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 newspaper examined more than a thousand police reports and found district attorneys routinely did not go after individuals accused of sex crimes. “As the Illinois data reveal, a stunningly small percentage of sexual assaults that are reported to police will eventually result in prosecution and conviction, and without meaningful data to portray that grim reality, there is no way for the public...to hold police departments and prosecutors’ offices accountable,” said EVAWI's Kim Lonsway.   read more

Judge Boasberg ordered the administration to cease detaining immigrants solely “for the purpose of deterring future immigration.” “The court specifically rejected the government’s assertion that detention was necessary to protect national security,” said professor Benson. The lawsuit was brought “on behalf of mothers and children who have fled extreme violence, death threats, rape, and persecution...and come to the United States for safety."   read more

“Judges should be free of political pressures and decide cases impartially based on the facts and the law," said Ryan Wright. "They should not have to worry that their decisions could be used against them for political gain.” Chief Judge Larry Solomon agreed and filed a lawsuit to have the law thrown out. The law is “a direct encroachment on the Kansas Supreme Court’s constitutional authority to administer the judiciary of the State,” states the lawsuit.   read more

The $5.8 billion that the IRS paid to fraud perpetrators in 2013 represented just 20% of all the phony returns it received, according to a report (pdf) by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In other words, the agency caught and rejected about 80% of the returns sent in by identity thieves.   read more

GCHQ planted malware on Gemalto computers, which enabled the agency to steal the encryption keys the company put on SIMs sold to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and other wireless companies around the world. Having the key makes it a snap to read all the information, whether voice or data, coming from a phone.   read more

Google has come out against a new plan by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to authorize remote searches of computers by federal authorities, calling the effort legalized hacking. Google stated that the plan would raise “monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal and geopolitical concerns that should be left to Congress to decide.”   read more

The “guns everywhere” law was enacted at the urging of the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights activists even though 70% of Georgia residents were against the legislation. It was also opposed by the state’s police chiefs association, the restaurant association, the Episcopal and Catholic churches, and the Transportation Security Administration.   read more

Researchers gathered information from 58 California cities and found more than 500 anti-homeless laws between them. Ninety percent ban begging and panhandling and 20% ban food sharing. All but one of the 58 cities ban at least one nighttime activity, “like sleeping, camping, or lodging in public places, including in vehicles.”   read more

Obama administration officials said Comey wasn’t invited because they didn’t want the conference to focus on law enforcement. However law enforcement officials from other countries, including Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the offspring of the KGB, did attend the meeting in Washington.   read more

The Obama administration has sent incorrect tax information to 800,000 customers of Healthcare.gov, the federally run insurance exchange, and is asking those people to wait to file their taxes until they get corrected information. About 50,000 of those who received the erroneous forms are estimated to have already filed their 2014 taxes.   read more

A law enacted during the George W. Bush administration that calls protests against animal treatment “terrorism” is being used to prosecute two men who released about 2,000 minks from an Illinois breeding operation. Kevin Johnson, 27, and Tyler Lang, 25, face up to 10 years in prison for charges brought under the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), which prohibits engaging in conduct “for the purpose of damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise.”   read more

Mahlangu was elected to South Africa’s parliament in 1994. He was appointed deputy chairman of the National Council of Provinces, the upper house in South Africa’s legislature and became chairman in 2005. In his official biographies, Mahlangu has claimed that he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Fairfax in 1995, but this was actually an unaccredited diploma mill.   read more

Washington agreed to pay $1.9 million for work to mitigate the damage caused to the coral reef. But an environmental group claims it will cost between $17 million and $27 million. "The said financial compensation is not enough to...absolve the U.S. Navy for the crime [it committed] in Tubbataha. The U.S. Navy not only incurred considerable damage to our world heritage site, they also clearly violated our Philippine sovereignty and laws,” said Clemente Bautista.   read more

The study showed that from 1987 to 2014, students in their senior year of high school who said they partied six hours or more per week declined from 34.5% to 8.6%. The report says 2014 incoming students’ self-rated emotional health dropped to 50.7%, its lowest level ever, a drop of 2.3% from the freshmen class of 2013. The number of students admitting to “frequently” feeling depressed also went up by 9.5%, which was 3.4% higher than in 2009.   read more

Using federal documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, TRAC discovered that immigration courts under the Obama administration adopted rules last year that pushed cases involving women with children to the head of the line. TRAC’s analysis of 26,342 adults-with-children cases found that fewer than 30% of the families were able to find a lawyer to help them, and those immigrants were allowed to stay in the United States only 26.3% of the time.   read more

Pérez took elective office himself in 2002 as a senator from the Dominican Republic’s national district, serving in that office for four years. In 2007 he was made director of his country’s Civil Aviation Institute and was later caught up in a controversy for overspending on a headquarters building for his agency. Pérez twice sought the PLD nomination for president, in 2008 and 2012, but failed to get it both times.   read more