Popeye can punch without permission and Tintin can roam freely starting in 2025. The two classic comic characters who first appeared in 1929 are among the intellectual properties becoming public domain in the United States on Jan. 1. That means they can be used and repurposed without permission or payment to copyright holders.

This year’s crop of newly public artistic creations lacks the landmark vibes of last year’s entrance of into the public domain of Mickey Mouse. But they include a deep well of canonical works whose 95-year copyright maximums will expire. And the Disney icon’s public domain presence expands.

“It’s a trove! There are a dozen new Mickey cartoons – he speaks for the first time and dons the familiar white gloves,” said Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “There are masterpieces from Faulkner and Hemingway, the first sound films from Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, and John Ford, and amazing music from Fats Waller, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin. Pretty exciting!”

A closer look at this year’s crop:

Popeye the Sailor, with his bulging forearms, mealy-mouthed speech, and propensity for fistfights, was created by E.C. Segar and made his first appearance in the newspaper strip “Thimble Theater” in 1929, speaking his first words, “‘Ja think I’m a cowboy?” when asked if he was a sailor. What was supposed to be a one-off appearance became permanent, and the strip would be renamed “Popeye.”

But as with Mickey Mouse last year and Winnie the Pooh in 2022, only the earliest version is free for reuse. The spinach that gave the sailor his super-strength wasn’t there from the start and is the kind of character element that could spawn legal disputes. And the animated shorts featuring his distinctive mumbly voice didn’t begin until 1933 and remain under copyright. As does director Robert Altman’s 1980 film starring Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as his oft-fought-over sweetheart Olive Oyl.

That movie was tepidly received initially. So was director Steven Spielberg’s “Adventures of Tintin” in 2011. But the comics about the boy reporter that inspired it, the creation of Belgian artist Hergé, were among the most popular in Europe for much of the 20th century.

The simply drawn teen with dots for eyes and bangs like an ocean wave first appeared in a supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, and became a weekly feature.

The comic also first appeared in the U.S. in 1929. Its signature bright colors – including Tintin’s red hair – didn’t appear until years later, and could, like Popeye’s spinach, be the subject of legal disputes.

And in much of the world, Tintin won’t become public property until 70 years after the 1983 death of his creator.

The books becoming public this year read like the syllabus for an American literature seminar.

“The Sound and the Fury,” arguably William Faulkner’s quintessential novel with its modernist stream-of-consciousness style, was a sensation after its publication despite being famously difficult for readers. It uses multiple non-linear narratives to tell the story of a prominent family’s ruin in the author’s native Mississippi, and would help lead to Faulkner’s Nobel Prize.

And Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” joins his earlier “The Sun Also Rises” in the public domain. The partly autobiographical story of an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War cemented Hemingway’s status in the American literary canon. It has been frequently adapted for film, TV and radio, which can now be done without permission.

John Steinbeck’s first novel, “A Cup of Gold,” from 1929, will also enter the public domain.

The British novelist Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” an extended essay that would become a landmark in feminism from the modernist literary luminary, is also on the list. Her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” is already in the U.S. public domain.

While a host of truly major movies will become public in the coming decade, for now early works by major figures from the not-always-stellar early sound era will have to suffice.

A decade before he would move to Hollywood and make films like “Psycho,” and “Vertigo,” Alfred Hitchcock made “Blackmail” in Britain. The film was begun as a silent but shifted to sound during production, resulting in two different versions, one of them the U.K.’s – and Hitchcock’s – first sound film.

John Ford, whose later Westerns would put him among film’s most vaunted directors, also made his first foray into sound with 1929’s “The Black Watch,” an adventure epic that includes Ford’s future chief collaborator John Wayne as a young extra.

Cecil B. DeMille, already a Hollywood bigwig through silents, made his first talkie with the melodrama “Dynamite.”

Groucho, Harpo and the other Marx Brothers had their first starring movie roles in 1929’s “The Cocoanuts,” a forerunner to future classics like “Animal Crackers” and “Duck Soup.”

“The Broadway Melody,” the first sound film and the second film ever to win the Oscar for best picture – known as “outstanding production” at the time – will also become public, though it’s often ranked among the worst of best picture winners.

And after “Steamboat Willie” made the earliest Mickey Mouse public, a dozen more of his animations will get the same status, including “The Karnival Kid,” where he spoke for the first time.

Songs from the last year of the Roaring Twenties are also about to become public property.

Cole Porter’s compositions “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” are among the highlights, as is the jazz classic “Ain’t Misbehavin’, written by Fats Waller and Harry Brooks.

