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

Hockey was made treasurer.but ran into trouble when he presented his first budget. It called for cuts to family payments, punitive measures for unemployed young people, a Medicare co-payment, removal of caps on university fees, and $80 billion (Australian) in long-term cuts to health and education funding. He also announced an unpopular increase in fuel taxes. He defended the increase, saying “the poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases.”   read more

President Barack Obama signed into law Thursday measures to give the public greater access to government documents and records under the nearly half-century-old Freedom of Information Act. The new law will require federal agencies to consider releasing records under a “presumption of openness” standard, instead of presuming that the information is secret. Supporters say the shift will make it harder for agencies to withhold information.   read more

Federal regulators quietly gave the green light to more than 1,200 oil company fracking operations in the Gulf of Mexico between 2010 and 2014, according to documents environmentalists obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. At least 630 wells were fracked along the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama during that four-year period, and more than 76 billion gallons in fracking waste were dumped into the Gulf in 2014 alone, the documents show.   read more

Portland’s police chief resigned Monday, two months after he shot a friend during a hunting trip and allegedly told sheriff’s deputies that the friend had shot himself. Police Chief Larry O’Dea was on a camping trip in Harney County on April 21 when he shot his friend, Robert Dempsey, in the lower back. O’Dea, Dempsey and two other retired Portland police officers were reportedly shooting ground squirrels.   read more

North Carolina lawmakers took steps Thursday to set aside a half-million dollars for the legal defense of a law limiting protections for LGBT people as a judge sought to streamline a cluster of lawsuits it has inspired. Republicans showed no appetite to change the provision requiring transgender people to use restrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate in schools, universities and many other public buildings.   read more

U.S. Customs and Border Protection found that employees acted properly when they fired guns in four incidents dating back to 2012 — including two that left two people dead. The reviews are the board’s first under its mandate to review uses of lethal force and other serious incidents once federal, state and local prosecutors decline to pursue criminal charges. It has opened investigations into 14 other cases.   read more

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paid Romania “millions of dollars” to host secret prisons, a rights lawyer said Wednesday as the European Court of Human Rights heard accusations that Romania allowed the agency to torture terrorism suspects in a secret renditions program under President George W. Bush.   read more

BancorpSouth deliberately avoided building branches in minority neighborhoods in Memphis, Tennessee from at least 2011 to 2013. The bank also denied more loans to African Americans and other minorities when compared to neighborhoods with smaller minority populations, the Justice Department and CFPB said Wednesday, and minorities who were approved for loans were given higher interest rates when compared to non-minorities.   read more

The city of Cleveland agreed Wednesday to allow protests closer to the site of the Republican National Convention, approving rule changes that increases the amount of space demonstrators can occupy and allows for longer events. A federal judge ruled last week that Cleveland’s regulations on protests and marches during the convention infringed on the right of free expression and ordered city officials and the ACLU to negotiate new rules.   read more

The European Commission said Wednesday that it has no choice but to extend approval of the herbicide glyphosate through 2017, after EU member states failed to either approve or ban the chemical. The European Union’s current approval of glyphosate was set to expire on June 30. However, a lack of consensus left the commission with a single choice as the EU’s executive body: extend glyphosate’s license for another 18 months in hopes that the member states will make a unified decision.   read more

Congressional officials have found lead in the drinking water of a House office buildings. The office of the Architect of the Capitol informed lawmakers Tuesday that lead levels in the drinking water of the Cannon Building “are slightly above the EPA standard.” Republican Rep. Dennis Ross dashed off an irate letter to House officials on Wednesday demanding to know how much lead is in the water and asking for free tests to measure lead in the people who’ve been drinking the water.   read more

Monday’s 5-3 ruling, striking down strict regulations on Texas abortion clinics, is the court’s most significant abortion ruling in more than 20 years and likely to reverberate well beyond the state’s borders. Justice Breyer rejected arguments that the Texas law was needed to safeguard women, saying the state had “no significant health-related [abortion] problem for the new law to cure.” He added that states may not unduly burden the ability of women to exercise their rights under Roe.   read more

Religious charities get millions of dollars of federal money to detain young, unaccompanied immigrants but deny them health services even if they have been raped, and punish them for asking for reproductive health care, claims the ACLU. The lawsuit tells of four young pregnant women, two of whom were raped on their journey to the U.S.. They were unable to get contraception or abortion through their detainers and had to be transferred to different states, away from the few friends they had.   read more

A $30,000 price tag for cancer drug therapy that extends life only a few weeks is understandably alarming. But a $2,000 price tag for all childhood vaccines — credited with eradicating smallpox, preventing a million or more cases of other diseases and averting thousands of deaths each year — is a bargain. In fact, the price of childhood vaccines may be too low for our own good because it contributes to shortages.   read more

The organization filed a lawsuit accusing Black of sending poor defendants to jail when they can't pay fines and charging them a questionable "extension fee" to avoid jail time. It's the latest of a series of legal challenges across the country to a system that opponents say criminalizes being poor. For the next 75 days, the judge has agreed to stop charging the $50 extension fee the group had objected to as well as some other fees and to stop jailing people who can't pay fines and fees.   read more

Police in the German town of Minden say a 25-year-old man who arrived last year as a refugee is their "hero of the day" after he found some 150,000 euros ($166,095) — and handed it to authorities. The unidentified Syrian man discovered the money in a cupboard he had been given by a charitable organization.   read more