I have learned that Florida election officials are set to announce that the secretary of state has discovered and purged up to 53,000 dead voters from the voter rolls in Florida.

How could 53,000 dead voters have sat on the polls for so long?  Simple. Because Florida hadn’t been using the best available data revealing which voters have died.  Florida is now using the nationwide Social Security Death Index for determining which voters should be purged because they have died.

Here is the bad news.  Most states aren’t using the same database that Florida is.  In fact, I have heard reports that some election officials won’t even remove voters even when they are presented with a death certificate.  That means that voter rolls across the nation still are filled with dead voters, even if Florida is leading the way in detecting and removing them.

CONTINUED at PJ Media.

At 6’6″, William “Big Willie” Andrew Robinson III — a bowler hat perched atop his head, his voice booming — cut an imposing figure among the youth of South Central Los Angeles during the 1970s. That figure both belied and contributed to his mission, which was to end gang violence and racial unrest through drag racing. Robinson died this past Saturday after a short illness. He was 70.

For a life lived in the furtherance of “peace through racing,” as was his mantra, Big Willie should get the Jalopnik Peace Prize. If there were such a thing.

His seemed an impossible task in a city whose racial entrenchment began decades before. Post-war racial violence in Los Angeles traced its roots to the 1920s, when blacks began to exit a claustrophobic ghetto, seeking elbow room in traditionally white areas, and were met with fists, blackjacks, knives, and gasoline bombs.

CONTINUED at Jalopnik.

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.

Before reality TV, and even still to a very large degree now, the best known name associated with performance cars to the average person is Carroll Shelby, and with good reason. Shelby has been considered a legend in the field for decades, and his influence is still strong to this day. He died today at the age of 89, as a result of complications from an illness.

Carroll Hall Shelby was born in the tiny town of Leesburg, Texas, and suffered from poor health throughout much of his childhood. By his teenage years his health improved, and, according to stories, received a speeding ticket the very first time he was loaned his father’s Willys. His interest in moving very, very rapidly continued, as he served in World War II as a flight instructor and test pilot.

Before building the racing cars he’s known for, Shelby was a driver himself, racing for a number of teams throughout the ‘50s, including Allard, Aston Martin, and Maserati. In his last year of driving, 1959, he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans for Aston Martin.

But more than a driver, Shelby will be remembered as a man who built many, many fast cars. The first, and in many ways still most iconic Shelby came about in 1959, when Shelby obtained a license to import AC Ace cars from Britain. Shelby’s revelation was to replace the straight-6 Bristol engine with a Ford 260 V8 engine, creating a light, incredibly fast sports car. Shelby went on to work with all of the Big Three American car companies, producing such car as his Series 1 with GM mechanicals, the Dodge Viper, and the Ford Mustang Shelby line that is still in production today.

Shelby’s career hasn’t been free of controversy: Shelby’s company has been associated with firms that have allegedly used prison labor to build Shelby Mustangs, and prior to that, in the 1960s, Shelby was found to have skipped large blocks of VIN numbers on cars to give the impression many more were produced, to allow his cars to be eligible for homologated racing classes. In the 1990s, Shelby claimed to have found the “missing” chassis and frames, and began finishing and selling the cars. It was later discovered the “found” cars were, in fact, built from scratch. Interestingly, those cars, now called “continuation” cars, are still sold today as the CSX4000 Cobras. There have been other VIN-related issues, and sexual assault allegations against Shelby from last year.

Shelby has also had some stranger ventures, including a stint as a chicken farmer, founding aTexas chili festival, and once having a brand of deodorant named after him, Carroll Shelby’s Pit-Stop.

In recent years, health has been an issue, with Shelby receiving a heart transplant in 1991. The experience of the transplant was so powerful to Shelby that he started the Carroll Shelby Children’s Foundation to help children in need of organ transplants.

Carroll Shelby was truly a legendary figure, and he will absolutely be missed.

Source: Jalopnik.

