The Daily Beast Latest Articles
The Daily Beast Latest Articles
Boeing 737 Crash During Takeoff Leaves 11 Injured
Universal Images Group via Getty ImagesA Boeing 737 plane skidded off the runway during takeoff at an airport in Senegal, the country’s transport minister said Thursday, leaving multiple injured.Transport Minister El Malick Ndiaye said 10 people were injured when the Air Sénégal flight operated by TransAir went off the tarmac at Blaise Diagne International Airport, which serves the capital of Dakar. Local media reports citing press communications from the airport say 11 people were injured, including four seriously.Intense video footage shared on Facebook by the Malian musician Cheick Siriman Sissoko purportedly showing the aftermath of the crash depicts a panic scene of people evacuating the plane, which he also said had “caught fire.” People can be heard screaming while flames are visible on one side of the aircraft.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Vivek Ramaswamy Praises Ann Coulter for Saying He’s Too ‘Indian’ to Vote For
Vivek Ramaswamy via YouTubeVivek Ramaswamy praised Ann Coulter Wednesday for telling him that she would not have voted for him on the grounds that he is “an Indian.”After giving a warm introduction to Coulter— “somebody I’ve been fascinated by for a long time”—on his “Truth Podcast” for an episode on “the N Word: Nationalism,” Ramaswamy then listened as Coulter returned the favor. “I too am a fan of yours, though I’m going to make a point of disagreeing with you so that it will be fun,” she said. “You are so bright and articulate—and I guess I can call you articulate since you’re not an American Black, can’t say that about them, that’s derogatory.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Fox News Host: Stormy Daniels Testimony Might Prove Trump Is a ‘Sex God’
Lucas Jackson/ReutersDonald Trump’s allies in the press are doing their best to spin Stormy Daniels’ testimony about her alleged sexual tryst with the former president as a MAGA win.Fox News host Greg Gutfeld had perhaps the boldest take in that regard, claiming Wednesday that the porn star’s shocking summary of her night with Trump should not be seen as embarrassing or damning—but as proof of his sexual prowess.“Stormy claims that she blacked out in this tryst with Trump, but she wasn’t on any drugs or alcohol. You blacked out without drugs or alcohol. Some of us call that sleeping,” he said on The Five. “Now, it could be that she really blacked out after having sex with Trump, which is a compliment. Truly, he screwed the brains out of her—that makes him a sex god,” he said.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Stormy Daniels to Go Toe-to-Toe With Trump’s Defense at Hush Money Trial
Win McNamee/AFP via Getty ImagesDonald Trump’s hush money trial will resume Thursday with more testimony from Stormy Daniels, the porn star whose claims of a sexual encounter with the former president and a subsequent payment to keep quiet about it are at the center of the prosecution’s historic criminal case.She will return to the witness stand to face questioning from the defense, who have already attempted to undermine her credibility and the prosecution’s contention that Trump plotted to unlawfully influence the 2016 election by burying potentially damaging stories about him ahead of the national vote.Daniels is key to the proceedings because prosecutors allege that the Trump Organization deliberately mislabeled payments to Michael Cohen—Trump’s former attorney and fixer—as legal expenses when they were in fact reimbursements for a $130,000 payment Cohen made to Daniels to buy her silence about the alleged affair. Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records and has denied ever having a sexual relationship with Daniels.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Cartel Says They Handed Over Killers of Jack Carter Rhoad and Jake and Callum Robinson to the Cops
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/GoFundMeTIJUANA, Mexico—You know you’ve screwed up when even Mexico’s notorious drug cartels think you’ve gone too far.That’s what happened to a couple of alleged thieves who are accused of killing a trio of foreign tourists—including an American—who were found dead in Baja California this weekend.U.S. national Jack Carter Rhoad and Australian brothers Callum and Jake Robinson were reported as missing on April 27 after taking a surfing trip near the city of Ensenada. On Monday Baja California state authorities confirmed the lifeless bodies of the three tourists were found at the bottom of a cliff and detailed the cause of death: each had received a shot to the head.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Opinion: Evangelicals See Trump’s Hedonism as Godly ‘Masculinity’
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Getty ImagesFor those looking for salacious content, Stormy Daniels’ testimony at Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial did not disappoint.Daniels testified that Trump answered the hotel door wearing “silk or satin.” She also said Trump told her, “You remind me of my daughter,” and that she spanked him with a magazine—among other prurient recollections.I’ll leave it to legal experts to debate whether this TMI could backfire by evoking sympathy for Trump, or even jeopardizing the trial. Personally, I’m more interested in what the same conservatives who insisted that Bill Clinton’s character flaws made him unfit for the presidency will think about all this.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Trump-Backed Senate Hopeful Has Extensive ‘Deep State’ Ties
