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Donna Summer, Gay Icon, Dead At 63 — Report

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Donna Summer, the gay icon and Queen of Disco has died at the age of 63, after a battle with cancer, according to a report at TMZ:

We’re told Summer was in Florida at the time of her death. She was 63 years old.

Sources close to Summer tell us … the singer was trying to keep the extent of her illness under wraps. We spoke to someone who was with Summer a couple of weeks ago … who says she didn’t seem too bad.

In fact, we’re told she was focused on trying to finish up an album she had been working on.

Summer was a 5-time Grammy winner who shot to superstardom in the ’70s with iconic hits like “Last Dance,” “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls.”

“Summer was the first artist to have three consecutive double albums reach number one on the US Billboard chart, and she also charted four number-one singles in the United States within a thirteen-month period,” notes Wikipedia, which also confirms the star’s passing.

Developing story, stay tuned.

Image: Wikipedia, by Harrywad

 

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News

Donald Trump Says Iran ‘Will Agree to Major Weapons Inspections’ to Ensure ‘Nuclear Honesty’

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President Donald Trump announced on Monday that Iran “will agree” to allow weapon inspectors into the country in a slightly confusing social media post.

“Everybody is fully aware that Iran will agree to have Major Weapons Inspections in order to ensure ‘Nuclear Honesty’ long into the future,” the president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

Vice President JD Vance has been handling the negotiations with Iran to end the military conflict started by the United States and Israel at the end of February. Vance said earlier today that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency would be allowed to enter Iran. The inspectors could be in the country as soon as Monday, according to the Washington Post.

READ MORE: Large Majority of Americans Say Iran Conflict Should End, Hasn’t Met Any of Trump’s Goals

Trump’s wording, however, is somewhat hard to parse. When he says “everyone is fully aware,” is Trump referring to Vance’s Monday announcement that had been widely reported? Or is Trump attempting to cast doubt, suggesting Iran may somehow be pulling a fast one, allowing inspections to provide cover for a weapons program?

Either way, the allowing of weapons inspectors into Iran is similar to what former President Barack Obama’s administration negotiated for in 2015. The Obama-era deal called for IAEA inspectors to make sure Iran was complying with the deal, and was not developing nuclear weapons. But in 2018, after Trump ended the agreement, Iran started to block IAEA inspectors from parts of their nuclear program. Since then, IAEA inspectors do not know the status of Iran’s enriched uranium, according to the Washington Post.

One year ago from Monday, the U.S. struck Iranian sites believed to hold stockpiles of enriched uranium. Since then, Trump has claimed that the strike “completely and totally obliterated” the country’s nuclear enrichment facilities, however, this has never been verified. Even at the time, the Pentagon said that Iran’s nuclear program had only been “degraded…by two years.” Trump’s national intelligence director testified prior to the strike that there was no evidence that Iran’s existing nuclear program was meant to build weapons, according to the Military Times.

Iran has long promised not to build or obtain nuclear weapons. In 1970, Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which deemed the country a non-nuclear state.

While Trump has warned that Iran could have a nuclear bomb “within six months,” the first report from the International Atomic Energy Agency since the Iran conflict started says that there has been no major change to the country’s nuclear program, according to Reuters.

Image via Reuters

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Federal Judge Quashes ‘Retaliatory’ Subpoenas Against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

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Six grand jury subpoenas were quashed by a federal judge Wednesday, when it was decided that the subpoenas were filed to retaliate against Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s administration and the city governments of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of the District of Minnesota made his ruling public on Monday, granting the motion requested by the Minnesota officials to quash grand jury subpoenas related to Minnesota declaring itself to be a “sanctuary” state.

Last December, the Department of Homeland Security deployed over 3,000 agents to Minnesota as part of the largest immigration-related operation in the department’s history, Operation Metro Surge. After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by DHS agents, the state of Minnesota as well as the twin cities challenged Operation Metro Surge in court, prompting President Donald Trump to rail against the local officials on social media.

READ MORE: Trump Dangles Another Insurrection Act Threat for Minnesota

Days after Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul filed suit, news reports revealed that the Department of Justice had begun to investigate Walz and Minnesota Mayor Jacob Frey. Trump administration officials said that by not supporting the actions of DHS, Walz and Frey were breaking the law.

