Chelsea Guglielmino Beloved Batman actor Kevin Conroy has died at 66, Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed on Friday. Conroy voice-acted Batman in 15 films, plus hundreds of episodes of television and multiple video games, including the Batman: The Animated Series show and the Batman: Arkham games. He died after “a short battle with cancer,” Warner Bros. announced in a statement. Read more at The Daily Beast.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast, Getty, Asmaa Waguih, Google Maps ZAPORIZHZHYA, Ukraine—Employees at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya power plant in Ukraine , one of the biggest nuclear facilities in the world, are facing an impossible decision. Do they hold on to their critical jobs and work under daily bombardment—or do they pack up their lives and flee to safety, despite the risk of an imminent nuclear catastrophe ? Escalating attacks on the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar, where the Zaporizhzhya plant is located, have sparked global panic—and for good reason. Ukraine has [...]
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast For more than 60 years, scientists have been pointing radio antennas at the sky, hoping to overhear a broadcast from an alien civilization—proof that we’re not alone in the universe. But the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is like listening for a whisper in a hurricane. Space is incomprehensibly big. There’s noise sputtering from every direction, especially from the countless number of stars dying and being born. A signal from E.T. might be faint. We’ve got only so many instruments and so much time, money and manpower for ou [...]
David Dee Delgado/Getty As the New York attorney general investigates the Trump Organization for cooking up fake property values on official documents, lawyers revealed Monday that one of the world’s largest commercial real estate companies is also under investigation for its role in the scheme: Cushman & Wakefield. On Monday, attorneys with the office of AG Letitia James said the real estate firm is now a central player in its expanding probe into alleged bank fraud by the Trump family corporation. “They’re right in the middle of this,” assistant attorney general Austin Thompson said in court [...]
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Library of Congress/Getty/Naval Historical Center Beginning in the summer of 1862, the CSS Alabama, a Confederate ship captained by Raphael Semmes, roamed the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans to find, capture, and burn Union Navy ships. In this endeavor, the Southern ship was wildly successful. Sailing 75,000 miles around the globe and back again, “that pirate Semmes,” as the newspapers called him, sent over 60 ships to the bottom of the ocean. Their precious cargos would never support the North’s military campaigns. As a last resort, Li [...]
Fox News Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he paid for sex, engaged in sex trafficking, and had a sexual relationship with an underage girl, said Wednesday on Fox News that he feels “vindicated” because he has not yet been charged with any crime. The investigation into the Florida Republican began in the final months of the Trump administration, The New York Times reported , and remains active. It originated from an investigation into Joel Greenberg, a friend of Gaetz’s who pleaded guilty last year to six charges of sex trafficking, among [...]
Aris Messinis/Getty Confusion reigns on Russia’s state TV , as panicked lawmakers and pundits try to explain to the public why their country invaded Ukraine and now faces crushing Western sanctions . And in the process of zealous propagandists striving to justify the unfathomable, they’ve inadvertently revealed too much. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state TV on Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was directly involved in making command decisions with respect to Russia’s military activities in Ukraine. He urged : “It’s time to unite around our president,” and encouraged those w [...]
YouTube/Warner Bros They’re still making Harry Potter movies—who knew? On Monday, a new trailer dropped for Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore , the third installment in the Fantastic Beasts spinoff series and the 11th overall film in the Harry Potter Wizarding World franchise. The upcoming fantasy film will focus on Albus Dumbledore’s (Jude Law) untold backstory as he inches closer to a confrontation with his former best friend, the powerful Dark Wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen). Due to a magical blood pact the two men formed when they were younger, Dumbledor [...]
Amazon Prime Super Bowl LVI was all about mining millennial nostalgia, with pricey ads (average price: $6.5 million for a 30-second spot) featuring stars of The Sopranos , Larry David hawking crypto (?), and last but certainly not least, The Lord of the Rings . Yes, Amazon Prime dropped a teaser-trailer for their upcoming TV series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power —a series set thousands of years before the events of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, and that cost a reported $465 million, making it the most expensive season of television ever. There will reportedly be no wizards or hobbits i [...]
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty Astronomers sifting through data from a NASA planet-hunting satellite have hit the jackpot: a common type of planet 131 light-years away called TOI-1759b, with an extremely uncommon story to tell. Thanks to its close proximity to its host star, the planet's atmosphere appears to be evaporating into dead expanse of space—extremely fast, by astronomical standards. Watching this radiation-induced “photoevaporation,” reported on in a new study led by Eder Martioli at the Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica in Brazil, could help us underst [...]
