AWARDS

Oil prices extended their gains on Friday, helped by a decline in U.S. oil inventories as investors turn their attention to next week’s OPEC meeting.

Brent crude for July delivery recently rose 0.9% to $63.17 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, West Texas Intermediate futures for July were trading up 1.1% at $58.32 a barrel.

U.S. commercial crude-oil inventories fell by a more-than-expected 2.8 million barrels last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Thursday.

Lower oil imports and a rise in crude processing were behind the fourth consecutive inventory draw, analysts at Commerzbank said. Gasoline demand was also healthy and reached its highest since 2007.

“The summer driving season in the U.S. has thus started with a vengeance,” the bank said.

However, U.S. crude production jumped to 9.57 million barrels a day after several weeks of declines. The EIA also reported that March production was 9.53 million barrels a day, the highest since the 1970s.

“Yesterday’s data showed a mixed sentiment as the bearish production increase was offset by a bullish inventory decrease,” said Daniel Ang, analyst at Phillip Futures. “As a result of this, we were seeing the bulls and the bears fighting fiercely.”

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Could toasted buns be the trick to turning McDonald's around?

CEO Steve Easterbrook said during a conference on Wednesday that while the company will make organizational changes in an attempt to stop decreasing sales, "at a more fundamental level we are recommitting to hotter, tastier food across the menu." When it comes to burgers, McDonald's will soon alter "the way we sear and then grill our beef so the patties come off juicier," and buns will get toasted for five more seconds to bump the temperature up 15 degrees. "It's the little things that add up to a big difference for our customers," Easterbrook said.

McDonald’s isn't stopping there when it comes to bread, BuzzFeed reports. In Australia, they're testing a brioche bun, and in India, customers can request a focaccia bun made with olive oil, rosemary, and oregano.

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A stretch of Manhattan Beach is closed as U.S. Coast Guard scientists investigate mysterious balls of tar or oil that have washed ashore.

Fire officials say it appears to be about a barrel or two of oil — nothing like the spill from a pipeline that created a 10-square-mile slick off the Santa Barbara County coast last week.

However, a two-mile stretch of beach was closed Wednesday from Manhattan into neighboring Hermosa Beach.

The cause of the goo is a mystery. There's a refinery and oil pipeline nearby but the Coast Guard didn't find the sheen from a spill. It also might be residue from the Santa Barbara spill.

Finally, natural seepage has been known to leave tar balls on the sand — and beachgoers' feet.

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Identity thieves used social security numbers and other data to access the tax filings of more than 100,000 Americans this year, the IRS has admitted. In a statement, IRS commissioner John Koskinen said the "Get Transcript" feature, which allows people to access tax returns and other filings from previous years, was targeted by "extremely sophisticated criminals" who were then able to obtain an estimated $50 million in fraudulently claimed tax refunds.

Security researcher Michael Krebs wrote about the problem back in March, but the IRS said it was only alerted to the thefts when technicians noted a higher-than-usual number of people using the Get Transcript feature from February to mid-May. Koskinen said that of 23 million downloaded transcripts, there were more than 200,000 attempts to use the feature — which has been temporarily disabled — from "questionable email domains." More than 100,000 of those attempts cleared the IRS' authentication procedures.

Although it admits to paying millions of dollars to crooks, the tax agency says its central computer system is still secure, and that the social security, address, and other personal information for taxpayers was obtained elsewhere. Koskinen didn't specify where that information had come from, but said that 80 percent of the identity theft the IRS was dealing with related to organized crime, and that the people involved had access to a "tremendous amount of data."

Congress is asking the IRS for more details about the case, but if the agency can keep the amount it pays to data-stealing crooks to $50 million, it will be an improvement on previous years. Just two years ago, in 2013, Koskinen said the IRS paid out $5.8 billion in fraudulent refunds to identity thieves.

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