WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A misfired email from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service employee in Cincinnati alerted a number of Washington IRS officials that extra scrutiny was being place on conservative groups in July 2010, a year earlier than previously acknowledged, according to interviews with IRS workers by congressional investigators.

Transcripts of the interviews, reviewed by Reuters on Thursday, provided new details about Washington managers' awareness of the heightened scrutiny applied by front-line IRS agents in Cincinnati to applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups with words like "Tea Party" in their names.

A political furor over the practice has engulfed the tax agency for nearly a month since a senior IRS official publicly apologized for it at a conference. Since then, the IRS' chief has been fired by President Barack Obama, the FBI has mounted an investigation and Congress has held numerous hearings.

The transcripts show that in July 2010, Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who was coordinating "emerging issues" for the agency's tax-exempt unit, was corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull.

In April 2010 Hofacre had been put in charge of handling tax-exempt status applications from conservative groups by her Cincinnati supervisor.

She was asked to summarize her initial findings in a spreadsheet and notify a small group of colleagues, including some staff in the Washington tax-exempt unit. However, she sent her email to a larger number of people in Washington by accident.

"Everybody in DC got it by mistake," Hofacre said in the transcripts. She later clarified that she did not mean all officials but those in the IRS Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements unit.

The Cincinnati office, where IRS reviews of applications for tax-exempt status were centralized, used a "be-on-the-lookout" (BOLO) list that included the words "Tea Party" and "Patriot" for flagging applications for extra review.

This practice has drawn criticism. However, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which closely studied the matter, has said no evidence exists that the list was created by high-level IRS officials, or political officials in the U.S. Treasury or the White House.

Lois Lerner, the IRS official who set off the controversy, has said that she first learned of the BOLO list in June 2011, and that she ordered the partisan criteria to be removed immediately. The Treasury inspector general backed up that statement.

Neither Hofacre, nor a second IRS worker in Cincinnati, Gary Muthert, knew who asked for the partisan names to be added to the BOLO list in the first place, the transcripts showed.

Still, Muthert said that when his supervisor in Cincinnati initially asked him to look for "Tea Party" applications, "he told me Washington, D.C. wanted some cases," according to his interview with congressional investigators.

Hofacre, however, indicated that a Cincinnati official told her to use the criteria. That official "told me what I needed to put on this particular BOLO list," Hofacre said, referring to the list for Tea Party cases only.

Hofacre lashed out at Washington officials for attributing the extra scrutiny to the staffers in Cincinnati. "It was a nuclear strike on us," she told congressional investigators.

(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh)

The study may help explain why black women have higher rates of breast cancer at young ages and a worse chance of survival.

Doctors say these patients should be offered genetic counseling and may want to consider more frequent screening and prevention options, which can range from hormone-blocking pills to breast removal, as Jolie chose to do.

"We were surprised at our results," said the study leader, Dr. Jane Churpek, a cancer specialist at the University of Chicago. Too few black women have been included in genetic studies in the past and most have not looked for mutations to the degree this one did, "so we just don't have a good sense" of how much risk there is, she said.

Churpek gave results of the study Monday at an American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago. The researchers include Mary-Claire King, the University of Washington scientist who discovered the first breast cancer predisposition gene, BRCA1.

Jolie revealed a few weeks ago that she carries a defective BRCA1 gene, giving her up to an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer and up to a 54 percent risk for ovarian cancer. The actress's mother had breast cancer and died of ovarian cancer, and her maternal grandmother also had ovarian cancer. An aunt recently died of breast cancer.

Children of someone with a BRCA mutation have a 50 percent chance of inheriting it.

In the U.S., about 5 to 10 percent of breast cancers are thought to be due to bad BRCA genes. Among breast cancer patients, BRCA mutations are carried by 5 percent of whites and 12 percent of Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jews. The rates in other groups are not as well known.

The study involved 249 black breast cancer patients from Chicago area hospitals. Many had breast cancer at a young age, and half had a family history of the disease.

They were given complete gene sequencing for all 18 known breast cancer risk genes rather than the usual tests that just look for a few specific mutations in BRCA genes.

Gene flaws were found in 56, or 22 percent, of study participants; 46 of them involved BRCA1 or BRCA2 and the rest were less commonly mutated genes.

Harmful mutations were found in 30 percent of black women with "triple-negative breast cancer" tumors whose growth is not fueled by estrogen, progesterone or the gene that the drug Herceptin targets. Doctors have long known that these harder-to-treat cases are more common in black women.

The National Cancer Institute, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Komen for the Cure paid for the study.