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty The job hunters at VIP Human Solutions have a unique pitch for those working in sensitive security jobs in Hezbollah and the Assad regime: come work for us in Israel. Underneath a picture of the Israeli flag and a contact number with an Israeli country code, VIP Human Solutions’ website advertises itself as “VIP center for recruitment of the most distinguished in the military and security services of Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon” that “specializes in research and consultancies in the studies of security and political science in all [...]
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty Donald Trump’s January 2021 coup attempt failed to overturn the election; but Trump has succeeded in transforming the GOP into an ever more radicalized party that rewards extremism, and punishes, or even banishes , those members who fail to support ever more audacious attacks on democracy and the nation’s electoral process. The Republican Party is now institutionally oriented to work towards the anti-democratic aims of its charismatic leader, Trump . As the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection approaches, we are only now b [...]
Spokane Police For more than 60 years it was a haunting mystery: Who killed a 9-year-old girl who vanished while out selling mints in Spokane, Washington, and who was found raped and strangled to death with her own slip two weeks later? The unsolved mystery was handed down as a cold case from one generation of retiring detectives to the next. But authorities revealed this week that they have finally cracked the case of Candy Rogers, using the modern marvels of DNA. “We are tenacious. We will never give up,” Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl said at a news conference announcing the murder had be [...]
MSNBC MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan didn’t mince words on Monday night over the damage he feels Fox News has caused, citing both the network’s Iraq War advocacy and its coverage of the pandemic to claim that “people actually die as a result of watching” the conservative news channel. Hosting Hasan and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg to discuss the late Colin Powell, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes contrasted Powell’s role in misleading the American public into the Iraq War with Fox News’ efforts to “further their agenda” by using Powell’s death from COVID-19 to “discredit vaccines.” “We are exper [...]
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast Seven years ago, a pair of scientists scouring high-resolution images of space caught fleeting glimpses of a bright round object peeking from a vast cloud of icy objects more than two billion miles from Earth. As if that whole scene wasn’t exciting enough, the object appeared to be a huge comet. Thought to be between 60 and 100 miles wide, it was the biggest comet a human being had ever witnessed. And it seemed to be heading toward us, very loosely speaking. Last month the discoverers of the giant object—University of Pennsylvania astronomers [...]
CNN anchor Dana Bash on Sunday repeatedly confronted Facebook executive Nick Clegg over the social-media giant’s role in spreading dangerous misinformation ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Clegg, of course, ducked and dodged while attempting to shirk any responsibility on Facebook’s part. In the wake of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s damning testimony before the Senate , in which she detailed how the platform knowingly stokes division for profit, Clegg has made the media rounds in an effort to push back and offer a counter-narrative. Read more at The Daily Beast.
Caltech Caltech engineers are no strangers to making sophisticated robots; they are the ones NASA calls up any time they want a new little rover that can zip around Mars. But they might have outdone themselves this time, with a new (and sort of terrifying?) bipedal robot that doubles as a flying drone. Called LEONARDO (short for LEgs ONboARD drOne), the robot stands 2.5 feet tall with two high-heeled, and four tilted propellers mounted on its shoulders. LEO is designed to get around through a combination of walking and short flights. When it needs to pass obstacles or scale up or down to diffe [...]
Fort Worth Police Department A Texas man accused of killing and dismembering three people before setting them ablaze in a dumpster told police he did it because he had “an in-depth knowledge of the bible and believed he was being called to commit sacrifices,” according to an arrest warrant affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast . Jason Alan Thornburg, 41, was arrested Monday night by Fort Worth police on capital murder charges, and is being held at the county jail on $1 million bond , according to detention records. Det. Thomas O’Brien, one of the lead investigators on the case, confirmed Thorn [...]
REUTERS When the United States sued Texas on Thursday it was the latest hit in a seemingly endless game of whack-a-mole legal attempts to protect abortion rights. The Department of Justice is hoping that a federal district court in West Texas will do what the Supreme Court did not when it refused to grant an injunction last week to stop the law , which bans all abortions after 6 weeks, from taking effect. The law had been crafted to reach that outcome , by leaving enforcement to private citizens, and the Court’s conservative majority decided that it did not have authority to stop it from takin [...]
Fox News Fox News host Raymond Arroyo wildly claimed on Tuesday night that car accident deaths are being counted as COVID-19 casualties if the victim tested positive for coronavirus, citing a “couple of coroners” that he purportedly talked to as proof. Filling in for Laura Ingraham on her Fox News primetime show, Arroyo discussed the recent allegations made by two Republican Minnesota state lawmakers that the state’s coronavirus deaths could be inflated by as much as 40 percent. The unfounded claims come two weeks after a Minnesota legislator died of COVID-19 and on the same day a 41-year-old [...]