The 1947 episode more on that later helped produce conflicting laws covering the kinds of activities tax-exempt organizations may conduct. The IRS' attempt to enforce those contradictory laws with vague regulations has sown even more confusion, tax lawyers, former agency officials and others agree.

"It's hard for groups to understand what the standards are, and different lawyers have different definitions of where to draw the line," said Abby Levine, who dispenses advice on nonprofit status to scores of groups as legal director of the liberal Alliance for Justice.

While no one interviewed by The Associated Press for this story defended the IRS' targeting of tea party and other conservative groups, no one disputed that the rules governing political activities by tax-exempt organizations are hard for everyone to follow, including the IRS. With one law saying some tax-exempt groups must engage "exclusively" in social welfare work, while a regulation changes the threshold to "primarily," President Barack Obama said last month that the result is "a bunch of ambiguity."

In the spotlight is a section of the tax code that has become increasingly attractive to many organizations in recent years, 501(c)(4), which grants tax-exempt status to so-called social welfare groups. Over the years, such groups have been allowed participate in overt political activity as long as they focus mostly on social welfare work. While many of them engage in little or no political activity, for those involved in politics the designation offers a valuable feature: It lets donors remain anonymous.

After the Supreme Court in its 2010 Citizens United decision allowed unfettered political spending by companies and unions, campaign spending by social welfare groups exploded. Between the 2008 and 2012 elections it tripled, to $254 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political expenditures.

The IRS received 3,357 applications for Section 501(c)(4) status last year, nearly double the number in 2010, according to the Treasury Department.

The story behind the confusion began a century ago, when Congress enacted legislation laying the groundwork for the modern income tax.

Exempted from the corporate income tax were nonprofits, including those "operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare" the designation that many conservative groups have sought in the current controversy. An IRS history of tax-exempt organizations says it is assumed that provision in the 1913 law was requested by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Fast forward to 1947, when wealthy graduates donated the C.F. Mueller Co., a pasta maker, to the NYU law school. That transaction, and a court ruling letting NYU keep its Mueller profits tax-free, helped call attention to the tax treatment of nonprofits.

NYU and other nonprofits had been fattening their coffers through ownership of factories, department store chains, cattle ranches, the Encyclopedia Britannica and other profitable businesses on which they were not paying taxes. One congressional estimate put the lost tax revenue at $173 million a year, a large amount at the time.

Urged on by President Harry Truman, Congress passed a law in 1950 allowing some nonprofits to keep unrelated businesses if they paid income tax on them.

But that left federal laws stating two things: a 1913 statute saying groups must operate "exclusively" for social welfare purposes and the 1950 law saying they could do unrelated things after all, as long as they paid taxes on the profits.

"So 'exclusively' couldn't mean 'exclusively,' because later law acknowledged these organizations could engage in other activities" if you tax them, said Ellen Aprill, a tax law professor and expert on tax-exempt organizations at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The government soon faced another issue a 1954 revamping of the entire federal tax code. Feeling a need to overhaul tax regulations, the Treasury Department issued new ones in 1959, producing even more ambiguity.

The new regulations addressed the two laws defining nonprofits by, for the first time, saying groups need only be "primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare." The rules permit "direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns" for or against candidates, as long as that isn't the group's principal activity.

"Congress made no effort to harmonize those statutes," said Marcus S. Owens, a Washington tax attorney who spent the last decade of his 25-year IRS career heading its tax-exempt organizations division. So the government adopted the "primarily" approach "as the only methodology they could think of to harmonize the statutes," Owens said.

Despite decades of IRS rulings and court cases refining the rules, definitions remain hazy for terms like "primarily," ''social welfare" and "intervention in political campaigns." Many lawyers, for example, say "primarily" means such groups can devote up to 49 percent of their resources to campaign activity, while others are more cautious.

While groups are supposed to devote most of their effort to "social welfare," that can include political issues if the work doesn't clearly support or oppose a candidate. That is a blurry distinction in an age when sophisticated political advertising writers tie politicians to specific viewpoints without explicitly calling for their defeat or re-election.

