IN CASE you missed it, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has pronounced a proposed free-trade pact with Colombia dead for the year. Congress, it seems, is too busy to approve it. Never mind that Colombia is our closest ally south of the border, and the only country throttling cut-throat guerrillas financed by (among others) the drug cartels. On this one, Congress is doing the bidding of the administration: Barack Obama opposed the free-trade pact during his presidential campaign. Yet he and his administration favor abundant new agreements with Cuba.
And maybe you never saw on your screen that (1) in their National League division playoffs, the Colorado Rockies had a snow-out at Denver's Coors Field for Game 3 with the Philadelphia Phillies -- or that (2) Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt stands at the lowest level in 30 years. It's obvious these are consequences of global warming.
Perhaps you also failed to notice that General Motors has sold its Hummer division -- a marquee American brand -- for $150 million to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. in (whoever would have guessed it?) China.
YOU MIGHT have missed Justice Antonin Scalia's scathing remark -- during arguments before the Supreme Court in a case brought by atheists to remove a cross built 75 years ago by the Veterans of Foreign Wars on federal lands in the Mojave Desert: "It's erected as a war memorial (to World War I soldiers). I assume it is erected in honor of all war dead. What would you have them erect -- some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and...a Muslim half-moon and star?"
Possibly you missed, as well, (a) that the Obama administration has asked Congress to extend key provisions of the Patriot Act, a measure that Barack Obama dismissed in 2004 as "a shoddy piece of legislation." And (b) that the administration has asked an appeals court to deny access to U.S. courts for detainees at a military prison in Afghanistan -- access candidate Obama favored for detainees at Guantanamo.
Finally, these two items from the collegiate scene likely escaped you. Item: Tufts' Office of Residential Life and Learning has decreed: Any sexual activity within your assigned room should not ever deprive your roommate(s) of privacy, study, or sleep time. And Item: Yale's Alumni Magazine carried a prideful multi-page July/August cover story headlined: Why They Call Yale the 'Gay Ivy.'