Free Republic

The IRS has notified congressional staff that top officials in the agency’s Affordable Care Act implementation team were recently placed on administrative leave for potential improprieties, according to a congressional source. The agency told lawmakers that Fred Schindler, who is Sarah Hall Ingram’s deputy, and another staffer in the division were put on leave. The move is the result of gifts the staffers allegedly received — including $1,100 in free food and other items — while attending a 2010 health care conference. The IRS didn’t immediately comment. The agency is surrounded in scandal after acknowledging last month that it wrongly...

A number of nations — such as Hong Kong, Israel, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Germany and Taiwan — do require paid vacation time. There's a growing movement of people advocating "simplified lifestyles" to try to get the United States more in line with the rest of the world. "We're sacrificing on the altar of productivity and gross domestic product all sorts of values: health, where we're not doing well in this area, longevity, physical fitness and obesity — all sorts of factors that rank the United States in last place among industrialized countries," said John de Graaf, the Seattle-based...