In 2010 former president Barack Obama initiated two comprehensive sex-education programs: Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program (TPP)

Washington (AFP) – An Obama-era sex education program that was criticized by conservatives succeeded in reducing teen birth rates in parts of the US that implemented it, a large study said Monday.

Teen births are higher in the United States than in any other G7 country, and the topic of whether to teach adolescents about the use of contraceptives has remained heated among academics, politicians and the public.

A 1996 law allocated federal funding to abstinence-only education, but in 2010 then-president Barack Obama initiated two more comprehensive sex-education programs: Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program (TPP). 

These programs provided more information about sex, contraception, and reproductive health compared to abstinence-only education, which research has shown has no effect on teen birth rates.

“We looked at ‘Where did this funding go? And what happens to teen birth rates in the places that it went?'” Nicholas Mark, a researcher at New York University (NYU) and lead author of the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) told AFP.

Mark and his co-author, NYU professor Lawrence Wu focused on TPP, because this program’s funding was allocated at the county rather than state level. This made it possible to draw comparisons between counties of similar income and poverty levels.

The researchers had access to public data on which counties received TPP funding, and a restricted birth certificate database that gave them birth rates in counties, as well as allowing them to capture the age of mothers at the time of birth and where they lived.

They examined teenage birth rates in 55 US counties from 1996-2009, the years before they received TPP funding, and during the years they received this funding, 2010-2016.

They also compared the birth rates in those 55 counties to more than 2,800 counties without the funding in the years before and after TPP was implemented. 

This method allowed them to make the truest comparison possible, by disentangling the specific impact of the sex education program from an overall trend of declining teen birth rates in recent years. 

Birth rates among 14 to 19 year olds in counties that received TPP funding dropped by approximately three percent in the years studied — both compared to the period before they received funding, and compared to unfunded counties.

The paper is the first national effort to study the question, and its methods demonstrated cause-and-effect, rather than simply correlation, according to the authors.

Support for comprehensive sex education versus abstinence-only teaching remains a fault line in the country’s ongoing culture wars. 

The administration of former president Donald Trump attempted to reallocate funding back towards abstinence programs, but faced opposition in court by the reproductive health group Planned Parenthood.

Many teen pregnancies and subsequent births are unwanted by the mothers, and therefore can be affected by access to abortion. 

The conservative-majority Supreme Court may soon be poised to overturn the ruling that made abortion a constitutional right in the United States 50 years ago, paving the way for state-level bans.

Zachary Horwitz promised healthy returns on investments, but was running a giant ponzi scheme and using the cash to fund a lavish lifestyle

Los Angeles (AFP) – An American actor who swindled $650 million in a huge Hollywood ponzi scheme, using it to finance a lavish lifestyle of yachts, jets and fast cars, was jailed Monday for 20 years.

Zachary Horwitz created fake contracts that he told investors were with HBO and Netflix to trick them into handing over vast sums of money, which he splurged on private flights, top-of-the-range autos and a luxury Los Angeles mansion, complete with a wine cellar.

“Horwitz portrayed himself as a Hollywood success story,” prosecutors said, according to the Department of Justice.

“He branded himself as an industry player, who… leveraged his relationships with online streaming platforms like HBO and Netflix to sell them foreign film distribution rights at a steady premium.

“But, as his victims came to learn, (Horwitz) was not a successful businessman or Hollywood insider. He just played one.”

Horwitz, who acted in small-time horror films under the name Zach Avery, told investors he was buying foreign distribution rights for US movies, and then selling them to streaming platforms.

The 35-year-old gave each victim a note promising a handsome profit six or 12 months later.

Over seven years he kept the scheme going by using new investors’ money to repay the old ones.

By the time it all fell apart, more than $230 million had vanished.

He admitted security fraud in October, and acknowledged that he had never bought any film rights, or secured any distribution contracts.

It would be “difficult to conceive a white-collar crime more egregious,” prosecutors said in a memo to the judge, noting he started his life of crime by swindling university friends, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“He began by betraying the trust of his own friends, people who lowered their guard because they could not possibly imagine that someone they had known for years would unflinchingly swindle them and their families out of their life savings,” they wrote.

Horwitz was jailed for 20 years, and ordered by Judge Mark Scarsito to repay $230 million to his victims.

