Daily Beast

Anna Conkling/The Daily BeastKOSTIANTYNIVKA, Ukraine—In a large bedroom in eastern Ukraine, a woman in her eighties wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe hunches over a table by her bed. The room is filled with icons of the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, and Saint Nicholas, figures she believes protect her against evil curses and the dangers of the war. The woman fixes her stare at the table, which she has filled with playing cards, ranging from the ten of clubs to the queen of hearts. She looks at me and says, “You need to leave Ukraine. You are in danger if you stay.”Anastasia says she is psychic and has made a living off of her “abilities,” which play a crucial role in the lives of her clients. Two years of Russian aggression have left some of them eager for answers to their everyday problems, like love and wealth, but they also ask if there is a reason they should leave their homes, like a looming occupation or if they will become a direct casualty of the war.Turning to the MysticRead more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/BravoThis week:The Real Housewives of the High SeasThere has not been a second that’s passed this week that I have not been thinking about Jill Zarin’s appearance on Below Deck. Well, there was that earthquake, during which I briefly thought, “This is not the apartment I want to die in!” But once the Earth stopped shaking and I officially became a *survivor*, it was back to Jill.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/StarzAs light and fun as it can be, Mary & George begins with a thud. The first episode of Starz’s scintillating new limited series about Jacobean-era English schemers—led by Julianne Moore as Countess of Buckingham Mary Villiers and Nicholas Galitzine as her second son, George—opens by dropping poor baby George, fresh from the womb, onto the floor. “Who dropped him?” Mary asks her two chambermaids. She’s not expecting a reply; she’s expecting them to pick him up. George is, after all, still attached to his mother by umbilical cord, and Mary does not suffer incompetence, as we’ll soon come to learn.Things don’t bode well for poor George from the start. There’s a reason that Mary is less incensed by her staff’s mistake than she is purely annoyed. “Perhaps they should’ve left you on the floor to rot,” she whispers to George, cradled in her arms once more. “Do you know why? You are my second son. You will inherit nothing of value. What use are you to anybody?” It’s a tough sentiment—the kid’s still covered in bodily fluids, and already he’s getting a lecture from his mother—but not exactly an untrue one. During this period in English history, family and bloodlines were everything; if you were not a daughter who could marry into a wealthy brood, or the first-born son who would inherit a family’s estate, there was little intrinsic worth to your mere existence.That’s the spirit that drives Mary and the worry that nips at her back everywhere she goes. After narrowly escaping a lowly destiny of her own, she’s desperate to make sure that she never returns to that status. She’ll do anything to secure her family’s name in good social standing, but with her first son, John (Tom Victor), growing more violent and troubled, her prospects don’t look good. That is, until the opportunity to pimp George out to England’s King James I arises, and it’s a chance that Mary can’t possibly pass up. While George is less hasty to be objectified, this reluctance creates a push-pull dynamic that Mary & George lays its groundwork upon in its excellent premiere, with plenty of nasty schemes and sex to build upon by the first installment’s end.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Getty / AlamyFirst and foremost, Hollywood does its job well. Very well. It creates spy movies and action adventures like Mission Impossible that keep us on the edge of our seats from opening shot to closing credits. But are they realistic? Not quite. And while we viewers instinctively know that, what we may not appreciate is how poorly real-life spy work would translate to the big screen.I found (this is Katherine Reay writing) during my research of Cold War era agents, spies, officers, and operations, that “spy work” is—as a character noted within one novel—“a lot of nothing wrapped around that little dangerous something.” There is an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes time, research, and detailed attention that go into each covert operation, even if that “operation” lasts mere moments. The work is mostly waiting and watching, assessing and analyzing; days, months—sometimes years—of diligent, secretive, and quiet planning, all to create that one moment of thrill. I write thrill rather than danger because, believe it or not, all those quiet moments of planning and plotting are full of inherent danger.Two famous spies and their experiences illustrate this perfectly. Soviet diplomat-turned-CIA-informant Aleksandr Dimitrievich Ogorodnik passed information to his CIA handler, Martha Peterson, via dead drops from 1975 to 1977. In a dead drop, a spy leaves vital bits of intelligence at a predetermined place at a set time so that, as soon as it is possible, the CIA handler can retrieve it. Ideally, there’s nothing for anyone to see. And, for two years, no one noted anything amiss. TRIGON (Ogorodnik’s code name) and Peterson passed information seamlessly. But after two years of “quiet,” both were betrayed in 1977 and that dramatic and final moment came. Peterson was swarmed by KGB officers on a Moscow bridge, arrested, and sent to the Lubyanka (the infamous KGB prison) for interrogation, before being exiled from the Soviet Union. Ogorodnik was arrested as well and took his life by releasing and swallowing the CIA issued L-pill hidden inside his favorite writing pen.