It included many younger women and those with a family history of cancer, and they are known to have higher rates of gene mutations that raise risk, said Rebecca Nagy, a genetics counselor at Ohio State University and president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors.

Still, "it has always stumped us" to see black families with lots of breast cancer but no mutations that can be found in ordinary testing for BRCA genes, she said.

That was the situation for Alicia Cook, 44, a Chicago woman whose grandmother died of breast cancer, mother died of ovarian cancer and two sisters have had breast cancer. When she was first diagnosed with breast cancer nearly 10 years ago, a test for BRCA mutations was negative.

Doctors said, "I'm sure there's something going on genetically" but they didn't have the tools to find it, Cook said.

Last year, she had a recurrence and a sister who was diagnosed with the disease learned she carried a BRCA1 mutation. Cook was retested for the same mutation and found to have it. Now she is telling her relatives in hopes that more of them will seek genetic counseling and be aware of their risk.

"You don't want to put people in fear, but knowledge is power," she said.

___

Online:

Breast cancer: http://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/breast-cancer

and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/risk/brca

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Exxon's annual meeting used to draw dozens of protesters from environmental and human-rights groups, but there was only a lone demonstrator outside as the meeting began Wednesday in an ornate symphony hall.

A retirement fund for New York state employees is proposing that Exxon ban bias based on sexual orientation. The Exxon board opposes the measure, saying that the company already prohibits all types of discrimination and doesn't need to add language regarding gays.

Last year, shareholders rejected a similar anti-bias measure and another on climate change.

On Wednesday, shareholders will vote on another resolution proposed by a religious group from Caldwell, N.J., to set goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from Exxon products and operations.

Exxon is tapping tar-sands oil in Canada and using hydraulic fracturing to boost U.S. production of natural gas. Some environmentalists oppose both practices and say that Exxon should invest more to develop wind, solar and geothermal energy. The company has made forays into alternative energy sources but argues that the world will be dependent on oil for decades.

"Exxon Mobil's goal is to be the premier petrochemical and petroleum company in the world," CEO Rex Tillerson said as he discussed the company's activities.

Exxon Mobil Corp. is coming off its second-biggest profit ever, having earned $44.9 billion in 2012.

[More from BGR: ]

All of this was possible, Hempton notes, because governments have access to Androids source code and can thus demand and implement any changes they want as a precondition of selling devices on national wireless carriers. Hempton says that its significantly more challenging for repressive regimes to drastically overhaul Apples iOS for their own purposes since Apple does not hand out its source code to anyone who asks for it. Instead, the regime must negotiate with Apple over potential country-specific modifications to iOS, which means that the government is unlikely to get everything it wants.

[More from BGR: ]

Of course, there is a solution to this for Android users living under more repressive governments: They can simply root their phones and install stock Android or remove their devices more oppressive features. But Hempton worries that knowledge about rooting Android phones will be severely limited in many countries and that rooted Android phones will be used only by a tiny elite who have educationin coding.

All of this brings us to the looming battle between . Hempton speculates that Apple might have to make such severe changes to its operating system to gain broad access to the Chinese market that it could actually wind up degrading its devices overall user experience. This will only stand to benefit Android vendors, especially among elites who will know how to root their devices to open up access to more apps and content.

I am assuming that if Apple goes mass-market in China it will sell systems with enough apologiesto the cultural differences of China, he writes. Those apologies will make a rooted Android massively superior to a botched-up Apple. The elite will want their SamsungsSome bullson Apple and China may be just flat wrong

This article was

The researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago said they identified 723 workers diagnosed with tumors between 1976 and 2004 at the United Technologies Corp. subsidiary. The tumors were malignant, benign or unspecified and included 277 cases of brain cancer.

The researchers also reviewed 11 chemical or physical agents on the basis of known or suspected carcinogenic potential that could affect the central nervous system or other organs.

The $12 million study, commissioned by Pratt & Whitney, was overseen by the state Department of Public Health.

Comparisons among Pratt & Whitney plants showed a slightly higher incidence of tumors and cancer among workers at the North Haven plant, the researchers said. But further evaluation found no association with estimated workplace exposures.

Pratt & Whitney spokesman Ray Hernandez said: "We are pleased that employees have answers to their questions and there is no correlation between cancer and the workplace."

The principal University of Pittsburgh researcher, Gary Marsh, said employees can be reassured that working at Pratt & Whitney before 2002, the start of the study period, "does not increase your risk of developing brain cancer and does not increase your risk of dying."

"The news is good," he said.

The slightly elevated cancer rates at the North Haven plant may reflect external occupational factors that researchers did not measure or other factors unique to North Haven or the baseline plant used in the internal comparisons, Marsh said.