Such opaqueness can serve a purpose, such as letting tax-exempt groups hold fundraisers that are indirectly related to their main mission, experts say.

"I don't think the IRS would ever have wanted as a practical matter to be so severe that organizations are constantly disqualified on a foot fault on some tiny thing," said Richard Schmalbeck, who teaches tax law at Duke University Law School.

The vagueness has persisted for other reasons too, such as making it easier for such groups to wade into politics, benefiting Democrats and Republicans alike, analysts say.

Owens, the former IRS official, said he's unaware of any congressional efforts to clarify the rules over the decades. Though the IRS has removed tax-exempt status of groups supporting each major political party including the conservative Christian Coalition and the Democratic Leadership Council the vagueness of the regulations makes it hard to do.

"Congress was pretty happy leaving it up to the IRS to enforce this case by case, rather than stepping in and trying to find a clear, bright line," Owens said. Because the IRS had dealt with groups that clearly overstep the boundaries, "there's been no incentive for Congress to dabble there" with additional fine-tuning, Owens added.

To this day the IRS investigates each group to see whether it is engaging in political activity, using tests such as whether an election is approaching or whether the group gives opposing candidates equal opportunities to participate in events. If it is, the agency determines whether politics is the group's primary activity a difficult judgment that can involve measuring money, time spent by workers and other factors.

"Congress put the IRS in the position of being the gatekeeper," said Gregory Colvin, a San Francisco attorney who has helped advise numerous nonprofit groups. He said that forces the agency to do "a huge job with an inadequate staff."

Colvin has led a group of tax law experts who have proposed tighter IRS regulations on political activity by tax-exempt groups. He said he would prefer to see political activity restricted to an "insubstantial" part of their work, such as about 15 percent.

On Monday, online gaming empire Zynga — maker of the puzzlingly popular FarmVille series — announced that it was slashing its workforce by 18 percent. That means 520 people are losing their jobs.

The layoffs are being cast as a necessary cost-cutting measure by the company, and will shrink Zynga's staff to pre-IPO numbers while saving about $70 million to $80 million per year, . As part of the downsizing initiative, Zynga's New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles offices are all shuttering.

Zynga — whose roster of games also includes Zynga Poker and Words With Friends — has struggled to prove that selling digital currency to millions of gamers accustomed to playing for free is a viable business. At the time of its initial public offering in late 2011, the company wasfrom both Wall Street and the media, earning Zynga an overall value of $9 billion.

Now a year-and-a-half later, the gaming titan is a shadow of its former self with a valuation of . Its stock plummeted another 12 percent after news of the staff cuts broke Monday before stabilizing... at least somewhat.

"None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth," Zynga CEO Mark Pincus . "But I think we all know this is necessary to move forward."

The cuts caught most of the employees based outside of Zynga's San Francisco offices by "by complete surprise," . Just a few weeks ago, "it wasn't immediately obvious that Zynga's New York office was about to be terminated. At that time, Zynga New York was pitching new ideas for games and business was operating as usual."

Among the New York layoffs is the entirety of OMGPOP, the studio behind the hit iOS and Android game Draw Something. Zynga acquired the small studio .

— Ali Nicolas (@ali_nicolas)

Think of this as a "right-sizing" of Zynga, , "to reflect a more somber reality that these mobile businesses are not as large as its web-based one that rode the startup to glory on the explosive growth of social networks, primarily Facebook."

Zynga is reportedly "winnowing down its games pipeline to focus on churning out a lower number of high-quality games," . One of those high-quality titles, at least , taps the star power of Food Revolution host Jamie Oliver, who will "infuse his passion for sustainable, unprocessed, and fresh cuisine" into a game called . Inside, players "learn the importance of sustainability by growing fresh ingredients in recycled garden containers that they build from scratch using discarded materials like an old boot and broken pot."

Zynga isfor $3 a share.