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fox NewsFox News host Jesse Watters on Friday claimed there is no difference between being gay and being transgender.During a segment about puberty blockers and minors transitioning from one gender to another, Watters began by arguing that gender reassignment surgery is some sort of money-making conspiracy among doctors.“So, surgeons can only make so much money until they invent new surgeries,” he said. “When plastic surgery came along, a lot of surgeons got very, very wealthy, and that’s fine—on adults,” he said.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Alex Wong/Getty ImagesA fire at the office of Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) in Burlington, Vermont on Friday was intentionally lit, authorities say. The Burlington Fire Marshal’s office deemed the fire “incendiary in nature,” according to a press release. An investigation found that an accelerant had been sprayed on the door of Sen. Sanders downtown office, according to NECN. Personnel in the building and surrounding structures were evacuated. Sanders was not in the office at the time, and no staffers were injured.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / GettyThe prospect of Eagle Pass, Texas, becoming the first municipality in America to see the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, triggered visions in the border town of big crowds preceded by a big music festival.The city’s marketing and tourism director, Aide Castano, told a 2023 meeting of the Eagle Pass Rotary Club that the city of 28,000 should prepare to host nearly four times its population for the event.“Mark your calendar for the eclipse, get your grocery shopping done, we’re gonna have 100,000 people in Eagle Pass, we’re gonna have millions of dollars in sales for downtown Eagle Pass,” Castano said, according to the recollection of resident Amerika Garcia-Grewall, who attended the meeting.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Kevork Djansezian-Pool/Getty ImagesMichael Jackson’s estate is fighting his accusers’ request to unseal police records that contain nude photos of Jackson that were taken by police, according to a filing obtained by The Daily Beast.Wade Robson and James Safechuck were the subject of the documentary Leaving Neverland, in which they describe, in grueling detail, being groomed and assaulted by Jackson over the course of several years from the ages of 7 and 10 years old, respectively—including repeated instances in which they were allegedly forced to either kiss Jackson or engage in anal or oral sex with him.The two now grown men are currently in the process of suing Jackson’s estate for allegedly enabling their abuse at the hands of the pop superstar. The latest bid by Robson and Safechuck’s legal team to obtain the old police records and photos is to prove their belief that Jackson “collected sexually provocative” photos of children, according to their attorney John C. Carpenter. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / GettyIt takes a lot of work to become a feature film director. Often, you’ll spend years slogging away in film school and on sets, networking, and working your way up the food chain until one day, a studio executive decides to give you a shot. Maybe you make some short films, or, in the 2020s, you build your brand on YouTube.…Or, if you’re very lucky, you’re Elizabeth Hurley’s son, Damian Hurley, so you spend some time on the Gossip Girl set as an 8-year-old, cameo on The Royals a couple times, make a short film in the Caribbean, and presto! Lionsgate is on your doorstep, ready to make your childhood dreams come true.Strictly Confidential, Damian’s feature directorial debut, hit theaters with a limited release on April 5 and is also available on VOD platforms including YouTube and Google Play, and there’s been seemingly no limit to the amount of press this 20-year-old has managed to attract. Publications like People and Vogue and Entertainment Weekly have all gotten in on the action, as has TMZ—which naturally zeroed in on the fact that, in this film, Damian directed his mother in a steamy, queer sex scene. For the morbidly curious, the trailer for Strictly Confidential is about three hours long and spells out most of the plot, minus one major twist.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty ImagesThe judge in Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush-money case has squashed the former president’s bid to subpoena NBCUniversal over a Stormy Daniels documentary, calling it “the very definition of a fishing expedition.”In late March, Trump subpoenaed NBCUniversal for information on a documentary about one of the trial’s key witnesses, adult film star Stormy Daniels, who Trump is accused of having paid-off through his former attorney Michael Cohen. Trump’s team had hoped to demonstrate collusion between Daniels and the media company about the Stormy documentary release date, which they contended was purposefully slotted in proximity to the trial’s start date.Read more at The Daily Beast.