An Arizona grand jury indicted a group of Republican figures over the effort to overturn the 2020 election, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“Arizona’s election was free and fair. The people of Arizona elected President Biden,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, on Wednesday in a video from Phoenix.

“Unwilling to accept this fact, the defendants charged by the state grand jury allegedly schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency,” she continued. “Whatever their reasoning was, the plot to violate the law must be answered for, and I was elected to uphold the law of this state.”

Eighteen Republicans were indicted, but officials initially released only 11 names because the rest were not yet notified. The Associated Press and other outlets identified some of the other defendants based on their descriptions.

Eleven of the Republican figures met a month after the election at the Republican headquarters in Phoenix and signed a certificate claiming to be the electors in order to re-install former President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

“The scheme, had it succeeded, would have deprived Arizona’s voters of their right to have their votes counted for their chosen president,” Mayes continued. “It effectively would have made their right to vote meaningless.

Others indicted in Arizona included Boris Epshteyn, a former White House aide, and Kelli Ward, the former chair of the Arizona Republican Party. Trump is listed as an un-indicted co-conspirator.

The charges include felony counts of conspiracy, fraud, and forgery.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung released a brief statement criticizing the indictments.

“Another example of Democrats’ weaponization of the legal system. Christina Bobb is a former Marine Corps officer, who served our nation and the President with distinction. The Democrat platform for 2024: if you can’t beat them, try to throw them in jail,” Cheung said.

Special counsel Jack Smith has charged the former president with alleged crimes related to the effort to overturn the election while Republicans have been charged by several states, including Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada.

“I will not allow American democracy to be undermined,” said Mayes in the video Wednesday. “It’s too important.”

Here’s more about the indictment:

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Democratic Rep. Donald Payne Jr. of New Jersey has passed away at the age of 65, his office said in a statement.

“Congressman Payne, Jr. experienced a physical accident at home on April 6, 2024, which necessitated hospitalization. During his treatment for this health issue, he faced medical complications due to diabetes and high blood pressure that led to subsequent cardiorespiratory arrest. Despite the dedicated efforts of the medical staff to treat him and improve his health, they were unable to prevent his passing unfortunately. Congressman Payne, Jr.’s passing comes 12 years after his father, Congressman Donald M. Payne, Sr., died in office on March 6, 2012,” the statement noted.

Payne Jr. took office in late 2012 after winning a special election held to fill the vacancy created by the death of his father.

“With his signature bowtie, big heart, and tenacious spirit, Donald embodied the very best of public service,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, said in a statement.

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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, described Payne Jr. as “a good friend, highly effective public servant and compassionate leader.”

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“I got to know Donald not just as a congressman, but as a friend, having served with him on the Congressional Colorectal Cancer Caucus focused on helping men and women overcome a pervasive form of cancer,” GOP Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee said in a statement. “His legacy will be one of a tireless commitment to public service and fierce advocacy for his constituents for over a decade in Congress.”

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The Department of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that an illegal alien had been arrested for child molestation after local officials ignored an ICE detainer on a previous molestation charge.

ICE issued a press release detailing the arrest of the unnamed 30-year-old immigrant at his residence in Bladensburg, Maryland, on April 15.

The Honduran national was arrested in July and charged with felony carnal knowledge of child 13-14 years of age without force, according to the release.

ICE says officers issued a detainer to hold the man for possible deportation, but the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center denied the request and released the man on a $10,000 bond on July 10.

Fairfax police officers then arrested the same immigrant in February on two counts of the same charge and also one additional charge of felony indecent liberties with a child less than 15 years of age.

Fairfax officials released him again on the same day before ICE could issue a detainer.

ICE said that deportation officers arrested him in April and served him with a notice to appear before a Department of Justice immigration judge.

ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations field director Liana Castano lambasted Fairfax officials for ignoring a detainer request and allowing the illegal immigrant to reoffend.

“This Honduran noncitizen stands accused of some very serious crimes and represented a threat to the children of the Washington, D.C. area,” said Castano.

“When local jurisdictions have policies in place which prohibit them from cooperating with ICE ERO and from honoring our lawfully issued detainers and administrative warrants, they put the suspects, law enforcement officers, and most importantly, the members of our local communities at risk,” she added. “ERO Washington, D.C. will continue to prioritize public safety by apprehending and removing the most egregious noncitizen threats from our neighborhoods.”

A similar incident unfolded in December when Fairfax officials ignored an ICE detainer on a 21-year-old immigrant also from Honduras who had raped a minor and produced child pornography.

ICE officials criticized local authorities who ignored detainers at that time as well.

“When ICE detainers are ignored by local authorities, the public is put at risk; unfortunately, this time the result was the unnecessary injury of a federal law enforcement officer while prosecuting the arrest of a noncitizen charged with sexually abusing a Virginia minor and producing child sexual abuse material,” said Deputy Field Office Director Erik Weiss.

