President Joe Biden on Monday issued preemptive pardons to 3 of his siblings and two of their spouses, raising concerns that they might change into targets of “unfounded and politically motivated investigations.”

The White House announced the pardons just minutes before President-elect Donald Trump entered the Capitol Rotunda to be sworn in as the subsequent commander in chief.

Earlier on Monday, Biden preemptively pardoned a lot of other figures – including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley and members of Congress investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — for similar reasons.

Biden's most up-to-date pardons included his brother, James Biden; James' wife, Sara Jones Biden; his younger sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Owens' husband, John Owens; and his other brother, Francis Biden.

“The issuance of these pardons should not be misconstrued as an admission that they have committed any wrongdoing, nor should their acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for a crime,” Biden said in an announcement.

He also pardoned Gerald Lundergan, former chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party, and former South Carolina councilman Ernest Cromartie. The outgoing president also commuted the life sentence of Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975.

Biden issued a pardon for his son in early December Hunter Bidenthereby reversing his earlier assertion that this may not be the case.

Hunter was convicted in a federal gun crime case last yr and pleaded guilty to tax crimes in a separate federal case.

James Biden was interviewed by the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last yr as a part of their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.

“Jim and Sara Biden did not seek this pardon because they never committed a crime. But for the reasons described by the president, they accepted it,” Paul Fishman, an attorney for James and Sara Biden, said in an announcement.

In Monday's press release, Biden said: “My family has been subjected to relentless attacks and threats motivated solely by a desire to hurt me – the worst kind of partisan politics. Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe that these attacks will end.”

“I believe in the rule of law and am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately triumph over politics,” he said.

“But unfounded and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety and financial security of targets and their families. Even if individuals have done nothing wrong and are ultimately exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can cause irreparable harm to their reputations and finances.”

“Therefore, I am exercising my authority under the Constitution to pardon James B. Biden, Sara Jones Biden, Valerie Biden Owens, John T. Owens and Francis W. Biden,” Biden said.

After Biden announced the Jan. 6 pardons of Fauci, Milley and members of the committee, Trump was heavily critical, calling the move “disgraceful.”

“Many are guilty of SERIOUS CRIMES! DJT,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker in a text message. Trump's White House press office didn’t immediately reply to CNBC's request for comment on Biden's subsequent pardons of his members of the family.

While Biden's blanket preemptive clemency goes against historical norms, it is not uncommon for presidents to issue last-minute pardons. And there’s precedent for a president to pardon a member of the family and someone related to a member of the family.

On his last day in office, President Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger Clinton, who had been convicted of drug charges.

Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the daddy of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, at the tip of his first term.

Charles Kushner pleaded guilty in 2004 to filing false tax returns, retaliating against a witness and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission.

policy

OAKS, Pa. – The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (right), began with questions from pre-selected attendees for the previous president. Donald Trump gave convoluted answers about how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses. But things took a sudden turn after two participants needed medical attention.

And so Trump took a special approach after jokingly asking the gang if “anyone else would like to faint.”

“Let’s not ask any more questions. Let's just listen to music. Let's make music out of it. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.

For 39 minutes, Trump swayed and bounced – sometimes pausing to talk – as he almost turned the event right into a front room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.

He played nine titles. He danced. He shook hands with the people on stage. He pointed to the gang. Noem stood next to him, nodding with folded hands. Trump remained standing on the stage and slowly moved backwards and forwards. He finished answering the evening's questions.

“Total lovefest at the PA City Hall! “Everyone was so excited they passed out so @realDonaldTrump turned to music,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung wrote on X. “No one wanted to go and hear more songs from the famous DJT Spotify playlist!”

Trump has long been obsessed together with his playlist, and aides have often described him DJing privately on his campaign plane or on the patio of his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. He has also angered music artists – similar to Celine Dion – who’ve called on him to stop playing their music at his campaign rallies.

As Trump stood on stage in his oversized suit and brilliant red tie, swaying backwards and forwards, it was almost as if he was taking a visit back to many years past. Trump's decision to chop the question-and-answer portion of the town hall and as a substitute allow the gang to hearken to his favorite songs was a somewhat bizarre move, considering the election was just 22 days away. Vice President Kamala Harris has described the 78-year-old Trump as unstable and questioned his mental capability.

Some in the gang began to depart. Some looked around, wondering if he was done talking for the evening and the way long the dance or sway session would last. Many held their cameras and watched as Trump recorded the music, sometimes a screen next to him that showed videos of James Brown singing “It's a Man's Man's Man's World” and Sinéad O 'Connor, who performed “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

The evening took a special turn when a person in the gang appeared to faint. Trump interrupted his remarks. Those in attendance fanned the person and started singing “God Bless America.” As the person waited for medical attention, Trump mused, “While we wait. So we had a beautiful evening. And I don't know if they may finish this song quickly, but when they may work really quickly backstage while we wait. 'Ave Maria' song began to play.

