Scott Neuman

President Obama announced late Wednesday that the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Steve Miller, has resigned in the wake of a report that employees at the agency engaged in partisan scrutiny of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

The president, appearing for a brief statement at the White House, said he had directed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew "to accept the resignation of the acting commissioner of the IRS."

The planet-hunting career of NASA's Kepler spacecraft might be near its end.

Astronomers said Wednesday that a reaction wheel that keeps the orbiting telescope pointed at tiny, distant patches of sky to look for Earth-like planets has failed. If they can't fix it, Kepler will be relegated to a less prestigious mission, directing its gaze much closer to home in a search for so-called "near-Earth objects," i.e., meteors and asteroids.

The Justice Department's subpoena of Associated Press phone records as part of an investigation into what Attorney General Eric Holder has called "a very grave leak" to the news agency has set off a political firestorm on Capitol Hill, but there's a lot to the AP story published a year ago that started it all.

Wal-Mart says it has drafted its own plan for improving safety at garment factories in Bangladesh rather than join other Western retailers in a legally binding agreement to pay for improved conditions for workers in the South Asian country.

A construction crew in search of gravel to use as road filler used its backhoes to level one of Belize's largest Mayan pyramids.

"It's a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill," Jaime Awe, the head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said of the destruction at the 2,300-year-old Nohmul pyramid, located in the Orange Walk/Corozal area.

"It's like being punched in the stomach. It's just so horrendous," Awe said Monday of the destruction thought to have occurred last week.

U.S. oil production is rising sharply and increased output from shale will be a "game changer" in global energy markets in the coming years, according to a new report out Tuesday by the International Energy Agency.

Attorney General Eric Holder has defended the Justice Department's actions in secretly obtaining journalists' phone records as part of a probe into leaks of classified material, but said he himself had nothing to do with the subpoena.

O.J. Simpson, shackled and wearing a blue prison uniform, was back in court on Monday asking for a new trial in the 2008 robbery-kidnapping case that landed him in prison.

The Associated Press described 65-year-old football star and TV pitchman as "Looking grayer and heavier ... flanked by guards as he nodded and raised his eyebrows to acknowledge people he recognized in the audience."

The Associated Press news agency says that the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months of telephone records on 20 lines used by its reporters and editors.

The records covered April and May 2012, and according to the AP:

Dr. Joyce Brothers, whose long-running television show dispensed advice on life and relationships to her viewers, has died in New York at age 85, according to her publicist.

She died on Monday of natural causes, Sanford Brokaw said.

Brothers, who was a pioneer of the television advice show, first gained fame as a winning contestant on the television game show "The $64,000 Question" in 1955, becoming the only woman ever to win the top prize. The AP says:

Americans appear to be split over the Obama administration's handling of the aftermath from the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Four retailers who represent the largest purchasers of clothes produced in Bangladesh announced Monday that they have will help finance safety upgrades at apparel factories in the South Asia country after the collapse of a garment complex killed more than 1,000 workers.

The news comes as the death toll in the April 24 collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza near Dhaka rose to at least 1,127, according to officials.

A jury in Philadelphia has found Dr. Kermit Gosnell guilty of first-degree murder in three illegally performed late-term abortions.

The jury also found Gosnell, 72, guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of a woman who was overdosed on anesthesia while undergoing a second-trimester abortion. He was found not guilty of one other murder charge in the death of an infant. Three other similar counts were thrown out by the judge last month.

The first-degree murder convictions carry a possible death sentence.

North Korea's hard-line army general, who is believed to have been responsible for attacks on South Korea in 2010 that killed 50 people, has been replaced by a relative unknown.

The move has analysts reading the tea leaves. The consensus is that the reshuffle at the top of the People's Armed Forces is part of a larger effort by leader Kim Jong Un to consolidate power over the military.

With a haul of $45 million, it's being billed as possibly the biggest cyber-heist in history. But in reality, experts and authorities say, it was thousands of small but highly coordinated thefts.

As we reported on Thursday, federal prosecutors charged eight people with being the just New York cell of an operation that allegedly encompassed criminal cohorts in 26 countries.