Here’s more about the prior detainer failure:

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A New Jersey woman is alive and improving after undergoing experimental transplant surgery involving a kidney from a genetically modified pig.

Earlier this month, Lisa Pisano — a 54-year-old grandmother from Cookstown, New Jersey, about 20 miles southeast of Trenton — was practically on death’s doorstep. She was in desperate need of a kidney transplant, but antibodies in her tissues made finding a match nearly impossible.

She was also in heart failure, but because she was on dialysis, doctors hesitated to implant a heart pump known as a left ventricular assist device because of the high mortality rates for dialysis patients undergoing that kind of procedure.

Miserable and seemingly out of options, Pisano suddenly received a message of hope from Dr. Robert Montgomery, the director of NYU Langone Transplant Institute. Montgomery and his team offered to perform two separate procedures that, if successful, would at least buy Pisano some more time with her loved ones.

The first surgery, which occurred on April 4, involved implanting the LVAD device. Eight days later, medical teams then transplanted a kidney from a pig into Pisano’s body.

Doctors have dabbled in xenotransplantation — or cross-species organ transplants — for some time, but with little long-term success. Last year, two men received hearts transplanted from pigs at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, but both men died within months. To lessen the chances of organ rejection and improve xenotransplantation possibilities, scientists at United Therapeutics Corp. genetically engineered pigs so that they wouldn’t produce a sugar that the human body does not recognize.

Dr. Montgomery chose a kidney from among those genetically modified pigs at United Therapeutics to implant inside Pisano. The pig’s kidney was also outfitted with the pig’s thymus gland to further reduce the chances of rejection.

Montgomery’s plan seemed to work. After the pig kidney was implanted in Pisano, it began producing urine almost immediately, causing doctors and nurses to erupt in cheers right there in the operating room.

While Pisano will likely have to stay at the hospital for several months, she has already shown dramatic signs of improvement. With the help of a walker and several physical therapists, she even took a few steps on April 22, just 10 days after the transplant.

“I’m feeling better and better and better every day,” she told NPR.

Prior to the surgeries, Pisano said she felt “horrible” and couldn’t perform even basic tasks. “I couldn’t even cook dinner,” she said. “I couldn’t vacuum. I couldn’t play with my grandkids because I couldn’t bend down to get them. I just couldn’t do anything with them.”

Now, she and her family are grateful that she has better quality of life. “With this surgery, I get to see my wife smile again,” her husband, Todd, said.

Though Dr. Montgomery cautions that Pisano’s long-term prognosis is unclear, he’s likewise pleased with the results so far. “When we brought her into the hospital, she was in really bad shape,” he said. But for the moment, he said, “her kidney is working better than yours or mine. So we’re optimistic that she’ll be able to go home and spend time with her children and grandchildren and live a comfortable life.”

That’s exactly what Pisano intends to do. “Any time on this Earth is better than none,” she said. “So if I get two years, that’s two years that I didn’t have before.”

Dr. Tatsuo Kawai of Mass General performed a similar pig-kidney transplant on a patient last month. That patient, Richard “Rick” Slayman, is doing well five weeks later even after some initial concerns about rejection. His most recent biopsy showed no signs of rejection, the AP reported.

Despite these hopeful signs, L. Syd Johnson, a bioethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University, cautions that xenotransplantation is still experimental and worries about the medical industry exploiting “desperate patients who have no other options.”

“Maybe those patients will benefit,” she added. “Maybe they believe they will benefit and that the risks are worthwhile for them. But I do worry about whether or not we are taking advantage of particularly vulnerable and desperate patients in conducting these experiments.”

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Even though former President Donald Trump is already the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee, Nikki Haley, who dropped her Republican presidential primary bid last month, won more than 16% of the vote in the Pennsylvania Republican presidential primary, unofficial results indicate.

Haley got more than 157,000 votes while Trump received more than 790,000, according to the unofficial results.

“In Pennsylvania, you can only vote for the candidates in the same political party you have named in your voter registration. For example, if you registered to vote as a member of the Republican Party then you can vote in the Republican primary, but not the Democratic primary,” according to vote.pa.gov.

On the other side of the political aisle, where President Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who dropped his primary bid last month, won more than 6% of the vote in the Pennsylvania Democratic presidential primary, according to the unofficial results. Those unofficial results indicate that Biden received more than 941,000 votes.

Regarding Pennsylvania’s presidential voting history, Trump’s victory in 2016 was the lone red island within a sea of blue, as Democrats won the Keystone State in each of the other presidential contests from 1992 to 2020.

Biden, who is already the oldest president in American history, would be 86 by the end of a second term if he were to win re-election later this year while Trump would be 82 by the end of his second term if he were to win the 2024 contest.

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Washington state police shot and killed a man they had confronted during a sting operation meant to catch online child predators.

The fatal incident unfolded on April 17 at about 3 p.m. at the DoubleTree Suites hotel in Tukwila.

