Everything You Need To Know About Last Week’s News

In reverse order of importance:

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes got divorced. Or maybe it was the week before. Somehow they managed to stay in the headlines all week.

There was some controversy over a revelation that US Olympic uniforms were made in China. Next they’ll be telling us the athletes sometimes eat fruit grown in South America! By the way, the 2012 Summer Olympics start July 27.

The sun is ramping up to the most active phase of its 11-year cycle. On Thursday it released an X-class solar flare directly at the earth. Looks like pretty much all it did was create some pretty auroras when it slammed into the earth’s magnetic field over the weekend. (SpaceWeather.com is an incredible resource for keeping up with this stuff.)

The celebrity campaign coverage mostly involved Obama accusing Romney of lying about when he left Bain Capital, and Romney asking Obama to stop calling him a liar, and Obama refusing to back down, and… are you bored yet? Apparently the date Romney left Bain matters because Bain outsourced some jobs and if Romney was involved in that then he must be bad, so we’re having a drawn out debate about Romney in 1999 vs. Romney in 2002 instead of actually discussing (for instance) whether or not outsourced jobs have been bad or good for our country.

We learned that the FDA spied on some of its scientists, collecting thousands of emails and screenshots and other pretty intrusive things. The more details come out, the sketchier this looks. Yay for transparent government!

We also learned that greedy financial people have spent the last few years manipulating a rate known as LIBOR, which is supposed to be a non-manipulated rate that affects things like loan rates for millions of people. This is supposed to be a Really Big Deal, but I don’t understand it well enough yet to have much to say about it. I haven’t even figured out what terrible consequences all this manipulation caused, or how it’s that different from the mundane central bank rate manipulations, except, you know, that it was done secretly by greedy financial people for profit. I suppose I have vague opinions that “increased regulation” might not have stopped it.