View this article onGetIssues of The Week

Other stories from this section:

STRENGTHS

Potential match-winners in captain Michael Clarke, Shane Watson and David Warner with the bat and the two left-arm fast bowlers Mitchell Johnson and Mitchell Starc. Won the last two Champions Trophies in India and South Africa.

WEAKNESSES

Still in transition after losing a host of great players in quick succession, with Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey both retiring this year.

ODDS 5/1

KEY PLAYER

Opening batsman Watson can dominate any attack with his meaty drives and pulls and he is also an experienced and wily medium-pace bowler.

SQUAD

Michael Clarke (captain), Nathan Coulter-Nile, James Faulkner, Mitchell Johnson, Mitchell Marsh, Mitchell Starc, Matthew Wade, Shane Watson, George Bailey, Xavier Doherty, Phillip Hughes, Clint McKay, Glenn Maxwell, Adam Voges, David Warner.

(Compiled by John Mehaffey)

A corrected version of the story is below:

By RON BLUM

Associated Press

Various Artists, "Wagner at the Met: Legendary Performances from The Metropolitan Opera" (Sony Classical)

Yes, there really was a golden age, and this was it.

To mark the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner's birth on May 22, a 25-disc set taken from the archives of Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts documents performances of nine of the composer's 10 mature works "Parsifal" was excluded. The recordings date from 1936-54 and while some of these had appeared previously on CD, these are the first authorized releases. The sound from the original lacquers and tapes has been improved and cleaned markedly, but don't expect the clarity, depth and width of the digital era, especially from the 1930s broadcasts. And the conductors of the day made cuts that would be unacceptable to the 21st century Met audience.

But, oh, the singing.

Hans Hotter's booming Dutchman from "Die Fliegende Hollaender" is paired with Astrid Varnay's excitable Senta under Fritz Reiner's baton from 1950. George Szell's "Tannhaeuser" from 1954 shows interesting tempi choices in the overture, which includes a sudden speedup in the Venusberg theme.

Ramon Vinay's clarion tenor is featured as Tannhaeuser, this time matched with Varnay's sultry Venus, Margaret Harshaw's hefty Elisabeth and a young Roberta Peters as the Shepherd.

For a 1943 "Lohengrin," a fresher-sounding Varnay's Elsa is together with Lauritz Melchior in the title role under Erich Leinsdorf's baton that emphasized flow over energy. Melchior's "In fernem land (In a far-off land)" is a model of diction, breath control, pacing, color and inflection.

Melchior is a central part of the Ring Cycle, as Siegmund in a 1940 "Die Walkuere" with Marjorie Lawrence's Sieglinde, Kirsten Flagstad's Bruennhilde and Julius Huehn's Wotan (under Leinsdorf), a 1937 "Siegfried" with Flagstad and Freidrich Schorr's Wanderer (under Bodanzsky) and a 1936 "Goetterdaemmerung" with Lawrence (again under Bodanzsky).

Melchior's seemingly effortless soft singing in "Winterstuerme (Wintry storms)" highlights how often the role is shouted these days by tenors lacking his technique, and Lawrence's "Du bist der Lenz (You are the spring)" builds tension and pace along with Sieglinde's ardor. Flagstad combines iciness and affection in her opening "Siegmund! Sieh' auf mich! (Siegmund! Look at me!)" from the Todesverkuendigung (Annunciation of death). While Huehn's "Leb' wohl (Farewell)" is low on emotion, Flagstad and Melchior sparkle in the closing duet from "Siegfried."

A 1938 "Tristan und Isolde" with Melchior, Flagstad and Bodanzsky reveals an incendiary love duet that lifts the opera to an even higher level, and Flagstad follows with an ecstatic, mournful Liebestod (lovedeath), although here the thin sound of the recording detracts.

Finally, there is a "Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg" from 1953. Reiner carefully blended Hans Hopf's lyrical Walther, Paul Schoeffler's thick-voiced Sachs and Victoria de los Angeles' sweet and innocent Eva.