“Singin’ in the Rain,” which would later forever be associated with the 1952 Gene Kelly film, made its debut in the 1929 movie “The Hollywood Revue” and will now be public domain.

Different laws regulate sound recordings, and those newly in the public domain date to 1924. They include a recording of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” from future star and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, and “Rhapsody in Blue” performed by its composer, George Gershwin.

Seven foreign tourists, including an American, were hospitalized in Fiji after drinking cocktails at a resort bar, Fijian authorities said on Monday, just weeks after six tourists died of suspected alcohol poisoning in a separate incident in Laos.

All seven were taken to hospital on Saturday night suffering from “nausea, vomiting and neurological symptoms,” according to Fiji’s health ministry.

They fell ill after drinking pina colada cocktails prepared at a bar in the five-star Warwick Fiji resort on the Coral Coast, about 45 miles west of the capital Suva, officials said.

A health ministry spokesperson said the seven guests, aged from 18 to 56, included four Australians, one American and two others whose nationalities were not given.

One of the patients had been discharged Sunday from the Sigatoka Hospital near the hotel, said the tourism minister, Viliame Gavoka.

The other six were transferred to the larger Lautoka Hospital on the island’s west coast, he said, with two of them released earlier Monday and another two set to leave later in the day.

The two patients remaining in Lautoka Hospital were in a “stable condition” in intensive care, he told a news conference.

David Sandoe, an Australian man who said his daughter and granddaughter were hospitalized, told Sky News Australia that his relatives had been released from the hospital and were due to fly home on Monday night.

Fiji’s health ministry and police force were investigating the cause, Gavoka said, adding that results from “critical” toxicology tests normally take three or four days.

“Everyone is in a state of disbelief that this has happened,” he said.

Asked whether the illness might be related to methanol poisoning, Gavoka said that was “something that we don’t believe is possible in Fiji.”

While declining to speculate about the cause, he said it was a “very isolated incident.”

Fijian tourism, which attracts close to a million people each year, was “typically very safe,” he said.

The minister said he did not believe it was the result of any deliberate action.

The hotel bar involved was “very busy” on the evening, he added, but only seven people were sickened by the pina coladas, which were normally “pretty harmless”.

A spokesperson for the Warwick Fiji hotel said it was conducting an investigation and waiting for test results from the health authorities.

“At this moment, we do not have conclusive details, but we are committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of our guests,” the spokesperson said.

Australia’s foreign ministry said it was providing consular assistance to two families but declined further comment citing “privacy obligations”.

In a separate incident in Laos last month, two Danish citizens, an American, a Briton and two Australians died of suspected methanol poisoning following what local media said was a night out in the town of Vang Vieng. The victims include Briton Simone White, 28, two young Australians, Holly Bowles and her best friend Bianca Jones, and two young Danish women, Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman and Freja Vennervald Sorensen, the BBC reported. Only one of the victims, 57-year-old U.S. citizen James Louis Hutson, was male. 

Police detained the 34-year-old manager of the Nana Backpacker Hostel and seven other employees for interrogation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s candidates for federal health agencies have promoted policies and goals that put them at odds with one another or with Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., setting the stage for internal friction over public health initiatives.

The picks hold different views on matters such as limits on abortion, the safety of childhood vaccines, the COVID-19 response and the use of weight-loss medications. The divide pits Trump picks who adhere to more traditional and orthodox science, such as the long-held, scientifically supported findings that vaccines are safe, against often unsubstantiated views advanced by Kennedy and other selections who have claimed vaccines are linked with autism.

A situation in which high-ranking policy makers are on the same team with such varying views could make it harder to develop and pursue priorities. 

The Trump transition team and the designated nominees mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s a potential “team of opponents” at the government’s health agencies, said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian policy organization. Kennedy doesn’t have a medical degree. 

Kennedy, he said, is known for rejecting opposing views when confronted with science.

“The heads of the FDA and NIH will be spending all their time explaining to their boss what a confidence interval is,” Cannon said, referring to a statistical term used in medical studies.

Those whose views prevail will have significant power in shaping policy, from who is appointed to sit on federal vaccine advisory committees to federal authorization for COVID vaccines to restrictions on abortion medications. If confirmed as HHS secretary, Kennedy is expected to set much of the agenda.

“If President Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr. to be secretary is confirmed, if you don’t subscribe to his views, it will be very hard to rise in that department,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “They will need to suppress their views to fit with RFK Jr’s. In this administration, and any administration, independent public disagreement isn’t welcome.”

Kennedy is chair of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit. He has vowed to curb the country’s appetite for ultra-processed food and its incidence of chronic disease. He helped select Trump’s choices to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. If confirmed, he would lead them from the helm of HHS, with its more than $1.7 trillion budget.