The Seattle Police Department says that the 67-year-old man believed he was meeting two young girls aged 7 and 11 years old in the hotel room. When the man was confronted by members of the Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, he appeared to pull a gun from his pocket and was gunned down.

“A struggle ensued,” said SPD deputy chief Eric Barden in a media briefing. “Two officers fired rounds, hitting the suspect.”

Police released body camera video from the incident. One police officer was grazed in the leg during the shooting and was treated for a minor injury.

A witness to the shooting from Texas named Erik Wehrmeister told KING-TV about what he saw.

“I heard a loud pop, I assumed it might have been maintenance. Seconds later, another pop and after that, a rapid succession of gunfire,” Wehrmeister said. “I turned around and saw someone shooting downward into the floor, and that’s when I made a run for the kitchen into the corridor and barricaded in one of the offices.”

He said that he called 911 and found out there were already police at the hotel.

“There were plain clothes officers immediately afterward that I saw in the lobby,” Wehrmeister added.

The man was declared dead at the scene.

The video was edited by many news stations, but a longer version of the footage was published by the Police Activity Channel on YouTube.

The man who died was later identified as retired Navy doctor Bruce Coval Meneley. The man served in Guantanamo Bay and spoke to the New York Times in 2016 about abuses at the base.

Meneley had been previously arrested in a prostitution sting in 2017, and police said his phone number was implicated in two other investigations involving prostitution. In an interview with investigators at that time, Meneley admitted that he had also been arrested on similar charges in Texas, but his sentence had been diverted to community service.

Here’s the video of the shooting:

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A black entrepreneur is angry and frustrated that his vegan shop has been burglarized by young black males, and he is demanding the community step up to do something about it.

Chef Imani Greer is the owner and CEO of Roasted and Raw a plant-based restaurant in downtown Oakland on 14th and Jefferson streets. He says that the constant burglaries are threatening to shut down his business.

“It’s everything. It’s crying, it’s rage, it’s anger, it’s frustration, it’s defeat,” said Greer to KTVU-TV on Tuesday.

He said his business suffered a fourth burglary recently after only being open for about two years.

“It’s a very defeating feeling to just try so hard every day and even as a leader you don’t have time to grieve,” Greer said.

The latest break-in happened on Monday at about 4:30 a.m.

“Couple guys, young guys, broke in, they basically hit the glass. Then they just go,” Greer said. “It’s almost a routine.”

Prior to opening up his brick and mortar shop in downtown Oakland, Greer had operated the business as a pop-up in Jack London Square. He has over 20 years’ experience as a chef.

“They have been … my own people.”

He said that the restaurant was just celebrating record sales in March when it was burglarized the last time.

“Unfortunately, all four of our break-ins have been young black males. They have been my own, my own people,” Greer continued. “And it’s heartbreaking.”

When asked who was to blame for the situation, he said society has to look at the home and schools.

“This is an Oakland problem. It’s not City Hall’s fault, it’s everyone’s fault. We all need to step up and do something,” said Greer.

He went on to say that even if he thought about leaving downtown, it would be tough to do logistically.

“Just because you get broken into a few times doesn’t mean you can just pack up and leave. You’re stuck into a lease, that if you leave, you’re gonna have to deal with an eviction court,” Greer explained.

“Hold yourself accountable. Grow.”

The business owner provided security video showing the burglars climbing into the restaurant after breaking the glass on a door.

Greer had a message for criminals who used their personal circumstances as an excuse to steal from others.

“Hold yourself accountable. Grow. Just because you were raised a certain way or weren’t raised a certain way. Just because you come from a certain area, we can change,” said Greer.

“We can improve,” he concluded. “There are jobs out here.”

Here’s the interview with Chef Greer:

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The Senate’s newly passed $95 billion package does next to nothing for Americans and does much more to fund endless war — especially with the billions in the package going toward Ukraine.

“It does not secure our border; it goes in and takes more money and straps your children and your grandchildren with another $95 billion. It gives money to Taiwan, which hacks off the Chinese,” Glenn Beck explains.

However, the blame can’t be laid entirely at the feet of the Democrats. Republicans are also fueling the war machine, as 45% of them want Ukrainian aid.

“I’ll never be able to make the case to the Lindsey Grahams of the world,” Glenn says, disappointed. “Is he just a war hawk that just wants war all the time because he actually believes it? I don’t know, but I will tell you this: The world is changing.”

“The biggest thing that is changing is our politicians are not following the Constitution. That’s the root of all our evils. We are not following the Constitution of the United States. Congress is no longer in charge of the purse. Congress doesn’t pass the laws. It’s all left in the hands of bureaucrats,” he continues.

“Before you know it, you’re a freaking slave, and who do you go to? It doesn’t matter who you vote for because they don’t make the laws anymore,” he adds.

Glenn believes this has to change unless we want to continue down a path where our freedom shrinks while the war machine grows.

“When you wake up, you start seeing, wow, this doesn’t work. Well, what doesn’t work? The Constitution or the people who are ignoring it?” Glenn says.

To hear more, watch the clip below.

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