While Sony had released 20 individual sets of Met broadcasts in recent years, including a 1968 "Walkuere" and 1972 "Meistersinger," the historic recordings have far more impact when packaged together here. A similar Verdi set is planned for the fall.

Witness Karen Faye also recalled how Jackson's reliance on medications coincided with the first time he was accused of child molestation in the early 1990s.

"Michael had to go on stage every night knowing that the whole world thought he was a pedophile," Faye said, shaking her head and crying.

Despite being asked by tour promoters, Faye said she refused to give the performer injections for pain.

She said Paul Gongaware, a promoter who later became a top executive with AEG Live LLC, then brought in doctors who treated Jackson in 1993 on his "Dangerous" tour, which she told jurors had to be halted early due to the singer's prescription drug addiction.

Faye testified in a negligent hiring lawsuit filed by Jackson's mother, Katherine, who claims AEG failed to investigate a doctor who cared for the pop star and was later convicted of causing his death in June 2009.

AEG denies hiring the doctor and says Jackson concealed his addiction to propofol, a powerful anesthetic that killed the singer.

Faye said she never witnessed the singer's treatments, but he appeared to become more dependent on prescription drugs in the years following the "Dangerous" tour.

She said she worried every time she saw a doctor arrive to treat Jackson.

"I was always worried that Michael was in pain," Faye said under questioning by Brian Panish, an attorney for Jackson's mother.

She said Jackson had a low pain tolerance except while performing.

She recalled that he complained more about back pain after he fell several stories from on on-stage bridge during a Munich concert in 1999. Despite the fall, Jackson finished the show.

His high-energy performances, however, led to sleepless nights afterward, she said.

Jackson's condition worsened during the singer's 2005 trial on child molestation charges, Faye said.

Although he was acquitted, the pressure of the case and media attention took its toll, she told jurors.

"He couldn't eat," she said. "He was afraid. He was in pain. He got thinner. His physical pain, his back pain, it all kicked in."

Faye spent about 90 minutes testifying about her close relationship with Jackson, who hosted her wedding at his Neverland Ranch and enlisted her to travel around the world with him.

She breezily described Jackson's meetings with Princess Diana and other dignitaries, his Super Bowl performance, and other larger-than-life moments from the singer's life. Jurors and spectators laughed at times as a parade of photos and videos shot during Jackson's performances were played.

"I was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was just very normal," she told jurors. "I found myself working with this magical person."

She said Jackson was like a brother to her and enlisted her for another tour even after she gave birth to her daughter.

"I said, 'I can't go all around the world with you. I'm a mother now,'" Faye recalled.

"Michael never took no for an answer. 'Yes you can, it'll be great for her,'" she recalled him saying.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP

The Austrian parachutist known as "Fearless Felix" reached 843.6 mph, according to the official numbers released Monday. That's equivalent to Mach 1.25, or 1.25 times the speed of sound.

His top speed initially was estimated last October at 834 mph, or Mach 1.24.

Either way, he became the first human to break the sound barrier with only his body. He wore a pressurized suit and jumped from a capsule hoisted by a giant helium balloon over New Mexico.

Baumgartner was supersonic for a half-minute "quite remarkable," according to Brian Utley, the official record-keeping official who was present for the Oct. 14 feat. His heart rate remained below 185 beats a minute, and his breathing was fairly steady.

The leap was from an altitude of 127,852 feet. That's 248 feet lower than original estimates.

"He jumped from a little bit lower, but he actually went a little bit faster, which was pretty exciting," said Art Thompson, technical project director for the Red Bull-sponsored project.

"It's fun for us to see reaching Mach speeds and proving out a lot of the safety systems," Thompson said in a phone interview from his aerospace company in Lancaster, Calif.

Thompson said everything pretty much unfolded as anticipated, with no surprises in the final report. The updated records were provided by Utley, official observer for the National Aeronautic Association's contest and records board. Utley was in Roswell, N.M., for Baumgartner's grand finale jump.

