Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin New Glenn rocket exploded during an engine test in Florida; no staff injuries were reported.

WATCH: A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket exploded during a routine ground engine test at Cape Canaveral on Thursday night.

The explosion occurred while the rocket was on the launch pad, but no one was injured and all personnel were reported safe.pic.twitter.com/lfWxTsGV4Q

— Clash Report (@clashreport) May 29, 2026

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White House Press Secretary Leavitt: “This is a hostile and political act by Amazon. Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?”

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Amazon rejected a plan to list tariff rates and prices after company founder Jeff Bezos received an angry phone call from US President Donald Trump.

The e-commerce icon said it had considered listing import costs on its budget site, Haul, but the idea “was never approved and is not going to happen” on the main Amazon site.

On Haul, there was a plan to indicate “how much of an item’s cost is derived from tariffs – right next to the product’s total listed price.”

An anonymous source within Amazon said it “doesn’t want to shoulder the blame for the cost of President Donald Trump’s trade war.”

Reacting to the report, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Amazon of being “China-aligned.”

“This is a hostile and political act by Amazon,” Leavitt said. “Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?”

However, Amazon responded to Leavitt’s remark by emphasizing that the proposal was floated only for the budget site and “that it was never going to happen” on Amazon’s flagship site.

Before Amazon denied that it was planning to list tariffs on its regular site, Leavitt said that she had just finished conversing with Trump about Amazon’s plan and added that she “will not speak to the president’s relationships with Jeff Bezos.”
Just days earlier, Trump called Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg “great,” implying that Trump did not always agree with them.

“They’ve been great,” Trump said of the tech moguls.

“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”

Trump has introduced a policy of dramatically higher tariffs on goods, particularly from China, which has increased the prices of many items sold on Amazon, some as much as 30%.

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Shatner, 90, became the oldest person in space, eclipsing the previous record — set by a passenger on a similar jaunt on a Bezos spaceship in July — by eight years.

By Associated Press

Hollywood’s Captain Kirk, 90-year-old William Shatner, blasted into space Wednesday in a convergence of science fiction and science reality, reaching the final frontier aboard a ship built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company.

The “Star Trek” actor and three fellow passengers hurtled to an altitude of 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) over the West Texas desert in the fully automated capsule, then safely parachuted back to Earth in a flight that lasted just over 10 minutes.

“What you have given me is the most profound experience,” an exhilarated Shatner told Bezos after climbing out of the hatch, the words spilling from him in a soliloquy almost as long as the flight. “I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”

He said that going from the blue sky to the utter blackness of space was a moving experience: “In an instant you go, `Whoa, that’s death.’ That’s what I saw.”

Shatner became the oldest person in space, eclipsing the previous record — set by a passenger on a similar jaunt on a Bezos spaceship in July — by eight years. The flight included about three minutes of weightlessness and a view of the curvature of the Earth.

Sci-fi fans reveled in the opportunity to see the man best known as the brave and principled commander of the starship Enterprise boldly go where no star of American TV has gone before. The internet went wild, with Trekkies quoting favorite lines from Kirk, including, “Risk: Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about.”

“This is a pinch-me moment for all of us to see Capt. James Tiberius Kirk go to space,” Blue Origin launch commentator Jacki Cortese said before liftoff. She said she, like so many others, was drawn to space by shows like “Star Trek.”

NASA sent best wishes ahead of the flight, tweeting: “You are, and always shall be, our friend.”

The flight brought priceless star power to Bezos’ space-tourism business, given its built-in appeal to baby boomers, celebrity watchers and space enthusiasts. Shatner starred in TV’s original “Star Trek” from 1966 to 1969, back when the U.S. was racing for the moon, and went on to appear in a string of “Star Trek” movies.

Bezos is a huge “Star Trek” fan — the Amazon founder had a cameo as an alien in one of the later movies — and Shatner rode free as his invited guest.

As a favor to Bezos, Shatner took up into space some “Star Trek” tricorders and communicators — sort of the iPhones of the future — that Bezos made when he was a 9-year-old Trekkie. Bezos said his mother had saved them for 48 years.