(Note offensive language in paragraphs 10, 15.)

By Rich McKay and Brad Brooks

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (Reuters) – A federal prosecutor in Georgia said on Monday that three white men on trial for hate crimes in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, had a long history of using racial epithets and undoubtedly killed him because of his race.

Arbery did nothing to deserve his fate, Barbara Bernstein, deputy chief of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, told the U.S. District Court in the coastal town of Brunswick in her opening statement.

Gregory McMichael, 66, his son Travis McMichael, 36, and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, were convicted last year of shooting dead Arbery after chasing him in pickup trucks through their mostly white neighborhood because they wrongly suspected he may have been guilty of a crime.

Unlike last year’s state trial, the federal hate-crimes trial will focus more squarely on the motive for the killing and whether the defendants targeted Arbery because he was Black, as the prosecution alleges.

Arbery’s killing was one of several murders of Black men and women, often at the hands of police, that helped spark recent racial justice protests around the world. The federal trial of Arbery’s killers is one of the first in which those who carried out a high-profile killing are facing a jury in a hate-crime trial. “Most of this trial will be about why the defendants did what they did,” Bernstein said.

Bernstein said if Arbery, an avid runner, had been white, he would have been able to go for an afternoon jog unmolested and “been home in time for Sunday supper.”

“Instead, he went out for a jog, and ended up running for his life. Instead, he ended up bleeding to death, alone and scared, in the middle of the street,” she told the court.

As Bernstein talked to the jury, Arbery’s parents sat in the front of the public gallery looking somber and shaking a little. His father, Marcus Arbery, sighed as Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, put her arm on Marcus Arbery’s shoulders.

Bernstein cited several messages posted on Facebook and elsewhere in which all three men used racial epithets.

She especially highlighted the words of Travis McMichael – who shot Arbery – who she said had made violent and racist statements on social media, including calling Black people “monkeys” and “subhuman savages.” He had also told a friend that he was glad to have left the Coast Guard because he no longer had to work with or be around Black people, she added.

She said the jury would hear from a witness how Gregory McMichael “went on a racist rant about Black people.”

Bernstein said Bryan used a racial epithet in an online post after learning four days before Arbery’s death that his daughter was dating a Black man.

USING THE N-WORD

Defense attorneys for the three men said in their opening statements that they found their clients’ use of racial epithets deeply offensive, but emphasized it was no reason to convict them. They said the men were not motivated by Arbery’s race.

“I can’t stand before you and say my client has never used the ‘N-word’,” said Amy Copeland, the attorney for Travis McMichael. “He did. He left a digital footprint over several years.”

But Copeland said Travis McMichael had chiefly been concerned with cases of theft that had left his neighborhood on high alert when he decided to chase down Arbery.

Trial experts told Reuters that the challenge for the prosecutors will be to back up the evidence of racist utterances with evidence that on the day of the shooting the three men were motivated by racial animus.

The court is scheduled to hear from Special Agent Richard Dial of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who has previously testified that Bryan told his office that Travis McMichael uttered a racial slur as Arbery lay dying.

Bryan’s attorney, Pete Theodocion, tried to distance his client from the McMichaels, saying that when he joined the McMichaels in chasing Arbery he assumed “he (Arbery) did something wrong, but not because of his race.”

Travis McMichael said at a hearing last month that he was willing to plead guilty to attacking Arbery because of his “race and color” after reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors.

But he changed his mind after Judge Lisa Wood rejected the agreement, saying she could not accept it because it bound her to sentencing McMichael to 30 years in federal prison before he was handed back to the state of Georgia to serve out the rest of his life sentence for murder.

She said she needed more information to know whether a 30-year sentence was just, and cited emotional testimony from Arbery’s family.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Brunswick, Georgia, and Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Ross Colvin, Alistair Bell and Matthew Lewis)

Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes are reportedly set to host the 2022 Academy Awards.

The prestigious ceremony hasn’t had a host for the past three years since Jimmy Kimmel in 2018, while last year’s event featured plenty of stars at the helm throughout the night rather than one designated host.

Now, Variety reports that the trio are in final talks to front the Oscars, with each star responsible for one hour of the three-hour show on March 27.