In the foreword of the 71-page report, Baumgartner said he never imagined how many people would share in his dream to make a supersonic free fall from so high.

Some 52 million people watched You Tube's live stream of the exploit.

The scientific and engineering experts who helped bring him back alive "broke boundaries in their own fields just as surely as I broke the sound barrier," Baumgartner wrote.

Baumgartner shattered the previous record for a free fall plunge, made by Joe Kittinger, an Air Force officer, in 1960. Kittinger did not quite reach supersonic speed during his jump from 19.5 miles up.

Police fired the teargas when about 1,000 demonstrators, mostly young people, advanced towards their lines in the central Kizilay square chanting "Tayyip resign".

(Reporting by Umit Bektas; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall)

The fossil of Aurornis xui was found last year in a museum at the Fossil and Geology Park in Yizhou, China, long after a farmer first dug it up in the Liaoning Province. The feathery specimen represents the most ancient of the avialans, the group that includes birds and their relatives since their split from nonavian dinosaurs.

The research also reconfirms the birdlike fossilas an avialan, a classification that was challenged by some recent research. []

Not everyone agrees that the new specimen is strictly a bird. "In my opinion, it's a bird," study author Pascal Godefroit, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, told . Even so, he added, "The differences between birds and [nonavian] dinosaurs are very thin."

"Traditionally, we have defined birds as things like Archaeopteryx and closer to things like modern birds," vertebrate paleontologist Luis Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience. "If you stick to the definition, this thing is not earliest known bird," Chiappe said, but that's missing the point, he said. What matters, is that it's a very interesting animal that "still helps us understand better the origin of birds," he said.

Aurornis xui was a feathered dinosaur that lived during the Middle Jurassic period about 150 million years ago, analysis shows. It was about 1.6 feet (0.5 meter) from beak tip to tail tip, and possessed small, sharp teeth and long forelimbs.

The creature probably couldn't fly, Godefroit said, but may have used its wings to glide between trees. The fossil's feathers aren't well-preserved, but the hip bones and other features strongly suggest it was a relative of modern birds, he said.

The researchers assert that Aurornis displaces Archaeopteryx as the , placing Archaeopteryx further along in the avialan lineage. Since Archaeopteryx was a flying creature, its placement among avialans means dinosaurs would have only had toonce during evolutionary history.

The new findings also classify another family of birdlike dinosaurs, known as Troodontidae, as a sister group to the avialans. This reshuffling of the bird-dinosaur family tree suggests birds and nonavian dinosaurs diverged in Asia during the Middle to Late Jurassic.

The findings are detailed in the May 30 issue of the journal Nature.

Follow Tanya Lewis on  and . Follow us ,  & . Original article on .

The optional service, known as two-factor authentication, is designed to verify the identity of users as they log in by requiring them to enter numeric codes sent via text message.

LinkedIn introduced the service on Friday, about a year after a highly publicized breach that exposed passwords of millions of its users. Some security experts criticized LinkedIn at the time, saying the firm had failed to use best practices to secure its passwords.

The site provided instructions to its 225 million users on how to turn on the optional service at http://linkd.in/1aIFV3D

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; additional reporting by Jennifer Saba; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

This Memorial Day weekend, the hulking metal come-ons are once again glinting and shimmering at night.

The Neon Museum, where Sin City's most iconic signs go to retire, has begun aiming more than 100 multicolored spotlights on its outdoor collection of 150 signs. It's also extending hours for nighttime tours, and a handful of signs have been fully restored with new bulbs.

Since October, visitors have been able to meander past the Silver Slipper, Aladdin's lamp, the Stardust marquee and dozens of other signs saved from the wrecking ball. But the museum closed at 5:30 p.m., meaning that tourists had to squint through the desert sun to glimpse the old guardians of this nighttime city.

For the first time Friday, visitors were able to behold the fully restored signs in all their luminescent glory. The dozens of other markers were bathed in custom-designed spotlights, like true Vegas showgirls.

