Daily Beast

ReutersA Florida fisherman had his hand bitten off by a massive alligator as he tried to land a freshwater bass on Sunday afternoon, witnesses and chilling 911 calls revealed.The attack occurred in the Orlando suburb of Leesburg, at a pond located on a golf course inside a retirement community, the witness Ron Priest told Fox 35. Priest said he watched the unnamed fisherman and alligator roll together on the ground, with the gator eventually biting off his hand and returning to the water.Priest said his wife was one of two people to dial 911—chilling calls that Lake County authorities released Monday. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Kevin MazurBeyoncé’s has announced the name of her forthcoming country music album: Cowboy Carter.On Tuesday afternoon, Beyoncé published a pre-order link on her Instagram story, and new merchandise and art quickly populated her website. The album will be released March 28, and is part of her project to reclaim Black music.The album art depicts a red, white, and blue sash draped over a deep brown leather saddle, with silver trims. The sash reads “COWBOY CARTER,” in a simple Western font. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Mathieu Polak/Sygma/Sygma via Getty ImagesGhislaine Maxwell’s lawyer asked a U.S. appeals court to overturn her conviction for grooming and abusing girls for the late sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.During oral arguments on Tuesday before the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, her attorney Diana Fabi Samson argued that Epstein’s infamous 2007 non-prosecution agreement (NPA) should have barred her prosecution.That lenient deal, inked with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, provided immunity for alleged co-conspirators including four women tied to Epstein. Maxwell wasn’t listed on the document, but her lawyers say she’s covered—and that the agreement was intended to bind every other U.S. Attorney’s Office in the country.Read more at The Daily Beast.

GoFundMeBeloved TikTok star Leah Smith died Monday after a years-long battle with a rare bone cancer, her boyfriend revealed in a heartbreaking post to her TikTok account on Tuesday. Smith, only 22, had used TikTok to document her battle with Ewing’s Sarcoma—a rare bone disease that typically only impacts children and young adults. The English TikToker, who had more than half a million followers, first revealed her diagnosis in 2020, saying she received the horrifying news after she lost all feeling in her left leg and visited a doctor. She’d previously ignored 10 months of back pain prior to her diagnosis, unaware of the horrific cause of the aches.Read more at The Daily Beast.

PAUL GROVER/POOL/AFP via Getty ImagesQueen Camilla just got Barbie’d.During an International Women’s Day event at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, Queen Camilla was presented with a matching Barbie—complete with golden lob of hair and bright blue dress—to celebrate her work as president of the Women of the World.“Thank you very very much indeed,” she said upon being presented with the look-alike doll, according to the Daily Mail. “It’s brilliant, and they’ve taken about 50 years off my life.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesA Brooklyn pastor was convicted on multiple fraud charges after being accused of taking money from a parishioner’s family to fund his luxury lifestyle and trying to convince a businessman to lend him hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for currying political favor with his mentor, New York City Mayor Eric Adams.Lamor Whitehead was found guilty of two counts of wire fraud, one count of attempted wire fraud, one count of attempted extortion, and one count of making false statements, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.Prosecutors alleged that Whitehead had taken $90,000 from the mother of one of his parishioners at his small Brooklyn church, Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministries. He promised the woman that he would use the money to help buy her a home. Instead, Whitehead used the money to purchase luxury goods, prosecutors said. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Russia Defense Ministry TelegramAnti-Kremlin militants claimed to have successfully crossed into Russia on Tuesday and seized control of a village, while Moscow said it had successfully fought off the attempted incursions.Ukraine insisted that the armed groups were made up of Russian citizens, with Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukrainian military intelligence, claiming the fighters were attempting to “free their country from the Russian Putin dictatorship,” the Kyiv Independent reports. Russia’s Defense Ministry flatly accused the groups of being “Ukrainian militants” who tried to enter Russian territory in the Belgorod and Kursk regions “with the support of tanks and armored combat vehicles.”The Freedom of Russia Legion, one of the organizations involved in the attack, claimed on Telegram to have taken control of the village of Tyotkino in Russia’s Kursk region on the Ukrainian border. It also released a video that it said showed Russian troops fleeing the village and abandoning heavy equipment.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Apple TV+(Warning: Spoilers for The New Look ahead.)It’s hard to imagine a world where Coco Chanel’s (Juliette Binoche) name is not on a guest list. However, rejection did happen—and is swift—in a recent episode of Apple TV+ historical drama The New Look, when Coco tries to enter a lavish party at the luxury Swiss hotel she currently calls home.At the end of WWII, friends and money were in short supply for the designer, who self-exiled from Paris after French authorities started to investigate her ties to the Nazis. Without her Parisian boutique, Coco lacked financial stability and threatened legal action against her former partners, the Wertheimers. So you’d think Coco would welcome a visitor from the past with open arms. But this critical juncture in her life, Coco needed to keep certain skeletons in her closet, and discretion certainly was not in fashion whenever socialite Elsa Lombardi (Emily Mortimer) stepped—or staggered—into a room, as she does in Episode 6 of the series.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Shannon Finney/Getty ImagesBlack-ish actress Jenifer Lewis is opening up about a terrifying near-death experience after she fell from a balcony in Africa two years ago. In an ABC interview with Robin Roberts that was previewed on Tuesday, Lewis said that after Black-ish had wrapped in 2022, she planned to retire and travel the world. One of her destinations was the Serengeti region of Africa, where she was staying in a hotel room with a balcony overlooking an infinity pool.“When the sun sets in the Serengeti, there are no street lights. It is pitch black,” she said. One night, she “saw the infinity pool out on my deck. So I went out. I was just taking in the fact that I was back in the Serengeti once again and I’m walking and all of a sudden, I had fallen 10 feet.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via GettySamantha Markle’s defamation lawsuit against her half-sister Meghan Markle has been dismissed by a Florida district court judge with prejudice after a failure to produce statements that could support a claim for defamation.It was the third time that Samantha, 59, had tried to bring the case, claiming that Meghan, 42, defamed her when she told Oprah Winfrey, during a bombshell 2021 interview with Prince Harry, that she “grew up as an only child” and didn’t have a significant relationship with Samantha.Samantha complained that Meghan cast her as an opportunist and damaged her reputation and credibility.Read more at The Daily Beast.