In the news
■ Actor Will Smith publicly apologized last week to comedian Chris Rock for slapping him in the face at the 2022 Oscars ceremony, offering a personal meeting “whenever you’re ready to talk.” In a video, Smith said he acted impulsively when Rock told a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s short hair—she suffers from alopecia— and that “I wasn’t thinking about how many people got hurt.” He said that he has spent three months struggling to come to terms with how his “unacceptable” behavior let his family, friends, and fans down. “Disappointing people is my central trauma,” Smith said.
Rock, who has made sarcastic references to the slap in his comedy routines, did not respond. Smith said that he’s been told by people close to Rock that “he’s not ready to talk, but when he is, he will reach out.”
■ In a new memoir, former presidential adviser Jared Kushner settles scores with his White House rivals and adversaries, claiming that former chief of staff John Kelly once physically pushed Ivanka Trump. Kelly once stormed out of a contentious Oval Office meeting and encountered Ivanka in a hallway. “Kelly shoved her out of the way and stormed by,” Kushner writes. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said he has no memory of such an incident, adding, “It is inconceivable that I would EVER shove a woman.” Kushner describes adviser Steve
Bannon as a “toxic” master of “the dark arts of media manipulation.” During one argument, Bannon and Kushner accused each other of leaking stories to the press to make the other look bad. “I will break you in half,” he quotes Bannon as warning him. “Don’t f--- with me.”
■ Singer Taylor Swift has the worst privatejet carbon emissions of any celebrity thus far this year, the analytics agency Yard has revealed.Taylor’s private jet has taken 170 flights since January, amassing nearly 23,000 minutes in the air and emitting a total of 8,293 tons of carbon—or 1,184 times the average person’s total annual emissions. Swift’s spokesperson said that “Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals,” but climate activists said it didn’t matter whether Swift was personally in her plane as it was disgorging carbon.