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

In a previous lawsuit brought by the town of Roxana against Shell, the refinery was said to have allowed 18 spills over a 25-year period. The new civil case claims more than 200,000 pounds of pure benzene have been released from Wood River since Shell owned the refinery. The company also stands accused of polluting the area around Roxana with other chemicals, including ethylbenzene, toluene and n-hexane.   read more

The investigation revealed that fake reviews were often written in other countries, including Bangladesh and the Philippines, where individuals sold them for as little as one dollar each. Businesses are often tempted to purchase fraudulent feedback for their websites because higher rankings can often mean more customers. For instance, a bump in just one star on Yelp can result in a 5%-9% increase in revenues, according to a 2011 Harvard Business School study.   read more

A big problem with the system is a lack of required federal standards, which has resulted in states and local governments using different rules for food dating. This has caused consumers to lack confidence in the information they’re given. And when consumers are in doubt, they’re likely to throw out food, including items that are still edible.   read more

Several states are paying private prison companies for housing prisoners who don’t exist, according to a new report from the advocacy group In the Public Interest. And there’s not much they can do, because of “occupancy clauses” in many private prison contracts that guarantee revenue even when prison populations decline. The report found quotas for prisoners ranging from 70% to 100% in nearly two-thirds of them. Most of the contracts mandated that at least 90% of prison beds be filled.   read more

Nearly half of the poor—43.9% or 20.4 million Americans—live below one-half of the poverty line, or $9,150 for a family of three. Thus 6.6% of the total population lives in “deep poverty,” including 9.7% of children. Poverty, regardless of its depth, along with the daily stresses that accompany it, is especially harmful to children, especially young ones. Studies have shown that living in poverty impairs the cognitive development of children.   read more

By introducing the exemption for past bad acts, Coffee argues, “the SEC is here acting, not simply as a weak-kneed enforcer, but rather as a generous Board of Pardons, granting immunity to those few persons that it has enjoined or held otherwise accountable within the last decade. If one were seeking to further tarnish an already compromised agency’s reputation and image, this would be the way to do it.”   read more

In a unanimous decision, a New York state appeals court sided with 50 citizens and residents of Israel who sued the Bank of China after they or their families were victimized by terrorist acts committed by Palestine Islamic Jihad and Hamas between 2005 and 2007. The government of China has majority ownership of the bank. The plaintiffs sued the Bank of China in New York alleging it had handled international fund transfers that helped pay for the terrorist actions.   read more

To celebrate the first airmail flight, the Post Office decided to issue a commemorative 24-cent stamp, with a picture of a Curtiss JN-4 biplane, or “Jenny,” the aircraft being used to carry the mail. The Post Office accidentally issued 100 Jenny stamps showing the biplane flying upside down. Printing inspectors and the postal clerk who sold the sheet to a collector missed the error, the clerk later explaining, “How was I to know the thing was upside down? I never saw an airplane before.”   read more

“This case started as one featuring allegations of brazen abuse of authority, violation of the law and corruption of the criminal justice system,” the Judge Englehardt wrote. “Unfortunately though the focus has shifted from the accused to the accusers, it has continued to be about those very issues.”   read more

Instead of paying costly expenses to ship the material to dumps, the Air Force could simply bury it on-site and walk away. There are reportedly seven bases in California that could face similar situations. State regulators rebuffed the Air Force in 2011 when it lobbied hard to classify its McClellan radioactive waste as “naturally occurring” so it could qualify for shipment to Clean Harbors’ Buttonwillow landfill. Instead, it sent 43,000 tons of soil to an Idaho dump.   read more

In a moral transgression that received much less attention than her statements about the Benghazi attack, in September 2012 Rice flew to Addis Ababa and gave a glowing eulogy for Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi that had human rights advocates wincing, at best. Rice has also been an enthusiastic supporter of Rwanda’s dictator, Paul Kagame, who was one of her clients when she worked for Intellibridge.   read more

Kant’s categorical imperative rules out torture, which can never be moral or ethical; in contrast, utilitarian ethics says that torture might be acceptable when its goal is important enough. In rejecting this idea that “the end justifies the means,” Kant urged that human beings are ends in themselves. In contemporary terms, in debating the U.S. use of torture in the years after 2001, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) is a Kantian, while Vice President Dick Cheney (R) is a utilitarian.   read more

A new study published in the Journal of Patient Safety estimates that between 210,000 and 440,000 patients annually don’t make it out of hospitals because of some kind of preventable harm. This means hospital deaths are now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., behind only heart disease (No. 1) and cancer (No. 2).   read more

The researchers concluded that differences in levels of sanitation, infectious disease and urbanization accounted statistically for about a third of the discrepancy in Alzheimer’s rates between countries. In other words, people need to be exposed to enough bacteria so their immune systems can fully develop and fight off disease, which doesn’t happen in countries obsessed with hand sanitizers and other germ-killing methods.   read more

U.S. military veterans who fought in Vietnam decades ago are entitled today to government-paid disability benefits and health care if they suffer from exposure to Agent Orange, an herbicide widely used during the conflict. But the same coverage is not available to the Vietnamese enduring the same effects from Agent Orange after fighting alongside American soldiers, and who later immigrated to the U.S.   read more

The latest ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo is a State Department Africa specialist who has served as the U.S. Special Representative for Somalia since August 2011. James C. Swan previously served as the number two official at the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa, and he is well acquainted with the situation in war-torn central Africa.   read more