In reverse order of importance:
The Alabama hostage situation ended peacefully… for the boy.
Canada is dropping the penny. The United States will never do this because that just wouldn’t make any cents.
The United States Post Office, however, suddenly decided to drop Saturday delivery later this year after they got tired of waiting for Congress to give them permission to do it. Or something like that. This means that my walks to the mailbox to retrieve unimportant mailings will increase in efficiency by 17%!
Scientists “proved” that a skeleton found under a parking lot was King Richard III.
There was a Super Bowl. One of the teams won. Beyoncé scored a big victory for women by using an all-female backing band dressing and dancing in a way that reinforced cultural norms that men should only value women for their sexuality.
A former Los Angeles police officer killed some cops and avoided capture in spite of a giant manhunt that has been going on for several days. Apparently the media is being a little inconsistently quiet about the man’s decidedly left-wing “inspirations.” Shocking, I know.
The Mars Curiosity rover has photographed another strange shiny object. Current odds on Intrade suggest a 75% chance it’s more debris from the landing, 23% chance it’s a natural mineral that looks funny at this angle and lighting, 1% chance it’s remnants of alien civilization, 1% chance it’s remnants of an advanced pre-flood Biblical human civilization.
The all-knowing Congressional Budget Office released some new projections. Apparently they’re still increasing their estimates of the cost of healthcare plans under Obamacare, and they’re still pushing back the growth they’ve been overestimating since the Great Recession. They’re also apparently forecasting the first deficit under a trillion dollars since 2008; that doesn’t seem completely implausible, but I won’t be surprised if it isn’t.
The United States government is suing S&P for its high ratings of bad mortgage funds that sparked last decade’s financial crisis. I’m not up on all the details here, but it at least feels slightly analogous to telling someone to hit you on the head and then getting mad when they do.
An 8.0 earthquake in the Pacific Ocean generated a small tsunami that hit the Solomon Islands and damaged some villages.
A secular Tunisian politician who opposed the Islamist government was mysteriously murdered. This is discouraging to those who fear that the new Arab “democracies” are descending into radical-friendly hell-holes. On the other hand, the huge outpouring of support by Tunisian citizens is perhaps more encouraging to those who hope that most Arabs just want to live peaceful and prosperous lives.
Meanwhile, the radical Islamists in Mali are fighting back against the French advances.
“Tensions” between China and Japan are back in the “escalating” phase.
Someone in the United States government “leaked” a drone memo to NBC, finally spawning a little bit of overdue discussion about when the president of the United States has unchecked authority to kill people.