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/ReutersAs he runs for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick’s claims to his “home state” have been a source of contention on the campaign trail: the Republican hedge fund titan spent much of his youth in Pennsylvania, but has lived out most of his recent adult and professional days in Connecticut.While the extent of McCormick’s ties to his “home state” are cloudy, his ties to another state—the “deep state”—seem far more clear.Despite his claims to the MAGA movement, McCormick is steeped in the nexus of government, intelligence, and big business that Donald Trump and his acolytes ambiguously refer to as “the deep state.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
‘Last Stop in Yuma County’: The Thrilling Film Noir You Absolutely Shouldn’t Miss
Well Go USAIt often takes mere minutes for a director to demonstrate whether they know what they’re doing, and that’s unquestionably true with regards to The Last Stop in Yuma County. From its tantalizing framing and camerawork to its poised, anxiety-laced pacing, performances, and tone, writer/editor/director Francis Galluppi announces from the outset of his feature debut that he’s in complete, confident command of his material, and that self-assurance never wavers throughout the course of his expert neo-noir, which is in theaters and on VOD May 10. A tense, fatalistic saga of bad luck and worse decisions, it’s a throwback that feels as fresh and alive as its predecessors did decades ago. Not to be missed, it stands as one of the most welcome surprises of this moviegoing year.Never stagey despite confining the majority of its action to a single location, The Last Stop in Yuma County sets up shop at a remote pit stop on a road cutting through the hot, dusty, windswept Arizona desert. At this gas station, an unnamed man (Jim Cummings) pulls up in a little yellow Toyota Corona in need of gas. Unfortunately for him and those who’ll follow in his wake, he learns from proprietor Vernon (Faizon Love) that the pumps are dry, the next filing spot is 100 miles away, and the refueling truck won’t be around until later in the day. Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
The New ‘Planet of the Apes’ Sequel Is a Disappointing Slip on a Banana Peel
20th Century StudiosEvolution is at the heart of the Planet of the Apes franchise, and yet for its fourth installment in its current reboot phase (and tenth chapter overall), it doesn’t progress so much as stand still. Set generations after 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (in theaters May 10) gets close to the future that was first envisioned by Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 original, with apes now civilized and verbose, and humans mostly reduced to primitive muteness. As such, this sequel is an attempt to move forward by returning to its roots—a have-it-both-ways approach that prevents catastrophe but also neuters most of its novelty. Too often rehashing its myriad predecessors’ ideas, conflicts, and images, it’s a competent if unexceptional blockbuster game of monkey see, monkey do.It’s been centuries since Caesar, the first hyper-intelligent ape, led his simian comrades to an idyllic sanctuary where they could thrive without the murderous interference of mankind. In this present, Noa (Owen Teague) and his friends Soona (Lydia Peckham) and Anaya (Travis Jeffrey) climb peaks to reach eagles’ nests in order to steal eggs as part of a ritual in which primates bond with fowl. Noa’s big day is spoiled the evening prior, however, when his egg is crushed during an encounter with a mysterious human intruder who scampers off into the dark before being caught. Desperate to find another egg, the young chimp ventures out of his village at night by himself, only to run into a group of deadly apes with buzzing zap sticks who find their way back to Noa’s peaceful forest-grove home and burn it to the ground, in the process enslaving its inhabitants and murdering Noa’s bird-taming father.Driven to seek vengeance as well as to rescue his kin, Noa sets out through a tunnel to the forbidden “Valley Beyond,” where he meets orangutang Raka (Peter Macon), who teaches him about Caesar—and his belief that apes should stick together and not kill each other—and chooses to accompany him on his quest. They’re soon joined by an unlikely companion: Nova (Freya Allan), a feral human who’s trailing Noa and whose name is given to her by Raka in an homage to a character from War for the Planet of the Apes.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
‘Bodkin,’ Netflix’s ‘Only Murders’ Knockoff, Is Miles Better
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/NetflixYou, me, and anyone with even a tangential grasp on modern technology may have true-crime podcast fatigue. But for the people of Bodkin, Ireland—the titular, fictional shoreside town in Netflix’s new mystery series Bodkin, premiering May 9—the true-crime podcast wave hasn’t even begun to crest. That’s why, when popular podcast host Gilbert Power (Will Forte), his researcher Emmy (Robyn Cara), and crotchety investigative reporter for The Guardian Dove (Siobhán Cullen) step foot in Bodkin, they’re welcomed with wide-eyed fascination.That is, until the trio starts poking around, looking to cover a decades-old cold case that still haunts the town and its colorful characters. When local threads are pulled, their once-knotted history unspools, revealing dark and absurd secrets. Bodkin takes pleasure in stringing viewers along, winding itself past red herrings and red-haired residents who all have something to hide. While the series sometimes mirrors the pace of Bodkin’s small-town life too literally, drifting aimlessly to fill time, its enthusiastic cast—led by the terrifically cast Forte and Cullen—keep Bodkin stimulating enough to be more than just a knockoff Only Murders in the Building. Instead, it skewers the macabre voyeurism of true-crime podcasting, implicating its viewers just as much as its characters, to surprisingly refreshing results.After three seasons of Only Murders, last year’s Based on a True Story, 2019’s Truth be Told, and a quietly vicious Portlandia sketch, television seems to have reached its limit for shows about making true-crime podcasts. You’d be forgiven for wanting to avoid Bodkin entirely based on its stale premise alone. (You can practically hear the pitch meeting at Netflix now: “Three people investigate a crime to make a podcast—this time, in Ireland!”). But the show, at the very least, anticipates its audience’s exhaustion—something other shows don’t typically contend with.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
