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Both the former IRS commissioner who was in charge when the agency singled out some conservative groups for extra scrutiny and the man who replaced him will be appearing at a Senate Finance Committee hearing Tuesday morning.

Douglas Shulman, an appointee of President George W. Bush who left the IRS last November, and acting commissioner Steven Miller (who is losing his job because of the scandal) are due at the 10 a.m. ET hearing.

Giant technology firm Apple is paying billions of dollars less than it should in U.S. taxes each year, according to a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The panel will hold a hearing on the matter Tuesday in Washington, D.C. Apple CEO Tim Cook will be there to defend the company.

(We're following the news from Oklahoma, where a tornado devastated the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on Monday. Most recent update: 7:25 a.m. ET.)

As Tuesday dawned, the official death toll from the monster tornado that roared through Moore, Okla., on Monday stood at 51.

But Amy Elliott, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma state medical examiner's office, was warning that officials believe at least another 40 people had been killed. Some of those are thought to be children in one of the schools that was destroyed by the powerful storm.

When the sun rises over the Rio Grande Valley, the cries of the urracas – black birds – perched on the tops of palm trees swell to a noisy, unavoidable cacophony. That is also the strategy, it could be said, that local officials, health care providers and frustrated Valley residents are trying to use to convince Governor Rick Perry and state Republican lawmakers to set aside their opposition and expand Medicaid, a key provision of the federal health law.

NBC News has put together a time-lapse video of the EF-4 tornado that tore through the southern suburbs of Oklahoma City, Okla.

As we told you in the live blog, the National Weather Service says it was at least an EF-4 tornado with winds in excess of 166 mph. The tornado stayed on the ground for 40 minutes and traveled 20 miles.

Although Oklahoma is a state where tornadoes are a fact of life, few days stand out like May 3, 1999.

It's another bad day for the Justice Department.

A federal judge in Louisiana has thrown out the central criminal charge against a former BP executive because prosecutors failed to prove he knew about a pending congressional investigation into oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico three years ago. U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt also ruled that a Democratic House member who inquired about the oil flow rate was acting as head of a subcommittee, not a full congressional committee, as required under the federal Obstruction of Justice statute.