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House Republicans investigating IRS targeting of groups for extra scrutiny say they have proof conservatives had it worse.

A House Ways and Means Committee staff analysis of the applications of 111 conservative and progressive groups applying for tax exempt status found conservative applicants faced, "more questions, more denials, more delays," says committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich.

That is, when the IRS sent groups letters asking for further information, conservative groups were asked more questions — on average, three times more. All of the groups with "progressive" in their name were ultimately approved, while only 46 percent of conservative groups won approval. Others are still waiting for an answer or gave up.

Here's a chart laying out the committee's findings:

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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Caroline Criado-Perez, the feminist activist who successfully campaigned to make Jane Austen the new face of Britain's 10-pound note, has been inundated with hundreds of death and rape threats on Twitter after the banknote news broke last week. Criado-Perez responded by retweeting the threats to her followers. Some of the more printable examples include: "I will find you and you don't want to know what I will do when I do, you're pathetic, kill yourself before i do." and "Hey sweetheart, give me a call when you're ready to be put in your place." British police arrested a man over the weekend "on suspicion of harassment offences," but the threats didn't stop. When British Parliament member Stella Creasy spoke out in support of Criado-Perez, she also received rape threats, which she in turn retweeted. This has sparked debate in the U.K. about whether Twitter is responsible for regulating such threats. CNN reports: "Twitter UK's General Manager Tony Wang said the social-networking company takes online abuse very seriously, offering to suspend accounts, and called on people to report any 'violation of Twitter rules.' " Separately, one of the world's most eminent classicists, Mary Beard, promised Monday to publicly shame those who send her misogynistic messages on Twitter, tweeting, "I'm not going to be terrorised." A man who purportedly sent the Cambridge professor crude messages Monday swiftly begged her forgiveness after another Twitter user threatened to tell his mother what he had written.

The Four Way Review published three new poems from Craig Morgan Teicher. The second, "Drunkenness," reads, "Sip by sip, life becomes tolerable, then pleasant, then milky — as soft and gregarious as a lamb. ... Not even happiness feels this good."

Mary Karr tells The New York Times about the unique experience of finding out your literary idols are jerks: "If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards."

The novelist Gary Shteyngart writes about wearing a Google Glass around New York: "Wearing Glass takes its toll. 'You look like you have a lazy eye,' I'm told at a barbecue, my right eye instinctively scanning upward for more info. 'You look like you have a nervous tic,' when I tap at the touch pad. 'You have that faraway look again,' whenever there's something more interesting happening on my screen."

The London Fire Brigade says a recent rise in the number of calls involving people trapped in handcuffs may be tied to Fifty Shades of Grey. A spokesman comments, "I don't know whether it's the Fifty Shades effect, but the number of incidents involving items like handcuffs seems to have gone up." Either way, the fire brigade has some practical advice: "If you use handcuffs, always keep the keys handy."

Regional disparities over the abortion issue have grown during the past two decades, leading to an ever widening gulf between the nation's most conservative and most liberal regions.

A new Pew Research Center survey reports that an eight-state region — Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma — has grown significantly more conservative when it comes to abortion, with opposition to legal abortion increasing by 12 percentage points since 1995-96. That's the biggest jump of any region in the nation over that period.

The result is a much wider divide between the South Central states and the region at the other end of the spectrum, New England, where support for legal abortion grew by 5 percentage points between 1995-96 and 2012-13.

The two regions are now separated by a 35-percentage-point difference when it comes to views on legal abortion.

Pew found that public opinion on abortion in those eight South Central states has essentially flipped, going from majority support for legal abortion in 1995-96 (52 percent) to just 40 percent today. More than half of adults (52 percent) in the South Central region now say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

In most other regions, the numbers have been fairly stable. But there have been a few notable changes. In the Midwest, support for legal abortion declined by 8 percentage points. And in New England, the most liberal region on the issue, support for legal abortion increased from 70 to 75 percent.

I asked Michael Dimock, the Pew center's director and a political scientist, what explains the more conservative tilt of the South Central states. For now, he had more questions than answers.

"There are interesting questions it raises about the composition of those states and whether this fits into broader thinking about whether people in this country are sorting themselves out more and more in terms of where they live and whether we are becoming more separated into our enclaves of similar-minded people."

It's possible, he said, that the shift has something to do with a "sorting out" linked to religiosity like evangelical Christianity. He promised to dig further into Pew's religion data to search for possible correlations between abortion, geography and religiosity. I'll update this post when he gets back to me.

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that the region that saw the most dramatic shift in opposition to abortion includes some of the reddest states on the political map. But it doesn't include any of the early presidential primary and caucus states like New Hampshire, South Carolina or Iowa.

So this trend seems unlikely to affect 2016 presidential politics, as none of the South Central states are early primary or general election battleground states.

Gay people should be integrated into society instead of being ostracized, Pope Francis told journalists after his week-long trip to Brazil. Answering a question about reports of homosexuals in the clergy, the pope answered, "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?"

In what's being called an unusually broad and candid news conference, Pope Francis took questions from reporters for more than an hour as he flew from Brazil to the Vatican; his plane landed Monday.

One question centered on recent reports in Italian media that accused the Vatican Bank's Monsignor Battista Ricca of conducting an affair with a Swiss army captain. In response, Pope Francis said that he looked into the reports, but found nothing to support the allegations.

The pope also used the occasion to expand on his June remarks about a "gay lobby" in the Vatican, clarifying that "he was against all lobbies, not just gay ones," the Italian news agency ANSA reports.

"Being gay is a tendency. The problem is the lobby," ANSA quotes the pontiff saying. "The lobby is unacceptable, the gay one, the political one, the Masonic one."

The pope's view of gays is being seen as diverging from his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. As the AP reminds us, Benedict "signed a document in 2005 that said men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests. Francis was much more conciliatory, saying gay clergymen should be forgiven and their sins forgotten."

"The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well," Pope Francis said, according to the BBC. "It says they should not be marginalized because of this but that they must be integrated into society."

During the news conference on the 12-hour flight home, the pope also addressed a less serious question: What did he have in the black bag he carried during his trip?

The AP reports:

"'The keys to the atomic bomb weren't in it,' Francis quipped. Rather, he said, the bag merely contained a razor, his breviary prayer book, his agenda and a book on St. Terese of Lisieux, to whom he is particularly devoted.

"'It's normal' to carry a bag when traveling, he said. 'We have to get use to this being normal, this normalcy of life,' for a pope, he added."