‘Mother of the Bride’: Every Wedding Should Have a Skinny-Dipping Brooke Shields
NetflixIt’s not easy being a mom—just ask Brooke Shields’s character, Lana, in Netflix’s newest rom-com, Mother of the Bride. One minute, your daughter is holding you close and insisting that she can’t have her wedding without you, and the next, she’s threatening to throw you out of her big day in Thailand because you’ve upset her “corporate parent” by skinny dipping at their resort. Mothers, you’ve all been there before, right? Anyone…?On the surface, Mother of the Bride follows Lana as she tries to process the fact that her daughter, Emma (Miranda Cosgrove), is engaged to a man she never met. To make things even spicier, the groom to be, RJ (Sean Teale) also happens to be the progeny of Lana’s grimiest college ex, Will (as played by certified zaddy Benjamin Bratt)—a not-so-fun fact the entire group finds out together when they arrive in Thailand for the destination wedding. Sadly, none of this is really the meat of the story.It turns out, Emma’s most complicated relationship is not with her brilliant perfectionist of a mother, or with her charming but possibly performative fiancé, but with her own deep desire to become… *checks notes* a brand ambassador? Oh, boy.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
RFK Jr. Boasts He Could Eat Brain Worms and Still Beat Trump, Biden
Mario Tama/Getty ImagesRobert F. Kennedy on Wednesday followed up the news of a “worm” that was discovered dead inside his brain in 2010 by boasting that he could eat five or six and still beat Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race.The dead parasite, dubbed a “worm,” was initially reported by The New York Times on Wednesday. Kennedy described the incident in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The Times. The incident occurred in 2010, when Kennedy was suffering from memory loss. Doctors initially diagnosed it as a brain tumor. It was only as he was packing for his procedure when he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital that believed his issues were “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Kennedy said in the deposition.His campaign assured Reuters that the incident occurred ten years ago and that the independent candidate was fit for the White House. Kennedy spokeswoman Stefanie Spear said he “traveled extensively in Africa, South America, and Asia in his work as an environmental advocate, and in one of those locations contracted a parasite. The issue was resolved more than 10 years ago, and he is in robust physical and mental health.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Stephen Colbert Marvels at RFK Jr.’s 2010 ‘Brain Worm’ Diagnosis
CBS“Let’s dig in,” said The Late Show host Stephen Colbert at the start of his monologue, “just like that worm did to RFK Jr.’s delicious frontal lobe.”Colbert was responding to the news on Wednesday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once had a parasitic worm squirming around in his brain.“Today, The New York Times published some newly discovered health records for the independent presidential candidate,” Colbert explained. “Turns out, back in 2010, RFK Jr. went to a doctor because he was experiencing some cognitive symptoms, like ‘memory loss and mental fogginess,’ as well as a tiny voice in his head going, ‘Let’s see, what wine pairs best with cerebellum?”Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Hotshot Attorney Says He Tried to Advise Trump’s Civil Fraud Judge: Report
Shannon Stapleton/ReutersA high-profile real estate lawyer who once told a tenant in a case that they should commit suicide told a New York City news station that he approached the judge in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial to volunteer a bit of unsolicited advice ahead of the potentially ruinous $355 million verdict that was handed down.That interaction is now the subject of an investigation by the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, sources familiar with the matter told NBC New York Wednesday. Adam Leitman Bailey, an oft-quoted attorney who weighed in on the trial as it proceeded, but who had no direct involvement in the case, made the claim in an on-camera interview with NBC New York on Feb. 16, hours before Judge Arthur Engoron’s ruling was made public.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
GOP Rep Cracks Incredibly Crass RFK Jr., Kennedy Assassination Joke
