The Internal Revenue Service isn't the only federal bureaucracy to be recently taken to task by its Office of the Inspector General. Amid considerably less fanfare in early May, the US Department of Agriculture's OIG issued a report damning the department's oversight of pork slaughterhouses and trashing a USDA pilot program…

Some experts predict there will be no more helium left for the party industry in less than a decade. 

"It is serious. It is not something that is going to rectify itself within a short space of time. People have predicted that by 2020 there will be no more helium left for the party industry," John Lee, chairman of the balloon industry body NABAS, told the Independent.

There are extraction plants in Canada, Russia and Poland, with America producing about 75 percent of…