In the briefing room at the State Department, Kerry made brief remarks that touted the latest annual report as an objective, clear-eyed look of what the state of religious freedom is in the world.

He also called the report a catalogue of violence and discrimination in countries that range from entrenched dictatorships to established democracies.

Kerry stressed the struggle in America for religious freedom and said in the U.S. there have been times when everyone has had to push, work and struggle to live up to our promise of the nation’s founding.

Countries listed in the detailed report as being restrictive of religious freedom include North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Iran, along with several allies of the U.S. such as Russia and China. Kerry said the country’s friends have not been exempt from behaving badly with regard to religious freedom.

Kerry said the report does call out directly some of America’s closest friends. He added that the report does so in an attempt to make progress even though some discomfort might be experienced.

Kerry said the birthright of every person on earth was the freedom to practice and profess one’s faith.

Some countries, such as Turkey and Vietnam, were mentioned as having lightened some of the restrictions they had on religious freedom.

The organization the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council is led by its president Kenneth Palinkas. He said the union never was approached by the bipartisan lawmakers who crafted the sweeping immigration reforms that are now being considered by Congress.

Palinkas claims the lawmakers drafted the legislation with special interests’ in mind and does not address many of the most serious immigration concerns the USCIS Council currently has about the system.

The union members are officers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is responsible for processing different visas and other paperwork regarding immigration.

The union leader said the legislation does not address pressures he claims are placed upon the adjudication officers to rubber stamp the application rather than conducting case reviews for each. He also said more had to be done to address the overstays on student visas.

Earlier in May, the National ICE Council, a union representing over 7,000 agents sent Congress a letter criticizing the new proposed immigration reform legislation saying they would not support it. Three major unions represent the immigration agents and officers in the country.

President Obama remains optimistic that the strategy in the Senate using the bipartisan approach is the best.

The Group of Eight Senators is scheduled to hit the floor in the Senate in June. In the House, a bipartisan group this week agreed on a large bill in principle that will be outlined for all sometime in June.

However, there are many major hurdles to pass before the final immigration reform reaches the desk of President Barack Obama. The biggest hurdle of them all is the House, which is controlled by the GOP.

At this point, the bill in the Senate has a zero chance of reaching the floor of the House. Senators key in the making of the Senate bill John McCain a Republican from Arizona and Chuck Schumer a Democrat from New York, both stressed their bill would have to have close to 70 votes in the Senate to put pressure on the House. However, GOP negotiators in the House have flatly said the vote in the Senate does not matter at all, regardless of what the margin is.

Republican Rep. John Carter from Texas said he does not think the legislation will pass in the House. He said he thought the bill the House was finalizing would have a better chance of being approved in the House, than the Senate legislation would. He called the Senate bill too broad and full of holes.

The GOP says the path to citizenship in the Senate bill is too short, the guest worker program is too generous for labor unions and the security measures at the border are not strong enough.

Wall Street improvements and the increase in the housing market in California will add close to $4.4 billion in cash for the state through the next budget, instead of the projected amount by Brown of just $1.2 billion, said Mac Taylor, a Legislative Analyst who is nonpartisan, in a report on Friday.

In addition, the changes in federal taxes, which reduced the take home pay for Californians this year, will cost less for the state than Brown suggested, said the report.

The latest budget proposal by Brown released this past Tuesday seemed pessimistic, said the report. A great deal of the extra cash, received from tax receipts, would go to schools under the education funding law in California.

However, the new figures in the report could make it difficult for Brown to keep his lid on spending in Sacramento, where he disagrees with lawmakers on the amount the economy in California is improving and how any extra, if there is extra, money should be allocated.

Legislators in the Democratic Party quickly embraced the higher numbers. Bob Blumenfield, the Budget Chairman in the Assembly and a Democrat said that the outlook of the Governor contradicts a consensus that is growing among economic forecasters that echoes the data in Friday’s report.

Many legislators want to restore the aid that was cut to the needy in order to balance the state’s budget over the last few years.

The Office of the Inspector General released a summary of its findings that found many deficiencies and vulnerability in national security arising from how the witness protection program was managed.

The program, known by the letters WITSEC, had been a way to shield witnesses in cases of high profile notably the World Trade Center attack of 1993, the Oklahoma City bomb attack of 1995 and the attacks on U.S. embassies in 1998 in East Africa.

However, the report from the OIG found that the office of the U.S. Marshals Service failed to locate two people with ties to known terror groups that were enrolled in WITSEC.

In July of 2012, the Marshals Service stated it could not locate two former participants in WITSEC identified as suspected or known terrorists, the OIG report revealed.

The report added that its investigators had concluded that one of the individuals was living outside the U.S., while the second individual was thought to be living outside the U.S.

The OIG warned that the Department of Justice failed to pass along information about the new identities of the participants in the program, leaving them the ability to fly commercial flights within the U.S. despite their terrorist background.

The report continued by saying the Department of Justice could not say definitively the number of suspected or known terrorists who had been admitted to the WITSEC program.

Steven Miller, who at the time the wrongdoing took place was not the commissioner of the IRS, agreed to step aside due to the misconduct on the part of the government agency. Obama was visibly angry and said that the additional screening that “Tea Party” groups went through prior to last year’s presidential election was a complete outrage.

Obama added that he was in fact angry over what happened and said the American people have a right to be upset.

The remarks Obama made were in response to the reverberation that has occurred due to the controversy throughout Washington this week.