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesIf Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) began the month of May trying to set a new standard for tasteless tweets from a sitting member of Congress, he’s off to a great start, thanks in part to a post Wednesday alluding to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Robert F. Kennedy five years later.Last week, the congressman dished out—and later walked back—praise for mostly white Ole Miss students who jeered at a lone Black pro-Palestine protester. Despite how one such student, who has since been expelled from his fraternity, was clearly seen making primate noises and mannerisms at the protester, Collins wrote, “Ole Miss taking care of business.”On Wednesday, Collins felt compelled to weigh in on how independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was told by a doctor that he had a dead parasite in his brain, The New York Times reported, citing Kennedy’s comments during a 2012 deposition that was part of his divorce proceedings.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Another Boeing Plane Narrowly Avoids Disaster After Landing Gear Failure
Turkish Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure/TwitterA Boeing 767 cargo plane operated by FedEx survived a touchdown at Istanbul Airport in Turkey without its front landing gear Wednesday, with video showing sparks and smoke flying from the plane after it tilted forward and hit the ground.Turkey’s Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, Abdulkadir Uraloğlu, posted footage of the incident on X, while confirming that no one was injured in the incident. The flight was arriving from Charles de Gaulle in Paris when its pilot alerted the traffic control tower in Turkey that its landing gear had failed to deploy.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
‘Abbott Elementary’: Wait, Janine’s Father is Who?!
Gilles Mingasson/DisneyIt’s Mother’s Day on Abbott Elementary this week—and yet, for some reason, all we can talk about is fathers. Particularly one father: Janine’s (Quinta Brunson). She doesn’t know who her dad is, and, after Ava (Janelle James) makes a snide comment about Kevin Hart, Janine starts to wonder…could the comedian be her father? After all, they’re both short.No one at Abbott is particularly revved up about Mother’s Day. It seems like the school is home to a community of folks who don’t have great connections with their mothers. Although teachers like Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) are committed to setting up arts and crafts for the kids to bring back to their moms, most of the teachers bond over how little they care about the holiday—and, at times, how alienating it can be to celebrate mothers without even having a real mom.This masterful episode is proof that, after three seasons, Abbott Elementary hasn’t lost its touch. A topic like Mother’s Day could easily be spun into an episode much more saccharine than the rest of Abbott’s tone—but no. The teachers may be struggling this Mother’s Day, but the show resists the urge to make everything too hopeful. They all go through it together. It’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s downright brilliant.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’ Belongs in Detention
Karolina Wojtasik / MaxThere have been five—count ‘em, five!—entries in the Pretty Little Liars franchise since the pulpy teen drama, based on the popular book series, premiered in 2010. That’s 14 years, more than 150 episodes, and countless actors calling their parents to tell them that they got their big break, only for their respective series to get canceled before their SAG card could even arrive in the mail. All of the spinoffs and continuations of Pretty Little Liars have been unsuccessful, failing to generate even an iota of the massive buzz that teenagers heaped onto the franchise’s first televised iteration in the 2010s.In 2022, it looked as though the curse plaguing Pretty Little Liars had lifted. A new reboot, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, came in swinging, looking to rectify the mistakes that old spinoffs had fallen prey to. Original Sin was edgier, meaner, and filled to the brim with cursing and bloody violence, two things that the franchise was always missing due to the constraints of its home on network television. This new Pretty Little Liars was streaming on Max, and there, the show could go wild. Any restrictions that had previously hindered the franchises’ ambitions were removed, helping the reboot—which fashioned itself as a teen horror slasher—feel more innovative than any of the franchise’s previous spinoffs. A cast of talented young actors, some brilliantly written twists, and a devoted fan base that will follow PLL wherever it goes helped on that front, too.Original Sin’s supreme quality makes the show’s new, inferior continuation (with an equally substandard subtitle), Pretty Little Liars: Summer School, all the more disappointing. Where Season 1 of this new PLL was saucy and surprisingly brutal, Season 2 is trite and unambitious. Anyone exhausted by horror that uses grief and trauma as the basis for their frightening imagery will be completely drained by Summer School. This season takes that weary allegory and plops it on top of the events of Original Sin, hoping the two will eventually coalesce into something watchable. But despite some decently cheeky attempts at expanding the story and its characters, keeping up with Pretty Little Liars: Summer School feels more like homework than a vacation.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Joe Biden Reveals Ultimatum He Gave Benjamin Netanyahu Over Weapons
CNNPresident Joe Biden said Wednesday that if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders an invasion of Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, then he will not supply Israel with any more American-made weapons.In an interview on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront a week after Biden paused weapons shipments, the president also acknowledged that those weapons have been used to kill civilians in the territory.“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” he said.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Is Nicole Shanahan the Most Dangerous Woman in America?
