How many little women is Count Alexander Rostov (Ewan McGregor) going to befriend in A Gentleman in Moscow? Alex’s habit of acquainting himself with little girls—this sounds odd, but he’s the one doing it over and over again—has returned in the fifth episode of the season. This man really needs to get some pals who are his own age.Alex has taken in Sofia (Billie Gadsdon), the tiny daughter of his old friend Nina (Leah Balmforth). Unlike Nina, who was full of childish whimsy and happiness, Sofia is a bratty thumbsucker. Sofia demands to sleep in the Count’s bed. Sofia only...

As the White House faced a growing clamor to respond to pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the nation, Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, quietly reached out to two Jewish leaders at Columbia University this week. Politico reports that Emhoff, the first-ever Jewish spouse of a vice president or president, called Rabbi Elie Buechler of the Ivy League college’s Orthodox Union-Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus and Brian Cohen, executive director of the campus Hillel chapter to discuss antisemitism. “The Second Gentleman recognized that while every American has the right to freedom of speech and to protest peacefully, hate speech and calls for violence against Jews is both antisemitic and unacceptable,” a White House official said. Emhoff has been one of the White House’s point people on antisemitism and has previously criticized universities for failing to crack down on anti-Jewish rhetoric.Read it at POLITICORead more at The Daily Beast.

The former CBS News anchor Dan Rather will make a brief return to the network Sunday, appearing in a live interview 18 years after his controversial exit. Rather, 92, is slated to be profiled on CBS News Sunday Morning through an interview with correspondent Lee Cowan, the network announced. The segment will, in part, promote the soon-to-be released documentary Rather, which chronicles the legendary newsman’s “rise to prominence, his sudden and dramatic public downfall, and his redemption and re-emergence as a voice of reason to a new generation,” the doc’s producers wrote in a statement. Rather’s falling out with CBS began with his 2004 60 Minutes II report about George W. Bush’s National Guard record that relied on documents CBS failed to authenticate—something the then-president skewered the network for. The incident shattered Rather’s reputation, despite the documents never being proven to be forgeries. The controversy, which was dubbed “Rathergate,” was dramatized in the 2015 film Truth. Rather’s return to CBS will air at 9 a.m. EST on Sunday.Read it at PeopleRead more at The Daily Beast.

That Donald Trump has a tendency toward pettiness is hardly surprising to those who have been paying attention to the former president’s antics in recent years. (See Exhibits A, B, C, D, and E.) But a late-night outburst on Wednesday attacking Bill Barr has The Daily Show correspondent and this week’s co-host Jordan Klepper declaring the former president the official “King of Pettiness.”Though Trump spent most of Thursday in a New York City courtroom (again) for his hush money trial, Klepper’s co-host Ronny Chieng said that it wasn’t all bad news for the former president. “After months of calling him...

Video taken by a witness and confirmed by local reporters captured the moment Noëlle McAfee, the chair of Emory University’s philosophy department, was dragged from a pro-Palestine campus protest in handcuffs Thursday evening—as she called on a student to let her peers know she’d been arrested. McAfee, who’s also the president-elect of the Emory University Senate, can be heard calling out to a stranger—who recorded the whole ordeal—and telling him she was merely observing the protest and was not participating.While McAfee spoke, she was drug in the opposite direction down a sidewalk by an officer who’d concealed his face with...

So-called vampire facials at a shuttered spa in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been linked to three cases of HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two of the women tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS in 2018—while the third only discovered she was infected last year. “These are people who had no known risks for HIV acquisition,” said Anna Stadelman-Behar, a CDC epidemiologist told The Washington Post. “It was a shock to them definitely.” VIP Spa was shut down after the first client was diagnosed, and state inspectors found a raft of horrifying lapses: unlabeled tubes filled with blood, unwrapped syringes, and equipment being improperly reused. Public health investigators found that women with HIV had used the spa and theorized that reused needles or blood was the culprit. The facials involve injecting a client with their own blood through microneedles to supposedly spur the growth of collagen and new skin cells.Read it at The Washington PostRead more at The Daily Beast.

As the Supreme Court weighs whether Donald Trump is shielded from prosecution for acts committed while president, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he opposes Trump’s view of absolute immunity.McConnell spoke with Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker Thursday for a pre-recorded interview set to air Sunday.During their talk, Welker inquired whether McConnell stood by his February 2021 comment—made just after he voted to acquit “shameful” Trump during his Jan. 6-related impeachment trial—that former presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution.“As we sit here, Donald Trump's attorneys are arguing before the Supreme Court that presidents are immune from criminal...

Columbia University’s faculty senate will vote Friday on a watered-down resolution rebuking school President Nemat Shafik for her handling of the Gaza protest that has rocked the campus and her testimony before Congress. The New York Times reports that the body is concerned that a vote to outright censure Shafik could result in her ouster at a time when she is under fierce pressure from Republicans in Washington, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who took the extraordinary step of showing up to the campus. “It really isn’t a precedent any university wants to set,” Carol Garber, a professor of behavioral sciences and a senator, told the paper. “We shouldn’t be bullied by someone in Congress.” Shafik infuriated some senators by calling police to dismantle the encampment of protesters against the war in Gaza after its 13-member executive committee voted against such a move. At a faculty meeting this week, Shafik reportedly told faculty that bringing the NYPD onto campus failed to solve the problem because the protesters just moved camp.Read it at The New York TimesRead more at The Daily Beast.

