The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year, according to a GOP senator.

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says his office has learned that the IRS is executing an agreement with the employees’ union on Wednesday to pay the bonuses. Grassley says the bonuses should be canceled under an April directive from the White House budget office.

A US man in Louisville, Kentucky has manifested a nightmare that has long been haunting bankers: 34-year-old Boma Robert Spero-Jack has been arrested for allegedly double-cashing checks by using mobile banking with good old-fashioned Western Union money orders.

Security reporter Brian Krebs spotted the news as reported by the Credit Union Times.

According to local news outlet WDRB News, the arrest report says that Spero-Jack went into several Kroger stores and bought at least 32 Western Union money orders, each for between $195 and $500.

He allegedly then left the store and deposited the money into his Bank of America checking or savings account via mobile remote deposit capture (MRDC).

What that entails, quite simply, is capturing an image of a check – which can be done with a plain old consumer scanner, as shown in this video from insurer USAA – and sending it to your bank.

Some banks even allow customers to capture the check image with their mobile phones or other consumer device cameras.

A controversial organization with tenuous ties to the United Nations — and which counts Kenyan relatives of Barack Obama among its good-will ambassadors — is supplying its officials and advisers with travel documents designed to look much like U.N.-affiliated diplomatic passports. The problem is, they aren’t.

The documents, known in diplomatic parlance as “laissez passers,” or LPs, ask national authorities to grant privileges and immunities to their holders on official business for the grandly named International Institution for the use of Micro-algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition (IIMSAM), which claims that it will solve the world’s hunger

There’s definitely an update coming next Tuesday, 18 June 2013, and you might as well get ready for it now if you haven’t already.

The details of what will be fixed aren’t a matter of public record yet, so we can’t spell them out for you in detail.

Nevertheless, Oracle has published a very brief pre-announcement to remind us of the importance of this month’s fixes.

Efforts in Washington to reform mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been a glaring failure to date, and in fact could boomerang to make the next housing crisis worse, according to the investigative journalism group ProPublica.

It has been five years since the government took over the teetering companies and their giant debt. ProPublica said efforts in Congress to repair Fannie and Freddie have been beset by “emotional battles and financial interests.”

In general, conservatives favor shutting the two companies down while more liberal D.C.
interests claim they can be fixed.

President Obama doubled down Monday on his defense of two National Security Agency spying programs that have damaged his approval ratings and distracted his presidency.

In an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose, Obama argued it’s a “false choice” to suggest freedom must be sacrificed to achieve security, a phrasing that echoes comments he made on the campaign trail in 2008.

The first experimental drug to boost brain synapses lost in Alzheimer’s disease has been developed by researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute. The drug, called NitroMemantine, combines two FDA-approved medicines to stop the destructive cascade of changes in the brain that destroys the connections between neurons, leading to memory loss and cognitive decline.

The decade-long study, led by Stuart A. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., professor and director of the Del E. Webb Center for Neuroscience, Aging, and Stem Cell Research, who is also a practicing clinical neurologist, shows that NitroMemantine can restore synapses, representing the connections between nerve cells (neurons) that have been lost during the progression of Alzheimer’s in the brain. The research findings are described in a paper published June 17 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

Beginning next month, Yahoo will attempt to resuscitate inactive email accounts by giving them away, according to Associated Press.

If you haven’t checked in on your Yahoo account for at least a year, there’s still time to save your handle from being given away to a stranger, and that might be a very good idea indeed.

House appropriators on Monday revealed that they plan to cut Energy Department spending on renewable energy in half next year as part of their plan to cope with automatic sequestration cuts in fiscal 2014.

Renewable energy, a key priority for President Obama, would be cut to $1 billion, a reduction of $911 million compared to 2013.

The cut comes as part of an Energy and Water appropriations bill, the fifth that the House is moving as part of a plan to produce all 12 annual spending bills at the topline $967 billion level called for in the 2011 sequestration law.

We are getting very close to this in some of the mountain towns.

Four people were injured in a series of attacks by at least two bears on Saturday and Sunday in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture.

According to police, the first attack took place on Saturday evening in a garden, where an 81-year-old man was attacked from behind by two bears, NTV reported. Police believe the animals to have been a female bear and her cub. The man sustained serious injuries in the attack, following which members of a local hunting club shot the cub.

There then occurred a series of bear attacks between 6:30 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, 1.5 kms from the site of the first attack, in which three people sustained injuries and were hospitalized. The head of the local hunting club told the press, “The bear is worked up, so there remains a strong possibility that she will attack again.”

A surge in migrant traffic across the Southwest border into Texas has resulted in a milestone: the front line of the battle against illegal crossings from Mexico has shifted for the first time in over a decade away from Arizona to the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.

Border Patrol agents with migrants captured in the Rio Grande Valley region. More support aircraft have been sent to help, but budget cuts have curbed their use.