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty Images/ReutersWhen Google co-founder Sergey Brin began openly dating Nicole Shanahan, in 2015, some members of his circle assumed it was a fling. Fresh out of law school, she was 12 years his junior, with few of the qualifications that might level the power dynamic with the world’s seventh-richest man. “I thought, okay, she’s fine,” a person close to the situation told The Daily Beast. “And then it went on.”By the time they married, in 2018, Shanahan had slingshotted into Silicon Valley stardom. She socialized with other billionaires’ plus-ones, distributed millions to pet causes—sometimes igniting controversy—and worked to distance Brin from his ex-wife, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, who had remained close with the billionaire, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the relationships.But almost as quickly, Shanahan’s marriage to Brin deteriorated. The couple squabbled over the right approach to raising their daughter, who was diagnosed with autism, and Shanahan chafed at Brin’s left-brain thinking. There was also the matter of her alleged affair with Elon Musk in 2021, a betrayal so profound and astonishing that the starchy pages of The Wall Street Journal might briefly have been confused for a tabloid.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Where Has the Trump Clan Been While Their Patriarch Sits in Court?
Win McNamee/POOL/AFP via Getty ImagesWhile the family patriarch spends his days in Manhattan Criminal Court attempting to fend off 34 felony counts of falsifying business records involving a six-figure payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, only one member of the Trump clan has appeared at the former president’s trial.Adult son Eric showed up in the courtroom gallery this week to observe testimony in his father’s case, but none of the other kids—or Trump’s third wife Melania—have been there to hear the twice-impeached ex-commander-in-chief’s dirty laundry being entered into the public record.Here’s what they’ve been up to while Big Papa sits through a trial which, if he’s convicted, could send Trump to prison for up to four years.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Even Donald Trump Is Getting Tired of MTG’s House Speaker Antics
Elijah Nouvelage / AFP via Getty ImagesEven Donald Trump seemed peeved by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) ill-fated attempt to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson Wednesday, with the former president posting to his Truth Social platform that she was risking “CHAOS” in the chamber and making Republicans look bad.“I absolutely love Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s got Spirit, she’s got Fight, and I believe she’ll be around, and on our side, for a long time to come,” Trump began, before laying into her plan to eject the second GOP Speaker of the House in less than a year.“Right now, Republicans have to be fighting the Radical Left Democrats, and all the Damage they have done to our Country. With a Majority of One, shortly growing to three or four, we’re not in a position of voting on a Motion to Vacate.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
DOJ ‘Stonewalling’ House Ethics Committee Probe of Matt Gaetz
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Getty ImagesAs the House Ethics Committee probes allegations that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) paid for sex with an underage teen, congressional investigators are hitting a wall: The Department of Justice.The DOJ is “stonewalling” the committee and refusing to turn over relevant information about its own sprawling criminal probe into Gaetz, frustrating the pace of the congressional investigation and leading the committee to seriously consider issuing subpoenas to the feds, according to two sources familiar with the matter.Currently, the committee has authorized multiple subpoenas to the DOJ for the information but has not served them yet, according to one source. Another source added that it is unusual for the DOJ to push back against the committee to this extent, especially when the relevant investigation isn’t active.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Newsmax’s Ratings Have Crashed From Its Post-Tucker Carlson Sugar High
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily BeastLast spring, pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax was riding a massive ratings surge after Fox News abruptly fired far-right primetime star Tucker Carlson, prompting disgruntled MAGA viewers to dump the conservative cable giant in protest.A year after transparently exploiting right-wing discontent over Fox’s removal of Carlson to gain a short-term boost in the cable news marketplace—which even saw the network occasionally surpass CNN in primetime—Newsmax is now experiencing a complete reversal of fortune.Despite a news cycle filled with high-profile events like Donald Trump’s hush money trial and the tumultuous pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Newsmax’s primetime viewership has plummeted to its lowest levels of 2024. The decline is staggering, with a drop of over 60 percent in certain categories compared to the same period last year, as reported by Nielsen.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
