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: