Daily Beast

Peter Foley/Pool/AFP via Getty ImagesAccording to Donald Trump, he wasn’t napping in the Manhattan courtroom where he’s being tried for his alleged role in a hush money scheme to cover up an affair he had with a porn star. No, the former president said on Thursday, he was merely resting his gorgeous peepers for a moment or two.“Contrary to the FAKE NEWS MEDIA, I don’t fall asleep during the Crooked D.A.’s Witch Hunt, especially not today,” the 77-year-old posted on Truth Social during a break in proceedings. “I simply close my beautiful blue eyes, sometimes, listen intensely, and take it ALL in!!!”His poetic denial comes after multiple outlets, including The Daily Beast, reported that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee appeared to doze off on the first day of jury selection—a pattern he was to repeat in subsequent days.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesElon Musk said he plans to reinstate the X account of white-nationalist activist and all-around problematic podcaster Nick Fuentes.On X on Thursday, Musk caved to a user’s demand to make good on his “promise” and bring Fuentes back to the social media site, from which he has been banned for over a year. It’s unclear what Musk’s “promise” was, but the billionaire has seemingly been determined to bring as many far-right voices espousing dangerous conspiracy theories back to the platform as possible.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Ada County Sheriff's OfficeFamily members of Chad Daybell—who’s accused of killing three people before fleeing with his new wife to Hawaii—took the stand on Thursday, describing the “introvert” Doomsday author’s increasingly extreme religious views.“He’s not a gregarious personality, is he?” defense attorney John Prior asked Daybell’s mother, Sheila, who took the stand Thursday.Sheila agreed he was not, at which point Prior asked if Daybell was a “man of the world,” noting that he did not “have a lot of experiences dealing with relationships.” Daybell’s mother, who also called her son a shy introvert, agreed.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Reuters/Susannah IrelandKevin Spacey hit back at the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 on Thursday, insulting the network ahead of a planned docuseries release that’s expected to bring forward new sexual abuse allegations against him. In a post to X, Spacey vowed that he’d respond to the allegations in full later this week, but gave a glimpse of what that response will be. “I will not sit back and be attacked by a dying network’s one-sided ‘documentary’ about me in their desperate attempt for ratings,” he wrote Thursday. “There’s a proper channel to handle allegations against me and it’s not Channel 4.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

GoFundMeBillionaire Bill Ackman has donated $10,000 to his latest worthy cause: an all-out rager for a bunch of University of North Carolina fraternity brothers who took down a Palestinian flag put up by protesters and replaced it with a U.S. flag.Ackman, who also donated to counter-protest efforts at UCLA, where the pro-Israel crowd turned violent on Tuesday night, was matched by at least two other $10,000 donations as of Thursday afternoon. By that time, the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity had raised $424,000 of their $450,000 goal.According to the GoFundMe, donations will go to “throw this frat the party they deserve, a party worth of the boat-shoed Broleteriat who did their country proud.” It’s apparently to celebrate their victory over the “commie losers” who protested Israel’s continued military action in Gaza, where over 34,000 Palestinians have died in the last eight months.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via GettyCarla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wife of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has been questioned as a suspect in a witness-tampering case against her husband, according to local media reports Thursday.The 56-year-old supermodel was questioned as a witness in the case last year but is now considered a suspect, according to Le Monde. The witness tampering case is linked to allegations that her husband accepted money from Muammar Gaddafi, the late Libyan autocrat, to help finance an election campaign.Bruni-Sarkozy was at the Paris offices of the Central Office for the Fight Against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses on Thursday, according to MailOnline. A source told the outlet that the former first lady of France is a “free suspect,” adding: “She has spoken to officers before, but not as a suspect in a case in which she’s accused of trying to whitewash her husband.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

via Telegram A 27-year-old Twitch streamer was hunted down by cops in the Russian city of Krasnodar and forced to issue a public apology for saying Ukrainians are better looking than Russians.Olga Kasyanenko, a native of Ukraine’s Donetsk region who relocated to Krasnodar a few years ago, was also fined nearly $1,000 for supposedly “discrediting” the Russian military with her comments, regional police said in a press release.Pro-war bloggers first began circulating clips from Kasyanenko’s streams earlier this week, demanding authorities take action. Head of the Safe Internet League Yekaterina Mizulina, whose favorite pastime is siccing law enforcement on anyone who defies the Kremlin narrative online, then roped in local police, according to state-run RIA Novosti.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty ImagesLaurence Fox, the controversial British actor-turned-political activist, could be facing a police investigation after he allegedly posted an explicit upskirt image of a broadcaster on X without her consent.Fox on Wednesday posted an old paparazzi shot showing Narinder Kaur sitting in a car without underwear on, according to The Daily Mirror. “This is now a police matter,” Kaur wrote in a post Thursday morning along with a link to an article about the incident.The image no longer appears on Fox’s X account as of Thursday morning. According to the Mirror, the photograph was taken without Kaur’s consent or knowledge and was scrubbed from online photo libraries after upskirting was made a criminal offense in Britain.Read more at The Daily Beast.

via OK.ru Russia appears to have two new poster children for its war against Ukraine and supposed crusade to save “traditional values” from the deviant West: a cannibal and a murderer united on the battlefield.Nearly two years after Moscow first hatched its deranged prison-recruitment scheme to use hardened criminals as cannon fodder in Ukraine, a selfie shared on social media provides a glimpse of the country’s new normal.Dmitry Malyshev, sentenced to 25 years in 2015 for murdering a man and filming himself eating the victim’s heart, among other things, can be seen grinning and embracing Alexander Maslennikov, who got 23 years for murdering and dismembering two women he met at a nightclub.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty The body of a fifth construction worker killed in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was recovered Wednesday, authorities said.The victim was identified as Miguel Angel Luna Gonzalez, 49, of Glen Burnie, Maryland. He was one of six workers who went missing in the March 26 collapse.According to the Unified Command—the multi-agency task force responding to the disaster—salvage teams located one of the missing construction vehicles and notified the Maryland Department of State Police. Gonzalez’s body was located and recovered from inside the red truck, authorities said.Read more at The Daily Beast.