Donna Summer – the Queen of Disco — died this morning after a battle with cancer … TMZ has learned.

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.”

She continued her dominance in the ’80s with “She Works Hard for the Money” and “This Time I Know It’s for Real.”

Summer and her producer Giorgio Moroder defined the dance music era of the ’70s and influenced acts like Duran Duran and David Bowie to enter the genre.

Summer married Brooklyn Dreams singer Bruce Sudano back in 1980. They had two daughters together.

Source: TMZ.

My Two Cents: She’s like a plastic sex doll with just as much talent and brains. Good for her for adding a few extra seconds to her fifteen minutes. I ain’t gonna lie though, I’d hit it fore sure. End Two Cents.

Inflatable doll look-alike and former reality star Heidi Montag somehow weaseled her way back into the news with the release of a new album, “Dreams Come True.”

Looking as desperate as ever on the cover, “Dreams Come True” is Montag’s sophomore effort and a follow-up to 2010′s “Superficial,” which sold fewer than 1,000 copies in the first week.

The EP contains just four songs, all of which have been released before.

In much the same way as her body is surgically enhanced, “Your Love Found Me,” “Party Is Wherever I Am,” “No More” and “Overdosin” are all computer enhanced and autotuned versions of Montag’s voice. It has been so heavily altered that it is barely recognizable as a human voice — just as Montag’s 10 plastic surgeries left her barely recognizable as a human.

The good news for Montag: “Dreams Come True” currently has a three and a half star rating on iTunes out of 51 user reviews, so we know that 51 people have either purchased or at least listened to Montag’s album since it was released on April 11.

Source: The Daily Caller.

Two actresses became victims of nude-photo scandals over the weekend — or at least that’s what some hackers would like you to believe. “Mad Men” star Christina Hendricks and her “I Don’t Know How She Does It” co-star Olivia Munn reportedly had nude photos leaked.

Hendricks’ rep denies that any scandalous photos you see of the star on the Internet are real. “Christina’s phone was in fact hacked and photos were stolen,” Hendricks’ rep told E! News. “The proper authorities have been contacted in hopes of rectifying this situation.” The rep added, “The topless image is fake and not an image of Christina.”

Meanwhile, Munn laughed off photos that anyone might believe are of her au naturel. “If you ever hacked my phone, these are the photos you’d find,” she tweeted along with shots of a kitten and a baby.

TMZ reported that sources close to Munn confirm that while some of the shots floating around — namely ones in which she isn’t naked — are real and have previously been tweeted by the actress, the completely nude photos in which you can’t see the model’s face aren’t her. Someone is apparently trying to pass herself off as the TV personality.

Munn and Hendricks are hardly the first actresses to get caught up in leaked-photo controversies. Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis (along with her “Friends With Benefits” co-star Justin Timberlake), Ashley Greene and Blake Lively are just a handful of A-listers who have been tied to photo scandals in the last few years.

Source: MTV.

Photos HERE.

It looks like the only dictator on the red carpet at Sunday’s Oscars ceremony will be the Academy itself.

After rumors circulated that comedian Sacha Baron Cohen — of “Borat” and “Bruno” fame — planned to attend the awards show dressed as his latest outrageous character, Admiral General Alladeen from the upcoming “The Dictator,” the Academy pulled Cohen’s invitation from the show.

The comedian was expected to attend since a film he acts in, the Martin Scorsese-directed “Hugo,” was nominated for 11 awards, including best picture. Cohen is also a voting member of the Academy.

“Unless they’re assured that nothing entertaining is going to happen on the red carpet, the Academy is not admitting Sacha Baron Cohen to the show,” a representative from Paramount Pictures, the company that produced “Hugo,” told Deadline.

The stuffy suits were none too pleased that the serious occasion could be marred by Cohen’s appearance as his Sadaam Hussein-meets-Gadhafi character.

Cohen is known for his extremely crude — and often nude — characters, who parody current events.

It’s a shame, since the consistently bland, three-hour ceremony could have used a little comic relief.

Source: The Daily Caller.

Sometimes people do things just to say they did. For David Cross, that means doing illegal drugs just feet from the President of the United States.

The comedian, known for his role as wacky Tobias Fünke on “Arrested Development,” admitted to Playboy that he snorted the white stuff in Obama’s presence at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2009.

“It was a tiny granule of coke that I put on my wrist and said, ‘Watch this. I need a witness.’ And then I ducked under the table and did it,” he told the gentleman’s magazine.

“It wasn’t like I got high. The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup. It wasn’t about that. It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president. I’m not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it.”

Source: The Daily Caller.

New Facebook group asks Prime Minister to postpone any plans to a strike of Iran’s nuclear facilities until after the Queen of Pop’s planned May 29 visit.

Recent verbal exchanges and remarks concerning alleged Israeli plans to attack Iran’s nuclear program later this year has Israelis scared, and not for the obvious reasons.

In a newly launchedFacebook page, Israeli fans of U.S. pop megastar Madonna are pleading Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off any such plans to strike Iran until the Queen of Pop’s planned show in Tel Aviv on May 29.

The group, simply and directly enough was named, “Bibi don’t start a war with Iran until after Madonna’s show on May 29.”

While the, currently relatively unpopulated, Facebook page could seem like a case of dealing with trivialities in the face of all-out war with Iran,” Israeli Madonna fans’ fears are not unsubstantiated, with a distinguished list of artists bailing out on Israeli shows in the last minute over political crises and wars.