Trump then continued. Minutes later, one other participant required medical attention. Trump stopped again. “Take your time, doctor,” he said, and “Ave Maria” began to play again. Trump then quipped to the gang: “Does anyone else want to faint?” Please raise your hand. Let’s do it now.”

Trump then pointed to a graph of immigration statistics that he said saved his life: “My favorite graph of all time. And let’s listen to Pavarotti singing “Ave Maria.” They gave me the 'Ave Maria' with no voice.” He then pointed to a Gold Star couple whose son was lost in battle and said, “This is on your boy, arise.”

He briefly spoke again in regards to the election and the importance of the victory in Pennsylvania. After giving Trump the chance to shut “with a specific song” or answer “two more quick questions,” Noem turned to certainly one of his advisers: “So Justin, how about some really beautiful women and we'll bet.” “Let’s go and relax.”

It was time to listen to Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye.” After listening to James Brown, Trump began speaking again, as if remembering that he was still at an event billed as a town hall.

“This is the most important election in the history of our country,” Trump said, again accusing Democrats of weaponizing elections. But then he turned back to his music.

“These two people who went down are patriots and we love them and because of them we ended up making good music, right?” he asked. “So play 'YMCA!' Continue. Let’s go loud!”

“Let’s go, everyone,” Noem interjected.

The crowd cheered and danced to the Nineteen Seventies song “Village People,” which celebrates gay cruise culture. Noem raised her hands in the form of a “Y.” When the song ended, Trump mouthed the words: “Nobody's going away.”

“No one leaves. What's up? Nobody is leaving. Carry on,” he said, as Rufus Wainwright’s version of “Hallelujah” played next. “Alright, turn up the music! Turn that up. Great song!”

Then it was “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O’Connor. “An American Trilogy” by Elvis Presley. Rich Men North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony. Trump stood there and swayed.

When Guns N' Roses' “November Rain” played, he left the stage. On the best way out, he spoke to those in attendance while “Memory” from the musical “Cats” played within the background.

Maybe we should always have known from the start that this might take some time.

Panathinaikos' Argentine midfielder Daniel Mancini scored the primary penalty within the shootout against Ajax after the Greeks equalised within the closing stages and compelled their Europa League qualifier to a penalty shootout on Thursday evening.

But although he technically missed the penalty, he might as well have just blown the ball away, a lot power did he put into the shot. A pathetic penalty, effortlessly saved by 40-year-old goalkeeper Remko Pasveer, was one of the best begin to a penalty shootout that was marked by slapstick, sheer incompetence and occasional brilliance.

A complete of 34 penalties were taken. That is, we probably don't have to let you know, a UEFA competition record. In total, 25 were scored, two were completely wide and 7 were saved – five by Pasveer and two by Panathinaikos goalkeeper Bartlomiej Dragowski.

Ajax, who finished second on penalties, had five “match points” – a penalty shootout would have resulted in victory – and wasted the primary 4 before emerging victorious.

Striker Brian Brobbey was brought off the Ajax bench in overtime, perhaps not specifically to take a penalty (there have been 10 minutes left when he got here on), but actually with a shootout in mind. He was considered one of the 12 players who needed to take two penalties. He missed each. And more importantly, each were potentially decisive penalties.

Missing a penalty in a shootout is a large shame, but you recover from it. Missing two penalties can haunt you for years. Missing two potential winners… well, a minimum of your team won ultimately.

After Mancini's first (terrible) penalty, the subsequent eight were taken very skillfully, including by Steven Bergwijn, Kenneth Taylor (each Ajax) and former Leicester City winger Tete (for Panathinaikos).

Then things got weird. Brobbey stepped up and there gave the impression to be an expectation that he would make short work of it: he shouldn’t be an everyday penalty taker, but he has only missed one in his skilled profession and has a wonderful conversion rate as an academy player. The home crowd chanted his name, he puffed out his cheeks, shot the ball with quite a little bit of force to the suitable of the goalkeeper… and Dragowski saved it. The air left the stadium as if it had suddenly develop into the airlock of a spaceship.

Is it possible to “morally” miss a penalty that you need to have scored? If so, then that's exactly what the Greek team's next taker, Dutch midfielder Tonny Vilhena, did. He's a Feyenoord youth player and played of their first team for eight seasons… which is one other way of claiming the Ajax crowd hated him.

He fired a low kick to the suitable past Pasveer, and the goalkeeper bent to this point that he got greater than only a hand (possibly an arm?) on it…

…however the ball squirted out from under him, it looked like it might stay out for a moment – a lot in order that the Ajax fans began cheering – but eventually it bounced over the goal and rolled into the alternative corner.

