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

Law enforcement must obtain a warrant before attaching GPS trackers to suspects’ vehicles, a federal appeals court ruled this week. The decision resolved a legal question left unanswered after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 (United States v. Jones - pdf) that police violated a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights by putting a GPS device on his vehicle. The high court declined to rule at the time whether such a search was unreasonable and had required a warrant.   read more

The United States is unlikely to experience another airline hijacking like those that occurred during 9/11, according to a secret government document mistakenly made public by a federal court. The document, created by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), said terrorists are not focused on American commercial jets—an admission that could undermine the agency’s use of controversial body scanners at airport checkpoints.   read more

The federal bureaucracy is not the ever-expanding blob that conservatives warn so much about, not according to the latest employee numbers out of Washington. As of September, and before the government shutdown, federal offices employed 2,723,000 individuals—the lowest figure on record since 1966, when there were 2,721,000 employees.   read more

TSA claims that the purpose of the expanded passenger data scans is to identify low-risk passengers in order to lighten their security screening at the airport and thus make actual searches more targeted. Previously, the air travel background checks, called Secure Flight, only involved a comparison of a passenger’s name, gender and date of birth to terrorist watch list data. Now it is clearly much more.   read more

Francis showered Misiewicz, and possibly another commander, with Japanese prostitutes, luxury hotel rooms, cash, plane tickets, and even a Lady Gaga concert being held in Thailand. This was done in trade for ship deployment data and to get aircraft carriers and other vessels steered to ports where Glenn Defense could overcharge the Navy for its services.   read more

Among the victims since early last year were a 68-year-old woman picking vegetables in a field with her grandchildren, and 18 laborers, including a 12-year-old boy, who were about to sit down together for a meal after a day’s work. Even when the drones don’t fire missiles, they are constantly hovering above, conducting round-the-clock surveillance with high-resolution cameras, according to the report.   read more

In an unusual, although not unheard of, decision, jurors in a federal civil rights lawsuit found Sheriff Lee Baca had personal responsibility for the jailhouse beating of a prisoner and assessed his penalty at $100,000. Attorneys for Tyler Willis filed the lawsuit in 2010, one year after Willis was tasered, beaten with flashlights and kicked at the Men’s Central Jail, causing a leg broken in two places, taser burns, lots of body bruises, a broken nose and multiple facial wounds   read more

The agency “successfully exploited a key mail server in the Mexican Presidencia domain to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon’s public email account,” according to an NSA document. The domain was also used by cabinet members, and contained “diplomatic, economic and leadership communications which continue to provide insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability.” The agency described the president’s office as “a lucrative source” of information.   read more

The government shutdown produced a tremendous amount of negativity towards Washington on the part of media pundits, and while Congress’ reputation suffered considerably from the attacks, other parts of the federal government came out unscathed. In fact, many federal agencies and those working for them have positive or very positive ratings among Americans, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.   read more

Public schools are becoming underfunded dumping grounds for the nation’s poor students, and a new report says that for the first time in nearly 50 years “a majority of public school children in 17 states … were low income students” at the close of 2011 school year. Thirteen of the 17 states are in the South, and the remaining four (New Mexico, California, Oregon and Nevada) are in the West.   read more

Drone warfare by the United States and other nations has come under attack from the United Nations, with a top official questioning the legality of using unmanned aircraft to kill foreign citizens. Christof Heyns, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, said in a new report that countries have relied on “wide and permissive interpretations” of international law to justify lethal drone attacks.   read more

JPMorgan Chase has negotiated a tentative agreement with the Obama administration that would require the Wall Street giant to pay a record amount of money for helping cause the 2008 financial crisis. Under the proposed settlement, JPMorgan would pay $13 billion in fines and compensation to homeowners who were wronged as part of the bank’s questionable mortgage practices that linked subprime loans with securities.   read more

Prisons across the United States have subjected inmates to solitary confinement for years and even decades, raising the question whether this practice constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, or even torture. On any given day about 81,000 prisoners in the U.S. are confined within some sort of “restricted housing” unit inside a correctional facility, where they have virtually no human contact.   read more

Most physicians believe that, except for cases of deficiencies arising from specific medical problems or the effects of chemotherapy, Low-T is a myth made up by marketers. “There is no such disease” says Dr. Joel Finkelstein, a Harvard Medical School expert on male hormonal changes during aging. “The market for testosterone gels evolved because there is an appetite among men and because there is advertising. The problem is that no one has proved that it works and we don’t know the risks.”   read more

Some experts on bullying question the wisdom of bringing criminal charges against such young girls. “The decision to charge them almost seems to take responsibility away from the adults,” argued Nadine Connell, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, who thinks adolescents are too immature to grasp the consequences of bullying, and that the real blame should be placed on parents and school officials for failing to intervene more decisively.   read more

In the concessionaire case, plaintiffs argue that the services they provide, including general maintenance, emergency first aid, restrooms and clean drinking water, are essential to protecting the health and safety of campers, who were forced to recreate in undeveloped areas that lack any services.   read more