‘Girls Trip’ producer Will Packer is producing this year’s event, and Hall has worked with him in the past on the likes of ‘Little’ and ‘Think Like A Man’.

Meanwhile, Schumer and Sykes both have a connection to ABC – the broadcaster for the ceremony – with the former’s series ‘Life Beth’ heading to Hulu, which is owned by ABC’s parent company Disney.

Meanwhile, Sykes appears in ABC series ‘Black-ish’.

It’s said the trio will be officially unveiled on Tuesday’s episode (15.02.22) of ‘Good Morning America’.

While the trio – and the Academy – are yet to comment on the news, Schumer shared an Instagram slideshow of some of her career highlights on Sunday (13.02.22).

She wrote: “Big fun news comin’.”

The ceremony has not had a presenter since Kevin Hart stood down from hosting in 2019 after homophobic jokes that he had previously posted on social media resurfaced.

He previously admitted he wished he had handled the controversy surrounding his past homophobic tweets differently, and confessed there was a “big gap” between what he thought the problem was and what had actually upset people.

He said: “I’m a firm believer in laying in the bed that you made. If there’s something that you did, then you did it. You know, there’s no wiggle room around it. You can address it, and then you can move on.

“With the whole Oscars thing, there was a big gap between what I thought the problem was versus what the problem really was.

“I got 10 years where I made sure not to joke or play in the way that I did back then because it was a problem. I don’t care if you’re gay or not gay. I’m a people person. I’m going to love you regardless.”

Prince Harry’s tell-all book will “shake the monarchy to its core”, his friends have said.

The Duke of Sussex is set to publicly reveal details about his relationship with the royal family in a new memoir due to be published later this year, and friends of Harry have hinted that the world can expect some explosive revelations.

They told the Daily Mirror newspaper: “If they think he’s gone soft, they are mistaken. Just wait for the book to come out because that will shake the monarchy to the core.”

Harry – who stepped down as a senior member of the royal family and relocated to the US alongside his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in 2020 – will collaborate with JR Moehringer in what has been described as “the definitive account of the experiences, adventures, losses, and life lessons that have helped shape him”.

Friends of the 37-year-old royal have suggested that the memoir will touch on Harry and his brother Prince William’s relationship with their stepmother Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall – who is set to become Queen Consort when Prince Charles accedes to the throne.

They said: “Although tensions have eased between two of them over the years, it was more for a show of unity than a close relationship.

“There were big problems at the start but as Harry and his brother William aged and matured, things got better and they can now co-exist as adults.”

Friends of Harry – who shares children Archie, two, and Lilibet, eight months, with Meghan – added: “He has got lots to say. People think he’s keeping a low profile to respect the family but it’s not that.

“He’s writing a book. He’s got a multi-million-pound book deal and he’s keeping a lot of his opinions for that. The memoir deal states that it should include personal details of personal and family arrangements.

“And it will be a really intimate take on his feelings about his family and what has gone in the breakdown of the relationship.”

Lizzo wants to pose for Playboy.

The ‘Good As Hell’ hitmaker is a big fan of the adult publication and urged Cardi B, who was named the brand’s first-ever creative director in residence in December, to get in touch to arrange for her to take part in a photoshoot.

Asked if she’d ever pose for Playboy, Lizzo told TMZ: “Oh my God, tell Cardi to call me!

“I love Playboy. Yeah, I’ll do it!”

The 33-year-old star had earlier shared footage on TikTok of a piercing party she’d held for her team and she revealed she’d had a jewellery inserted in an intimate area of her body.

She said: “I have so many piercings right now, I never thought I’d be this girl!

“You can’t see my coochie, I can’t show you. I can’t show you! I can’t show TMZ my p****.”

Last week, Lizzo shared a nude photo of herself on Instagram as she reflected on having “unconditional” love for herself.

She wrote: “If you love me… you love all of me. You don’t get to pick and choose. We should be unconditionally loving of one another, starting with being unconditionally loving to ourselves. Take a moment today and think about the conditions we cling to. Free yourself in love. You deserve it.”

The ‘Truth Hurts’ singer previously praised Cardi – who was a stripper before finding musical success – as a game-changer for female artists following their collaboration on ‘Rumors’.

She said: “Cardi B is the ultimate. She, to me, has always done it right.

