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

Six years ago, federal regulators tried to delist Yellowstone grizzlies, but a federal judge, Don Molloy, stopped the process after ruling that it was unclear from a scientific perspective how dependent grizzlies were on whitebark pine nuts as a food source. Whitebark pine trees in and around Yellowstone have been devastated by disease, which has killed nearly 75% of them.   read more

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval,” Leon wrote. He described the agency’s spy technology as “Orwellian,” and added that “the author of the Constitution, James Madison...would be aghast” by the NSA’s work.   read more

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shocked the soap industry this week when it demanded that manufacturers prove that antibacterial chemicals in their products are safe, or prepare to remove them. The decision comes after years of concerns by public health experts who warned that the chemicals may do more harm than good by negatively impacting human hormones and expanding the risk of drug-resistant infections.   read more

In Colorado, where lawmakers adopted several new gun bills in the wake of mass shootings in Aurora and in Newtown, Connecticut, many county sheriffs say they will not enforce them. In fact, all but seven of the 62 elected sheriffs in Colorado support a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the statutes. The new laws require background checks for private gun transfers and ban magazines of more than 15 rounds.   read more

The equipment, manufactured and supplied by International Home Finance & Development, was purchased so that soldiers at Forward Operating Base Sharana in Paktika Province could safely dispose of their solid waste. But the incinerators’ bad wiring—which wasn’t checked by the Corps of Engineers—left them useless. That, coupled with construction delays, forced base personnel to use open-air burn pits to get rid of the waste.   read more

Most of the 36 casualties were members of a wedding party. It has variously been reported that between 14 and 17 of them died, while the rest were wounded, many critically. Only two of the dead—Saleh al-Tays and Abdullah al-Tays—had at one time been identified as al-Qaeda suspects by the Yemeni government, according to AFP.   read more

For 2013, representatives in the U.S. House were in session for only 942 hours. That comes out to about a 28-hour work week in Washington. Regardless of how many hours they worked, or how few bills they adopted, lawmakers received $174,000 in salary. It wasn’t always this cushy for congressional members. Six years ago, the House logged 1,700 hours in session, nearly double the amount of this year’s total.   read more

The statute will lie dormant because of two key provisions: Four other states must enact similar legislation—and any combination of northeastern states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey) with a combined population of at least 20 million must adopt GMO labeling laws.   read more

Waddoups said bigamy is illegal only if a family fraudulently acquires multiple marriage licenses. A family with one husband and multiple wives cannot be considered a violation of the law on its own. Brown has four wives, but is only legally married to his first wife, Meri. The judge took exception to Utah’s law making cohabitation illegal, ruling the phrase “or cohabits with another person” represented a violation of both the First and 14th amendments.   read more

Last year, sales of stimulant medication intended to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) reached $9 billion—a fivefold increase from a decade ago. Today, 15% of high school students have been diagnosed with ADHD, with about 3.5 million of them on some sort of drug marketed to treat the disorder.   read more

Levinson himself doubted the wisdom of his final mission. “I guess as I approach my fifty-ninth birthday on the 10th of March, and after having done quite a few other crazy things in my life,” he wrote to a friend, “I am questioning just why, at this point, with seven kids and a great wife, why would I put myself in such jeopardy,” adding presciently that he wanted some assurance that “I’m not going to wind up someplace where I really don’t want to be at this stage of my life.”   read more

From October 4 to November 28, a “Free Weibo” app was available on the Chinese version of Apple’s online “App store,” allowing users to access the uncensored, but government-blocked “Free Weibo” website, which for about a year has been documenting the messages censored from Sina Weibo.   read more

Cantor Fitzgerald reached a settlement last week of its 2004 lawsuit against American Airlines over Cantor’s business losses arising from the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Cantor lost 658 of its 960 New York employees when terrorists flew an American Airlines jet into the center’s north tower, where its headquarters was located.   read more

The bill, introduced by Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), would cap funding for the portraits at $20,000 per painting. Another provision says taxpayer money can only be spent on portraits of those officials who are in the line of succession for the presidency (that being the vice president, the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate and cabinet members).   read more

The cross has been around in one form or another 100 years and the target of litigation for the past 24 years. The first cross was erected in 1913, stolen and replaced in 1923, then burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan after a black family moved into the area. A new cross was erected in 1934 but was blown down by high winds in 1952. It was replaced in 1954 with a 29-foot cross on a 14-foot-high base that remains there to this day.   read more

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, ruling the paragraph he called “8(h)(i)” was really just a badly indented “8(i),” interpreting the “(i)” as a lower case letter “I”. “The printer simply made mistakes in the indentation of the two subparagraphs placed within paragraph 8(h), which the lawyers who proof-read the documents overlooked,” the court concluded.   read more