The House Oversight Committee is holding another hearing on the IRS - but not one dealing with the agency's targeting of conservative groups.

The panel, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), will hear on Thursday from Treasury's inspector general for tax administration about "excessive spending" at IRS conferences.

"The IRS is an agency in crisis," Issa said in a statement. "The American people expect that their tax-dollars will be used responsibly and not for financing lavish hotel suites and entertainment for government employees. The Oversight Committee will examine these egregious abuses of the public trust and an IRS culture that shuns accountability."

"Cutting down on excessive and inappropriate travel has been a personal priority for me," said Werfel, a former senior official at the Office of Management and Budget.

Danny Werfel, the acting IRS chief, said that the inspector general report would discuss an IRS conference from 2010 - "an unfortunate vestige from a prior era," as Werfel put it.

"While there were legitimate reasons for holding the meeting, many of the expenses associated with it were inappropriate and should not have occurred," Werfel said.

Werfel said the sort of conference that will be described in the report, which he expects to be released on Tuesday, could not happen today, and that travel and training expenses at the IRS have already dropped more than 80 percent since 2010.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has asked Werfel to conduct a thorough examination of the agency in his first month on the job, and the new acting commissioner made clear that the IRS's bottom line would be a hot topic for him.

More than 1,000 people were killed in violence in Iraq in May, making it the deadliest month since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07, the United Nations reported today, raising fears of a return to civil war.

"That is a sad record," Martin Kobler, the UN envoy in Baghdad, said in a statement. "Iraqi political leaders must act immediately to stop this intolerable bloodshed."

A senior Iranian diplomat blasted Washington for raising baseless allegations against Tehran, and said the US which supports terrorist groups with financial, political and arms aids cannot accuse others of advocating terrorism.

"The US is not in a position to accuse other countries of supporting terrorism," Spokesman of Iran's mission at the UN in New York said, reacting to the US state department's 2012 annual report on terrorism.

He further reiterated that the US support for terrorist groups in the region, Israel's state-sponsored terrorism and the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO, also known as the MEK, PMOI and NCRI) shows Washington's double standards in confronting the phenomenon of terrorism.

Mir-Yousefi underlined that the Islamic Republic of Iran which is a victim of state-sponsored terrorism has fought terrorist groups through different possible means for decades.

Most Americans assume that the U.S. military is so vastly superior to everyone else that no other nation would ever dream of fighting a full-scale war against us. Unfortunately, that assumption is dead wrong. In recent years, the once mammoth technological gap between the U.S. military and the Chinese military has been closing at a frightening pace. China has been accomplishing this by brazenly stealing our technology and hacking into our computer systems. The Pentagon and the Obama administration know all about this, but they don't do anything about it. Perhaps the fact that China owns about a trillion dollars of our national debt has something to do with that. In any event, today China has the largest military in the world and the second largest military budget in the world. They have stolen plans for our most advanced jets, helicopters, ships and missile systems. It is estimated that stealing our technology has saved China about 25 years of research and development. In addition, China is rapidly developing a new generation of strategic weapons that could potentially enable it to actually win a future war against the United States. At one time such a notion would have been unthinkable, but as you will see below, the next war with China could go very badly for the United States.

The Washington Post is reporting on a confidential report that was prepared for the Pentagon, and what this report says about the extent of Chinese cyber espionage is absolutely startling. Will China know ALL of our secrets at some point? The following is a brief excerpt from the Washington Post article about the theft of our military technology by China. It turns out that Chinese hackers have gotten their hands on plans for almost all of the new cutting edge weapons systems that we have been developing...

Some of the weapons form the backbone of the Pentagon's regional missile defense for Asia, Europe and the Persian Gulf. The designs included those for the advanced Patriot missile system, known as PAC-3; an Army system for shooting down ballistic missiles, known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD; and the Navy's Aegis ballistic-missile defense system.

Also identified in the report are vital combat aircraft and ships, including the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the Navy's new Littoral Combat Ship, which is designed to patrol waters close to shore.

Also on the list is the most expensive weapons system ever built - the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is on track to cost about $1.4 trillion.

Every now and again, a political pundit is required to stand up and admit to the world that he or she got it wrong.

For me, this would be one of those moments.

For quite some time, I have been predicting that Obamacare would likely mean higher insurance rates in the individual market for the "young immortals" and others under the age of 40. At the same time, my expectation was that those who fall into the older age ranges would benefit greatly as their premium charges would be lowered thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

It is increasingly clear that I had it wrong.