In 2006, electro band Depeche Mode famously cancelled its planned show in Tel Aviv during what later became known as the Second Lebanon War, over the production’s apparent inability to convince its technical support team to make the trip.

The U.K. band later made it up to its Israeli fans by opening its 2009 world tour in Tel Aviv.

An earlier, and just as famous cancellation, was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bailing out of a planned 2001 show during the turbulent events of the Second Intifada.

According to the their Israeli Shuki Weiss, the cancellation came in light of the two suicide bombings over the last week, in Kiryat Motzkin and Jerusalem, and in the wake of warnings by the American foreign ministry to U.S. citizens not to visit the area.

The U.S. band is scheduled to conduct its first show in Israel since 2001 this summer.

A more recent high-profile case was the sudden cancellation of a planned show by U.S. alternative veterans The Pixies, announced in the aftermath of the IDF’s raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla which resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish nationals.

Source: Haaretz.

Roseanne Barr said Thursday she’s running for the Green Party’s presidential nomination — and it’s no joke.

The actress-comedian said in a statement that she’s a longtime supporter of the party and looks forward to working with people who shareher values. She said the two major parties aren’t serving the American people.

“The Democrats and Republicans have proven that they are servants — bought and paid for by the 1% — who are not doing what’s in the best interest of the American people,” Barr said.

Occupy Wall Street protesters popularized the “We are the 99 percent” slogan in their fight against economic disparity and perceived corporate greed.

Barr has submitted paperwork to the Green Party for her candidacy. The party’s presidential nominee will be selected at a convention in Baltimore in July.

Barr said she has been fighting for working-class families and women for decades.

“I will barnstorm American living rooms,” she said in a candidate questionnaire submitted to the Green Party. “Mainstream media will be unable to ignore me, but more importantly they will be unable to overlook the needs of average Americans in the run-up to the 2012 election.”

Barr’s hit TV sitcom “Roseanne” aired from 1988 to 1997 and earned her an Emmy and a Golden Globe. She played a wise-cracking mom in the comedy about a blue-collar family. Barr has a 46-acre macadamia nut farm in Hawaii.

Source: CBS DC.

Don Cornelius, creator of the long-running TV dance show “Soul Train,” is dead at 75 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Los Angeles police tell the Associated Press.

Cornelius’ death was discovered early Wednesday morning at his Sherman Oaks, Calif. home.

Us Weekly reports that when Cornelius was in court in 2009 for divorce proceedings, he complained of “significant health issues.”

“Soul Train” began in 1970 in Chicago and aired in syndication from 1971 to March 2006, featuring primarily African-American musicians. It brought the best R&B, soul and later hip-hop acts to TV and had teenagers dance to them. It was one of the first shows to showcase African-Americans prominently, although the dance group was racially mixed. Cornelius was the first host and executive producer.

Stars such as Ike and Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, the Jackson 5, James Brown and Stevie Wonder appeared on the show.

Watching the show became a weekly ritual in many households, especially African-American homes. Author Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote in theGrio that “It was virtually a black household ritual to do one of two things when Saturday rolled around and it was Soul Train time. One was to sway, swoon, and sing the lyrics belted out by the parade of R&B legends and top hit artists … The other ritual was to dance, or more likely stumble around the living room, trying to do our best imitation of the latest dance steps displayed by the show’s perpetual motion gyrating couples.”

Popular features on the show included the ”Soul Train Line,” where individual dancers showed off their moves between two lines of people, and the “Soul Train Scramble Board,” where dancers unscrambled letters that spelled the name of that night’s performer or a prominent African-American.

The show began each episode by welcoming viewers to “the hippest trip in America” and closed by wishing them “love, peace and soul.”

Source: MSNBC.

Actor Robert Hegyes, one of the stars of the 70s sitcom “Welcome Back Kotter”died today of an apparent heart attack.

Hegyes was best known for his role as the Puerto Rican-Jew on that show — Juan Luis Pedro Phillipo de Huevos Epstein. Epstein for short.

Hegyes reunited with John Travolta and the rest of the Sweathogs last year to accept TV Land’s 35th Anniversary Award.

He also co-starred on the hit drama, “Cagney and Lacey.”

Hegyes was in his New Jersey home this morning when he suffered the heart attack. He died at JFK Medical Center in Edison, NJ. He was 60 years old.

Hollywood actor Christian Bale was roughed up by Chinese security guards as he tried to visit a blind legal activist whose detention has sparked international outcry.

Bale, joined by a camera crew from CNN, was confronted by four men dressed in plain clothes as he tried to visit Chen Guangcheng who has been under house arrest in the Dongshigu village for 15 months.

The Oscar-winning actor, who plays superhero Batman, can be seen being pushed and shoved by the guards in the video released by CNN.

‘Why can I not visit this free man?’ Bale can be heard repeatedly asking the security officers, while they were pushing him.

In response the guards are reported to have shouted ‘Go away!’ while physically shoving Bale and the crew on Thursday.

According to the report, Bale was also punched by the guards who were aiming for his small camera in an attempt to stop him recording.

Once Bale and the crew left the area, they were pursued by a grey minivan for over half-an-hour.

‘What I really wanted to do is to shake the man’s hand and say: ‘Thank you,’ and tell him what an inspiration he is,’  a clearly disappointed Bale told CNN after the incident.

‘You know, I’m not being brave doing this,’ he added.

CONTINUED at the Daily Mail. Video at link.