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

The Kansas State Board of Education voted unanimously on Tuesday to ignore a directive from President Obama’s administration that public schools allow transgender students to use restrooms matching their gender identity, and instead the board left decisions up to school districts. What remains unclear is whether the 10-0 vote will endanger over $479 million in federal aid, or about 10% of the state’s education budget.   read more

In an effort to appeal to picky young palates, food processors often make their products more tempting by putting color in the food. A recent study (pdf) has shown, though, that 43% of foods marketed to children contain artificial food colors (AFCs). The food most likely to contain artificial dyes is—no surprise—candy, with 96.3% of the brands sampled containing artificial dyes. Next on the list were fruit-flavored snacks (94.7%); drink mixes and powders (89.7%); and frozen breakfasts (85.7%).   read more

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the government’s “net neutrality” rules that require internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. The 2-1 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is a win for the Obama administration, consumer groups and content companies such as Netflix that want to prevent online content from being blocked or channeled into fast and slow lanes.   read more

More than a decade into his 18-year prison term, a man hammered by disproportionate crack cocaine penalties can try to benefit from recent drug sentencing reform efforts, the Ninth Circuit ruled Monday. The U.S. Sentencing Commission passed an amendment the following year that would allow more than 12,000 drug offenders to apply for retroactive relief. But prosecutors claimed that Davis waived his right to contest his sentence when he signed his plea agreement back in 2005.   read more

A defense contractor responsible for cleaning up pollution at a facility where most munitions manufacturing was done under contracts with the U.S. military can seek cost recovery from the government, the Ninth Circuit ruled Monday. In 2013, Whittaker filed its own lawsuit under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, seeking recovery from the United States for expenses Whittaker incurred since the 1980s investigating and cleaning the Bermite site.   read more

Washington firefighters asked Gov. Jay Inslee (D) to stop oil trains from running through the state until a “full investigation” is conducted into the June 3 derailment in Oregon. “The account given by firefighters of the Mosier response and by others who have responded to similar incidents across North America make it clear these fires are exceedingly difficult to extinguish, even under unusually ideal circumstances,” council president Dennis Lawson wrote.   read more

Gun homicides are a common cause of death in the United States, killing about as many people as car crashes. Some cases command our attention more than others, of course. Counting mass shootings that make headlines and the thousands of Americans murdered one or a few at a time, gunshot homicides totaled 8,124 in 2014. This level of violence makes the United States an extreme outlier when measured against the experience of other advanced countries.   read more

In what appears to be the first such ruling ever, an Oregon judge granted a transgender person’s petition to be legally considered “non-binary,” rather than male or female. Jamie Shupe of Portland filed a petition for change of sex in April. Shupe, who was born male, used the honorific “Mx” in court filings.   read more

Starting in 1932, North Dakota law barred nonfamily corporations from owning farmland or operating farms. But that changed in March of last year when the state legislature passed a bill that would relax the corporate farming ban and Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple signed it into law. Citizens protested the new law, with the state’s farmers union at the forefront, which led to a referendum that voters will face on Tuesday.   read more

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from a group of American Samoans who say the United States should grant full citizenship to people born in the U.S. territory. The justices on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that said the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship does not extend to the islands that have been a part of the country since 1900.   read more

The global number of nuclear warheads dropped last year, though none of the nine nuclear powers showed any signs of giving up their atomic weapons, an arms watchdog said Monday. In an annual report, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, together had about 15,395 nuclear weapons on Jan. 1 this year, down from 15,850 a year earlier.   read more

Seven years into his presidency, Barack Obama continues to publicly back ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Secretary of State John Kerry vowed late last year to “re-energize” efforts for congressional approval — a move that the head of the U.N. organization created to enforce a ban says would lead at least some of the other holdouts to do the same. But with Obama’s days in office numbered, that appears to be a forlorn hope.   read more

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), released a report today slamming an accreditor of for-profit colleges for its “appalling record of failure.” “Students and taxpayers have paid the price” for the failures of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), she wrote in an accompanying letter to the U.S. Secretary of Education. Warren urged the Department of Education to take “strong, aggressive action to hold ACICS accountable.”   read more

In the 21st century, the United States has reinstated a broad system of debtors’ prisons, in effect making it a crime to be poor. If you don’t believe me, come with me to the county jail in Tulsa. On the day I visited, 23 people were incarcerated for failure to pay government fines and fees, including one woman imprisoned because she couldn’t pay a fine for lacking a license plate.   read more

While corporate executives have been outspoken in defending their labor practices before Congress and the public, the American workers who lost jobs to global outsourcing companies have been largely silent. Until recently. Now some of the workers who were displaced are starting to speak out, despite severance agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers.   read more

The last word about the quality of Dimock’s water came from assurances in a 2012 statement from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The agency declared that the water coming out of Dimock’s taps did not require emergency action, such as a federal cleanup. The agency’s stance was widely interpreted to mean the water was safe. Now another agency has analyzed the same set of water samples, and determined that is not the case.   read more