Judge rules that Washington DC performing arts venue cannot be renamed without an act of Congress

A judge on Friday ordered the removal of Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, ruling that the prestigious Washington DC venue cannot be renamed without an act of Congress.

US district judge Christopher Cooper in Washington directed the Trump administration to take down all physical signage bearing Trump’s name and to eliminate any references to a “Trump Kennedy Center” from official materials within 14 days.

“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” Cooper wrote in a 94-page opinion. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

New poll results show 53 percent of those surveyed couldn't recall struggling harder to make ends meet

A majority of Americans now say the cost of living is the worst they can remember — and most of them blame President Donald Trump for their predicament.

Poll results published Friday by Politico showed 53 percent of those surveyed couldn't recall struggling harder to make ends meet, up from 46 percent in November.

The poll by Public First also found 46 percent felt Trump was fully or mostly responsible for the state of the economy, unchanged from six months ago.

A federal immigration officer wanted in the shooting of a Venezuelan man during the Trump administration’s Minnesota crackdown was arrested Friday in Texas, authorities said.

Christian Castro, of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, was taken into custody 11 days after Minneapolis prosecutors charged him with assault and falsely reporting a crime in the Jan. 14 nonfatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.

Hennepin County, Minnesota prosecutors said the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension located Castro, 52, in Texas, and the Texas Rangers said they assisted in the arrest in Cameron County, which borders Mexico in the southernmost part of the state.

A federal judge in Miami made a striking turnabout on Friday, reopening President Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S. and saying that she wanted to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception.”

The ruling by the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, was a significant blow both to Mr. Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department. After the president withdrew the suit, senior department officials released a pair of extraordinary agreements that settled the case by establishing a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of government “weaponization” by Democrats.

The deal also conferred lucrative tax benefits on Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses.

Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to bring the case back to life and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.

Before she closed the case, Judge Williams, an Obama appointee, had questioned whether the lawsuit presented an actual conflict that she could adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was on both sides of the suit, bringing claims against a federal agency that he controlled. When she closed it, she noted there was no “settlement of record,” but shortly after, the Justice Department released its agreement foreclosing the action.

In her brief but stern order on Friday, Judge Williams said that she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr. Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies.

Asserting that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in a case before her, she ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the case should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud” and whether Mr. Trump had colluded with his own government to settle the case “to avoid judicial scrutiny.”

She pointed to reporting by The New York Times that described how the I.R.S. had prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining defenses against the suit that the Justice Department did not take up in court.

Lawyers for the former judges hailed Judge Williams’s decision.

“The judges and their counsel greatly appreciate the seriousness with which the court is addressing these grievous allegations,” said Norman Eisen, who represented the former judges. “We stand ready to work with the court as it investigates this matter.”

Donald Trump has claimed he could approve an Iran peace deal on Friday that contains major concessions from Tehran, including the opening of the strait of Hormuz and the elimination of the country’s nuclear programme. However, top Iranian officials signalled a final agreement had not been reached.

The two versions indicate Trump may once again be practising his “art of the deal” as he seeks to talk his way out of a war that has disrupted global energy supplies and rocked the world economy.

Trump emerged from the White House situation room after spending more than two hours with senior aides but did not immediately announce his decision. The New York Times, citing a senior administration official, reported that Trump had not made a decision on the peace deal.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/40454349

8 weeks almost to the day. I start on June 15th!