National / International News

Rutgers University welcomes the arrival of new athletic director Julie Hermann as the beginning of a new era, weeks after turmoil engulfed its athletics department. The school's basketball coach was fired last month after videos showed that he verbally and physically abused players during practice.

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The HS2 rail project has an estimated £3.3bn funding gap and the benefits for the economy are "unclear", the National Audit Office says.

A 32-year-old man is arrested and charged in connection with a stand-off at a pharmacy in Edinburgh's Royal Mile.

CBS News and CNN say they've been told by sources familiar with what was found that investigators believe marathon bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote on an interior wall of the boat where he was found hiding. He allegedly said the attack was in retaliation for the Afghan and Iraq wars.

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Bulgaria's biggest political party says it will seek to have the result of Sunday's deadlocked election cancelled on grounds of a violation.

A threatened strike by liquor shop workers in the Canadian province of Ontario has drinkers scrambling to find other sources of alcohol.

A tropical storm crashes into coastal areas of Bangladesh, killing at least 12 people, and forcing up to one million to flee.

Wayne Rooney or Frank Lampard will captain England in the friendlies against Republic of Ireland and Brazil.

Four Egyptian soldiers and three policemen are seized by unidentified kidnappers in Sinai, Egyptian security officials say.

A man in his 60s has shot himself in front of a dozen children at a nursery school close to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, French officials say.

On board Royal Navy minehunter for simulated attack

A BBC news team has travelled to a town in northern Syria which eyewitnesses claim has been attacked with poisonous gas.

If you thought it was hard to get up this morning, imagine working at the IRS. Even on a good day, you're commonly a source of dread, and the butt of jokes.  Now, in the wake of disclosures that IRS has been targeting conservative groups for scrutiny, your workplace is also the subject of hearings on Capitol Hill and a potential criminal investigation. And the guy who runs everything just resigned.  

“This scandal just adds to the burden,” says Clint Stretch, with the tax policy news service Tax Analysts.   “You're frankly despised by a number of people in the political system, and the recipient of enormous broad-based criticism.  It’s hard to keep up morale.”

Meanwhile, you’ve still got a job to do, namely collecting taxes to keep the U.S. government running.  So, how’s all the chaos of this week going to affect that undertaking? 

Stretch says studies have shown that historically, in moments when tax collection authorities are held with suspicion, the country collects much less tax. He says the same could well be true this time around. “You could well see a dip in tax revenue.  But it won’t be because the government isn’t doing its job.  It’s because citizens won’t be doing their job.”

That’s because in the end collecting taxes is based mostly on trust. It’s a voluntary system. “When you’ve got politicians saying the institution is corrupt,” Stretch says, “that encourages taxpayers to ask themselves ‘If there are a bunch of criminals and thugs at the IRS does it really make sense for me to send them my money?’”

But despite this latest drama, the IRS, which employs hundreds of thousands of people, is “generally very good at what it does,” says  Alice Abreu, a professor of tax policy at Temple University Law School.  “And for that reason congress continues to put more programs and social policy through the tax system,” she says, referring to a growing list of programs administered through the tax code, ranging from the Earned Income Tax Credit to the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, and, soon, a big chunk of managing the Affordable Care Act.  

Meanwhile, Abreu says, Congress continues to reduce IRS funding.  She thinks that tension, of growing responsibilities coupled with shrinking budgets, is a big part of why the IRS is in this current mess over targeting conservative groups. They're trying to do more with less, she says. That can lead to missteps.   

“It may not be acceptable but it is understandable that somebody is going to look for a short cut that allows them to process the mountains of pieces of paper that they have in an efficient way.  And when you go for efficiency because you’ve got to get the job done, equity and fairness can fall by the wayside,” Abreu says.

Of course, making a case to spend more on a scandal-tainted agency that collects taxes is going to be tough, something Abreu acknowledges. “It’s not politically attractive to say we want to give more money to this agency that everybody loves to hate.”