"The skyline of Las Vegas is a nighttime skyline," said executive director Danielle Kelly, moments before the first afterhours tour came through.

"We stand among the architecture of this city. The notable architecture of this city is its signage. And their illumination is when they came alive," Kelly said.

In a town known for detonating buildings that are beyond their prime, Las Vegas' Neon Museum stands apart in its zeal for salvaging the blinking, glowing memories of the past.

Kelly says time has transformed the signs from commercial emissaries into objects of art.

The hour-long guided tours bend through the artfully cluttered 1.5-acre lot. The excursion offers an alternative to the mega-mall homogeny along the desert metropolis' revamped main drag.

Worn by the beating sun and twisted by desert winds, most of the marquees have lost their flash, some of their bulbs and much of their paint. They tilt toward each other like tombstones in an ancient cemetery. But taken together, they tell a story about the town's glitziest days.

There's the nouveau graveyard's oldest sign: a green and white 1930s relic that marked a restaurant where Hoover Dam construction workers bought fried chicken and bootleg whiskey.

One of the signs with working bulbs a vintage arrow pointing lovebirds to "Marriage Information" alludes to the town's role as the nation's elopement, and divorce, capital.

And the giant marquee that once sat astride the Stardust casino featuring a space-age, deep-red font and cascade of stylized diamonds recalls Nevada's embrace of its role as a test site for nuclear weapons

While only four of the kitschy relics are illuminated, the spotlights play up each sign's attributes and create a feel of pulsating energy.

On Friday, the flashing red lights and blue and purple shadows along with the errant stray cat gave the attraction the surreal, slightly creepy feel of a shuttered theme park.

The museum plans to turn on a few more signs, but facilities director Sam Reza said full wattage would be too dazzling.

"The purpose of the museum is never to have all of the signs fully illumined. We wanted to keep them in the state that they were taken down. To have all of these signs fully lighted up would be overwhelming," she said.

Funding is also a factor; it can cost $100,000 to bring back a single sign.

Art lovers founded the museum in 1996 in a sandy lot outside downtown Las Vegas a few miles north of the Strip as a way to rescue old signs when buildings were demolished or remodeled.

In 2012, curators had the bright idea to open it to the public and began working on a plan to light up the night once again.

Casino bosses began abandoning curlicues of neon in the desert several decades ago, beginning with Steve Wynn's remodel of the Golden Nugget.

Today, major hotel-casinos are built to advertise themselves. The facades and exterior entertainment do the heavy lifting, from the glossy, brown obelisk that is the Wynn Las Vegas, to the fountains that dance outside the Bellagio, to the condensed New York City skyline that frames New York New York.

When signs do crop up, neon has all but surrendered to computerized LED signs.

But most visitors still feel a connection to the town's glittery glory. Most anyone can visualize Vegas Vic, with his checked shirt, perpetually lit cigarette and extended thumb, in their mind's eye.

Sandra Chervinsky, who snapped dozens of pictures during the Neon Museum's inaugural twilight tour, demonstrated her love of vintage Vegas signage by getting full-color tattoo of the iconic "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign on her calf.

"When I saw the night tours, I was like, 'I got to do it,'" said Chervinsky, of Montreal. "The light is so perfect, and you're surrounded by all these different eras."

The new tours will run every half hour through 10 p.m., leaving visitors enough time to catch a late show or hit up one of the town's 24-hour bars before heading hotelward.

With the changes and expanded tour capacity, the museum hopes to welcome more than 50,000 visitors this year.

The lot can feel a bit macabre in this youth and novelty-obsessed town, but Kelly said the museum's latest iteration shows that the signs have become key players in a new kind of escapist vision.

"It's not a graveyard," Kelly said. "The signs haven't died. They're just in a new space. And they perform a new function. It's still a fantasy they're selling: the idea of a place."

___

Hannah Dreier can be reached at http://twitter.com/hannahdreier