According to aides who were present when Trump discussed the issue, but who choose to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, Trump said he was sick of Vance and wanted to fire him. “I wanted him to be my attack dog,” said Trump, “but he appears foolish on television. He dropped the college football trophy. He met with Pope Francis and the next day the pope died. Vance is toxic, and I don’t want him to come near me. He just doesn’t look as good on television as I thought he would.”   read more

Public health experts urge doctors to ask about gun ownership, in part so they may recommend safety measures if children are in the home or if there is someone mentally ill present. Doctors also ask about household chemicals and swimming pools, but those don’t have the National Rifle Association making contributions to politicians on their behalf.   read more

A report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) shows that 73% of those who die in jail haven’t been convicted of a crime. In addition, 29% of those who die are African-American, more than double their percentage of the U.S. population at large. BJS found that 31.3% of all jail deaths in 2012 were by suicide.   read more

Warafi’s lawyer, citing declarations by President Barack Obama that the Afghan war is over, tried to get him released. The government has an obligation to release all POWs at the end of a conflict. But federal Judge Royce Lamberth rejected Warafi’s argument, saying regardless of what Obama has said publicly, U.S. soldiers are still fighting Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. Since the beginning of 2015, three Americans have been killed in Afghanistan.   read more

Georgia farms out the publishing of its laws to Lexis-Nexis, which writes annotations and then assigns the copyright for them back to the state. Lexis-Nexis then charges for access to the laws, something that Malamud says should be available for free to the taxpayers who paid for the laws in the first place.   read more

The Bush administration attempted to exempt the Tongass from the Roadless Rule because it claimed it would harm local economies. The vote fell almost completely along party lines of the presidents who appointed the judges. Of the six who voted to keep the forest roadless, three were appointed by Barack Obama, two by Bill Clinton and one by Jimmy Carter. The five voting to keep the Bush exemption included three appointed by Bush, one appointed by Ronald Reagan and one by Clinton.   read more

A study from the Government Accountability Office has found that hundreds of chemical plants are incorrectly reporting the “Distance of Concern” which defines how large an area may be subject to toxic effects of a chemical release. The GAO report estimated that more than 2,700 of the estimated 6,400 facilities, or 44%, misreported the Distance of Concern.   read more

The federal government sucked a total of $150 million out of seniors’ checks in 2013 to satisfy student loan debt, according to the Government Accountability Office, which also made it clear that 82% of senior still owe money for their own student loans rather than those of their children or other dependents.   read more

Prosecutions for crimes such as mail fraud, healthcare fraud and other such offenses are off almost 37% from their peak during the Clinton administration. In 1995, the number of prosecutions was about 11,000 and that number has dropped steadily since then, with the exception of a spike during the first three years of the Obama administration.   read more

The FBI has found that it can’t match salaries offered by the private sector. In addition, its strict background checks weed out those who have smoked marijuana within three years or used other drugs within 10 years. One thing the Army isn’t doing to fill its ranks is cut its standards.   read more

Under the settlement, the Federal Bureau of Prisons will acknowledge humanism as a worldview that deserves the same recognition as theistic religious beliefs. Inmates will be able to have humanist study groups and to observe Darwin Day just as Christians celebrate Christmas. Naturalist Charles Darwin’s birthday on February 12 is widely celebrated among humanists.   read more

The new standard could get in the way of the Obama administration’s interrogations of detainees that still involve the use of psychologists, such as the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which has been sent overseas to interrogate terror suspects or those associated with them. The administration also uses psychologists at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they oversee voluntary interrogations requested by a detainee.   read more

During the first third of this year, 42.2 million individuals 18-34 years old lived on their own, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers analyzed by Pew researchers. That’s fewer than in 2007, before the downturn, when 42.7 million headed their own households. Looking at just the post-recessionary period, the trend is for millennials is to stay with their parents. In 2010, 69% of this group lived independently. Five years later, the number has fallen to 67%.   read more

The Nonhuman Rights Project contended that “Hercules and Leo are autonomous and self-determining beings who possess the New York common law right to bodily liberty protected by the New York common law of habeas corpus.” Judge Jaffe denied this claim. “Animals, including chimpanzees and other highly intelligent mammals, are considered property under the law,” she ruled. “They are accorded no legal rights beyond being guaranteed the right to be free from physical abuse and other mistreatment.”   read more

The report, whose findings didn’t make it into the Environmental Impact Report, recommended that oil and gas development near homes, hospitals and schools be stopped. It warned of insufficient knowledge about the dangers of shallow fracking, used by 75% of the state’s frackers, and recommended that it be halted until more was known.   read more

Reeder moved to the Senate Finance Committee as senior benefits counsel for the Democratic staff May 2009. He returned to the Treasury Department in March 2013 as senior benefits counsel for the Internal Revenue Service.   read more

"Most users really have no idea how much information Facebook collects about them or how Facebook is able to infer from even a post...what their political orientation might be,” said EPIC's Rotenberg. “Facebook knows everything you’ve said, everything you’ve posted, everything you’ve clicked on.” Said Rand Paul strategist Vincent Harris: “Think about how powerful this is. It’s a fundraising tool [and] a persuasion tool... Facebook is actually everything. And this is what scares people.”   read more