Everything You Need To Know About Last Week’s News #12

In reverse order of importance…

The NFL worked out a deal with its striking referees Wednesday after the replacement refs made a bad call that ruined a Monday Night Football game. Unfortunately, the media now has to focus on less important things like the elections and the state of the global economy.

Japanese scientists claim they are the first to synthesize periodic table element #113, which currently has the name ununtrium (un-un-tri-um). I hope they’re right, because then it gets an official name, and the world needs fewer real-life materials with names less clever than unobtainium.

Kids are saying they’re still hungry after eating lighter lunches at public schools this year. Conservatives can no longer attack the poor state of public schools, as Michelle Obama is giving 32 million children a hands-on demonstration of the value of one-size-fits-all government regulation.

ABC left iPads at TSA checkpoints and caught an agent stealing one. I thought that story was a little too much of a deliberate setup, but apparently a TSA agent gets fired for stealing almost every 10 days, and there are plenty more who know how to work the system without getting caught. It’s so nice that we have them here to keep our possessions safe from the terrorists.

Spain’s economy is doing so bad that thousands of Catalonians marched through the streets, and 51% of them now favor secession. Apparently that region is tried of paying more to the Spanish government than they get back from it. Since we’re always hearing how California suffers from the same problem, I wonder when they’ll do us all a favor and try the same thing.

The new Mars rover proved that there used to be water on Mars. Apparently it’s a Really Big Deal For Science.

A new report by legal experts at Stanford and New York University reveals the terror brought by the CIA’s double-tap drone strikes, which sometimes hit civilians and then, while other civilians search the rubble for survivors, hits the same area again. I guess when Obama said a few weeks ago that “a lot of what you read in the press” about the drone war “isn’t always accurate,” he was right – the truth is even worse.