‘Sadistic’ NYC Doc Convicted of Rampant Sexual Abuse of Patients
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/TwitterA former New York City urologist is facing life behind bars after a federal jury found him guilty on Wednesday of sexually abusing eight patients, including six who were minors at the time.“Darius A. Paduch leveraged his position of trust as a medical doctor for his own perverse gratification,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement issued after the unanimous verdict. “For years, patients seeking needed medical care, many of them children, left his office as victims.”A lawyer for Paduch told Newsday that they “definitely” planned to appeal, and declined to comment further.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Shohei Ohtani’s Interpreter to Plead Guilty to Stealing From MLB Star
Reuters/Kirby LeeThe embattled ex-interpreter for Shohei Ohtani is expected to plead guilty to bank fraud and false tax return charges next week, accepting blame for the bombshell scandal that saw him accused him of stealing millions from baseball’s biggest star. Those in Ohtani’s camp accused Ippei Mizuhara, once spotted smiling alongside Ohtani nearly daily, of using the stolen funds to place thousands of illegal bets on everything from college soccer to the NFL. Mizuhara, who prosecutors said was Ohtani’s “de facto manager” in addition to translating Japanese and English, is expected to officially enter a guilty plea guilty on May 14 during a scheduled arraignment, the Department of Justice announced. Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Opinion: Did Trump’s Legal Spokesperson Violate the Terms of His Gag Order?
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/ReutersThe bombshell testimony of Stormy Daniels in Donald Trump’s election interference case was certainly dramatic, but other events that took place may mean we are closer than ever to the former president facing the prospect of jail time.It was the statements made by one of Trump’s lawyers that could land him an evening on Rikers Island, and also potentially get that attorney in ethical trouble herself.The coverage of the trial focused mostly on Stephanie Clifford’s (aka Stormy Daniels’) testimony, including quite specific allegations related to her supposed interactions with the former president.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
50 Cent Sues Ex for Defamation Over Rape Allegations
Prince Williams/FilmMagic/Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for Rémy MartinRapper 50 Cent, real name Curtis Jackson, filed a defamation lawsuit against his ex-partner, Daphne Joy this week. Back in March, Joy publicly accused Jackson of raping and physically abusing her during their relationship, claims which Jackson says are baseless. Jackson claims in his suit that Joy (full name Daphne Joy Narvaez) made allegations were not only “false and defamatory,” but that were a “calculated attack”—an attack that his lawyer says was likely motivated by Narvaez's relationship with embattled hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.“Despite being given ample opportunity to retract a false and malicious retaliatory accusation, Ms. Narvaez has shamefully chosen to interfere with her 11-year-old son’s relationship with his loving father by falsely calling him a ‘rapist,’” Reena Jain, one of Jackson’s lawyers, told The Daily Beast in a statement. Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
MTG Officially Sets Up Doomed Vote to Remove Mike Johnson
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesRep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) pulled the trigger on Wednesday on her motion to oust Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) from the speakership, a move that sets up a full vote in the House on his fate.While that vote will mark the second time in seven months that House Republicans have voted on removing their own Speaker—an unprecedented sign of chaos—Greene is all but certain to fail in her quest to boot Johnson as Democrats will likely help table the motion.For starters, the Georgia Republican has only garnered two additional members to publicly support her motion, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ). The latter has expressed to reporters that he does not believe the motion to vacate should be triggered this week.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Republican Introduces Absurd Bill to Send Arrested Student Protesters to Gaza
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesA group of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill on Wednesday which would send “any person convicted of unlawful activity” at a college or university, to do community service in Gaza for six months.The bill, dubbed the “Antisemitism Community Service Act,” was introduced by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), and backed by Representatives Jeff Dunch (R-SC) and Randy Weber (R-TX), as part of two bills which take aim at college students.The bill seeks to punish students opposing the U.S.-backed genocide, by sending them to the very place where Israel has used U.S. funds and weapons to kill over 34,700 people, obliterating homes, and displacing nearly two million of Palestinians.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com