News You Might Have Missed

Hi everybody. Welcome back to my weekly attempt to bring you the news that you might have missed. I hope everyone is recovering nicely from their turkey coma. Every week needs to end in a long weekend. Because this work stuff? I really don't care for it at all. There should be a law or something. Anyway, while I was very busy not blogging for you, I was also busy not watching the show (hey, everybody needs a break). So I don't really know exactly what 360 did or didn't cover (though I suspect the shows were of the same meh-quality we've been getting for a while), which means maybe they actually hit on some of the following. As always, some of this stuff broke later than 360 could cover it.

• Is our children learning? Americans are not only reading less; their reading proficiency levels are dropping as well.
  

• Left behind again. The commission that selects sites for presidential debates has rejected New Orleans as a host, stating that the city has not recovered enough since Katrina.
  

• The leak that continues to drip. An excerpt from former Press Secretary Scott McClellan's upcoming book implicates Bush in the outing of Valerie Plame. Let the backtracking begin!

• Red tape continues to hurt the troops. After soldier Jordan Fox brought media exposure to the fact that the military was asking for signing bonuses back from wounded soldiers (because they couldn't complete their tours), the Army assured those involved that it was all a mix-up. Nevertheless, senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton are introducing legislation to make sure this doesn't happen again. Keep an eye on this one. It's not over.
  

• Okay, so the senate doesn't suck all the time. Due to Bush's penchant for recess appointments, the senate is going on a preemptive strike by having individual senators gavel 30 second sessions every couple of days while everyone is on break. That's amusingly diabolical. Now fellas (and ladies!), how about ending that war?
  

• Fudging the numbers? The official Pentagon tally of wounded does not reflect injuries discovered after a soldier returns home, thus resulting in 20,000 troops with brain trauma not being given a casualty classification.
  

• Anybody keeping an eye on that other war? The Taliban are present in more than half of Afghanistan now and they're closing in on Kabul.

• Turning a corner. Amid the overall decreased violence, women in Iraq are finding life increasingly difficult.
  

• Crikey, that's embarrassing. Conservative Prime Minister John Howard goes down...in the land down under, suffering a big defeat to the Labor Party.
  

• Let's just keep on doing nothing about that global warming. A new study has found that natural disasters quadrupled over the past two decades.