The researchers analyzed the records of nearly 250,000 workers over a 53-year period, making it one of the largest and most comprehensive such studies in an occupational setting, Marsh said. It also is the first large-scale study of workers in the jet engine manufacturing industry.

The results echo what was released in the first stage of the three-stage study in 2008. The researchers said then they did not find statistically significant excesses in deaths from malignant brain tumors among North Haven workers.

Workers and their families, joined by the International Association of Machinists, pushed for the study after widows and union officials said they were concerned with what appeared to be numerous and similar deaths at Pratt & Whitney plants.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Automattic, the company that operates blogging service WordPress.com, announced a $50 million investment from hedge fund and private-equity investor Tiger Global on Friday.

The investment comes on the heels of Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging company Tumblr, showing the high prices fast-growing services that targeting Internet users can command. The valuation for Automattic was similar, Fortune reported. A spokeswoman for WordPress declined to comment.

WordPress powers the blogs at companies such as CNN.com and Techcrunch, a spokeswoman said.

The investment bought out shares of existing shareholders, including early employees, rather than directly funding the company, wrote WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg in a blog post.

"Allowing early investors to lock in some returns releases any short-term pressure there might be on the company for a liquidity event and allows us to focus fully on the long road ahead," he wrote in his post.

The investment is part of a crop of financing where nontraditional investors make bets on venture-capital backed companies. They include private-equity firms such as Rizvi Traverse Management, which last year led a $200 million funding round in payments service Square, and mutual funds such as T. Rowe Price, which has invested in companies including micro blog service Twitter.

Many of these investors "come in with the ability to write checks larger than the entire size of most VC funds," wrote Mullenweg.

More top blogs run Word Press than any other publishing platform, according to a 2012 study conducted by Kingdom, a website monitoring service. Blogs it cited in the study include technology sites such as Tech Crunch and Boingboing and Hollywood news site Deadline.

While many organizations use Tumblr, it is heavily associated with individuals updating friends and others on their activities and interests, social-media style.

And while Tumblr's revenue is advertising based, the bulk of WordPress's revenue comes from fees to users who upgrade beyond its basic free service. It also derives significant revenue from charging large media companies to host their entire blogging platforms, said Automattic Chief Financial Officer Stuart West in a telephone interview. He declined to disclose figures.

Like Tumblr, WordPress is growing fast, with 50 million users today compared with 4 million five years ago, the company said. Tumblr launched five years ago and today has more than 100 million blogs in its network.

The largest single audience group for WordPress is users aged 25-34, according to consultancy comScore. For Tumblr, the largest group is users aged 18-24.

Earlier this year, Tiger led a $444 million equity investment in online survey company SurveyMonkey as part of a financing round that also allowed early investors and employees to cash out. Tiger partner Lee Fixel handled his firm's investment in both SurveyMonkey and Automattic.

Tiger extended its offer to WordPress in April, before Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr was announced, West said.

Automattic's venture backers include Polaris Partners, True Ventures, and the New York Times Co.

(The story corrects to "automattic" from "wordpress" in second paragraph, name to "Rizvi Traverse" in sixth paragraph, and spelling of name to Mullenweg from Mullen in seventh paragraph)

(Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

ROME (Reuters) - An encyclopedia of Italian political slang has shone a light on a colorful and Byzantine world where lawmakers and journalists speak a language you won't find in any ordinary dictionary.

The confusing nature of Italian politics has come to the fore in recent months, with an electoral result in which the leading party won the lower house but not the senate, a resulting two-month stalemate, and the final formation of a government led by none of the candidates who campaigned.

Here is a selection of the words that best sum it all up in the encyclopaedia 'Il Crollo' ('The Downfall'), compiled by journalist Lorenzo Pregliasco:

BUNGA BUNGA

The term for a "mysterious sexual ritual" supposedly enjoyed by guests at Silvio Berlusconi's parties. It originated from testimony from the Moroccan nightclub dancer Karima El Mahroug, or 'Ruby the Heartstealer', in October 2010.

The phrase became synonymous with Italy's then prime minister, and its viral spread through international media in 2011 accompanied the collapse of both his reputation and the financial markets' trust in Italy's ability to repay its debt.

CASTA

Originally meaning caste, the word now refers to a clique of politicians keeping a grip on privilege and power. It was a favorite term of the 5-Star Movement that stormed to 25 percent of the vote in its first national election, promising to kick the 'casta' out of parliament.

