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

Reuters examined county property records in 25 states and found thousands of cases where people purchased homes not knowing that a developer had retained all underlying mineral rights. Homebuilders have been motivated to secretly keep mineral rights because of the booming fracking industry, hoping that someday energy companies will show up wanting to drill underneath the properties.   read more

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) took legal action for the first time against a drone pilot. The drone operator, Raphael Pirker, got into trouble over a video he made from a drone flying over the University of Virginia, with the citation alleging that the video records a series of aviation violations, including flying too low over vehicles, buildings, people, streets and structures, and even aiming the craft at a person, who Pirker says was his spotter.   read more

Obama inherited a culture of secrecy from the George W. Bush administration. But rather than change it, Obama became “more aggressive” by increasing the use of the 1917 Espionage Act to pursue those accused of leaking classified information. Under Obama, the Espionage Act has been used to go after six government employees and two contractors accused of revealing secrets to the press. In all previous administrations, there had been just three such prosecutions.   read more

Obama fundraiser Timothy Broas is getting a do-over. Despite an embarrassing late night arrest for drunk driving and resisting arrest in June 2012 that killed his nomination to be the next ambassador to the Netherlands, Broas was re-nominated by Obama on July 18 of this year to be his man in The Hague.   read more

Sensenbrenner’s bill would do the following: • Limit the collection of phone records to known terrorist suspects • End “secret laws” by making courts disclose surveillance policies • Create a special court advocate to represent privacy interests • Allow companies to disclose how many requests for users’ information they receive from the government • Restrict a loophole involving overseas surveillance that has allowed the NSA to target Internet and email activities of Americans.   read more

Research published in March by University of Wisconsin researchers David Kindig and Erika Cheng found that female mortality rates went up in nearly half of U.S. counties between 1992 and 2006. For men, only 3% of counties witnessed increases in male mortality over the same period.   read more

According to the study report, a team of researchers based in Europe found that 145 of the Internet’s top 10,000 websites use Flash-based fingerprinting, and that 404 of the top 1 million sites use JavaScript-based fingerprinting to track non-Flash devices. But the researchers found the websites used device fingerprinting to track visitors even when they explicitly request not to be tracked by enabling the Do Not Track HTTP header, and that few sites informed visitors of the practice.   read more

Gaspard signed on as Obama’s national political director in June 2008 and after the election served as associate personnel director of President-elect Obama’s transition team. He then worked in the White House as assistant to the president and director of the Office of Political Affairs from 2009 to 2011. As the re-election effort loomed, he moved over to the Democratic National Committee, where he was executive director from 2011 to 2013.   read more

In South Carolina, the sheriff of Richland County acquired a tank (dubbed “the Peacemaker) with 360-degree rotating machine gun turrets. In Jefferson County in upstate New York, the sheriff’s department guarding a community of about 120,000 people now has a 20-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle, which was developed for the U.S. military to survive roadside bomb attacks. It was given to the county sheriff by the Pentagon.   read more

The five-day notice is intended to give journalists and publishers time to challenge the subpoena or narrow the scope of information the third party would be required to disclose. The new law, which was drafted by Democratic state Sen. Ted Lieu of Torrance, also requires the notice to include an explanation of why the government wants the records and why it can’t obtain the information through alternate sources.   read more

Donald Eugene Miller Jr. of Ohio was declared legally dead nearly 20 years ago after he walked out on his life and disappeared. But Miller never died, and now he’s struggling to convince the legal system that he should live again. Judge Davis refused to reverse the original decree, citing the three-year legal limit for changing a death ruling.   read more

Despite the fact that the message included the date 1973 and a reference to the long-gone Soviet Union, traders mistook the Twitter post as indication Israel had just attacked Syria. This mistaken assumption led them to worry that the supply of petroleum might shrink, which prompted a buying spree that raised the barrel price of oil by $1. But even after traders realized the tweet wasn’t about a current event, oil prices went up even higher.   read more

Moreno became a federal judge when he was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, where he served from February 1998 to mid-2001. Nominated by Gov. Gray Davis (D), Moreno served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California from October 18, 2001 until his retirement on February 28, 2011.   read more

A new Gallup poll found 33% of Americans said dissatisfaction with government and elected representatives was the nation’s top issue. Not since 1939, when Gallup began keeping track, have so many people put government at the top of the fix-this list. The economy came in a distant second, at 19%, . The situation in Syria, which last month was rated as the country’s top problem by 8% of Americans, has now fallen nearly out of sight at 1%.   read more

A Pentagon spokesperson stated that the U.S. government is reviewing Panama’s request and will resolve it “in a timely manner.” In negotiations this year at The Hague over Panama’s petition to have the U.S. clean up the munitions, U.S. officials reportedly requested one change to the document. They insisted that it say the U.S. did not “abandon” the weapons in Panama, but rather that it had “forgotten” about them.   read more

The two areas of the U.S. with the highest rates of prescription-drug overdoses are Appalachia and the Southwest. West Virginia leads the nation, with 28.9 deaths per every 100,000 people. Prescription overdoses have skyrocketed in the state by 605% since 1999. Men between the ages 25 and 54 are most likely to abuse drugs like OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin. But rates among female abusers are accelerating, increasing by 400% over the past 14 years.   read more