“Everything that she said, every way that she’s reacted because you know why? It’s because she was true to herself the whole time. She’s a ground breaker. You can’t deny her ability. She’s a superstar.

“She has changed the game forever for a lot of us, a lot of women. I don’t even think she realises she’s doing it because it’s just like, I’m trying to just be successful. I’m trying to get this money. I want to live a happy life.

“She just follows her heart. That’s what I love about her.”

(Reuters) – The father of a teenager who was killed in Florida’s Parkland high school shooting marked the fourth anniversary of the massacre on Monday by climbing a construction crane near the White House and demanding the Biden administration take action on gun violence.

Gun-control advocate Manuel Oliver unfurled a sign that read “45K people died from gun violence on your watch” above a picture of his son Joaquin Oliver. The teenager was among 17 people killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the deadliest high school shooting in the United States.

“The whole world will listen to Joaquin today. He has a very important message,” Oliver said in a video he posted on Twitter as he wore a helmet and safety gear from atop the 150-foot (46 m) crane as police officers watched below.

Oliver added that he has yet to get a meeting he had requested with President Joe Biden.

Biden said in a statement on Monday that his administration has working to reduce gun crime by curbing the number of untraceable guns, cracking down on gun dealers who violate the law and promoting safe firearm storage.

“As we remember those lost in Parkland, we also stand with Americans in every corner of our country who have lost loved ones to gun violence or had their lives forever altered by a shooting,” he said.

The accused shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was a former student who had been expelled from Parkland. He opened fire on Feb. 14, 2018, with an AR-15-style rifle inside the South Florida high school, killing 14 students and three staff members and injuring 17 others.

Cruz pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. A jury will decide if he faces the death penalty or spends the rest of his life in prison without parole during a sentencing trial starting in April.

Like many other Parkland parents and students, Oliver has become a vocal advocate against gun violence since the shooting, calling on federal lawmakers to address the issue. The 54-year-old artist has also traveled across the country, building “Walls of Demand” murals in honor of his son.

“As we mark this day of solemn remembrance, and every day, let us renew our commitment to ending the horrors of gun violence, restoring safety to our schools, workplaces and houses of worship,” U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Whoopi Goldberg has returned to ‘The View’ after a two week suspension.

The 66-year-old actress had been suspended from her presenting role after claiming during a debate that the Holocaust was “not about race” and noted in her opening speech on her return to the talk show that it was “marvellous” to be back.

She said: “Hello, hello, hello and welcome to The View. And yes, I am back. I missed you all. I got to tell you, there’s something kind of marvellous about being on a show like this because we are The View and this is what we do.”

The ‘Sister Act’ star then went on to seemingly acknowledge her ill-received comments about the Holocaust by stating that debates on the show are not always handled as “eloquently” as they could be.

She added: “Sometimes we don’t do this as eloquently as we could.”

Whoopi – who was joined on her return to the ABC panel show by Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin and guest host Ana Navarro – had initially apologised for her comments on the following episode of the show just before she was landed with a two-week suspension.

She told viewers: “I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention. And I understand why now, and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and it helped me understand some different things.”

Her comments were criticised by the Anti-Defamation League and the Oscar-winning actress went on to issue a separate apology to the organisation, which was accepted.

Frederic L. Bloch, chief growth officer of the ADL, said in a statement: “We criticized this misinformed statement and called for Goldberg to get her facts right and apologize. She did so, and graciously invited our CEO Jonathan Greenblatt to come onto ‘The View’ to talk about the racial underpinnings of the Holocaust and the problems caused by comments like Goldberg’s. ADL has accepted her apology, as we have always known her as someone who stands up for the Jewish community. Goldberg has been suspended for two weeks by ABC News.

Paris (AFP) – The megadrought that has parched southwestern United States and parts of Mexico over the last two decades is the worst to hit the region in at least 1,200 years, researchers said Monday.

Human-caused global heating accounts for more than 40 percent of the dry spell’s intensity, they reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“The turn-of-the-21st-century drought would not be on a megadrought trajectory without anthropogenic climate change,” lead author Park Williams, an associate professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, and colleagues wrote.

Over the last decade, California and other western states have experienced severe water shortages, triggering periodic restrictions on water usage and forcing some communities to import bottled water for drinking.

Occasional heavy snow or rainfall have not been enough to compensate. 