Bezos himself drove the four crew members to the launch pad, accompanied them to the platform high above the ground and cranked the hatch shut after they climbed aboard the 60-foot rocket. He was there to greet them when the capsule floated back to Earth under its brilliant blue-and-red parachutes.

“Hello, astronauts. Welcome to Earth!” a jubilant Bezos said as he opened the hatch of the New Shepard capsule, named for first American in space, Alan Shepard.

Shatner and his crewmates wore close-fitting, flame-retardant, royal-blue flight suits, not exactly the tight, futuristic-for-the-’60s V-necks that the crew of the Enterprise had on TV.

The actor said he was struck by the vulnerability of Earth and the relative sliver of its atmosphere.

“Everybody in the world needs to do this. Everybody in the world needs to see,” he said. “To see the blue color whip by, and now you’re staring into blackness, that’s the thing. The covering of blue, this sheath, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around, we say, ‘Oh, that’s blue sky.’ And then suddenly you shoot through it all, and you’re looking into blackness, into black ugliness.”

Shatner said the return to Earth was more jolting than his training led him to expect and made him wonder whether he was going to make it back alive.

“Everything is much more powerful,” he said. “Bang, this thing hits. That wasn’t anything like the simulator. … Am I going to be able to survive the G-forces?”

Passengers are subjected to nearly 6 G’s, or six times the force of Earth’s gravity, as the capsule descends. Blue Origin said Shatner and the rest of the crew met all the medical and physical requirements, including the ability to hustle up and down several flights of steps at the launch tower.

Shatner going into space is “the most badass thing I think I’ve ever seen,” said Joseph Barra, a bartender who helped cater the launch week festivities. “William Shatner is setting the bar for what a 90-year-old man can do.”

The flight comes as the space tourism industry finally takes off, with passengers joyriding aboard ships built and operated by some of the richest men in the world.

Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson went into space in his own rocket ship in July, followed by Bezos nine days later on Blue Origin’s first flight with a crew. Elon Musk’s SpaceX made its first private voyage in mid-September, though without Musk on board.

Last week, the Russians launched an actor and a film director to the International Space Station for a movie-making project.

Blue Origin said it plans one more passenger flight this year and several more in 2022. Sounding like the humane and idealistic Captain Kirk himself, the company said its goal is to “democratize space.”

Shatner strapped in alongside Audrey Powers, a Blue Origin vice president and former space station flight controller for NASA, and two paying customers: Chris Boshuizen, a former NASA engineer, and Glen de Vries of a 3D software company. Blue Origin would not divulge the cost of their tickets.

The flight brought to 597 the number of humans who have flown in space.

“Today’s launch is a testimony to the power of the imagination, and we should not lose sight of that power,” University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank said in an email.

“William Shatner may be `just an actor,’ but Captain James T. Kirk represents a collective dream of a hopeful future in space that ‘Star Trek,’ and science fiction in general, gave us all,” Frank continued. “Bezos gave Shatner a seat on his rocket because he, like millions of others, fell in love with ‘Star Trek’ and its vision of a boundless frontier for humanity.”

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According to the investigation, any number of cyber weapons could have been used, including Israeli spyware firm NSO Group’s Pegasus.

By Associated Press

The cellphone of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos was hacked in what appeared to be an attempt by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince to “influence, if not silence” the newspaper’s reporting on the kingdom, two U.N. human rights experts said Wednesday.

The U.N. experts called for an “immediate investigation” by the United States into a report commissioned by Bezos that showed the billionaire technology mogul’s phone was likely hacked after he received an MP4 video file sent from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s WhatsApp account after the two men exchanged phone numbers during a dinner in Los Angeles in 2018.

The video file was sent to Bezos’ phone five months before Saudi critic and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by Saudi government agents inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey in October. At the time, the crown prince was being widely hailed for ushering in major social reforms to the kingdom, but Khashoggi was writing columns in The Post that highlighted the darker side of Prince Mohammed’s simultaneous clampdown on dissent.

The Post was harshly critical of the Saudi government after Khashoggi’s killing and demanded accountability in a highly public campaign that ran in the paper for weeks after his death.

“The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in surveillance of Mr. Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia,” the independent U.N. experts said.

At a time when Saudi Arabia was “supposedly investigating the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, and prosecuting those it deemed responsible, it was clandestinely waging a massive online campaign against Mr. Bezos and Amazon targeting him principally as the owner of The Washington Post,” the experts said.

Bezos first went public about the hack last year. He said the National Enquirer tabloid, whose owner has ties to the crown prince, was threatening to publish Bezos’ private messages and photos if he didn’t stop a private investigation he’d sought into the hacking of his phone.

Iyad el-Baghdadi, an activist who worked with Bezos’ investigators, told The Associated Press it appears the hacking was about free speech. “It’s not about trying to compromise a businessman for business purposes,” he said. “It’s not about Amazon, it’s about The Washington Post.”

Saudis: Hacking allegations ‘absolutely illegitimate’

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, called the hacking allegations “absolutely illegitimate.”

“There was no information in there that’s relevant. There was no substantiation, there was no evidence,” he told an AP reporter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It was purely conjecture, and if there is real evidence, we look forward to seeing it.”

The independent experts, Agnes Callamard, special rapporteur on summary executions and extrajudicial killings, and David Kaye, special rapporteur on freedom of expression, were appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council. They published their statement after reviewing the report conducted by FTI Consulting, which was hired by Bezos’ security adviser to manage the investigation. The report was published in full exclusively by VICE’s Motherboard later on Wednesday.

The digital forensic investigation assessed with “medium to high confidence” that Bezos’ phone was infiltrated on May 1, 2018, via the video file sent from the crown prince’s WhatsApp account.

The U.N. experts said that records showed that within hours of receiving the video from Prince Mohammed’s account, there was “an anomalous and extreme change in phone behavior” with enormous amounts of data being transmitted and exfiltrated from the phone, undetected, over months.

The report stated that Bezos’ phone was compromised “possibly via tools procured by Saud al-Qahtani,” the former adviser to the crown prince who was sanctioned by the U.S. for his suspected role in orchestrating the operation that killed Khashoggi.

Saudi Arabia’s justice system found al-Qahtani not guilty of any wrongdoing in the killing. A judge sentenced five people to death and sentenced three others to a combined 24 years in prison in December for Khashoggi’s slaying.

Al-Qahtani was also head of Saudi Arabia’s cybersecurity federation and allegedly behind campaigns that created artificially-trending tweets to attack the prince’s perceived enemies, rally support around the leadership, and stymie criticism on social media.

Saudi Arabia has already been accused of spying in America in a case involving Twitter. U.S. prosecutors in California allege that the Saudi government, frustrated by growing criticism of its leaders and policies on social media, recruited two Twitter employees to gather confidential personal information on thousands of accounts that included prominent opponents.

Adam S. Hickey, deputy assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Security Division, would not confirm or deny a U.S. investigation of the latest allegations was underway, but said “we investigate nation state-sponsored hacking all the time.”

Bezos visited Saudi Arabia in 2016 to meet with Prince Mohammed before the two men met again during the prince’s tour of the United States in 2018.

The billionaire had been looking for a site in the Middle East to expand Amazon’s cloud services. The company ultimately selected the island nation of Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia.

Bezos’ chief investigator Gavin De Becker said in a published report last March that the investigation “concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information.”

The investigation said that any number of cyber weapons could have been used, including Israeli spyware firm NSO Group’s Pegasus. The firm’s wares have been used by governments to target journalists in Mexico, opposition figures in Panama, and human rights activists from the Middle East.

The U.N. experts said Bezos’ phone hacking occurred during a period in which the phones of two close associates of Khashoggi were also hacked, allegedly using the Pegasus malware.

In response, the company denied involvement in Bezos’ phone hack and said its technology was “not used in this instance”.

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