Still, she says, Congress should “look more deliberately and more closely at what it’s asking human beings to do, without giving them the resources with which to do it.”  

If you thought it was hard to get up this morning, imagine working at the IRS. Even on a good day, you're commonly a source of dread, and the butt of jokes.  But this week, your agency is also the subject of a gauntlet of hearings on Capitol Hill and a potential criminal investigation. And the guy who runs everything just resigned.  

“This scandal just adds to the burden,” says Clint Stretch, with the tax policy news service Tax Analysts.   “You're frankly despised by a number of people in the political system, and the recipient of enormous broad-based criticism.  It’s hard to keep up morale.”

Meanwhile, you’ve still got a job to do, namely collecting taxes to keep the U.S. government running.  So, how’s all the chaos of this week going to affect that project?

Stretch says studies have shown that historically, in moments when tax collection authorities are held with suspicion, the country collects much less tax. He says the same could well be true this time around. “You could well see a dip in tax revenue.  But it won’t be because the government isn’t doing its job.  It’s because citizens won’t be doing their job.”

That’s because in the end collecting taxes is based mostly on trust. It’s a voluntary system. “When you’ve got politicians saying the institution is corrupt,” Stretch says, “that encourages taxpayers to ask themselves ‘If there are a bunch of criminals and thugs at the IRS does it really make sense for me to send them my money?’”

The drama aside, Stretch says in an agency that employs hundreds of thousands of people, most of them are trying to do a good job.  But, a scandal like this one could drive the best employees out. 

The good news: Inflation remains in check. The bad news: Jobless claims are up, and housing starts are down.

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We talked to Kevin Drum for today's Marketplace Tech. He's got a long piece out for Mother Jones on a topic we're familiar with: robots replacing humans in the workforce.

The good news is Drum seems optimistic about this robot utopian future, where highly intelligent machines will do all our work for us while we sip cocktails and play ping pong (or at least that's what I hope to be doing in 2040). There is a caveat: economists, policy makers and the rest of us need to think about using our extreme computing powers of the future to increase equality--not widen the income gap. 

Drum touches on a lot of numbers -- and I thought one particular set was pretty interesting. That set is the computing power of our brains:

Computing power is measured in calculations per second-- a.k.a. floating-point operations per second, or "flops" -- and the best estimates of the human brain suggest that our own processing power is about equivalent to 10 petaflops. ("Peta" comes after giga and tera.)

What does all of this have to do with Lake Michigan? Drum says if you turned 10 petaflops into their equivalent in fluid ounces, you'd get the volume of Lake Michigan. And he thinks that by 2025, your average computer will have that same capacity for computing. 

We talked to Kevin Drum for today's Marketplace Tech. He's got a long piece out for Mother Jones on a topic we're familiar with: robots replacing humans in the workforce.

The good news is Drum seems optimistic about this robot utopian future, where highly intelligent machines will do all our work for us while we sip cocktails and play ping pong (or at least that's what I hope to be doing in 2040). There is a caveat: economists, policy makers and the rest of us need to think about using our extreme computing powers of the future to increase equality--not widen the income gap. 

Drum touches on a lot of numbers -- and I thought one particular set was pretty interesting. That set is the computing power of our brains:

Computing power is measured in calculations per second-- a.k.a. floating-point operations per second, or "flops" -- and the best estimates of the human brain suggest that our own processing power is about equivalent to 10 petaflops. ("Peta" comes after giga and tera.)

What does all of this have to do with Lake Michigan? Drum says if you turned 10 petaflops into their equivalent in fluid ounces, you'd get the volume of Lake Michigan. And he thinks that by 2025, your average computer will have that same capacity for computing. 

Only 22% of people know who their MP is and the number saying they will not vote is increasing, says the Hansard Society's annual survey on political engagement.

Tories know Europe matters, says BBC's Ross Hawkins

Frank Lampard signs a one-year contract to stay at Chelsea, the day after the club win the Europa League final.