In a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Americans for Limited Government, the Internal Revenue Service revealed this month that 201 of its employees work full-time on union activities.

“A lot of people are not aware that under federal law, a federal agency is allowed to enter into a collective bargaining agreement with a union that has provisions where employees of the agency, in this case the IRS, are allowed to do union work on the taxpayer’s time and get paid for it,” ALG president and Nathan Mehrens explained in an interview with The Daily Caller.

As Office of Personnel Management documents explain, the performance of union duties instead of official government business is allowed, as it is a part of the government’s collective bargaining system.

“‘Official time,’ authorized by 5 U.S.C. 7131, is a core component of the federal government’s carefully crafted collective bargaining system,” OPM explains in its most recent “Official Time Usage in the Federal Government” report. “Official time is time spent by Federal employees performing representational work for a bargaining unit in lieu of their regularly assigned work. It allows unions to satisfy their duty of fair representation to members and non-members alike.”

Read more on KFI's National News Section

Do You Feel The PM Was Out-of-Line?

In a parliamentary debate, Australian prime minister Julia Gillard attacks the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, calling him a misogynist and a hypocrite.

Abbott had requested that the government remove Peter Slipper as speaker following the release of offensive text messages he sent referring to female genitalia.

Gillard reminds parliament of Abbott's track record on women.

Read more at The Guardian

Should jurors hearing the George Zimmerman case be sequestered?

SANFORD, Fla. (AP) — The jury in the George Zimmerman trial will be sequestered.

A Florida judge told a jury candidate Thursday that the six jurors and four alternates eventually picked to hear the second-degree murder case will be kept in isolation during the two to four weeks that it will last.

It was the first time Judge Debra Nelson has weighed in on whether jurors will be sequestered.

Read more at USA Today 

Digital deadbeats, consider yourselves warned: Yahoo (YHOO) says it will start culling inactive user names this summer "to give our loyal users and new folks the opportunity to sign up for the Yahoo ID they've always wanted," in the words of platforms executive Jay Rossiter.

For example, an average Al who hasn't signed into Yahoo for 12 months won't be able to keep squatting on prime albert@yahoo.com real estate come next month. Yahoo might free up that coveted name space for the millions of other Als, or wannabe Als, who might like to use the moniker. That should cut down on the number of users forced to use strings of numbers in their ID, whether it's used for email or fantasy football.

Yahoo won't say how many of its dormant account IDs face change of ownership, but it's safe to say the number isn't insignificant. "It's a good number," spokeswoman D.J. Anderson says.

Read more at Wall Street Journal

Carie Charlesworth thought speaking out about her abusive ex-husband would keep her safe.

Instead, it got the California woman fired.

“That’s why women who are victims of domestic violence don’t come forward,” a teary Charlesworth told KNSD-TV. “Because they are afraid of the way people are going to see them, view them, perceive them, treat them.”

Read more at New York Daily News

(Madeleine Morgenstern) Seventy House Republicans are planning a politically risky showdown with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to try to force additional debate on an immigration bill they say will mean amnesty for illegal immigrants and have dire consequences for the country.

The 70 members are petitioning for a special Republican conference meeting on the bill, a “highly unusual” move to go head-to-head with the speaker, according to Reps. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Steve King (Iowa) and Louie Gohmert (Texas), who are serving as spokespersons for the group.

Bachmann, King and Gohmert told TheBlaze the group is invoking the Hastert Rule: requiring support from a majority of the majority to bring a bill forward.

The petition is expected to go to the House leadership on Friday, but it’s possible some signatories might remove their names due to political risk, or that Boehner could head off the challenge by striking a deal. Going against leadership in such a way could have harsh political consequences for the signatories, including retaliation such as permanently getting passed over for chairmanship positions.

A Boehner spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.

Read more on KFI's National News Section

Would You Consider Licking Your Significant Others Eyeball As A Sign Of Affection? 

We've all heard about people doing strange things for love, but Japanese students are taking love-induced madness to a whole new level - and putting their health at risk in the process.

The latest craze sweeping through Japan is ‘oculolinctus’ – eyeball licking as an expression of affection between young lovers.

However, it has led to a surge in cases of eye infections and can even cause blindness, doctors have warned.

Read more at Daily Mail 

Have You Ever Wondered What We Will Look Like In 100,000 Years? 

Homo sapiens have slowly evolved over thousands of millennia, but what happens when modern technology comes into play? 

Visual artist, Nickolay Lamm of Pittsburgh, Pa., tried to answer that question. Interested in illustrating how humans would look like in 100,000 years, he asked science for the answers.

“Because I'm not expert in evolution, [I] got in touch with Dr. [Alan] Kwan who gave me his educated guess at what we may look like,” Lamm told FoxNews.com in an email. 

Read more at Fox News

The former elementary school from Simi Valley arrested and charged this week with molesting a male student has agreed to plead guilty.

The Ventura County Star reports Malia Brooks, 32, admitted to three felony counts of lewd acts with a child younger than 14 and will be sentenced in August.

Brooks, who surrendered to police Tuesday, could face up to 12 years in state prison.

Her attorney, Ron Bamieh, told the Star Brooks suffered a manic episode stemming from her own childhood abuse.

She resigned from her teaching job at Garden Grove Elementary School in Simi Valley June 5, authorities said.

“During the course of the investigation there have been no indications Malia Brooks had any other victims, Simi Valley Police detective Casey Nicholson said yesterday.

Read more on the KFI News Blog