Vilhena, who had heard the house fans' thoughts, decided to provide something back by silencing the stands. Would that come back to haunt him later within the penalty shootout? Certainly not.

Jordan Henderson was next up for Ajax, perhaps also to remind everyone that he still plays for them. Henderson and penalties aren’t particularly good friends: it's easy to forget that because England won, but he missed of their 2018 World Cup shoot-out victory against Colombia and has only taken one penalty in normal time for club or country since then… which he also missed for England in a pre-Euro 2020 friendly against Romania. Thankfully he had no problems here, firing the ball straight down the center into the online with the within his foot.

Then one other miss: Nemanja Maksimovic made a mistake for Panathinaikos which Pasveer saved brilliantly. But again Ajax couldn't capitalise on their probability as Bertrand Traore shot high and wide, which is sort of difficult to do from 12 metres out. After this penalty a row broke out within the centre circle, each teams became irritated on this prolonged penalty shoot-out and referee Chris Kavanagh cautioned a player from either side.

The next penalty was taken by Panathinaikos player Sverrir Ingason, who got here low but too near Pasveer, who saved his third penalty. At that moment he and his counterpart Dragowski hugged one another and began laughing: yes, now it was getting pretty silly. And it got even sillier when Ajax wasted one other probability to win when Dragowski saved a shot from Ajax defender Youri Baas.

This was the penalty shootout that no person desired to win. On the sidelines, Ajax coach Francesco Farioli looked as if he had just undergone open-heart surgery. His counterpart Diego Alonso looked similar.

The next 14 penalties, nonetheless, were all excellent, with the goalkeepers hardly having a probability. They took the shots themselves and converted them without much fuss, which only increased the strain. After all, 14 penalties is one and a half times greater than a traditional penalty shootout. The Panathinaikos substitutes and coaches, who were holding onto the sidelines with their arms, were reprimanded for encroaching on the pitch. At one point, Farioli retreated from the sidelines and sat alone on the bench, his aorta pulsing about two feet in front of him.

But then Ajax had one other probability to win: Panathinaikos centre-back Filip Mladenovic tried a robust shot, but was too near Pasveer, who parried to the left.

Redemption was at hand. Just as he had done within the penalty shootout, Brobbey marched forward, knowing that if he scored, Ajax could be through. He advanced, puffed out his cheeks again, determined to not make the identical mistake again – this time he wouldn’t let Dragowski get anywhere near it.

And he didn't – the issue was that the one individuals who got near the ball were within the back rows of the Johan Cruyff Arena. Brobbey fired an absolute Chris Waddle penalty high into the stands…

… after which crumbled to the bottom …

…face down, unable to imagine what he had just done…

…and creates a classic “you can see the exact moment his heart breaks in two” moment…

But wait. Here comes Vilhena. You'll keep in mind that the previous Feyenoord player silenced the Ajax fans after he (almost) scored his first penalty. You can understand that: he was insulted, he scored and his job was done for the evening because there was no way he was going to need to rating one other penalty, right?

Alas. Unfortunately, he was again faced with the extraordinary Pasveer. The 40-year-old shouldn’t be Ajax's first goalkeeper, but he took his probability to make an impression here: Vilhena attempted the identical penalty as the primary, but this time Pasveer was in a position to show more physicality and save the ball along with his fifth save.

“Five is quite a lot, yes,” he said after the sport with a serious expression, also saying that he had laughed in the course of the penalty shootout with former Ajax midfielder Wesley Sneijder, who was working on the sidelines for Dutch television. “I save a penalty every now and then, but I don't think you see something as crazy as this very often.”

Pasveer last saved a penalty in regular time within the Eredivisie in 2021, when he played for Vitesse against Heerenveen. The last penalty shootout he was involved in was again for Vitesse, against AVV Swift within the KNVB Cup (Dutch Cup) in 2017. He didn't save a single one which night.

“Remko asked why there was never a picture of a goalkeeper who had not conceded a goal,” Farioli told AFP, referring to the various photos of Ajax greats that adorn the partitions of the stadium. “I told him maybe he should play a bit better. But now I think we should quickly put up a picture of him.”

Once again, Ajax needed only one penalty to win. This time, something interesting happened to them: while the opposite players who took a second penalty did so in the identical order as in the primary round, Ajax mixed things up and sent winger Anton Gaaei to the bench for the seventeenth penalty, as an alternative of Henderson. He shot low into the underside corner, Dragowski went the unsuitable way and eventually, finally, finally it was over.

From the moment Mancini took the primary penalty until Gaaei's winner found the back of the online, 24 minutes and two seconds had passed. Ajax won 13-12 and moved into the play-off round. If they beat Polish side Jagiellonia Bialystok, they are going to qualify for the league phase of the Europa League.