Two suicide blasts ripped through the Syrian capital today, killing 55 people and leaving scenes of carnage in the streets in the deadliest bombing attack since the country’s uprising began 14 months ago, the Interior Ministry said.

A self-portrait of Amy Winehouse that was made out of her own blood will be auctioned off by friend and former rumored lover Pete Doherty .

Multiple sources are reporting that the former lead singer of Libertines will sell the painting, a small piece entitled “Ladylike,” alongside items such as instruments, diaries and articles of clothing.

The auction will be held at the Cob Gallery in London on Friday, as part of an exhibition of Doherty’s blood-infused works called “On Blood: A Portrait of the Artist”.”

CONTINUED at CBS Las Vegas.

Noted hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, known for creating the modern “bob,” has died at age 84.

At 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, police were dispatched to Sassoon’s Los Angeles home on Mulholland Drive, where he had died of apparent natural causes, LAPD spokesman Kevin Mailberger confirmed to NBC News.

The British style icon opened his first eponymous hair salon in 1954, and it grew into a worldwide chain with locations in New York and Los Angeles.

Sassoon’s popularity grew as he promoted his low-maintenance, “wash and wear” hair philosophy, changing the constricting, structured styles of the 1950s to the more free-flowing, creative cuts of the ’60s – taking a cue from the women’s liberation movement. Sassoon grabbed headlines when he created Mia Farrow’s iconic pixie cut for the 1968 movie, “Rosemary’s Baby” – at a reported cost of $5,000.

CONTINUED at MSNBC.

This column is about politics. Today, it’s not. Still, there’s Watergate, Paul Revere, Edward R. Murrow, fighting for your right, so, kinda still.

Adam Nathaniel Yauch died Friday. If you’re age 16-66 — maybe 106 — you know him as MCA, one-third of the Beastie Boys. He was 47. Way too young. But gone.

Now, half-white Barack Obama (exactly my age) didn’t say a word, even though he was talking to college kids that day, but make no mistake, MCA was no Jay-Z orKanye West. This guy was the real deal, groundbreaker, up from his bootstraps, Brooklyn boy made good. Funny the “coolest president ever” doesn’t say a word about the passing of MCA. Weird and kinda sad, actually.

“Yauch was born an only child in Brooklyn, New York, the son ofFrances, a social worker, and Noel Yauch, a painter and architect,” Wikipedia says. “His father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish.” Kinda like Barack, all over the place, half this, half that, and a tough life ahead from the outset. But nothing from the first half-white, half-black president (MSM has made him black — he’s not; he’s half-and-half. No, Trayvon Martin wouldn’t have looked like his son.)

The boys, the Beastie Boys, started out as a thrash hard-core punk band in ‘79, at the tail end of the movement. The Sex Pistols, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, 999, were lighting up America, banging CBGB, 930 Club, every stop on the scene. But the Boys were on the tail end of the punk movement and were looking for a new sound (they definitely weren’t going new wave).

CONTINUED at the Washington Times.

Taliban bombers attacked a heavily fortified guesthouse used by Westerners in Kabul on Wednesday, announcing the start of their annual “spring offensive” in defiance of calls from visiting US President Barack Obama that the war was ending.

Seven people were killed after attackers in burqas detonated a suicide car bomb and clashed with guards at the “Green Village” complex of guesthouses used by the European Union, the United Nations and aid groups, officials said.

The assault raises fresh concern about the resilience of the insurgency on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death as NATOwinds down its combat presence in the next two years and hands over responsibility for security to Afghan forces.

The Taliban said the assault was a riposte to Obama, who just hours earlier signed a new partnership pact in Kabul to govern Afghan-US relations after 2014 — a deal the insurgents dismissed as “illegitimate”.

In an election-year address, Obama presented himself as a commander-in-chief capable of ending two long wars, following the US withdrawal from Iraq, and crushing Al-Qaeda, and tried to conjure up a new dawn for a US public exhausted by conflict and recession.

CONTINUED at Yahoo News.