CELODURISMO (I HAVE IT HARDISM)

From the catch phrase of regionalist party the Northern League - "The League has it hard", a not so subtle allusion to an erect penis. It refers to macho posturing and "the assumption of aggressive or decisive political attitudes, at the cost of appearing crude or coarse".

COMPRAVENDITA (PURCHASE AGREEMENT)

Paying lawmakers to switch sides in parliament to shore up or undermine a government. In a current 'compravendita' investigation, former Senator Sergio De Gregorio told officials he accepted 3 million euros ($3.86 million) from Berlusconi to change sides and topple the centre-left government in 2006.

ESODATI (EXILED ONES)

Workers who voluntarily took early retirement but found themselves without a stipend because of a 2011 pension reform that raised the retirement age. A combustible political issue, particularly following several suicides of people affected.

GRILLINI

The supporters of former comic and 5-Star founder Beppe Grillo, meaning 'little Grillos' or 'little crickets'. In Italy, the insects are associated with speaking uncomfortable truths.

INCIUCIO

The word for a deal done under the table, particularly between supposedly rival political groups. It leapt in usage in April 2013 as opposing centre-left and centre-right groups in parliament zoned in on an agreement that would allow them to share power.

OLGETTINE

Term for 14 young women housed at Berlusconi's expense at number 65 via Olgettina in Milan. They were frequent guests at parties at the home of the former prime minister.

PIANISTA

A 'pianist' uses the vote of an absent adjacent parliamentarian as well as his own, by stretching out his arm to press the voting button on his colleague's desk.

SPREAD

Taken from the English. In Italian financial circles, it is most often used to refer to the price difference between Italian 10-year bonds and benchmark German bunds. "Lo spread" spread beyond those circles to become a ubiquitous buzzword in 2011, referring broadly to Italy's precarious financial position.

"Enough with this talk of the spread," Berlusconi declared in February 2013. "We lived happily for years without worrying about it. It's an invention of two years ago."

(Reporting by Naomi O'Leary; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

MIAMI (Reuters) - The Miami Heat reached their third straight Eastern Conference final after a 94-91 win over Chicago on Wednesday secured a 4-1 series victory for the defending NBA champions.

Miami will face the winners of the series between the New York Knicks and the Indiana Pacers. Indiana currently lead 3-1 going into Thursday's Game Five in New York.

A series that began with a Chicago upset win in Miami and included some fierce, physical encounters, ended with a strange game as Miami blew an 18-point first quarter lead but somehow managed to claw their way back to victory.

"It was very challenging to be up like we were and then to be down like we were in second half. Mentally, we had to not get too high, not get too low in the whole game," said Miami's LeBron James, who ended with 23 points.

"Emotionally, this game took a lot out of both teams," added the league MVP, who said he was left with "no energy".

The Heat made a blistering start, putting up 10 unanswered points to start the game and upped their advantage to 18 in the first quarter but once again the Bulls fought back.

Miami's sharp movement of the ball fell away dramatically, as did their shooting, as Chicago, led by the livewire Nate Robinson and powerhouse Carlos Boozer, roared back.

Chicago led 53-47 at the half and went into the fourth quarter with a 77-69 advantage but Miami got their second wind when it mattered.

A three-pointer from Shane Battier and a Chris Anderson dunk helped Miami close the gap before Norris Cole's left-handed dunk put the Heat back in the lead with 6:40 left on the clock.

'NO QUIT'

Still the Bulls kept on scrapping and it was not until Jimmy Butler's hopeful three-point attempt in the final moments was off-target that Miami could finally celebrate.

Dwyane Wade, who has struggled with his knee, provided 18 points and some crucial defensive plays for Miami in the fourth quarter.

Boozer ended with 26 points and 14 rebounds as the depleted Bulls, who played without their star Derrick Rose throughout the season, finally bowed out.

While Miami won the best-of-seven series in five games, that outcome masks the determination of a Bulls team that were also robbed of Luol Deng and Kirk Hinrich.

Head coach Tom Thibodeau said the way his team fought back from a big early deficit summed up his team's year.

"It is sort of the story of the season. Obviously we are disappointed in losing the series but I was never disappointed in the team," he told reporters. "I thought our team fought hard all year. There was no quit in them."

The Heat's quality and depth proved to be too much though.

"You have to give them a lot of credit. They are a great team. They are not going to beat themselves, you have to beat them," said Thibodeau.

Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra said the Bulls had shown their resilience throughout the series.

"We knew right from the beginning that we would have to earn everything we got. That certainly played out to be true," he said. "They made it extremely tough but in the fourth quarter we were able to change the momentum and finally turn the corner."

(Editing by Peter Rutherford)