Mark Memmott

All branches of the U.S. military have been ordered "to retrain, re-credential and rescreen all sexual assault prevention and response personnel and military recruiters," the Pentagon confirmed Wednesday morning.

That order from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel follows Tuesday's news that an Army sergeant who was part ...

Saying that their client is not a "monster," attorneys for Ariel Castro have told Cleveland's WKYC-TV that the man accused of kidnapping three young women, holding them captive and repeatedly raping them over the course of about a decade will plead not guilty to all charges if he ...

The language is not dramatic, but the message is clear: A much-anticipated report from the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration is straightforward about how Internal Revenue Service personnel unfairly singled out some conservative groups for unnecessary scrutiny during the 2012 campaign cycle.

As the report's summary ...

As his Justice Department faces bipartisan outrage for searching phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder says he is not sure how many times such information has been seized by government investigators in the four years he's led Justice.

During an interview with ...

Attorney Gen. Eric Holder has ordered the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether any laws were broken when the Internal Revenue Service singled out some conservative groups for extra scrutiny, he told reporters Tuesday.

Echoing comments made Monday by President Obama, Holder also said ...

Make no mistake, the acting commissioner of the IRS put himself in historic company Tuesday by writing in USA Today that "mistakes were made" when his agency singled out for extra scrutiny some conservative groups.

No less an authority on language than the late ...

We want to note the launch of a new NPR blog — Parallels, which condenses its mission into four words: "Many stories, one world."

NPR.org international editor Greg Myre, who's hosting the blog, writes that:

"We have reporters around the world who are willing to ...

"Mistakes were made, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan motivation," the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service writes in USA Today's op-ed pages.

In his first public comments on the growing controversy over the extra scrutiny the agency admits ...

In case you haven't seen and heard it yet, there's a short video clip circulating of what it was like last Friday as a woman aboard a flight from Los Angeles to New York was taken off the plane after an unscheduled stop in Kansas City.

Her offense? ...

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- Actress Angelina Jolie Shares Story Of Her Double Mastectomy.

-- Russian Security Service Claims To Have Uncovered CIA Agent.

-- Afghan Taxes Weigh Heavily On U.S. Contractors, Report Says.

-- Book News: Amazon Debuts Its Virtual ...

From Russia Today:

"Russia's counterintelligence agency has detained a CIA agent in Moscow trying to recruit an officer of the Russian secret service, the Federal Security Service (FSB) announced. The agent was operating under guise of career diplomat."

According to Reuters, the Russian foreign ministry has ...

Since 2008, the Afghan government has assessed nearly $1 billion dollars in taxes — sometimes erroneously — on U.S. contractors working in the country, according to a new report from the Pentagon's Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, NPR's Tom Bowman tells our Newscast Desk.

John Sopko, the ...

Jolie, 37, wants other women to hear of her decision. She chose to have the surgery after learning that she carries the "faulty" BRCA1 gene. Studies show women with that gene have a m...

We like videos of bridges and buildings and other things being blown up on purpose.

Here's the story of an implosion that didn't go quite according to plan, which may make it even more fun. On Sunday near Brisbane, Australia, a silo used to store malt for brewing ...

Republican questions about how and when changes were made to his administration's "talking points" about last September's attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, are a "sideshow," President Obama told reporters at the White House on Monday.

"There's no there, there," the president declared.

"What we have ...

James Holmes on Monday formally changed his plea from not guilty to "not guilty by reason of insanity" for the July 20, 2012, movie theater shooting rampage in Aurora, Colo., that left 12 people dead and an additional 70 injured.

Holmes' lawyers had said last week that the ...

It's "outrageous and there's no place for it" if the Internal Revenue Service did, as it has admitted, single out some conservative groups for extra scrutiny in recent years, President Obama said Monday morning during a news conference at the White House.

Asked about reports that the IRS ...

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Monday that an Indiana farmer infringed on Monsanto's patent when he planted soybeans that had been genetically modified by Monsanto without buying them from the agribusiness giant.

In the decision, written by Justice Elena Kagan, the nine justices ruled that "patent exhaustion does ...

"The Internal Revenue Service's scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with 'tea party' or 'patriot' in their names — as the agency admitted Friday — to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to 'make America a better place to live,' ...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry "made a real breakthrough" last week in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin when they agreed there will be an American-Russian peace conference on Syria, British Prime Minister David Cameron told NPR on Monday.

Russia has continued to support Syrian President Bashar ...