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U.S. photographer Annie Leibovitz was named in Madrid as this year’s recipient of the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.

Leibovitz, 63, who is known for portraits of celebrities such as music icons Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, is one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary photographers.

Her work is characterized by a “painstaking, sophisticated staging and by a studied use of lighting that lends her photos a characteristic atmosphere,” the Prince of Asturias Foundation’s Web site said.

The photographer beat out international photographic cooperative Magnum Photos and British-Iranian journalist and television host Christiane Amanpour in the final round of voting.

The Connecticut native studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute while also taking photography classes in the evening.

She began working at Rolling Stone in 1970, prior to finishing her studies, and became that magazine’s head of photography three years later.

In 1983, when her photos had already graced 142 covers, she left that publication to join the editorial launch of the new Vanity Fair. Since 1998, she also has worked for Vogue magazine.

Since deciding to give up photojournalism in the early 1980s - after covering the Lebanon War for Rolling Stone - and focus on portraits, Leibovitz has become one of the most highly respected photographers in Europe and America, the jury’s minutes said.

Leibovitz’s work has been featured in exhibits at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Smithsonian Institute’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, where she became the first woman and second living photographer to exhibit there.

“I am very happy that the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities has recognized the work of Annie Leibovitz, a worldwide symbol of photographic portraiture,” Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, winner of the 1988 Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, said in a statement.

The Communication and Humanities is the third of eight Prince of Asturias Award winners to be announced this year, after the Arts and Social Sciences prizes were bestowed on Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke and Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen, respectively.

The Communication and Humanities prize recognizes “the person, institution, group of people or group of institutions whose work or research constitutes a significant contribution to universal culture,” the Prince of Asturias Foundation says.

Along with a cash prize of 50,000 euros (about $64,000) and a sculpture by Joan Miro that symbolizes the awards, each award recipient gets a diploma and an insignia bearing the Prince of Asturias Foundation’s coat of arms.

The prizes, which Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe will hand out at a ceremony in the fall in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo, are regarded as the Ibero-American world’s equivalent of the Nobels.

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Chile’s government has launched a bid process for the construction of a 2,600-meter (8,525-foot) suspension bridge linking Chiloe Island to the mainland, a project with an investment limit of $740 million.

Public Works Minister Loreto Silva said the eight consortiums vying for the project in southern Chile have until October to submit their technical and design proposals for the bridge, which would span the Chacao Channel and be the longest of its type in Latin America.

Chinese-, South Korean- and Chilean-led consortiums, one of which includes Spain’s Sacyr Vallehermoso in partnership with Samsung, are in the running for the project.

The winning consortium will be selected in the first quarter of 2014, while construction is scheduled to begin in 2015 and the bridge is projected to be operational by 2019.

In 2005, then-Chilean President Ricardo Lagos proposed the project and put its cost at $650 million, but the administration of his successor, Michelle Bachelet, scrapped it a year later after cost estimates soared to $970 million.

On Tuesday, President Sebastian Piñera said the Controller’s Office had given the green light for the initiative.

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This week’s deployment of Mexican army soldiers in Michoacan has brought “tranquility” to the violence-wracked western state, Gov. Jesus Reyna said Thursday.

Acknowledging the state is not “100 percent” calm, the governor told MVS radio that “the results have been good.”

He said his administration asked President Enrique Peña Nieto for military help “to re-establish completely the institutional order” amid the rise of armed militias that had taken it upon themselves to police their own communities.

The military deployment sparked an incident Wednesday in the Michoacan municipality of Buenavista Tomatlan, where, according to media accounts, residents briefly held 24 soldiers captive at the local police station.

Reyna rejected the press’ version of events, insisting that residents had only blocked a highway to protest the arrest of four militia members.

Detained for carrying guns, the militia members were subsequently freed on bail, the governor said.

Residents of Buenavista Tomatlan and Tepalcatepec took up arms Feb. 24 and announced a campaign against a criminal organization that calls itself Los Caballeros Templarios (The Knights Templar).

Authorities will hold public meetings to convince the militias to stand down, Reyna said.

The Caballeros, La Familia Michoacana and Jalisco Nueva Generacion drug cartels have been fighting for control of Michoacan, which is home to extensive marijuana plantations and clandestine labs producing synthetic drugs.

French food giant Danone and Mexican pharmaceutical company Grupo Saba have decided to close their plants in Michoacan due to the high level of crime and move their operations to the less violent states of Queretaro and Jalisco, officials said.

Mexico’s previous president, Felipe Calderon, gave the armed forces the leading role in the struggle against the drug cartels, an approach that was accompanied by soaring violence and a toll of 70,000 deaths over his 2006-2012 term.

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For years, remnants of agave plants used to make tequila were discarded and left in the fields to rot, but now the 3M company is turning that “waste” into something useful.

When the juices of the agave are extracted, the plants are of no use to tequila producer, that is, until now.

The 3M company, the parent company of brands like Post-It and Scotch, have now developed a way to turn agave waste into cleaning supplies like sponges.

In 2011, in Jalisco, Mexico alone, 700,00 tons of agave were used to make 41 million gallons of tequila. On average, it takes 6-10 years of farming to grow agave before it is harvested for tequila. The 3M technology now allows all that time and energy to create more than just the famous drink.

On its website, 3M states:

3M scientist Myhanh Truong was part of a team in the U.S. looking to manufacture 3M products with new, more environmentally sustainable materials. And in France, another 3M team had just pioneered a way to turn agave fiber, called a bagasse, into a nonflammable nonwoven material (one of 3M’s core technologies).

Could it be adapted for use in a new kind of sponge?

…

The 3M team created scrubbing fibers made of 50% agave, the scouring muscle of a new 100% plant-based-fiber sponge using 23% recycled material. It’s called the Scotch-Brite® Greener Clean Non-Scratch Scrub Sponge. It helps clean up unused agave even before you bring it home. That’s an innovation that will live on.

The agave-based non-scratch scrub sponges can reportedly outlast 30 rolls of paper towels and can be sanitized in the dishwasher.

The entire line of scouring pads and scrubbers is made with 100-percent plant-based fibers, 50 percent of that being agave fibers.

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