The White House says it made only minimal changes to the now-discredited talking points used to discuss the deadly attack last year on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been interred at a Muslim cemetery in central Virginia after a two-week ordeal in which a Massachusetts funeral director sought in vain to find a burial location.

Update at 7:15 p.m. ET: Sailor Was 'Trapped Underneath Boat'

On its website, Artemis Racing says Simpson, 36, "was trapped underneath the boat and despite attempts to revive him, by doctors afloat and subsequently ashore, his life was lost." Artemis says Simpson was part of an 11-member team aboard the boat and that all others have been accounted for.

Update at 6:40 p.m. ET: Dead Sailor Identified:

Gunmen in Pakistan stormed an election rally and abducted the son of a former prime minister — the latest violence in a bloody campaign ahead of nationwide polling.

Armed men drove up to an election rally in the city of Multan, opened fire, grabbed Ali Haider Gilani and sped off, witnesses said. Gilani, who is running for a seat in the Punjab provincial assembly, is the son of former Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

Eight people in New York have been charged as part of what prosecutors say was a global ring of cybercriminals who stole $45 million by hacking into prepaid credit card accounts and then using the data to get cash from thousands of ATMs around the world.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch described the alleged scheme as "a massive 21st century bank heist that reached across the Internet and stretched around the globe. In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and the Internet."

Tim Lambesis, the lead singer of the Grammy-nominated band As I Lay Dying, has been arrested on suspicion that he plotted to kill his estranged wife.

Lambesis, 32, allegedly tried to hire an undercover detective to kill his wife, Meggan, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

The heavily tattooed singer was arrested in Oceanside five days after his contact with the undercover officer. His wife lives in nearby Encinitas.

Authorities in Bangladesh say the death toll in last month's collapse of an eight-story garment factory complex has surpassed 800 as dozens more bodies were pulled from the rubble on Wednesday.

The latest corpses to be recovered were so badly decomposed that they were being sent to a lab for DNA identification, police said, according to The Associated Press.

Jurors on Wednesday found Jodi Arias, accused of killing her onetime boyfriend in a fit of rage, guilty of first-degree murder.

Arias, 32, initially denied involvement in the June 4, 2008, shooting death of Travis Alexander, blaming his death on two masked intruders. Two years later, she changed her story, saying she had killed him in self-defense.

Testimony began in January in the four-month trial in Phoenix that became a cable television sensation, with details of the couple's sexual escapades and photos of Alexander after his death presented as evidence.

Three witnesses billed as whistle-blowers appeared before a House committee Wednesday to challenge the Obama administration's explanation of what transpired on Sept. 11, 2012, as the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked and the ambassador and three others killed.

A cargo ship slammed into a dock in Genoa, Italy, on Wednesday, killing at least seven people and toppling the control tower at one of the country's busiest ports.

The Associated Press reports that divers had found seven bodies in the wreckage. Four others have been hospitalized and two were still unaccounted for, Luca Cari, a spokesman for the fire rescue teams at the scene, told The Associated Press.

Seventeen Air Force officers with control over nuclear missiles have had that authority suspended after receiving poor reviews on their mastery of launch operations, The Associated Press reports in an exclusive.

The origin of some of the words we use today go back much further than scientists once thought, suggesting an Ice Age-era proto-language that spawned many of the world's contemporary linguistic groups, according to a new study by a group of U.K.-based scientists.

Pakistani cricketer turned politician Imran Khan is said to be OK after he fell from a lift during a campaign rally in Lahore on Tuesday.

Al-Jazeera reports that Khan "fell 14 feet as he was stepping off an improvised forklift that was raising him to the top of the platform."

Khan, who heads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party, was shown bleeding from the head after the fall.

President Obama says the United States and South Korea are determined to stand firm against North Korean threats and that the days of Pyongyang manufacturing a crisis to get international concessions "are over."

In a joint news conference with South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Tuesday, Obama said the two leaders "very much share the view that we are going to maintain a strong deterrent" against North Korea.

"We're not going to reward provocative behavior, but we remain open to the prospect of North Korea taking a peaceful path," he said.

The work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal oversight agency established by Dodd-Frank three years ago, has resulted in its first criminal referral — a case against a debt-settlement company it says defrauded thousands of people.