People: Khloe Kardashian’s FYI talk show to debut Jan. 20

Khloe Kardashian’s new talk show has a premiere date. The FYI channel says “Kocktails With Khloe” will start Jan. 20.

Taped in a Los Angeles studio, it will be the gathering place for celebrity friends and family, who will join her on a set that replicates a home environment, complete with dining area and a functional kitchen. There will be eight weekly episodes, FYI said Thursday.

She’s been part of her family’s TV empire in shows including “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and “Khloe and Lamar,” which featured NBA star Lamar Odom, her husband from whom she later filed for divorce.

She recently halted divorce proceedings as Odom recovers from an apparent overdose of cocaine and other drugs at a Nevada brothel, where last month he was found unconscious.

Bush ’41 unloads on son’s presidency, cabinet

Former President George H.W. Bush has finally revealed what he really thinks of his son’s presidency, faulting George W. Bush for setting an abrasive tone on the world stage and failing to rein in hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld.

In a years-long series of interviews with biographer Jon Meacham, the elder Bush frowned on the sometimes “hot rhetoric” of George W. Bush, saying such language may get headlines “but it doesn’t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem.”

The elder Bush faulted Cheney and Rumsfeld for their “iron-ass” views, calling Rumsfeld an “arrogant fellow” and saying Cheney had changed markedly from the days when he served in the first Bush administration.

As vice president, Cheney “had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer,” the elder Bush said, adding: “He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.”

Ultimately, the elder Bush assigned fault to his son for Cheney’s over-reach and for fostering a global impression of American inflexibility.

“It’s not Cheney’s fault, it’s the president’s fault,” the elder Bush said. “The buck stops there.”

For all of that, though, the elder Bush did not suggest that he disagreed with his son’s decision to invade Iraq, saying Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “is gone, and with him went a lot of brutality and nastiness and awfulness.”

The assessments are contained in Meacham’s 800-plus page “Destiny and Power,” the fullest account yet of Bush, the only modern ex-president not to write a full-length memoir. Meacham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Andrew Jackson biography “American Lion,” draws on Bush’s diaries and on interviews he conducted with Bush from 2006-15. The book is being publicly released on Tuesday.

Science Channel series shares astronauts’ close calls in space

Lunch with former astronauts Robert Curbeam, Jerry Linenger and Yi So-yeon feels a little like eavesdropping on the meeting of a special club.

Bring up the reason they’re together – to discuss the near misses that have them featured on the Science Channel’s upcoming series “Secret Space Escapes” – and the club would seem even more exclusive. But not as much as you’d think, since the danger of space travel probably isn’t fully appreciated by the general public.

For many reasons, incidents are often minimized at the time. Space agencies don’t want the bad publicity, no one wants to scare families back home and astronauts are trained to fix problems and move on.

“Whenever you’re operating on the edge of human ability, you’re going to have close calls,” Linenger said. “We’ve had quite a few. But because we usually come out of them successfully people say that it’s fine when it’s actually quite hairy.”

Linenger’s close call, part of the series that premieres 7 p.m. Nov. 10, came when he and the other five men onboard had to put out a fire on the Russian space station Mir in 1997. Russian press reports at the time dismissed it as akin to a cigarette burning; in reality it was like a sparking blowtorch so hot it melted metal. There aren’t many places to escape a serious fire on a spaceship.

Most astronauts are at peace with the danger they face, they say, believing the importance of the missions makes the risk worth it.

Curbeam was on a spacewalk in 2001 when a valve leaked, spilling toxic ammonia flakes all over his spacesuit. He had to fix the leak, then stay outside the International Space Station for two extra orbits around the Earth, waiting for the sun to melt away the ammonia crystals. He was protected by his space suit, but exposure to the ammonia would have put his colleagues at risk if he couldn’t clean himself off.

During the incident, Curbeam said he put aside negative thoughts to get to work.

“It wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to die,“’ he said. “It’s just that I have a job to do. It’s all business.”