The Minnesotan officials argued that the subpoenas were “issued as part of an unconstitutional effort to coerce” them into working with DHS and ICE.

Judge Schiltz found that though grand juries traditionally “have broad investigatory powers,” the subpoenas had exceeded those powers. Schiltz agreed that the subpoenas were in violation of the Tenth Amendment, allowing states some degree of autonomy from the federal government.

Schiltz wrote that he had “no doubt” the subpoenas were issued for the “forbidden purposes” of attempting to “harass” or “coerce” Walz and Frey “into taking official action…. a blatantly unlawful and unethical use the grand-jury process.”

“On the one hand, the evidence that the challenged subpoenas were issued for unlawful reasons is overwhelming. On the other hand, the Department has struggled-without success-to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas,” Schiltz wrote, pointing out that the “public record… is replete with direct evidence of the Trump administration—including the highest-ranking officials of the Department—threatening and attempting to punish states and localities that have adopted ‘sanctuary’ policies.”

“To be clear, the Court agrees with the Department that a grand-jury subpoena need not be supported by probable cause. At the same time, a grand-jury subpoena cannot be issued for an improper purpose. The fact that connections between the information sought in the subpoenas and any possible criminal violation range from extremely weak to nonexistent only adds to the overwhelming evidence that these subpoenas were not issued to investigate, but to harass, coerce, and retaliate,” Schiltz added.

Image via Shutterstock

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GOP Rep Demands Biden’s Pardons to Be ‘Declared Null and Void’

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Rep. James Comer (R-KY) appeared on Fox Business to demand that former President Joe Biden’s pardons made on the final day of his term be nullified.

Comer appeared on Mornings With Maria Monday, demanding that Biden’s last-day pardons be undone, particularly one granted to former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“There were never any meetings that Joe Biden had with his staff on these pardons,” Comer said, according to a clip surfaced by journalist Aaron Rupar, dismissing host Maria Bartiromo’s statement that it was merely that the pardons wouldn’t count because they were signed with an autopen rather than by hand.

READ MORE: Trump Is Promising Mass White House Pardons: Report

“The defense is: There were never any scheduled meetings on his calendar… There was not a single person involved in the pardon process, in the decision making on who authorized the auto-pen, that ever met with Joe Biden and discussed the individual pardon. So, there’s no evidence Joe Biden had any decision making in the pardon process. So, I think that alone is more than enough evidence to declare all the pardons issued by Joe Biden in the last day of his presidency null and void.”

Comer’s comments came after outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gabbard said the documents show a connection between the United States and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, reigniting debunked claims that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak.

The autopen, a device that stores the motions of a person’s signature and can automatically recreate it, has been at the center of a number of right wing conspiracy theories. Though it is a fact that Biden often used an autopen to automate the document-signing process, he is far from the first president to use it, according to NPR. Moreover, there is no evidence that Biden did in fact use an autopen for these particular pardons.

But even if he did, it would not matter. Nothing in the legal code requires a pardon to have a hand-signed signature. The president is granted the power to issue pardons or grant clemency in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. There is no mechanism through which Congress or another president can revoke a completed pardon. A president can revoke a pardon before it has been accepted by the pardonee—as happened in 1869 and again in 2008 under President George W. Bush—but once the pardon has been completed, it is forever. The only person who can go against a presidential pardon is the pardonee themselves if they refuse to accept it.

Not to mention that while the Department of Justice or other officials can make recommendations on whether or not to grant a person clemency, there is no requirement that the president must meet with anyone to discuss a pardon. The president has full discretion on whom to pardon. A pardonee does not have to be convicted or even indicted—for example, President Gerald Ford preemptively pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, from being tried for any of the actions that led to his resignation.

Though he’s called for Biden’s pardons to be revoked in the past, President Donald Trump has also made a number of controversial pardons. Most famously, one of his first acts upon taking office for the second time was to pardon anyone involved with the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. If Biden’s pardons could be revoked, it stands to reason that a future president could revoke many of Trump’s pardons.

Image via Reuters

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