Yesterday, Covered California - the name given to the healthcare exchange created pursuant to the Affordable Care Act that will serve the largest population of insured citizens in the nation - released the premium rates submitted by participating health insurance companies for the four health insurance program categories (bronze, silver, gold and platinum) established by the Affordable Care Act, along with the catastrophic policy created for and available to those under the age of 30.

Israel's long-standing habit of making bellicose threats in the face of neighbors potentially acquiring defensive weapons has reached a new level today, with Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon threatening to attack Russian ships in the Mediterranean if they attempt to deliver anti-aircraft weapons to Syria.

Russia has had a long-standing contract with Syria to provide anti-aircraft defensive systems, and the Assad government is keen to get those shipments completed in the wake of repeated Israeli air strikes against them. The Russian S-300 system, the best the Russian government sells, is seen as being able to foil Israeli attacks.

George W Bush has risked a backlash from veterans by claiming that he does not feel sorry for soldiers who were injured after he sent them into battle. The former President said that that 'to a certain extent you can't help it' when men got hurt on the battlefield.

He claimed that because soldiers are volunteers it absolved him from blame to a degree - and claimed that none of them were angry about their injuries. Mr Bush said: 'You know, I don't feel sorry for them, because they don't feel sorry for themselves'.

His comments are likely to be seen by Democrats as another attempt to whitewash his legacy as one of the least popular presidents in history. But they risk angering veterans' groups who have long backed him as a former Commander in Chief.

During his presidency Mr Bush embarked on two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resulting in a total of 6,471 American troops being killed so far. Some 32,000 soldiers were injured in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan, many with horrific injuries such as loss of limbs or psychological scars which will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

At least 132,000 civilians have died in both conflicts.

Mr Bush was speaking to The Huffington Post during his third annual Warrior 100K, a three-day mountain bike ride hosted at his ranch in Crawford, Texas as a way to show veterans he 'still care(s) about them'.

The father of Ibragim Todashev, who was shot by an FBI agent a week ago while being quizzed over his links to the Boston bombers, revealed the extent of his son's injuries in gruesome photographs of his dead body today.

Outspoken Abdul-Baki Todashev called for an investigation and possible legal action against the agent involved at a press conference in Moscow where he showed the images of his son's body lying in a morgue with up to seven gunshot wounds, including one to the back of the head.

His angry calls for justice came as a report claimed the 27-year-old native Chechen was unarmed in the clash with a federal agent in Florida on May 22. Previous reports claimed the US citizen went for the agent with a knife while being interrogated in his home. However, a report by the Washington Post yesterday cited law enforcement officials saying he had no weapon.

For a president that is executing Bush's "war on terror" against Al-Qaeda and "it's affiliates," it seems odd that President Obama has targeted the secular Syrian government for "regime change."

Equally odd is that Obama's strongest military ally on the ground in Syria- the best equipped and effective fighting force against the Syrian Government - is Jabhat al-Nusra, a group that has affiliated itself with al-Qaeda, and aims to turn Syria into an extremist Islamic state that enforces a fundamentalist version of Sharia law.

It's difficult to know exactly how al-Nursa received its guns, but one can make an educated guess. For example, The New York Times explained in detail how the CIA has been in a massive arms trafficking operation that has already funneled thousands of tons of guns from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Syria:

"The C.I.A. role in facilitating the [weapons] shipments... gave the United States a degree of influence over the process [of weapon distribution]...American officials have confirmed that senior White House officials were regularly briefed on the [weapons] shipments."

Where are the guns winding up in this massive arms trafficking operation? An important question to ask is: which rebels in Syria have guns and which ones don't. The Guardian reports:

"The [secular] Free Syrian Army's shortage of weapons and other resources compared with [jihadist] Jabhat al-Nusra is a recurrent theme... 'If you join al-Nusra, there is always a gun for you but many of the FSA brigades can't even provide bullets for their fighters,'...3,000 FSA [Free Syrian Army] men have joined al-Nusra in the last few months, mainly because of a lack of weapons and ammunition...Al-Nusra fighters rarely withdraw for shortage of ammunition..."

European Union foreign ministers have said they will not renew an arms embargo on the Syrian opposition, due to expire on Saturday.

But there was no immediate decision to send arms to Syrian rebels and all other sanctions remained in force.

Even so, Russia said it would "directly harm" the prospects of an international peace conference on Syria.

Meanwhile, the BBC has heard evidence that 200 people were killed in a massacre in western Syria this month.

Opposition activists said they had documented the civilian deaths in al-Bayda and Baniyas after government troops and militias entered the towns.

The government described the operation as a strike against "terrorists".