This was not the longest penalty shootout ever. That title still belongs to SC Dimona and Shimshon Tel Aviv, who took 56 penalties within the Israeli Third Division play-off semi-finals earlier this 12 months.

But from Pasveer's saves to Brobbey's two misses to Farioli's utter despair, there was good enough drama here.

Ajax face NAC Breda this weekend of their second Eredivisie game of the season, and one suspects that a pleasant, quiet, boring 1-0 win will do them good.

politics

BUTLER, Pa. (AP) — To the sounds of “God Bless the USA,” former President Donald Trump took the stage on the fairgrounds in Butler, Pa., at 6:02 p.m. Saturday, waved to the cheering crowd and delivered his usual campaign speech under the scorching midsummer sun.

A couple of minutes later, Trump pointed to a projection of a graph showing a rise in illegal border crossings under his opponent, President Joe Biden. “This graph is a few months old,” Trump told the gang. “And if you want to see something really sad –“

That's when the shots rang out, at the least five. Trump clutched his ear as dark-clad Secret Service agents rushed toward him. He dropped to the bottom because the agents screamed, “Get down!” The hundreds of protesters who had crowded into the sector in front of him moved as one man and dropped to the bottom as silence spread across the grass, punctuated only by occasional screams.

Moments later, Trump stood up as Secret Service agents crowded around him, covering his body with their very own. They attempted to push the previous president off stage left as blood dripped from his ear. “Wait, wait, wait,” Trump said. He clenched his fist as the gang cheered and appeared to mouth the word “fight” before agents hustled him down the steps and toward a waiting black SUV. Trump clenched his fist yet another time before climbing in.

The local district attorney said the shooter and a protester were dead. In an announcement released shortly after the attack, which officials said gave the impression to be an attempted murder, Trump's campaign team said he was “fine.”

When protesters gathered outside the Secret Service compound within the early afternoon, the horror that lay ahead was not yet foreseeable. Butler is a town of 13,000 residents 33 miles north of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania, right in Trump's region. It's the type of rural Rust Belt area that made Trump president in 2016 and nearly kept him in office in 2020 – Trump won Butler County by 32 percentage points.

The green grass of the sector was slowly covered by a sea of ​​red “Make America Great Again” hats because the temperature climbed to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. As rallygoers waited patiently for hours, local politicians occasionally spoke up, and sometimes they broke into chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” At one point, an enormous American flag hanging above the stage became tangled, prompting chants of “Fix the flag!” until it was properly unfurled.

Outside the grounds, there have been booths selling food, drinks and Trump paraphernalia, as is common at rallies. Behind the stage, separated from the sector by waist-high metal barriers, stretched one other field with buildings in the space. The crowd perked up as Trump's favorite playlist began, kicking off with “YMCA” by the Village People. Then Trump walked toward the stage wearing his trademark red hat, a black suit, a white shirt unbuttoned on the collar and no tie.

He smiled and pointed to the cheering crowd, and waited until Lee Greenwood's song ended before starting his remarks. “This is a great crowd,” Trump said. “This is a great, great, beautiful crowd.”

After mentioning the name of David McCormick, the Republican running against Democratic Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and promising to bring him on stage later within the rally, Trump got right down to certainly one of his favorite topics. “We have millions and millions of people in our country who shouldn't be here,” he said. “Dangerous people.”

He then referred the audience to the projected map of the border crossings.

After the shots rang out and Trump was pushed off the stage, agents in black uniforms with rifles, the agency's counter-assault team, stormed the stage. The crowd remained seated, apart from a gaggle of individuals standing on the left fringe of the realm, near the shooting.

Rico Elmore, vice chairman of the Beaver County Republican Party, was sitting in a special guests' area across from Trump when he heard what seemed like fireworks. “So everyone hesitated – and it was like it was actually gunshots,” he said in an interview. “So I yelled, 'Lie down!'”

Elmore heard someone calling for a medic from his left. Although Elmore will not be a medic, he knows first aid and CPR from his time within the military. He jumped over a barricade, but when he reached the person, Elmore saw that he had been shot in the top. Elmore said he held the victim's head, however it was too late.

“I mean, it was horrific,” Elmore said.

The victim was not identified.

Even as Trump was wheeled away, protesters remained subdued. Some had heard the bullets ricochet off the stands and severed a hydraulic line to the speakers, which then began to tip over. Others quickly called their families or checked their cell phones to seek out out what had happened to the previous president.

“Is he okay?” people began asking. “Is he OK?”

Eventually, people slowly began to return out. A small group of about half a dozen stopped in front of the fenced area where the media was housed. “It's all your fault!” they shouted.

First the police after which the Secret Service escorted everyone out. An hour after the shooting, the large field was declared against the law scene, plagued by empty plastic water bottles and soggy cardboard containers that had once held cheese fries.