2021 was especially dry. As of February 10, 95 percent of western US had drought conditions, according to the US government’s Drought Monitor.

Last summer, two of North America’s largest reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — reached their lowest recorded level in more than a century. 

The odds are high that the current dry spell will continue for at least a couple of years, probably longer, according to the findings.

Running simulations based on soil moisture records stretching back 1,200 years, the researchers calculated a 94 percent chance that the drought would extend through 2022.

There’s a three-in-four chance it will run until the end of decade.

Tree-ring analysis shows that the area west of the Rocky Mountains from southern Montana to northern Mexico was hit repeatedly by so-called megadroughts — lasting at least 19 years — between the years 800 and 1600. 

Chronic water scarcity

Earlier research had established that the period 2000-2018 was likely the second worst drought since the year 800, topped by one in the late 1500s. 

Data from 2019-2021, backed by new climate models released last year, have revealed the current drought to be worse than any from the Middle Ages.

But without climate change it “wouldn’t hold a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s,” Williams said in a statement.

Western North America is not the only region hit by increasingly severe dry periods.

Climate change worsened the El Nino-driven droughts of 2015-2016, leading to widespread crop failures, loss of livestock, Rift Valley fever outbreaks, and increased rates of malnutrition. 

Globally, 800 million to three billion people are projected to experience chronic water scarcity due to drought caused by two degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels, according to a draft 4,000-page Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate impacts seen by AFP. 

In a 4C world, that figure is up to four billion people.

Earth’s surface has already warmed 1.1C on average, and is almost certain to breach the 1.5C cap called for in the Paris Agreement within two decades. 

Other natural extreme weather events enhanced by global warming include deadly heatwaves, flood-causing rainfall and superstorms.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. judge on Monday threw out Sarah Palin’s lawsuit accusing the New York Times of defaming the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate by incorrectly linking her in an editorial to a mass murder.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan said he will order the dismissal of Palin’s lawsuit, but in an unusual twist will enter his order after the jury finishes its own deliberations.

Rakoff said he expected Palin to appeal, and that the appeals court “would greatly benefit from knowing how the jury would decide it.”

The judge’s order effectively preempted a potential jury verdict to the contrary, in a case seen as a test of longstanding protections for American media.

Jurors began deliberating on Friday and resumed their work on Monday. They are not being told about the judge’s ruling, and will continue deliberations.

Palin, 58, had sued the newspaper – one of America’s most prominent media organizations – and its former editorial page editor James Bennet, arguing that a 2017 editorial incorrectly linked her to a mass shooting six years earlier that wounded Democratic U.S. congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

It is rare for a major media outlet to defend its editorial practices in court, as the Times had to do in this case. Palin had sought unspecified monetary damages.

Palin had said that if she lost at trial, her appeal might challenge New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision establishing the “actual malice” standard for public figures to prove defamation.

The lawsuit concerned a June 14, 2017, editorial headlined “America’s Lethal Politics,” that addressed gun control and lamented the rise of incendiary political rhetoric.

It was written the same day as a shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia where Republican U.S. congressman Steve Scalise was wounded.

One of Bennet’s colleagues prepared a draft that referred to the January 2011 shooting in a Tucson, Arizona, parking lot where six people were killed and Giffords was wounded.

Bennet inserted language that said “the link to political incitement was clear” between the Giffords shooting and a map previously circulated by Palin’s political action committee that the draft editorial said put Giffords and 19 other Democrats under crosshairs.

On the witness stand, Palin compared herself, a celebrated conservative politician with a national following, to the biblical underdog David against the Times’ Goliath, while accusing the newspaper of trying to “score political points.”

Palin testified that the editorial left her feeling “powerless” and “mortified,” and that the correction issued by the newspaper the morning after publication was accurate but insufficient and did not mention her by name.

She maintained that the Times undermined her reputation by falsely linking her to a mass murder and by not being fast or thorough enough in correcting its error.

Palin, who no longer commands as much public attention as she once did, struggled under cross-examination to provide specific examples about how the editorial harmed her reputation and cost her opportunities.

(Reporting by Jody Godoy and Jonathan Stempel in New York;Editing by Will Dunham and Noeleen Walder)

Grindr has limited the visibility of Olympic athlete users in an attempt to protect their privacy.