More than 3,500 people will be evacuated Friday from an area around the FSV Mainz 05 soccer stadium in Germany as authorities attempt to diffuse a massive, active World War II bomb that was discovered there this week. The explosive, an 1100-pound American aerial bomb, was found as the Bundesliga team’s stadium, MEWA Arena, was having renovations done. League officials are banking on a successful diffusion, with Mainz’ match against Cologne still slated to kick off as planned on Sunday. The operation is sure to cause a headache for many on Friday, however, as local officials have closed major roads near the bomb site and are set to evacuate homes and apartment buildings. Mainz, which is situated in west Germany, less than 100 miles from the French border, was severely damaged during World War II. It was on the receiving end of more than 30 air raids by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force, and was later the site of ground clashes between allied and axis troops. Read it at CBS SportsRead more at The Daily Beast.

The search for a missing Iowa trucker came to a tragic end Wednesday, with loved ones revealing David Schultz’ body was found lying in a field, his cowboy boots still on and his keys in his pocket—details police used to identify him.Schultz, 53, disappeared without a trace on Nov. 21 in Sac City, Iowa, where his truck was left abandoned, loaded with hogs he was set to deliver to a farm 10 miles down the road. His keys and phone were left in his rig, and his jacket was found in a nearby ditch, police said.A months-long search ensued, with...

Let us be clear: it is mesmerizing, a delicious treat, a little surreal, and utterly thrilling to watch Jessica Lange act on stage in Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions (2nd Stage, to June 16). In this Broadway play, she plays Phyllis, the louche, erratic, loving, and extremely not-loving mother of Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger). The play, set in various apartments inside and outside the Beltway of Washington D.C., spans 1964 to the 21st century, and Phyllis in various stages of detachment from her children and the world around her.The one constant is this...

Donald Trump’s claim that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 was less hateful than pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses lately was “repugnant and divisive,” the White House shot back Thursday night.After proceedings in his criminal trial in New York concluded for the day, Trump said the torch-lit rally on the campus of the University of Virginia—in which participants chanted “Jews will not replace us” and a Neo-Nazi murdered a counter-protester with his car and injured thirty others—was “a little peanut” compared to the largely peaceful encampments springing up on college campuses in recent weeks.“It was nothing compared,...

A passerby interrupted a local television interview Tuesday with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to start a fight with one of Mahan’s security personnel, leading to an arrest for felony battery on a police officer, among other charges, local media reported.During an interview with KRON, which captured video of the altercation, Mahan was speaking on camera when a man, who police have identified as 35-year-old Wesley Pollard, approached the security detail from behind Mahan and began swearing.After Pollard got into frame beside Mahan, the mayor told him, “Sorry, we’re doing an interview, sir.” Pollard soon spoke to Mahan’s security guard,...

The extraordinary claim by Rebel Wilson that she was invited to a drug-fueled orgy by a minor royal at an LA party was greeted with wry amusement by friends of some hard-partying members of the aristocracy and minor royals this week.Dubbed the “narco-toffs” by their peers, there has always been a section of the upper class that has incorporated copious drug taking alongside the more traditional society pursuits of hunting, shooting and fishing.Take the famously dissolute John Hervey, the 7th Marquess of Bristol who inherited a vast fortune but died penniless from drug addiction in 1999. The writer Anthony Haden-Guest...

Testimony in Donald Trump’s trial on Thursday revealed a list of other celebrities who allegedly dished out cash—or favors—to have the rights to negative stories purchased and killed by the National Inquirer. Trump has been infamously accused of calling on the magazine’s publisher, David Pecker, to kill negative stories about him during his campaign and presidency’s early days, allegations at the center of Trump’s alleged hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels in 2016. While testifying about this pay-to-kill strategy, however, Pecker also threw a number of other celebrities under the bus who he claimed had reached an agreement with him to...

Following news that Emilio Garcia, a former cameraman for rap star Megan Thee Stallion, is suing the rapper for withholding wages and creating a “hostile work environment,” including forcing him to watch her have sex in a car, another former employee of the rapper has come forward to corroborate some of his claims.Megan Thee Stallion, whose real name is Megan Pete, denied Garcia’s allegations soon after they were made, with her attorney, Alex Spiro, telling The Daily Beast, “This is an employment claim for money—with no sexual harassment claim filed and with salacious accusations to attempt to embarrass her. We...

A Maryland high school athletic director was arrested Thursday after police said he used artificial intelligence to generate a fake audio clip of a principal making racist and antisemitic remarks—an alleged frame-job believed to have been in retaliation after the school official opened a probe into him. Dazhon Darien was arrested at Baltimore’s international airport on Thursday, three months after the fake voice recording of Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert circulated far and wide, announced Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough.Eiswert’s voice, which McCullough and AI experts believe was simulated, made disparaging comments about Black students, which make up...

Once upon a time Fox News gleefully mocked its cable-news rivals for their breathless promotion of disgraced former Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti, who was once hyped as Donald Trump’s “worst nightmare” and even floated as a possible presidential candidate.Now that the convicted felon is defending the ex-president as a “victim of the system” in the hush money case, begging to testify on Trump’s behalf and trashing Daniels, his former client, as an unstable liar, the tables have turned: Avenatti is now a commodity in the Fox News universe, scoring a primetime interview from prison, where he is serving...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling for MSNBC to ban Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt from its airwaves over recent comments he made about college students protesting against the war in Gaza.During an appearance last Friday on Morning Joe, Greenblatt railed against the pro-Palestinian protests raging at Columbia University and other college campuses, describing them as antisemitic and threatening to Jewish students. He also took a shot at the two main organizations behind the demonstrations—the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.“Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like...

The news that Harvey Weinstein’s New York rape conviction was overturned left his victims and #MeToo advocates reeling in disgust. But the disgraced Hollywood mogul was so happy he cried tears of joy.And now the 72-year-old, who has a host of medical problems that go far beyond his infamously deformed genitalia, is looking forward to being transferred from a bleak upstate prison to a lockup in his old stomping grounds of New York City.“Today is a big deal for him. He wants to get the hell out of there,” his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said of Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome,...