This shift has intensified a bitter debate under way in the Senate over whether the border is secure enough now, or ever will be, to move ahead with legislation that could give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already here.

Shocker – it involves a woman.

The government of the Czech Republic has become embroiled in a scandal involving allegations of corruption and abuse of office that has seen Prime Minister Petr Necas announce his resignation.

Why has he felt obliged to quit?

In the end, the pressure for him to do so proved too great. The aide at the heart of the scandal, Jana Nagyova, is his closest political – and, allegedly, personal – companion, someone with whom he was in constant contact for much of the past decade, from his time as labour and social affairs minister to when he became prime minister in 2010.

The Turkish government has said it could use the army to end nearly three weeks of unrest by protesters in Istanbul and other cities.

The government would use “all its powers” and the armed forces if necessary, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said on state-run television.

It is the first time the Islamist-rooted ruling party has raised the prospect of deploying the armed forces.

… from the hospital. Don’t worry. It’s a regular procedure.

Six reasons why choosing Hong Kong is a brilliant move by Edward Snowden

Jordan’s King Abdullah said on Sunday the kingdom was ready to fight to protect itself against any threat to its security from the escalating civil war in neighboring Syria.

He was speaking as Jordanian and US forces proceeded with joint military exercises with the participation of 17 other countries. Diplomats say the exercises, which entered their second week, aim to send a strong message to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“If the world does not help as it should, and if the matter becomes a danger to our country, we are able at any moment to take the measures to protect the country and the interest of our people,” King Abdullah told military cadets at a graduation ceremony in southern Jordan.

Riot police from the Turkish provinces have been flown into protest-torn Istanbul as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan prepares to rally supporters.

Some 1,000 riot police officers arrived at Ataturk Airport from regions as far away as Diyarbakir and Sirnak in the south-east, Turkish media report.

Istanbul has been tense since riot police broke up a protest camp on Taksim Square on Saturday evening.

They moved in after weeks of protests against Mr Erdogan’s policies.

The protests began on 28 May against a plan to redevelop Gezi Park, but snowballed into nationwide anti-government protests after the perceived high-handed response of the authorities under their three-term prime minister.

Medical officials estimate that 5,000 people have been injured and at least four killed since protests began.

The police were out in force in Northern Ireland Saturday as anti-G8 protests got underway ahead of the summit. The crisis in Syria is likely to top the agenda at the meeting, which is due to start on Monday.

Police in Northern Ireland deployed in large numbers on Saturday as trade unions and anti-hunger campaigners began protests ahead of a summit of G8 leaders there. The crisis in Syria is likely to top the agenda at the meeting, which is set to begin officially on Monday.

At least four soldiers and one civilian have been killed after special forces clashed with armed fighters in the eastern port city of Benghazi, the army has reported.

The interim leader of Libya’s army warned of a “bloodbath” as the unrest in the city flared up again, a week after clashes there killed more than 30 people.

Shortly before dawn, heavy gunfire and explosions could be heard near the headquarters of the special forces, not far from the city centre.

The Facebook page of the special forces said its members were exchanging light arms and rocket fire with an “outlaw” group and reported that two of its fighters had been wounded.

A little later it posted photos of three of its members and announced that they had been shot dead as they “were defending the legitimacy of the state with courage and honour”.

Scientists from the University of Manchester have shown for the first time that magnetic clouds in graphene can be controllably dissipated and then condensed back, allowing researchers to work towards transistor-like devices in which information is written down by switching graphene between its magnetic and non-magnetic states.

Yale researchers eradicated most melanoma tumors by exposing them to a fast-acting virus, they report in the June 15 edition of the Journal of Virology.

Melanoma is the deadliest type of skin cancer and can spread throughout the body and even into the brain.

“After injection into the blood stream of mice, the virus finds melanoma on its own, and is fast and aggressive with tumors,” said Anthony N. van den Pol, professor of neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine, investigator for the Yale Cancer Center and senior author of the study. “Because the virus replicates rapidly, it can kill the melanoma before the immune system responds and kills the virus.”

In the process of eliminating the virus, the immune system may also begin to target and kill tumor cells, he added.

Private investigators found that CBS News Washington reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was tampered with multiple times late last year, the network said Friday.

CBS said an intruder, working remotely using Attkisson’s accounts, executed commands involving the search and filtering of data. The network said it is taking further steps to identify the intruder and how that person gained access to her computer.

Only 24 hours before hosts Brazil take on Japan in their Confederations Cup opener in Brasilia’s National Stadium, football took a back seat Friday after protests erupted in several cities across the giant country.

Overnight, police made hundreds of arrests in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s business capital, as well as Rio de Janeiro, after thousands of protesters blocked thoroughfares to protest planned hikes in transport fares which already outstripped typical fares in many a European metropolis.

Friday then saw hundreds more protesters gather in Brasilia itself, taking the focus away from the football as they protested urban reform and conditions for health workers.