselves in front of a fire,” the photographer added.”You had elderly people walking down the street in front of burning homes, and people riding around on motorcycles in the middle of an embercast. That was crazy… There were many thousands of people just wandering around in the middle of an active wildfire. It wouldn’t take much for any of them to get hurt.” “Normally when we are covering fires they are in the mountains around Los Angeles,” said video reporter Clarenne. The blaze may take a few houses, but never “an entire neighbourhood” like Altadena, he said. Which is why the toll has been so great: 24 dead so far, 90,000 people still evacuated, 12,000 structures and vehicles destroyed or damaged. President Joe Biden estimates the bill could run into tens of billions of dollars. – ‘Everyone wants a piece of the fire’ -Edelson has been a familiar figure at wildfires across California for more than a decade. The veteran photographer would never dream of going into affected zones without full protective gear, “the whole shebang”, including a helmet with lamp, gloves and a shroud that covers his neck and face. “I’m dressed exactly the same way the firefighters are. And that’s imperative because if an ember lands in your hair, your hair’s on fire. Every fire that I do I learn more.”Edelson also knows to keep out of firefighters’ way. “I am always yielding to them and giving them respect. I don’t go in front of them.””I’m like a fly on the wall.”Which is why the photographer has been appalled by the behaviour of members of the public, including apparent influencers and live streamers, who seemed to be everywhere in the entertainment capital of the world. “Everybody wants the piece of the fire, so they can get more clicks and shares and likes,” he said.Some have had no compunction about stopping their cars in the middle of the road and blocking firefighters to get shots with their smartphones, he said.”It’s frustrating to do a good job when these things kind of work against us,” said the photographer, who has won awards for his work on climate change.- Dangerous drones -“One of the most infuriating things is that many social media people have been flying drones illegally over the fires” despite flight restrictions.”You cannot fly a drone during a fire because it endangers firefighters,” Edelson said. Last week a drone hit and damaged a water bomber, with the FBI trying to track down the owner.    Media outlets like AFP have to rent a helicopter and stick to authorised flyover zones — even if that means giving up filming certain disaster areas, Edelson and Clarenne said.Even so, Edelson’s understanding of the way firefighters work meant that last week he was invited to go into the heart of a blaze for the first time with them at a burning middle school in Altadena.First Edelson thought the firefighter was joking.”A door was completely outlined in a bright orange glow. So you know there’s fire behind it. He was like check it out. And he opens the door and it is just like the craziest scene — it was like the inside of a pizza oven. I don’t know how else to describe it.”However, the photographer did not feel particularly in danger, insisting that covering forest fires is more dangerous as there is often only one road to get out, while there are multiple possible escape routes in urban areas.- ‘Everything’s got more extreme’ -The fires have, however, inflicted massive trauma and suffering on the people of Los Angeles. Which makes them even more difficult to cover, said Clarenne, whose own wife and daughter had to be briefly evacuated from their home.Since journalists are allowed into evacuation zones, residents ask them to check on their homes for them.”Sometimes it’s good news, but other times it’s tough because you have to send photos and videos of homes that have been reduced to ashes,” he added. You have to respect the pain people are feeling, insisted Edelson.”I’m not going to force myself into a situation where people are uncomfortable” even if “the most emotional photos are the ones that are the most impactful.””I’ll usually say, ‘Is it OK that I’m here. I’m really sorry you’re going through this.’ And once they give me an OK, then I feel comfortable to just do my thing.”One thing is clear for both Edelson and Clarenne — the disaster has done away with all the old certainties about covering California fires. “Everything’s gotten more extreme and the timelines just keep breaking the rules,” said Edelson, who has won awards for his climate reporting. “This is extremely rare for January — typically, fire season starts around July and it usually goes until October.””The fact is,” echoed Clarenne, “that you can have fires now at any time, and they are more intense.”Interviews by Catherine Triomphe and Michaela Cancela-Kieffer. Edited in Paris by Catherine Triomphe and Fiachra Gibbons

Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its massive New Glenn rocket into orbit for the first time early Thursday, marking a new step in the commercial space race.The rocket, whose inaugural mission had been delayed by several years, blasted off at 2:03 am (0703 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the US state of Florida, a live webcast showed.The mission is seen as critical to Blue Origin’s efforts to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which dominates the commercial space industry.”LIFTOFF! New Glenn is beginning its first ever ascent toward the stars,” Blue Origin said on social media platform X.”New Glenn has passed the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space!” the firm posted just a few minutes later.Blue Origin said in a statement that the second-stage engine had reached “its final orbit”, adding that the Blue Ring advanced spaceship prototype that was along for the ride was “receiving data and performing well.”The first-stage booster, which was meant to be reusable, was lost during descent, it added.”I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said the company’s CEO, Dave Limp, in the statement.”We knew landing our booster… on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring.”Blue Origin had intended to land the booster — powered by liquid methane and designed for up to 25 flights — on a drone ship stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.Rival SpaceX has made such landings now routine, but this would have been Blue Origin’s first shot at the feat.Fellow billionaire Musk commended Bezos on New Glenn’s inaugural launch, offering congratulations “on reaching orbit on the first attempt” in a post on his X platform.Upping the high-stakes rivalry, SpaceX is planning another orbital test later Thursday of Starship — its gargantuan new-generation rocket.- Repeated delays -An initial test launch of the towering 320-foot (98-meter) rocket, dubbed New Glenn in honor of American astronaut John Glenn, had been scrubbed early Monday after repeated halts during the countdown.The company later said it had discovered an icing issue on a purge line and postponed the launch.With the latest mission, dubbed NG-1, Amazon founder Bezos was taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than him: fellow tech innovator Musk.Musk’s SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, which have become vital for the commercial sector, Pentagon and NASA.”SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor… this is great,” G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, earlier told AFP, expecting the competition to drive down costs.- Blue Ring -Aboard the New Glenn test flight and now in orbit is a Defense Department-funded prototype of an advanced spaceship called Blue Ring, which could one day journey through the solar system.Physically, the gleaming white New Glenn rocket dwarfs SpaceX’s 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads.It slots between Falcon 9 and its big sibling, Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity but holds an edge with its wider payload fairing, capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 trucks.Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink.For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals — United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab — trail far behind.Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space.But where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, “humanity’s blue origin.”

Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its massive New Glenn rocket for the first time early Thursday, a livestream of the blastoff showed.The rocket, whose inaugural mission had been delayed by several years, blasted of at 2:03 am (0703 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in the US state of Florida, the webcast showed.The mission is seen as critical to Blue Origin’s efforts to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which dominates the commercial space industry.”LIFTOFF! New Glenn is beginning its first ever ascent toward the stars,” Blue Origin said on social media platform X.”New Glenn has passed the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space!” the firm posted just a few minutes later.And then: “Second stage engine cutoff confirmed. New Glenn’s second stage and payload are now in orbit.”An initial test launch of the towering 320-foot (98-meter) rocket, dubbed New Glenn in honor of legendary American astronaut John Glenn, had been scrubbed early Monday morning after repeated halts during the countdown.The company later said it had discovered an icing issue on a purge line and would aim for a possible early Tuesday morning launch, but that weather conditions were unfavorable.On Monday night, Blue Origin announced that launch had been postponed.With the mission, dubbed NG-1, Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than him: fellow tech innovator Musk.Musk’s company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, which have become vital for the commercial sector, Pentagon and NASA.”SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor… this is great,” G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, earlier told AFP, expecting the competition to drive down costs.Upping the high-stakes rivalry, SpaceX also plans another orbital test this week of Starship — its gargantuan new-generation rocket.- Landing attempt -Blue Origin will now attempt to land New Glenn’s first-stage booster on a drone ship stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.SpaceX has made such landings now routine, but this will be Blue Origin’s first shot at the sci-fi feat.High seas last week caused the New Glenn launch to be pushed back several days.Meanwhile, the rocket’s upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of roughly 12,000 miles above the surface.A Defense Department-funded prototype of an advanced spaceship called Blue Ring, which could one day journey through the solar system, will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight.Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets — used for suborbital tourism — but they are five times smaller and land on terra firma rather than a ship at sea.Physically, the gleaming white New Glenn dwarfs SpaceX’s 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads.It slots between Falcon 9 and its big sibling, Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity but holds an edge with its wider payload fairing, capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 moving trucks.- Slow v fast development -Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink.For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals — United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab — trail far behind.Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space.But where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, “humanity’s blue origin.”If New Glenn succeeds, it will provide the US government “dissimilar redundancy” — valuable backup if one system fails, said Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden’s administration on Wednesday announced a ban on Red Dye No 3, a controversial food and drug coloring long known to cause cancer in animals.Decades after scientific evidence first raised alarm, Red 3, as it is also called, is currently used in nearly 3,000 food products in the United States, according to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.”FDA is revoking the authorized uses in food and ingested drugs of FD&C Red No 3 in the color additive regulations,” said a document from the Department of Health and Human Services, published in the Federal Register on Wednesday.The decision stems from a petition filed in November 2022 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and other advocacy groups, which cited the “Delaney Clause” — a provision mandating the prohibition of any color additive shown to cause cancer in humans or animals.Notably, the FDA determined as early as 1990 that Red 3, whose chemical name is erythrosine, should be banned in cosmetics because of its link to thyroid cancer in male rats. However, the additive continued to be used in foods, largely due to resistance from the food industry. Manufacturers of maraschino cherries, for example, relied on Red 3 to maintain the iconic red hue of their products.It’s also present in thousands of candies, snacks and fruit products — and thousands of medicines, according to a search of a government-run database, DailyMed.”Manufacturers who use FD&C Red No 3 in food and ingested drugs will have until January 15, 2027, or January 18, 2028, respectively, to reformulate their product,” the FDA said.Although the agency acknowledged a cancer link in rats, it maintained that the available evidence does not support such a link in humans, citing differences in hormonal mechanisms between the species and significantly lower exposure levels in people.- US lags behind -While the FDA determination focused on carcinogenicity, other research has also found potential neurobehavioral effects of synthetic food dyes on children, notably Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).”The body of evidence from human studies indicates that synthetic food dyes are associated with adverse neurobehavioral outcomes in children, and that children vary in their sensitivity to synthetic food dyes,” a California government report found in 2021.Animal studies indicated that synthetic food dyes caused changes in neurotransmitter systems in the brain and produced microscopic changes in brain structure, affecting activity, memory and learning.The United States has been slow to act on Red 3 compared to other major economies. The European Union banned its use in 1994, with similar prohibitions enacted in Japan, China, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.Carl Tobias, a former FDA legal consultant and now a professor at the University of Richmond, told AFP it was “hard to square” the agency’s mission of protecting American health with the prolonged delay in reaching the decision.”There’s pretty extensive lobbying, there always has been, and some of it is sometimes effective,” he said, calling the ban a “step in the right direction.”CSPI also hailed the FDA’s decision as long overdue, and expressed hope that it would pave the way for broader action on other harmful chemicals in food. “They don’t add any nutritional value, they don’t preserve the food — they’re just there to make food look pretty,” Thomas Galligan, a scientist with CSPI, told AFP. The nonprofit called on the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump to take further steps to protect consumers, including setting stricter limits on heavy metals like lead, arsenic and cadmium in foods consumed by children.