Mark Memmott

Seven employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission have been disciplined, but no one has been fired, after investigations into how the agency failed to stop Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme despite repeated warnings that he was stealing billions of dollars from investors, The Washington Post reports.

All the attention this week on the firing of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, the protests afterward by many of the school's students and the actions or inaction of school officials when they learned that a former assistant football coach might have been sexually abusing young boy

Mexican authorities say Secretary of the Interior Francisco Blake Mora, "the highest ranking official in the country after the president" and the person in charge of the fight against drug cartels, has been killed in a helicopter crash, The Associated Press reports from Mexico City. Seven other people also died, according to the Mexican government.

Reuters says that local media are reporting that the minister's helicopter went down south of Mexico City.

The spectacular collapse of the brokerage unit at MF Global has now cost all 1,066 employees their jobs.

For the many Americans who have been following the story of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) as she recovers from being shot in the head last January, there's now a chance to briefly hear her voice.

She feels "pretty good," Giffords has told ABC News' Diane Sawyer, although things are still "difficult."

"My heart aches for the victims and the families and my mind searches for answers," Penn State University's interim president, Rodney Erickson, just said at the opening of a meeting of the school's board of trustees.

WPVI-TV is streaming the meeting here.

It's become the formula.

1. Have an embarrassing gaffe, such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry did during Wednesday's Republican presidential debate, when he couldn't remember the third of three federal agencies he would eliminate.

Good morning. We've veered from the solemn to the silly already today. Our early headlines:

-- We Pause On Veterans Day To Reread 'In Flanders Fields'

-- Penn State Scandal: Alleged Victim's Mother Was 'Horrified'

Jim Romenesko, a blogger who pioneered online reporting about the news media, "has submitted his resignation" to the Poynter Institute "and I have accepted it," Poynter's online director Julie Moos writes.

Here are some of the latest developments in the scandal at Penn State, where former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky has been charged with sexually abusing young boys for more than a decade (he says he's innocent) and head coach Joe Paterno has been fired after coming under withering criticism for not having done more to investigate the allegations: