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

New York City decided to dust off its old, non-computerized voting machines and use them in time for Tuesday’s local elections. The move was prompted after some local leaders lost confidence with the newer, electronic voting machines that encountered troubles during the 2012 election. The state legislature and the NYC Board of Elections authorized 5,100 lever voting machines to come out of retirement, undergo maintenance and be set up in voting precincts for the September 10 balloting.   read more

In the month of May, petroleum operations in the U.S. surpassed the total amount of oil being imported. The nation last experienced this turnaround in January 1997. American output is so strong that if it continues on this pace, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest petroleum producer before 2020, according to a forecast by the International Energy Agency.   read more

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been accused of spying on Brazil’s state-run oil company, according to a news report from the South American country’s largest television network. The implication is that not all NSA espionage has to do with fighting terrorists or even criminals.   read more

The biggest culprit, experts say, are cars and other forms of road transportation. Vehicles were found to cause 53,000 early fatalities, followed by power plants with 52,000. Steven Barrett, an MIT assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics who took part in the study, said a premature death was defined as one occurring about 10 years earlier due to exposure to air pollution than might otherwise happen.   read more

Kanye West has become the latest celebrity to get into trouble for attending a Central Asian dictator’s lavish celebration. This time the country was Kazakhstan, where West showed up—after getting paid $3 million—to participate in the wedding festivities of Aysultan Nazarbayev, grandson of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the country’s ruler.   read more

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno led an effort with author and former Central Valley resident Tim Z. Hernandez to raise money for an official memorial, complete with the names of those who died. It was unveiled on September 2 at a ceremony attended by more than 500 people, including family members of some of the farmworkers who traveled all the way from Mexico.   read more

The 10 lawmakers supporting the resolution received 83% more campaign contributions on average from defense contractors than the committee members who voted “no.” The top three recipients who voted “yes” were Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) at $176,000; Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) at $127,350; and Timothy Kaine (D-Virginia) at $101,025.   read more

Under the rules, importers would have to ensure that their foreign suppliers comply with FDA safety rules or equivalent local regulations. Industry groups, which the FDA consulted during the drafting process, generally support the rule. Although consumer advocates were cautiously supportive of the new rules, they also worried that the companies were getting too much discretion over whether to require on-site inspections of the sites where food is grown and processed.   read more

For-profit schools use veterans to avoid a federal requirement that no more than 90% of their revenues can come from government sources like Pell grants—but a loophole says that GI Bill benefits don’t count toward the 90% cap. This makes the veterans’ aid more valuable, and the Senate committee report cited constant phone calls by recruiters, pressuring applicants to sign contracts before speaking to a financial adviser.   read more

According to the brief, the NSA domestic spying program undermines one of the key reforms included in FISA: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which is supposed to supervise surveillance activities and which is “empowered…to consider each instance of placing an electronic wiretap.” “In contrast,” say Mondale and Hart, “the NSA’s program…delegates such oversight to the executive, leaving all further inquiries of the databases to the agency involved.”   read more

The full court held that because the text message was not labeled as either “classified” or “sensitive,” MacLean’s disclosure may be protected by the Whistleblower Act if he believed his leak helped expose dangers to public safety. George Randy Taylor, head of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association’s air marshal unit and also a former whistleblower, said MacLean had suffered legal harassment for “raising the B.S. flag on mismanagement.”   read more

Louisiana comes out on top when convictions are measured on a population basis. Calculated that way, the Bayou State is a clear No. 1, at 8.76 convictions per 100,000 people, followed by North Dakota (8.2), South Dakota (7), Kentucky (7), Alaska (6.6), Montana (6.2), Mississippi (5.7), and Alabama (5.6). The states with the lowest rates were South Carolina, Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Utah, each with no more than 1.3 convictions per 100,000.   read more

Beale’s fraud began as far back as 2000, while he served as a senior policy adviser in the Office of Air and Radiation making $164,700 a year. He spent a lot of his time over the next 12 years away from his job, telling his superiors that the CIA needed him on clandestine missions. Another colleague of Beale, speaking anonymously to the Post, agreed. “We all actually believed that maybe there was something going on.” Indeed there was.   read more

Medical experts decided to test the effects of gut bacteria. They transferred the bacteria from human twins—one lean, the other obese—into mice. The result: mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat, and those that received bacteria from lean twins stayed lean. Fischbach said he was “very excited” by the work, and insisted the next step should be to use gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.   read more

Resident attitudes reflect, to some extent, the frustration of living in a rural community that is answerable to a state which is attentive to a much larger urban electorate. But the rural life that compels their desire for independence is also the tie that binds them to the state. “Siskiyou is one of the largest counties with one of the smallest populations,” Mark Lovelace told a local reporter. “It is also full of state roads that they won't be able to maintain.”   read more

Klotz served as assistant vice chief of staff and director of Air Force Staff at USAF Headquarters from August 2007 to August 2009, retiring from the military after a stint as commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, at the time a new organization of 23,000 that assumed responsibility for all U.S. nuclear-capable bombers and land-based missiles under a single chain-of-command, from August 2009 to January 2011.   read more