Clashes are likely. Kennedy has supported access to abortion until a fetus is viable. That puts him at odds with Dave Weldon, the former Florida congressman whom Trump has chosen to run the CDC. Weldon, a physician, is an abortion opponent who wrote one of the major laws allowing health professionals to opt out of participating in the procedure.

Weldon would head an agency that’s been in the crosshairs of conservatives since the COVID pandemic began. He has touted his “100% pro-life voting record” on his campaign website. (He unsuccessfully ran earlier this year for a seat in Florida’s House of Representatives.)

Trump has said he would leave decisions about abortion to the states, but the CDC under Weldon could, for example, fund studies on abortion risks. The agency could require states to provide information about abortions performed within their borders to the federal government or risk the loss of federal funds.

Weldon, like Kennedy, has questioned the safety of vaccines and has said he believes they can cause autism. That’s at odds with the views of Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon whom Trump plans to nominate for FDA commissioner. The British American said on the “Brian Kilmeade Show” on Fox News Radio that vaccines “save lives,” although he added that it’s good to question the U.S. vaccine schedule for children.

The American Academy of Pediatricians encourages parents and their children’s doctors to stick to the recommended schedule of childhood vaccines. “Nonstandard schedules that spread out vaccines or start when a child is older put entire communities at risk of serious illnesses, including infants and young children,” the group says in guidance for its members.

Jay Bhattacharya, a doctor and economist who is Trump’s selection to lead NIH, has also supported vaccines.

Kennedy has said on NPR that federal authorities under his leadership wouldn’t “take vaccines away from anybody.” But the FDA oversees approval of vaccines, and, under his leadership, the agency could put vaccine skeptics on advisory panels or could make changes to a program that largely protects vaccine makers from consumer injury lawsuits.

“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” Kennedy said in 2023 on Fox News. Many scientific studies have discredited the claim that vaccines cause autism.

Ashish Jha, a doctor who served as the White House COVID response coordinator from 2022 to 2023, noted that Bhattacharya and Makary have had long and distinguished careers in medicine and research and would bring decades of experience to these top jobs. But, he said, it “is going to be a lot more difficult than they think” to stand up for their views in the new administration.

It’s hard “to do things that displease your boss, and if [Kennedy] gets confirmed, he will be their boss,” Jha said. “They have their work cut out for them if they’re going to stand up for their opinions on science. If they don’t, it will just demoralize the staff.”

Most of Trump’s picks share the view that federal health agencies bungled the pandemic response, a stance that resonated with many of the president-elect’s voters and supporters — even though Trump led that response until Joe Biden took office in 2021.

Kennedy said in a 2021 Louisiana House oversight meeting that the COVID vaccine was the “deadliest” ever made. He has cited no evidence to back the claim.

Federal health officials say the vaccines have saved millions of lives around the globe and offer important protection against COVID. Protection lasts even though their effectiveness wanes over time.

The vaccines’ effectiveness against infection stood at 52% after four weeks, according to a May study in The New England Journal of Medicine, and their effectiveness against hospitalization was about 67% after four weeks. The vaccines were produced through Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership Trump launched in his first term to fast-track the shots as well as other treatments.

Makary criticized COVID vaccine guidance that called for giving young children the shots. He argued that, for many people, natural immunity from infections could substitute for the vaccine. Bhattacharya opposed measures used to curb the spread of COVID in 2020 and advised that everyone except the most vulnerable go about their lives as usual. The World Health Organization warned that such an approach would overwhelm hospitals.

Mehmet Oz, Trump’s choice to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, an agency within HHS, has said the vaccines were oversold. He promoted the use of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. The FDA in 2020 revoked emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine for COVID, saying that it was unlikely to be effective against the virus and that the risk of dangerous side effects was too high.

Janette Nesheiwat, meanwhile, a former Fox News contributor and Trump’s pick for surgeon general, has taken a different stance. The doctor described COVID vaccines as a gift from God in a Fox News opinion piece.

Kennedy’s qualms about vaccines are likely to be a central issue early in the administration. He has said he wants federal health agencies to shift their focus from preparing for and combating infectious disease to addressing chronic disease.

The shifting focus and questioning of vaccines concern some public health leaders amid the spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus among dairy cattle. There have been almost 60 human infections reported in the U.S. this year, all but two of them linked to exposure to cattle or poultry.

“Early on, they’re going to have to have a discussion about vaccinating people and animals” against bird flu, said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We all bring opinions to the table. A department’s cohesive policy is driven by the secretary.”

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