Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON — The widening inquiries into the Internal Revenue Service are focusing less on why employees singled out small-government groups for scrutiny and more on agency executives who didn’t inform Congress earlier.

WASHINGTON — States should lower the definition of drunken driving to a blood-alcohol reading of no more than .05 percent, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended Tuesday, saying the United States is too tolerant of impairment behind the wheel.

 “A DELICATE TRUTH.” Viking. By John le Carre. $28.95.

In “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carre plunges us into Operation Wildlife, a secret anti-terrorist strike being staged in Gibraltar by an odd mix of British Special Forces and American mercenaries.

WASHINGTON — Usually when a senator suffers a big public defeat, he slinks off to lick his wounds. He rarely retwists the arms that didn’t bend his way. Colleagues don’t like to be seen switching. Were they horribly mistaken the first time? Don’t know what they believe?

WASHINGTON — Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, the Air Force’s top officer for sexual assault prevention, had a trial set for July 18 at his first court appearance on a charge of groping a woman in a suburban Virginia parking lot.

Krusinski, dressed in civilian clothes, didn’t enter a plea to the misdemeanor charge at his arraignment Thursday in Arlington County court. His attorney, Sheryl Shane, asked Judge Richard McCue to schedule a trial for September.

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Clashes between police and members of an Islamic group demanding the introduction of blasphemy laws left 14 people dead and 250 wounded in Dhaka and surrounding districts.

Police in combat gear patrolled the capital while armored vehicles were stationed in the main business district, footage from local television stations showed. Streets were littered with burned tires and broken bricks.

“A TREACHEROUS LIKENESS.” By Lynn Shepherd. Delacorte Press $26. (United States release is in August and its title will be “A Fatal Likeness.”)

LONDON — When novelist Lynn Shepherd set out to capture the excesses of the Young Romantics, she was able to draw on a previous career in banking in the 1980s.

“They’d have given Byron a run for his money, I’m sure,” the author says of the risk takers and “dominant personalities” encountered while she was working in the City.