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

Does using a government computer to access a website dedicated to helping people have extramarital affairs constitute grounds for punishment? The answer is probably not. “The rules of the game for morality in federal offices may be straightforward for pornography (it can get you fired) — but the kind of skeleton in the closet that showed up in the trove of 36 million users exposed on the cheating Web site presents officials with a murkier problem, experts say,” according to the Washington Post.   read more

Opponents of ballot selfies say they could lead to vote buying or voter intimidation. Legislators feared, for instance, that a selfie could be used as proof that a voter had cast his or her ballot a certain way to collect payment. The New Hampshire law said anyone showing photographs of their completed ballots to others or posting them online could be fined up to $1,000. The ACLU objected to the statute, claiming it violated free speech and the right of political expression.   read more

“The U.S. could likely reduce its number of school shootings, workplace shootings, and public mass shootings...if it reduced the number of guns in circulation,” said Lankford. “Until now, everyone was simply speculating about the relationship between firearms and public mass shootings. My study provides empirical evidence, based on my quantitative assessment of 171 countries, that a nation's civilian firearm ownership rate is the strongest predictor of its number of public mass shooters."   read more

Lockheed Martin operates Sandia National Laboratories, one of the nation’s leading nuclear research facilities. It has had this responsibility since 1993, yet Lockheed officials decided to use some of the federal contractor funding to lobby Congress from 2008 to 2012 to get a more lucrative deal. While it did not receive the kind of contract it hoped for, Lockheed Martin came away with a two year non-competitive extension worth $7.7 billion.   read more

Judge Gee said the detention of immigrant children violates the 1997 Flores legal settlement, which established legal requirements for housing children who are undocumented immigrants or who are seeking asylum in the U.S. She says the detention centers and temporary holding cells along the border are “deplorable” and don’t “meet even the minimal standard” for “safe and sanitary” conditions. She also stated that children may not be held in facilities not specifically licensed for housing minors.   read more

Fatalities from truck-involved crashes have been on the rise, climbing 17% from 2009 to 2013. During the same period, car-related deaths declined more than 3% thanks to “airbags...and anti-lock brakes,” Abramson wrote. “The trucking industry has resisted most of those safety devices.” The industry instead is trying to push Congress to loosen rules on trucking. That includes allowing truck drivers to work 82 hours a week and eliminating the weekly two-day rest break.   read more

A high-pressure dome over the Middle East resulted in “what may be one of the most extreme heat indices ever recorded in the world on July 31st,” according to NCEI. The Iranian port city of Bandar Mahshahr weathered an unprecedented temperature of 165°F. The record-breaking scorcher prompted the government to declare a four-day national holiday so people would stay indoors rather than step out into the heat to go to work.   read more

The decision has already been cited as precedent in an anti-robocall case, an anti-panhandling ordinance and a case involving a voter who took a selfie with their ballot. Justice Elena Kagan joined in the result of Thomas’ opinion, but in a concurrence took issue with the strict scrutiny standard, writing that it might mean that the Supreme Court “may soon find itself a veritable Supreme Board of Sign Review.”   read more

Traders are accused of using electronic chat rooms and instant messaging to drive up the price that secondary customers pay for Treasury bonds, then conspiring to drop the price banks pay the government for the bonds, increasing the spread, or profit, for the banks. This also ends up costing taxpayers more to borrow money.   read more

A three-judge panel voted 2-1 Tuesday to strike down a law requiring companies to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when their products contain minerals from conflict areas in central Africa in and surrounding the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The opinion was written by George H.W. Bush appointee Raymond Randolph and joined by David Sentelle, a Ronald Reagan appointee. A 29-page dissent was written by Barack Obama appointee Sri Srinivasan.   read more

Some of the five schools ended up with fewer counselors than other schools with lower numbers of at-risk students. As a result, violence skyrocketed at Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose elementary schools, averaging eight incidents a day for the five years starting in 2010. In 2014 there were more violent incidents at those five schools than there were at the county’s 17 high schools.   read more

The U.S. government did its best to support the ouster of Zelaya. It blocked a resolution by the Organization of American States that would have required Zelaya’s return as a pre-condition for staging an election. The United States also refused to call the change in government a military coup, which would have meant a cutoff in aid to Honduras.   read more

The Pentagon turned to General Atomics because it wants to “boost its drone presence by 50 percent in four years,” Tucker wrote. The Air Force says it needs help from contractors because although it brings in 180 new pilots every year, it needs about 300 of them and loses about 240 because of attrition, according to Military.com. Predator drones have been used to kill about 3,000 people, according to some estimates.   read more

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is refusing to release an internal study of its vulnerable computer network, which Chinese hackers infiltrated two years ago. The Chinese cyberattack reportedly crippled the commission’s systems that inform the public about the billions of dollars raised and spent each election cycle by candidates, parties and political action committees.   read more

The six board members who voted against the proposal said it was because there’s not enough evidence that marijuana is a safe and effective treatment for the condition. So, victims of PTSD, many of them veterans, will continue to be treated with opioid drugs that can lead to addition, overdose and many other unpleasant side effects.   read more

Home health care workers had been exempt from such protections since 1974, when it was found that they mostly provide “companionship” and as such were exempted from wage and hour laws. President Barack Obama’s Labor Department proposed to change this in 2013, but was blocked by a trial-court judge who ruled the department didn’t have the authority to make the change.   read more