Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has quietly appointed the wife of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to a religious freedom commission a month after the governor of West Virginia fired her from a state post.

The congressional record shows Schumer appointed Gayle C. Manchin to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) on April 19. She has no known prior experience working on international or religious freedom issues. 

American taxpayers have an extra day to pay their 2017 taxes. The IRS on Tuesday extended the filing deadline to midnight on Wednesday after an e-filing glitch. Earlier in the day, a notice on the IRS website told users the site was down for a “planned outage” until Dec. 31, 9999, but noted the agency still expected Americans to pay their taxes on time. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said Tuesday the outage was a “high-volume technical issue.” The site was back up and working by Tuesday evening.

A friend from Pennsylvania told me the story 25 years ago, but I still remember the depressingly funny details.

He was mostly retired but drove a public school bus to augment his income. Glancing in his rearview mirror, my friend noticed that one of his young passengers was breaking the no-gum-chewing rule designed to keep the buses passably clean. 

A few hours after President Donald Trump signed a $1.3 trillion spending bill to keep the federal government funded through September, satirical news website The Babylon Bee ran a stinging headline: “Republicans Clarify That By ‘Defund Planned Parenthood’ They Meant ‘Give Them $500 Million Every Year.’”

The fake-news-for-laughs carried an unfunny truth: After months of lofty promises from Republicans and Trump to defund the nation’s largest abortion business, the GOP-controlled Congress passed a bill that keeps the funds flowing. And President Trump signed it.

WASHINGTON—Immigrants from four countries sued the Trump administration Monday over its decision to end their temporary protected status. Lawyers filed the suit in San Francisco federal court on behalf of nine immigrants and five children from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan. Thousands of immigrants from those countries fled to the United States, where they have lived and raised their families for years, after their homes were ravaged by natural disaster or war. U.S.

WASHINGTON— Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin misused taxpayer dollars during a trip to Europe last year, according to an inspector general’s report released Wednesday. The July trip to Copenhagen and London cost the VA at least $122,334, with 10 other people, including Shulkin’s wife Merle Bari, joining the secretary for meetings on veterans’ issues.

Electric company crews in Puerto Rico have restored power to most homes and businesses affected by a blackout Sunday night. The outage started with a substation fire that knocked out another substation and two power plants. Replacing the damaged equipment could take as long as 10 days. A union representative called the incident “very strange,” noting a breaker should have prevented the problem. Crews are still trying to determine what sparked the fire. Puerto Rico’s electrical grid already had problems before Hurricane Maria battered the island last year, felling most of its power lines.