Midday Roundup: Secret Service caught leaking info on U.S. lawmaker

Unbecoming conduct. Forty-one Secret Service employees have been disciplined for retaliating against a congressman who investigated scandals within the agency. The employees, including 11 senior officials, allegedly accessed private records about Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and leaked details about his life to the media. As chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Chaffetz has held several hearings on Secret Service missteps and blunders. The files on him were accessed just after the start of one of those hearings last year. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said some of the employees involved have been reprimanded, and others have been suspended without pay.

Preteen prodigy. The Scripps National Spelling Bee ended in a tie Thursday for the third year in a row. Eleven-year-old co-champion Nihar Janga became the Bee’s youngest winner ever and shared the title with 13-year-old Jairam Hathwar, whose older brother won two years ago. Contest producers have worked in recent years to include harder words and modified the rules to avoid ties. But Jairam and Nihar, who have become friends during the last year, both went the distance despite the changes. Jairam’s winning word was Feldenkrais, which is derived from a trademark and means a system of body movements intended to ease tension. Niram won with gesellschaft, which means a mechanistic type of social relationship.

Dire consequences. Weapons sent from the United States to Mexico as part of the Obama administration’s controversial Operation Fast and Furious are tied to at least 69 killings, according to the watchdog group Judicial Watch. The group accessed records from the Justice Department showing that over the past three years, 94 Fast and Furious firearms have been recovered south of the border. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives allowed guns to be sold to Mexican drug cartels in hopes the weapons would be recovered at crime scenes. Fast and Furious weapons were involved in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of others in Mexico.

Superbug fears. Doctors are expressing alarm after a U.S. patient was infected with a scary, drug-resistant bacteria. Though the patient’s infection resisted treatment with the antibiotic colistin, it was susceptible to other drugs and she was cured. But the development worries officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because colistin is often a treatment of last resort for illnesses that resist other antibiotics. Other countries have already seen multi-drug resistant superbugs that no antibiotic can fight. So far, the United States has not. But this sets the stage for that development, according to the CDC.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.