Previously Obama has said the accusations against the IRS had been outrageous but did not report publicly on the incident until he received a report prepared by the Department of the Treasury.

Jacob Lew, the Secretary of Treasury requested that Miller resign. Miller agreed to do so but his resignation was effective immediately, it will take place in June.

The Inspector General’s report, which was released on Tuesday, did not put the blame on the leadership of the IRS in Washington for initiating the scandal, but found fault with them for not adequately supervising employees located at its office in Cincinnati where the targeting had first started.

The auditors announced that the activities deemed improper had not been influenced by any organization or individual outside the Internal Revenue Service. The auditors were told this by officials from the IRS.

The report instead painted a picture of a Cincinnati based IRS unit that used criteria that was inappropriate for deciding what application to look into, without any review by the senior management.

Groups that used the words “tea party” in the title of their names were targeted and that went on for at least 18 months. Some applications requesting nonprofit status during this time, languished for over three years, said the contents of the report.

The statement saying no one outside the offices of the IRS had been involved would counter Republican Party leader’s efforts to depict the actions by the IRS as being politically motivated and tied to the White House.

Jay Carney, the Press Secretary at the White House, found himself barraged by questions Tuesday and said no one in the White House had been aware of the IRS scandal until April, when the counsel’s office for the White House was briefed about it.

However, the controversy did not show any signs of abating, with both the Senate and House prepared to start hearings. Up first on all agendas will be questions as to why officials from the IRS, who had been aware of what had been taking place, continued assuring Congress that there was no improper targeting taking place.

In the report, three Council on Foreign Relations researchers also explained that the falloff in the amount of illegal immigration is just partly the result of border security being tougher.

However, two-thirds of the reason for the drop is due to economic changes taking place in both the U.S. and Mexico that have made the migration north for Mexicans less attractive than before.

The authors wrote it was surprising how little is known regarding the actual border security and how small an effort the current administration and Washington lawmakers have made in attempting to make the security stronger, especially at a time when the new immigration bill depends upon improved border security.

Regardless of the efforts of the Border Patrol, some immigrants are going to make it into the U.S. from Mexico unseen. However, the report shows that border security has increased in the past 10 years and the likelihood of some crossing illegally and being caught is between 50% and 60%, which is an increase from 2000, when it was between 30% and 45%.

The Senate’s Judiciary Committee started last week working through the immigration bill that is 867 pages in length. They already closed out the section on border security after making just minor changes.

The committee shot down the repeated efforts of Republicans to stiffen security measures at the border or to insist on the borders being secure prior to giving legal status to current undocumented immigrants.

Those two measures were defeated 12-6 with all 10 Democrats and 2 Republicans voting in opposition.

Republicans are calling for a committee to look into the September 11 attack that took place at the U.S. diplomatic post in Libya. However, Obama and his administration also must deal with the reports saying conservative groups were being targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.

Cameron is meeting with Obama and both are scheduled to hold a joint press conference in the Rose Garden at the White House on Monday morning.

Obama has yet to make any public comment about the IRS admission that it placed extra scrutiny on groups that were filing for tax-exempt status that had the world Patriot of Tea Party in their name. Even though the President has not made any comment about the practice, aides at the White House criticized the IRS practice.

Jay Carney, the spokesman at the White House, said the IRS is an entity that is non-partisan with just two political appointees. The IRS is conducting an internal investigation of its own.

Carney said the action that the IRS took was very inappropriate.

Republican Susan Collins, a Representative in the House from Maine, said it was almost as upsetting that the President and Jack Lew his treasury secretary have not apologized personally to the people of America and promised a complete investigation.

Other congressional Republicans have called for a committee to address the administration’s actions that surrounded the attacks on September 11 in Benghazi. Senator John McCain a Republican from Arizona and other Republican lawmakers said that aides of Obama attempted to cover up that the attack had been terrorism carried out by a group of terrorists.

The aides, who attributed the attack to protesters upset due to a film that was anti-Islam, said that since the evidence had changed, their story did as well.

Carney, on the other hand, accused congressional Republicans of making an attempt to politicize the attack that killed four U.S. citizens including Christopher Stevens the ambassador to Libya.

Conservative Senator Jim Inhofe a Republican from Oklahoma and Michael Tomasky a columnist with Newsweek magazine both mentioned the “I” word.

Inhofe was on the Rusty Humphries radio show on Thursday and he called the Benghazi incident the greatest American cover-up in the history of the country.

On Friday, during the show Now, broadcast by MSNBC, Tomasky responded to a suggestion that the political knives of the Republicans were out to get Hillary Clinton the former U.S. Secretary of State in advance of the presidential election of 2016, by saying that the Benghazi incident could reach into the White House and take out it current resident.

He continued by saying that the hearings on Benghazi could point to impeachment and would remain that way as long as the House is controlled by the Republicans.

It is very rare for an impeachment of a president and would start with charges brought in the House of Representatives, which is controlled by the Republicans. However, the Senate is controlled by the Democrats and votes on whether or not to convict a president who has been impeached.

The Democratically controlled U.S. Senate stopped the impeachment of President Clinton. The senate would not convict the president on charges of lying while under oath over his affair with a then intern at the White House. Mike Huckabee, the former Governor of Arkansas and now host of his own show on Fox News Channel, predicted earlier that Obama would not serve his complete second term due to accusations related to Benghazi.