Daily Beast

CNNFormer Trump White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin said Monday that it’s “remarkable” how voters don’t seem as concerned about Donald Trump’s age as they are about President Joe Biden’s.On CNN, anchor John Berman noted how Trump has recently been mixing up names of other politicians, like on Saturday when he again referred to former President Barack Obama instead of Biden. Trump, rarely one to admit fault, has insisted he actually does so on purpose.Berman then asked Griffin how often Trump would make such inaccuracies while he was in office.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Brittany Greeson for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesEric Mays, a longtime and beloved member of the Flint City Council, died from natural causes last month. Then things got weird, according to a new lawsuit.Eric HaKeem Deontaye Mays, identified as the councilman’s only child in court documents filed Monday, alleges that “violations of Michigan law, fraud, and conspiracy by the Lawrence E. Moon Funeral Home and four siblings of the late Councilman” have been committed in connection with the handling of his remains.Mays died without a will, according to the lawsuit, which claims that only his son Eric has next-of-kin rights as to how to handle his remains. But the suit alleges that two of the elder Mays’ siblings instead lied to authorities that he had no children, and that a third sibling—an employee of the Moon Funeral Home—falsely represented to the Genesee County Medical Examiner’s Office that he had the legal authority to authorize the release of his body.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/ABC(Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Bachelor Season 28, Episode 8.)It’s been more than a full month since The Bachelor producers dangled the prospect of a heartbroken Joey Graziadei over our pretty little heads, and now, it looks like we’ve finally reached this season’s dramatic final act. As always, the waters started getting choppy during hometowns. Maria Georgas, frontrunner for either Joey’s final rose or her own season of Bachelorette, went home in a painfully awkward rose ceremony, and now, season previews indicate that Joey is in for a note bearing the four most dreaded words in any relationship: We need to talk.Oh, boy...Read more at The Daily Beast.

Jose Colon/Anadolu via Getty ImagesA civilian employee in the U.S. Air Force was charged in federal court with giving classified material about the war in Ukraine to a woman he met on an online dating service, apparently unperturbed by her bizarrely worded requests for information on military targets and Russian capabilities.David Franklin Slater, 63, of Nebraska, was taken into custody on Saturday on a three-count indictment. He is accused of conspiring to transmit and transmitting classified information relating to the national defense to someone who, claiming to be a single Ukrainian woman, wheedled sensitive information out of him while referring to him as her “secret informant love” and her “secret agent.”A former U.S. Army officer, Slater retired as a lieutenant colonel before signing up to work with the Air Force as a civilian, according to the Justice Department. He was assigned to U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where he worked in a classified space and held a top secret security clearance from August 2021 until the following April.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Anna Rose Layden/ReutersSen. John Thune (R-SD), the Senate GOP whip, is looking to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) when he steps down from his role as party leader in November, he told local news outlets Monday.When asked directly by Keloland News reporter Dan Santella if he wants to be the GOP’s next Senate leader—either in the majority or minority—he replied in the affirmative.“Well, I hope to be, and I’m going to do everything I can to convince my colleagues,” Thune said. “They’re the voters. They’re the ones who ultimately make the decision.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

TwitterPerhaps the strangest character to emerge from the bizarre, viral “Willy Wonka Experience” in Glasgow is getting their own movie. Nicknamed “The Unknown,” the silver-masked, cape-clad figure will be the center of an upcoming horror film.That’s according to the blog Bloody Disgusting, which revealed Monday that Scotland-based film production company Kaledonia Pictures is getting to work on a film titled “The Unknown” that’s centered around the viral character. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Ken Murray/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesA New York pimp convicted Monday of fatally strangling and dismembering a sex worker to collect her life insurance policy got tips for the 2018 grisly murder from crime TV shows Dexter and The First 48, prosecutors said.Cory Martin, 36, was found guilty in Brooklyn federal court of all charges, including murder-for-hire, in connection with the April 2018 slaying of 26-year-old Brandy Odom. Prosecutors say that Martin was sex trafficking Odom before ultimately murdering her and dumping her remains in Canarsie Park. Afterward, he and a co-conspirator made multiple unsuccessful attempts to collect upwards of $200,000 from life insurance policies they took out in Odom’s name.“Martin saw the victim as a moneymaker, trafficking her for commercial sex, then after killing her with his bare hands, tossing out her slaughtered body parts like trash so he could profit from her death,” United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace said in a press release announcing the verdict.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/NBCThe chaotic brilliance of Deal or No Deal has returned. But it’s back with a Survivor-style twist. Deal or No Deal Island may sound like a title ripped from 30 Rock—I feel like I write this every week at this point, with reality shows about twins dating, MILFs, and polyamory always popping up—but it’s 100 percent real and about to debut on NBC.Deal or No Deal Island, which premieres Monday night on NBC at 9:30 p.m. ET, was a show made for anyone who still watches reruns on the Deal or No Deal Roku Channel that airs reruns at every hour of the day. (So, me. I’m unapologetic about this fact—Deal or No Deal rocks.) It was made for people who want to scream, “Don’t make that deal!” at confused contestants who think a measly $83,000 is better than a potential million bucks hiding within their case. Even without Howie Mandel, Deal or No Deal Island is a dreamlike, messy, absurdist concept that ties in facets of the original Deal or No Deal with ease.At first, one might not expect such high praise for Deal or No Deal Island. The series is shoddily made, with iPhones replacing the iconic landline phones to contact the banker. Joe Manganiello takes the place of Mandel as host, a C-minus replacement at best. The models who present the cases—Meghan Markle used to be one—are no longer present; instead, two unfashionable “banker’s assistants” do that job. The ever-present techno thrums of the stressful Deal or No Deal music have vanished too.Read more at The Daily Beast.

HBOAlabama’s Supreme Court ruling last week that frozen embryos fertilized in test tubes legally qualify as living, breathing human beings sent Republicans scrambling to clarify their positions so as not to lose votes from women in the 2024 elections—and John Oliver wasn’t about to let them get away with it.On Last Week Tonight, Oliver said equating in vitro fertilization (IVF) with actual people was “wrong for a bunch of reasons—mainly if you freeze an embryo, it’s fine. If you freeze a person you have some explaining to do.”But the Alabama court ruling carries “massive implications” nationwide, as an estimated 2 percent of Americans are born through IVF. The ruling prompted many of that state’s fertility clinics to immediately stop treatments out of fear they could be sued for wrongful death for any unused, discarded or destroyed embryos. That, in turn, prevents countless couples from continuing their efforts to have kids. “IVF cycles take weeks of careful monitoring and expensive treatments. You can’t just hit pause and wait out a court case,” Oliver said.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Samir Hussein/GettySarah Ferguson has said she is “resting with family at home” as she expressed her “shock” at receiving a malignant melanoma skin cancer diagnosis just months after she underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer.Writing on Instagram, Fergie, the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, said she had been “taking some time to myself” following her “second cancer diagnosis within a year.”She said it was thanks to the “great vigilance of my dermatologist that the melanoma was detected when it was.”Read more at The Daily Beast.