Newsmakers: Indra Nooyi tells the truth and an aquanaut mission

Tom Steyer

The billionaire and anti-Keystone XL pipeline crusader earned a big black mark on his record as one of America’s most influential environmentalists. The former hedge-fund manager reportedly backed a controversial coal project in Australia, slated to begin this year. Steyer vowed to sell off his investments in fossil fuels in 2012. But a fund he founded, Farallon Capital Management, has invested in and lent hundreds of millions of dollars to coal companies, the New York Times reports. (Steyer sold his ownership stake in the fund but remains an investor.) Critics note coal from those investments will fuel power plants in Asia while American coal jobs disappear as Steyer pushes a green agenda stateside.

Indra Nooyi

The CEO of PepsiCo waded into the debate on whether women can “have it all.” Her conclusion: no, they can’t. The mother of two described outsourcing parenting duties to others, including her secretary. “Stay-at-home mothering was a full-time job,” she said at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “Being a CEO for a company is three full-time jobs rolled into one. How can you do justice to all?”

Stephen Colbert

In the ongoing war over the price of ebooks between Amazon and publishing giant Hachette—among other tactics, Amazon is not taking pre-orders on the publisher’s titles—writers are picking sides, perhaps none more vocally than Stephen Colbert, a Hachette author. “We will not lick their monopoly boot,” the late-night TV host proclaimed on his show, adding that Amazon’s tactics hurt fledgling authors. He then held up a copy of California, the debut novel from fellow Hachette writer Edan Lepucki, and urged viewers to buy it at independent bookstores. Lepucki’s post-apocalyptic love story is now on its way to becoming the surprise hit of the summer. “We’re going to prove I can sell more books than Amazon,” Colbert said.

Fabien Cousteau

Grandfather Jacques would be proud: on July 2, Fabien and his small crew of aquanauts surfaced after living underwater for 31 days. (He beat Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s record, set in 1963, by one day.) “It was amazing how much it felt like home,” he said of the underwater Florida lab, Aquarius, where his team was based. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is also headed for the life aquatic: as of Sept. 7, he’ll be spending seven days aboard Aquarius as part of NASA’s NEEMO mission, doing simulations that will inform future voyages to asteroids and Mars.

Harry Potter and friends

J.K. Rowling’s website crashed when she released an update on her wizarding world, written as an article by the series’ gossip columnist, Rita Skeeter, at the Quidditch World Cup. Among the juicy revelations, 33-year-old Harry’s marriage to wife, Ginny, may be in trouble (or not–Skeeter’s often wrong), Ron Weasley is co-running brother George’s joke emporium and Hermione Granger is a bigwig at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.