The location-based gay dating app – which has around 13 million monthly users – has an ‘Explore’ feature, which allows for the tracking of any location in the world, but the feature has been modified to exclude profiles logging in from the Olympic Village.

Grindr boss Jack Harrison-Quintana said in a statement: “We want Grindr to be a space where all queer athletes, regardless of where they’re from, feel confident connecting with one another while they’re in the Olympic Village.”

While users staying in the Olympic Village – which is an is an accommodation centre built for the Olympic Games set up in the hosting city, the next of which will be Paris in 2024 – will be able to browse nearby profiles, but the new privacy setting will prevent the athletes from unwanted exposure.

Users logging in to Grindr from the Olympic Village will be told: “Your privacy is important to us. Our Explore feature has been disabled in the Olympic Village so that people outside your immediate area can’t browse here.”

It comes just one month after Grindr removed itself from Apple’s App Store in China, citing a new privacy law was the reason behind their decision, despite initial reports it was due to views on homosexuality in China.

In a statement, a Grindr spokesperson said :”We’ve chosen to remove our app from the app store in China due to the potential increased burden from China’s recently implemented Personal Information Protection Law. We may revisit this in the future.”

‘Friends’ has been censored in China over its LGBT-related storylines.

The hit US sitcom has been edited on Chinese streaming platforms – including iQiyi and Youku – which have removed all references to Ross Geller’s ex-wife Carol being gay and in a relationship with another woman.

Carol – who was played originally by Anita Barone, before she was replaced by Jane Sibbett – was edited out of her first appearance in the show, including all references to Ross – played by David Schwimmer – getting divorced, the South China Morning Post newspaper reports.

Meanwhile, a scene that showed Joey – played by Matt LeBlanc – and Chandler – played by Matthew Perry – kissing at a New Year’s Eve party has also been removed by the streaming platforms.

Fans of the comedy recently took to the Chinese social media site Weibo to voice their opposition to the move, using the hashtag FriendsCensored. However, the hashtag has now been removed from the site, according to CNN.

Prior to this release, the unedited version of the sitcom was available between 2012 and 2013 on platforms such as Sohu and iQiyi.

However, in 2016, the Chinese government brought in new guidelines that prohibited TV programmes from featuring gay relationships, along with topics that “exaggerate the dark side of society”.

The eight-page document banned “vulgar, immoral and unhealthy content” and ruled that homosexuality, extra-marital affairs, casual sex and underage relationships as no-go areas.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the Oscar-winning biopic of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, was previously altered to satisfy the guidelines. Editors of the film removed over two minutes of LGBT-related content, including two men kissing and the use of the word “gay”.

Jennifer Coolidge wants to develop an “a** candle”.

The 60-year-old star will feature alongside Gwyneth Paltrow in the Super Bowl commercial for Uber Eats and joked that she wants to develop a product to rival Gwyneth’s infamous ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ candle.

Jennifer told PEOPLE: “You know what I want to do? I want to have an a** candle. I want to be the first that comes up with it!”

The Uber Eats advertisement shows both Jennifer and Gwyneth – as well as Trevor Noah and Nicholas Braun – taking bites out of inedible objects such as paper towel rolls, dish soap and more.

In the clip, Paltrow is seen biting her Vagina candle – uttering the words: “This candle tastes funny. Not bad, but funny.”

Jennifer admitted that she was stunned to have the chance to appear in the advertisement and thought it was “crank phone call” at first.

The ‘White Lotus’ actress said: “This is my first Super Bowl ad. Who would have thought? When they told me they wanted to do this, I thought it was a crank phone call!

“It’s been so great working with Uber Eats because they’ve really made this into a great business. It’s a concept I didn’t know anything before I signed up to do this commercial. I thought they just did food, but there are so many things you can have delivered with Uber Eats.

“It’s just so cool that you can just get on an app and get everything brought to your house!”

Meanwhile, Gwyneth previously revealed that she hoped that her Vagina candle – which launched on her Goop website – removed the stigma around female sexuality.

The 49-year-old actress said: “The idea [is] that women have been taught to have a certain amount of shame about their body. So, if you just light a candle that says ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’, and put it on the coffee table, it’s kind of a punk rock statement.”